Bryntroll

I recently was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the more powerful (and cooler looking) weapons out of ICC, namely Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter.  The theorycrafting on this potent weapon is still rather sparse, so I spent several hours testing the limits of the proc and it's dps contribution.  First off, the basics:

• The 264 version proc has an average damage of 2250, while the 277 version has an average of 2538.
• The damage does not scale with any character stats (though the dps does, more on that below).
• The damage does scale with any percentage damage increases that affect spell damage, such as Avenging Wrath, Curse of Elements, Blood Presence, etc.
  
• The drain can proc off of any weapon attack, as well as some odd events such as applying or refreshing effects such as deathknight diseases or the paladin talent Righteous Vengeance.  However, any of the odd events that can proc it require you to be in melee range and facing the target (in other word, in a position such that your character would swing the axe at the target if you turned on auto-attack) in order for the drain to be able to proc.
  
• The drain has a base proc rate of 2 procs-per-minute, or 11.3333% chance per swing, and has no internal cooldown.
• The drain can proc multiple times per attack, provided there's are more than one weapon event for the attack.  For example, the drain can multi-proc off the following:
• On any or all of the multiple targets of Cleave, Whirlwind, Divine Storm, Heart Strike, or Sweeping Strikes.
  
• From a melee (or special) and it's subsequent seal proc, Blood-Caked Blade proc, or Windfury proc (though why a shaman would be using it...).
• From both the physical and shadow portions of Scourge Strike.
• The drain can not proc from any spells, excluding the odd events mentioned above.
• The drain is incapable of critting, functions on the spell hit table, and can be partially resisted.
  

Now, with a 2 PPM baseline, the weapon will deal 2 procs a minute before any waste or special attacks or talents are factored in, giving it a minimum dps of 75.  The wonderful thing about the proc rate, though, is that it scales linearly with haste buffs.  The more haste your character has, the more dps the proc provides and the higher it's equivalent AP value.  In practice, the proc will usually provide between 200 and 400 dps, depending on the character's haste rating, spec and rotation (and therefore number of procable attacks per second), spell hit chance, and +damage buffs present.  A good estimate is that it will provide approximately 4-8% of a character's dps.

For many classes, this means the proc is worth the equivalent of between 400 and 800 additional attack power, though it's place on the best-in-slot list is strongly dependent class, spec, haste rating, and rotation.  In general is can be assumed to be near the top of the list, however, as the proc itself provides a fairly respectable amount of dps while also making it easier for the healers to keep you alive through miscellaneous raid damage.


References
Melee/BCB Doubleproc
Scourge Strike Doubleproc
Heart Strike Doubleproc
PPM Recount Parse
Bryntroll on DK Forums

3.3: Area Damage Caps

Patch 3.3 is changing the way Area Damage Caps function, but AoE Caps are a fairly poorly understood mechanic to begin with for most players.  Thus I will explain how the current capping mechanics works, how the new 3.3 mechanics works, and the advantages and disadvantages of the new system.

Currently, the cap on an AoE spell is set by and only by the spell's rank.  3 spells with known caps are Arcane Explosion, Howling Blast, and Blood Boil, all three of which have a cap at max rank (rank 10 for AE, rank 4 for HB and BB) of 37500 damage.  Each spell has a designation for how much damage it does per target, and this is the maximum damage per target it can do, but not the minimum.  The AoE cap comes into play when the total damage being done reaches said cap.  At that point, instead of doing the damage stated by the spell per target, it does damage to each target equal to the damage cap divided by the number of targets.  Thus once you are at the cap, adding more targets reduces the amount of damage per target done, keeping the total damage done constant.  Note that this damage cap applies before critical effect damage is factored in, so an AoE spell can in fact to more damage than the cap if some of the strikes crit.

For example, at approximately 305 spell power, Arcane Explosion does 625 damage per target.  On up to 60 targets, the spell will continue to deal 625 damage per target (before resists and crits).  After 60 targets, however, the damage per target begins to drop as the cap of 37500 damage has been hit.  In this mage upgraded their gear to approximately 3250 spell power, their AE would then be doing 1250 damage per target.  On up to 30 targets, this would continue to hold true, but beyond 30 targets, the damage per target would again begin to diminish, and once at or past 60 targets, both mages would be doing the exact same damage per target.

