“Hey,” said Tirion Fordring as they entered the antechamber. “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’ve recently had occasion to go through my old screen grabs, and one in particular grabbed my attention. It’s of The Hidden Circle in Serpentshrine Cavern, and it was taken by my girlfriend during an attempt against Morogrim Tidewalker.

The big thing to notice is that there are four tanks in the Main Tank frames. A paladin, a bear and two warriors. Thinking back to that level of content, almost everything needed three or more tanks. There were the odd fights that needed one or two, but they were an exception much more than a rule.

THC’s current regular tanking team consists of one of each of the current tanking classes, and these days we can never take more than three of us into a raid. And three tanks is one too many for most fights in Icecrown, the vast majority being suited to exactly two (the same number as are needed in the 10-man versions of the same fights).

If all four of us do get in the same raid, it’ll be because at least one person needs to DPS rather than tank because we don’t have enough DPS signups. And that’s a damn shame. I long for fights like Al’ar where two tanks are taunt-swapping the boss while another two deal with phoenix adds, or for Kael’thas where we all had something to grab hold of.

Instead the limitations of encounters scaling between 10 and 25 players swing into force. In the cases where a third tank is needed, it’s down to lazy encounter design – witness Professor Putricide where tank no.3 has nothing to do but pretend to DPS for phases one and two and most of phase 3, or the “Add one more target to the saber lash” scaling of Marrowgar. Even on the add fights – Lady Deathwhisper and Valrithia Dreamwalker, we’re better off with fewer tanks and more DPS as it’s all about raw damage output.

This can only be bad for tanking in the long run; tanking was already the hardest role to land a regular raid spot with. And now the encounter design doesn’t lend itself to tank scaling, I wonder how long it will be before the number of tanks in the 25-man raid is “fixed” at two, simply because the encounter’s easier to code that way.

Blizzard may have said that they didn’t wany dual-spec to influence raiding, but given the challenges in meeting some encounters’ hard enrage timers, I do have to wonder if that is really the case.

So, overall, we have about the same number of bosses in Lich King than in Burning Crusade (and I haven’t even counted the loot pinata that is Vault of Archavon). Admittedly, that includes a number of recycled bosses, but in the case of Naxx almost nobody saw it at level 60, and Onyxia is only a single digit drop if we discount her.

No, the problem is this – difficulty level. Those raids who worked hard because they want to see the content now have to work less hard, and get through it more quickly than they did before.

Normal modes are about pitched between the old bosses and the new hard Modes. Many see the content, they see no reason to do hard mode, they get bored. There’s no less content, it’s just easier. Perhaps a little too easy. By allowing more people to see the content, perhaps Blizzard have shot themselves in the foot. Those who wanted to see it before now do it in half the time and get bored. Those who stood no chance before for whatever reason still haven’t.

There’s more content than ever before. The trouble is it doesn’t last anywhere near as long.

It struck me recently that I’ve not seen a single trash pull in any of the Lich King instances where crowd control has been anything other than a nice, and entirely optional, bonus. Hell, a combination of improved warrior AoE threat and the smaller pulls means that the vast majority of the time everyone just lets rip with whatever area of effect spells they can muster and wait for the pack to die.

The challenge of working out a decent strategy for big pulls given the resources available to me is one I’m missing a great deal. The only thing that comes close, so far as I can see, is the Obsidian Sanctum encounter when running with one or more of the optional drakes up. Unfortunately, that is an order of magnitude harder than working out which things to kill first in a trash pull ever has been (and rightly so). There doesn’t seem to be anything between the two, not really.

Where will the next generation of raiders learn to tune their strategies? I suspect Ulduar will be a brick wall for a great many people because it will be the first time that it’s really no longer possible to brute-force an encounter. I can already imagine the cries for the instance to be nerfed and it’s a shame, because the learning curve at the moment just doesn’t seem quite right.

On, then, to Felmyst, an undead dragon created by some bizarre accident involvng a Pit Lord’s blood and the proximity of the sunwell. She has a groud phase, where people have to move out of an AoE effect, and an air phase where she breathes down on the raid and causes a load of skeletons to appear, at which point they’re AoEd down. Yes, it’s Nightbane with a twist, which is that of her breath, both on the ground and in the air.

Had a few odd wipes where the wrong location for the breaths was called out, and one particularly frustrating one where she entered the air phase with one health and we wiped to the breaths but she went down too.

Twins next! Just so long as they’re not just a rehash of the Twin Emperors, we’ll be fine…

A friend of mine, who isn’t so lucky as I am, asked me the above after I complained that raids were now too easy. It’s a sentiment I think is well worth exploring. We’ve all seen now how much easier almost every boss is in the current state of affairs.

Last night The Hidden Circle zerged through Black Temple, downing everything from Supremus to the Illidari Council in under three hours. It was rather ridiculous, really. The difficulty is gone, and with it some of the enjoyment. We still have some new content to poke at, Sunwell, which I expect we’ll see soon, and I expect some challenge there, but to have Illidan in his previous form stolen from us is somewhat disappointing.

On the other hand, I understand that it’s nice for the more casual players to experience the content before it becomes completely obsolete. I don’t want to take the opportunity to experience the content away. I also appreciate that I’m lucky to have seen as much as I have – in terms of Vanilla WoW, I never saw Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas or much of Molten Core. That doesn’t mean I’m being elitist when I’m disappointed that things I was working toward are now nerfed to ridicule (as an example, Reliquary of Souls phase 1 last night didn’t reach the enrage).

It’s a shame that the old style bosses (minus, maybe, shear) couldn’t be activated by maybe adding a Heroic mode for raid instances, and with normal mode dropping gear from the previous tier (say SSC gear from BT). That way casual players could see the content, and the higher-end (I won’t use the word “hardcore”, because I know true hardcore players and I couldn’t cope with it) raiders could carry on almost like they were before.