Wednesday 2 December 2009

The death of the raid lockout extension?

By now everyone has read the plans to gate the Icecrown Citadel content. While I don't object to opening "wings" of the raid on a rolling basis, I have though of a consequence of the boss attempts gating:

The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana'thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses.


I think this will be the death of the raid lockout extension, certainly in our guild.

Remember in 3.2 when they added the raid lockout extension feature? If you didn't have the time to kill all the bosses in Ulduar in 1 week, you could extend into the next week and have another crack.

Except now I am assuming your "boss attempts" will not get reset if you extend, so if you used them all up, what's the point of extending? You might as well reset and redo all the bosses again. Even if you used up 5 of the 10, I would think most raiders would want to hit the instance with all of their boss attempts available.

Say in one raid week you got a few attempts in on Lana'thel and now have 5 attempts left. You could extend into the next week and use those 5 attempts to try to down her. Or you could reset, clear the other bosses, assume a 1 or 2 shot on Putricide, then have 8 attempts left on Lana'thel. Even in our relatively casual guild, I think there will be a strong push for the latter approach. Worse if Sindragosa is available and we get stuck on Lana'thel with 5/15 left, we will definitely reset so we get more attempts on Sindragosa.

Goodbye raid lockout extension, though I hardly knew you at all!

2 comments:

Merlot said...

You might not bother with extensions to start with, but it will only be temporary. The number of attempts available to each raid is going to be extended over time - and who knows, maybe even lifted eventually. That might be too late for some top-end raiding guilds, but I think most guilds will be in a position to benefit from extensions should they choose to use them.

Skraps said...

While I really like the concept of raid lockout extensions, we never used one. We are a fairly casual guild, but even so we were clearing ulduar by the time the lock out extension was available. Our B and C 10 man teams were not so advanced, but the clearing to the boss we needed to down was never took too long, and hey loot or shards everyone likes to down bosses.

I think my real life has finally settled and I will be joining my raid next week for our first attempts at IC. Cant wait!

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