The new system radically changes the manner in which this cap is calculated.  Instead of there being a static cap imposed by the spell rank, the cap on any AoE spell is equal to ten times the non-crit single target damage it deals.  In the above example, the first mage would have a cap of 6250 damage, while the second would have a cap of 12500 damage.  If up against 20 targets, the first mage would be dealing 312-313 damage per target, while the second would be dealing 625.  Both of these caps are significantly lower than the prior 37500 cap, but there are advantages to the system as well.

One of the largest advantages is scaling.  Currently, improving your gear will improve your AoE output only while below the damage cap, and increasing that output means that it takes less and less targets to reach that cap as you get better and better gear.  In the above example, the mage improved his spell power from 305 to 3250.  In doing so, his damage per cast below the cap doubled below the cap, but the number of targets necessary to cap out his AE also halved.  In the 3.3 system, this is no longer the case.  All AoE spells by definition now cap out at 10 targets.  However, since the cap itself is based on the scaling damage done by the spell, the damage a spell does even beyond that cap is proportion to the damage done under the cap.  In the above example, the first mage will do half the damage of the second while under the cap...and continue to do half the damage of the second mage while over the cap.  In other words, you are no longer penalized on AoE damage for improving your gear.

The other thing to note about these new mechanics is that they only apply when you are damaging more than 10 targets.  On 10 or fewer targets, all spells, regardless of their potency, will deal full damage to all targets (again, before crits and resists are factored in).  This is especially relevant for higher damage abilities such as Howling Blast which can easily reach the AoE cap in as few as 4 targets in a raid setting (at very high gear levels, of course).  In my current gear in a 10-man raid (and this is against targets without the spell damage debuff), my Howling Blasts average a bit over 5000 damage, and can cap out at almost 10000 damage due to AP procs (and these are non-crits).  This means that it takes between 4 and 8 targets to cap out the damage on HB, much much less than the 20-30 it takes for a mage to cap out AE in similar gear.  With the new 3.3 mechanics, HB will guaranteed full damage against up to 10 targets, giving me a potential cap of up to 100000 damage, a nearly 3-fold increase in maximum damage.

An easy way to illustrate the advantages of this change is to relate it to the testing I did to determine the HB cap.  Against the 33 Converted Heroes gathered up by Frostbound, my HB was dealing 1136 damage a piece, for a total of ~37500 damage done.  Given the new system, and assuming maximum procs in a raid setting, I would be dealing a touch over 3000 damage per target, almost 3 times as much damage per cast as before.

There is a minimum in which this change is valuable, though, and it varies per spell.  In the case of Howling Blast, it takes a touch over 8000 AP for HB to have a cap more than 37500 damage on 10 targets (in other words, for the change to be a buff), which is relatively easy to achieve with a single of the many procs available in a raid setting in high-end raiding gear, but otherwise fairly out-of-reach.  For AE, the necessary spell power is absolutely ludicrous, requiring 12595 spell power to reach a cap of 37500 damage against 10 target, and that's for a mage with full points in Arcane Instability, Spell Impact, and World in Flames, a net 16% increase in damage to AE.

Still, on the whole this change is a good thing as it allows one of the few true damage caps in game to scale with gear.  I'm especially pleased as it means I'll no longer be seeing crits down around the 4-5k mark from HB against packs like the Exploding Lashlings on Freya.

Worgen

I just saw the new Worgen gameplay videos posted on MMO-Champion, and I have to say, I'm far from impressed.  While I understand that Gilneas is a human kingdom, the design and texturing are so blatantly similar to the ones currently in-game that one would almost think themselves in Darkshire if they didn't know better.  The castle in the distance is somewhat interesting, but otherwise the land is rather dull.

The model animations are the worst part, though.  The animation for transforming into a worgen was revealed at Blizzcon earlier this year, and it hasn't changed a bit, it's still over-the-top in terms of graphics and yet somehow still astoundingly so basic and crude.  The walking animation for the worgen is my largest complaint, though.  They look awkward and uncoordinated, something wolves and especially the werewolves of legend are most certainly not known for.  Despite having arms that hang down past their knees, they only go down on all fours as a random idle animation (and sadly this is really the only time they look cool).  Even when their racial sprint is popped, the only change in animation is a trailing white flag identical to the animation present on a rogue's Sprint.

