“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.

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. Two new bosses this week, and then we have to wait until Onyxia (and then Icecrown) before there’s any more new gear available. And, to be honest, they were both somewhat of a disappointment. First up, Koralon the Flame Watcher. I knew vaguely what he was capable of, and went into the encounter expecting something straightforward. I wasn’t quite prepared for how incredibly straightforward it was going to be. An air of definite anticlimax accompanied the kill; all the more because it felt orders of magnitude easier than the Coliseum bosses. The gear just didn’t feel earned.

And then there was Anub’Arak. Also quite straightforward – one-shotted in 10-man, got him second go on 25. The sole problem was too many DPS on the adds rather than the boss himself. Admittedly the entire encounter feels epic thanks to the lead-in to the boss, but, still, Faction Champions feels like the hardest boss in there by a long way. Doesn’t feel right.

In any case, killing Anub means that we can now attempt hard mode. And we did – to say it was hard would be an understatement. I’ve not done badly out of gear from normal Trial of the Crusader, but … well, insane isn’t really the word. At times we had 60k+ damage coming in to tanks in half a second. Given I have 48k health raid buffed, there’s just a smidgeon of difference there. By rotating cooldowns, we managed to down Gormok, but only just. I have no clue how we’ll see Dreadscale and Icemaw through. There’s scope for improvement, but… damn, perfection as a requirement I haven’t seen in a long, long time.

Now I know how people raiding Sunwell pre-nerf felt.

However, our strategy was eventually formed, and it’s a little different than what I’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than kite the boss, we aimed to keep him in one place all the time.  This helped immensely with spacing as well, giving us one less thing to worry about. Of course, the problem is that there are new things to worry about. However, by treating the fight like the three drakes fight, and arranging cooldowns accordingly, we were able to arrive at a strategy that worked reasonably well.

We used the following:

• A Warrior tank with Improved Disciplines, Glyph of Shield Wall and Glyph of Last Stand
• A Holy Priest
• A Discipline priest

The cooldown on Vezax’s tank-splatting move, Surge of Darkness is sixty seconds. Armed with that knowledge, we were able to use the following spell rotation so that the boss didn’t have to move:

• 1st cast: Shield Wall
• 2nd cast: Pain Suppression, Last Stand and dodge trinkets
• 3rd cast: Shield Wall
• 4th cast: Guardian Spirit, Last Stand and dodge trinkets
• 5th cast: Shield Wall
• … and so on

A different strategy to what’s recommended, I know, and one that’s slightly more healing intensive, but it works for us. And once our DPS have learned to not suicide in the saronite clouds (best attempt was 6%), then I’m pretty sure we’ll see him dead.

The first time we took a look at the trash in the Antechambe of Ulduar, we wiped. More than a few times, in fact. There were runes to stay away from, Baron Geddon – style blowings up of people and, well, general carnage. Maybe not so much of the wipings with Ignis’s trash, but getting to him too was a challenge. Now? It’s a foolish raider that gets himself killed on trash. Somewhere between the first week and the second, something happened to Ulduar. The trash got easier. And the bosses got easier too. XT-001 had his enrage timer extended, as did the Assembly of Iron (massively, in fact).

The question I have to wonder is – why? At a time when hard modes are being buffed, why make normal modes easier? It’s not as if they were excessively difficult. The Hidden Circle are a country mile away from hardcore and yet we made some good progress in the first week.

In the second? The only trash to cause us major issues was Auriaya’s. I’m somewhat disappointed that things have been nerfed so swiftly and brutally. I’m aware I said this before, at the release of patch 3.0, talking about the Black Temple, but this time it’s only a week since the content’s release.

There’s still a challenge, but how many more stealth nerfs are going to sneak through?

It’s all very Karazhan. And for all the bitching, and the moaning that I made about the place after seeing it week in, week out for over a year, it was still a fantastically designed instance, far more than any of the other raids in the Burning Crusade, some of which seemed to have no story at all (Zul’Aman) and some of which just didn’t seem as epic as they could have (Shade of Akama in particular).

No, there’s a polish there that seems to have been lacking in my raiding for a while, and I like it. The difficulty level is maybe pitched just a little on the wrong side of “easy” for some of the regular modes, but not so much that I’m overly complaining.

Doing Kara before patch 2.1 felt a lot like doing Ulduar does now; there’s a dead easy boss first up (Attumen / Flame Leviathan), followed by a set of harder bosses only some of which need to be defeated to progress. The trash is a threat -we even wiped more times on Assembly of Iron trash than we did on the Assembly themselves (so, yes, I think they’re probably too easy).