The worgen present in Grizzly Hills have one of the single coolest-looking run animations in the game right now.  They get down on all fours and literally claw their way over the ground.  They seriously look neigh-unstoppable while barreling after you, and that's precisely the animation that the worgen player race should have had.  Standing bipedally is a fairly common piece of werewolf lore, but running on all fours is almost universal, and looks far better than a gorilla-proportioned creature swinging its strung-out forelimbs back and forth in a crude attempt to maintain balance.

On the whole, I can honestly say that at this point I'm frighteningly disappointed with the feature that I was most looking forward to out of Cataclysm.

Pet Peeve of the Day: Gear Scaling

Something I've been thinking about a great deal lately is how Blizzard decided to have gear scale with raid difficulty and size, and I believe they've designed the system entirely incorrectly.  Currently, 10-man Heroic instances have little to no incentive behind them other than progression, as 25-man Normal drops the same itemlevel gear and can be PuGed, and is a virtually guaranteed clear.  10H has an advantage of having slightly better itemized 245 gear, a higher loot to raider ratio, and only requires keeping 10 people focused rather than 25 (but actually requires said focus, unlike 25N), but otherwise has no true advantages over simply PuGing 25N each week.

Nothing burns quite as much as knowing I'm on one of the best progression teams on the server, yet looking around and seeing people within a couple hundred gear-score of me (or even almost equal to me) that are in some little-known guild that never raids, yet that player PuGs 25N each week and therefore has nearly the same or higher average itemlevel as me.  Thus I propose the system which Blizzard should have used for the ilevel progression:

10 Normal
The easiest of the easy, 10N will have the lowest itemlevel items: 232 for ToC and 251 for IC.

25 Normal
Given it's PuGable nature and lack of true difficulty (other than keeping 25 people focused and doing what they need to), 25N will have an IL half a teir above 10N: 239 for ToC and 258 for IC.

10 Heroic
Befitting it's significant jump in difficulty over 25N, yet it's smaller group size, 10H will have an IL a full tier above 25N: 251 for ToC and 271 for IC.

25 Heroic
As difficult as it gets, 25H will have the highest IL available, half a tier above 10N: 258 for ToC and 277 for IC.

The blatant advantage of this design is that it immediately separates heroic (ie. 'hardcore') raiders from casual ones, while still allowing casual raiders to experience the content and get gear that, while not bleeding-edge good, it still quite solid.  It does, however, also allow the hardcore raiders to retain the gear advantage that was the trademark of hardcore raiding for the first 4 years of the game.

Another distinct advantage of this system is that it puts 10-man Heroic forward as a viable gear progression option, as it has a noticeable gear advantage over 25N, and is only half a tier below 25H.  This would serve to inspire 25H guilds to run 10H as their auxiliary raid rather than 25N, cutting down on some of their boredom (and likely complaints of the game's lack of difficulty).

The last advantage evolved from this new system is that gear progression would be a relatively smoother curve, with 4 distinct IL gear sets rather than 3, yet it would still only take up 2 tiers worth of IL.  Assuming the 10N IL was placed equal to the 10H IL of the prior raiding tier, gear would show precisely a 1.5 tier upgrade per raiding tier, the exact jump currently displayed between ToC and IC.  In addition, it would show a full 1.5 tier upgrade between difficulties (befitting the significant increase in the difficulty of the encounters), and only a half-tier between raiding sizes (since handing 2.5 times as many people, while definitely something worth rewarding, isn't nearly as impressive as the Heroic modes).

As a raid leader that regularly runs 10H and partially PuGs what I can't guild-fill in my 25N each week, I can honestly say that the implication that 10H requires the same effort as PuGing a 25N is a fairly potent insult to 10H teams.   Given the fact that Blizzard seems a lot more interested in making sure both raid sizes are valid options for raiding then they do making sure PuG raids are as rewarding as possible, this change would alleviate much of the frustration and complaining by the more hardcore raiders (who strongly dislike seeing the visible marks of their progress become next to meaningless to the casual observer), yet still allow the more casual raiders access to the upper-end content.

Blizzard Pet Store

So I was surfing MMO-Champion and up on the front page pops a message about a Blizzard Pet Store.  My first thought was that the current in-game pet store run by Breanni, the NPC avatar dedicated to the creator and administrator of WarcraftPets.com, would be expanded to include new purchasable pets, perhaps with a new token system.