I only worry if the rate at which Ulduar gets easier week-on-week is the same as Kara. Hopefully Hard Mode can put paid to that.

And now? Once I reach 80, it’s my intention to play a healing character, to see how the other side lives. In the meantime, though, having played through much of the levelling and questing content of the original World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade and now Lich King, I can see some differences in how quests are implemented but in many ways they’re fundamentally the same.

In the Burning Crusade, quests were very much a continuation of the tradition started in classic WoW – go out and kill a certain number of mobs. Unfortunately, inflation kicks in and eventually you get to requirements to kill silly numbers of creatures, like fifty ogres (The Twin Clefts of Nagrand, I’m looking at you). Things have changed in Lich King. The most I’ve had to kill for any single quest is twenty creatures, something of a step down. So, Lich King has significantly improved the quest to killing ratio. Or has it?

Sure, there are lots less of the “Kill everything stone dead” type quests, but what of it? We’re killing nearly as many things, but instead we’re fetching items that have a 100% drop rate, or finding things that are strewn across the area. Sure, there are many more interesting quests, like the vehicle quests but it just feels like a bit of a distraction from the exact same grind we had before. Borean Tundra in particular felt like this, though I can’t really explain why. Superficial differences are all that seperate the new quests from the old, with the exception of the vehicle “gimmick” quests.

In an effort to make the levelling process interesting again I’ve turned to something else. By speccing resto and running dungeons, I’m seeing a different way to level that may or may not be what I’m looking for. I’ll report back on my experiences in a few days.

We’re done with PvE content. There’s nothing left to do, and boredom is creeping in, so while I’d never say Dalaran felt empty (at least not since I first visited there at level 70), I would say it’s very much less busy.

The reason? A drought in what to do next. We’ve done the hardest encounter in the game at present, and other than farming Naxx for those last few bits of gear that we all need, and that’s true for pretty much anyone. Either Naxx was pitched too easy, or Ulduar should have been out a month ago. Maybe both. And there’s the rub.

There isn’t anything to do outside raids at the moment (roll on the Argent Tournament), and while I still enjoy raiding I can see why other people might be growing tired of the lack of other things to do. And given the raids are stale, well, I can see why a number of people might choose to take a break from the game.

I’ve seen this before; back in the day I was an Earth and Beyond player (Zira of Orion, in the unlikely event that means anything to anyone). After EA bought Westwood and consolidated the businesses, the game saw fewer and fewer content patches until it eventually fizzled out. As the difficulty of WoW has gradually reduced, so increases the perceived distance between patches.

My big hope for Ulduar is that we won’t have it on farm, in its entirety, by the time patch 3.2 comes out. Because if it doesn’t, this looks a lot like the end of the world.

Three Drakes. No waiting.

Well-deserved by so many people who have stuck at this for the last few weeks, Sartharion is defeated on “ultra-hard” mode.

Roll on Ulduar…

For a start, Last Stand is having its cooldown reduced to 3 minutes.  When glyphed with Glyph of Last Stand, this suddenly means that Last Stand could be up all the time. I don’t believe for a second that will be attainable, but by nerfing the glyph to a 2 minute reduction, the minimum I expect to see, we’ll still see the ability available once a minute to boost health by 20% for 20 seconds.

Add to that the new glyph – Glyph of Shield Wall. It’s a similar deal to that of the Last stand glyph:

Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

When properly talented with Improved Disciplines, Shield Wall too gains a 1 minute cooldown. This suddenly means that the 4-piece set bonus for Tier 7 gear (an extra 3 seconds on Shield Wall) means a lot more than it did.

There are two things that this could mean.

The first is that these are just the first iteration of testing and they’ll be nerfed back down to an appropriate level. Fine, I say. That isn’t too much of a problem – PTRs are for testing, and by making extreme changes and then gradually moving them back to a point where they’re comfortable, Blizzard can be sure to get them to a point at which they’re much better balanced against other tanking trees.

The second, and which has been partially borne out by the Hodir fight on the PTRs (melee strikes of 25k), is that we’ll be seeing a lot more encounters in which we take a lot of damage, like Patchwerk and Brutallus. It will mean that it’s not complete suicide for a warrior to tank an encounter such as Sartharion with all three drakes up. And, most importantly, it will make the decision to use panic buttons so much easier.

Of course, dual specialisation will be our saviour here too. A strict survivability spec might well depend on these two glyphs. Adding a full set of threat glyphs in the second means the choice is always there.