Instead what I found was the most blatant and pitiable attempt to wrest more money from their customers that I've ever seen.  It's bad enough that they are effectively charging us (and charging us exorbitantly!) for services like name, faction, server, or race changes, but now they want us to dump the equivalent of 2/3rds of a month's subscription fee for some of the more desirable pet models they've ever implemented, after taunting us with them for a month via MMO-C's data mining.

Honestly, this is a whole new level of disrespect to customers.  I can see charging minor amounts for certain services to cover the expense of performing them, but charging for an in-game item, especially one with a purely aesthetic purpose?  This seems remarkably hypocritical after their efforts to eradicate gold-selling.  Is purchasing in-game items with real-world currency somehow suddenly acceptable so long as it's Blizz that gets to sleep on the bed stuffed with bills?

TSO

Last night I was fortunate enough to find myself with a ticket to the TSO show here in Denver.  It was a nightmare getting down, and the show started late due to some technically issues with the rigging, but it was well worth the hassle.  Amazing show musically, pyrotechnically, and choreographically, I highly recommend it to anyone living near one of their tour show stops.  Hit up their tour page for details.

Icecrown, Part 2

Now for the Valithria Dreamwalker fight.  When I first read of this fight, I thought it was an extremely cool concept.  Put the healers in the role of dps, put them in charge of the pace of the fight.  It sounded like an exceptionally innovative idea for an encounter.

Then I saw the video of it...and realized that the implementation they chose makes the entire fight essentially into a long drawn-out KT phase 1.  The raid still takes damage, though, so the healers are basically all on raid healing + a giant dragon, and the rest of the raid is just fighting off endless waves of undead until the healers get around to topping off said dragon.  Booooring.

Icecrown, Part 1

I just got through watching a video on the Gunship Battle encounter in the upcoming Icecrown Citadel, and I have to say I'm incredibly impressed with how it looks so far.  It has some very innovative mechanics involved, and similar to the Twins fight in ToC, feels a lot like a fight that's there mainly to play around.  The inclusion of jetpacks, the requirement to split focus between many different (but not instagib) damage sources, to prioritize targets and who's doing what...

This is the precise sort of fight that was missing in Ulduar and ToC, requiring everyone to be paying attention and looking out for themselves, but not to the point where they get instagibbed if they make a mistake (but if they make several in quick succession, they likely will die).  Beyond that, the fight has motivation behind it, fighting off the intrusion of enemy faction as you battle for control of the citadel's access rampart, instead of just gibbing these random monsters, demons, undead, or PMSing gladiators that the Argent Crusader brought in to try to kill off as much of their army as possible.  It's a fight I can get involved in and have fun with in addition to the challenge.

Sindragosa's fight looks similarly interesting, a true evolution of the Sapphiron fight.  Instead of a stack Frost Breath that kills anything it touches, now it moves around (and there's a lot more of them), doesn't hit as hard, but still needs to be avoided.  On top of that, the raid chooses when the iceblocks are removed (as they have to kill them).  Lastly, the Unstable Magic mechanic sounds like a very interesting way for a caster to go out in a streak of glory before getting instagibbed by a 40k+ arcane bomb.  Mages, of course, can simply Ice Block out of it, though >.>

Then on the other side there's the Lord Marrowgar encounter.  Of the 5 fights I've seen in ICC to date, this one looks by far to be the most dull, basically a tank and spank with ridiculously slow lines of fire to avoid (they don't even follow you like Archi's did), spears of ice to kill, and the same annoying whirlwind of death kite that Skadi in Utgarde Pinnacle has, and that's pretty much the entire fight.  Not terribly innovative or engaging.

On Boss Design and Mechanics

I read an interesting post on the WoW forums called Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design, the first of a 3-part series focused on encounter design and how WotLK has performed in that area thus far.  I was planning on writing a post about this anyway, but last night's heroic Anub'Arak really amplified my feelings on it.

For those unfamiliar with the Anub'Arak fight on heroic, it's a 3-phase fight, with the first two running almost identically to the regular version, excepting that you are limited to 6 of the frost orbs (thus giving the fight an effective soft enrage for those first 2 phases).  The only really important difference in the first two phases is that pairs of adds spawn instead of lone ones, and the adds gain a new ability called Shadow Strike, which is essentially a 4-second-cast (hasted to 2-seconds if there are two of them close together) random target shadowstep which must either be interrupted or the raid member targeted will be instagibbed.  This isn't terrible unruly to deal with, as the adds are still stunnable (and are undead, so our prot paladin offtank can keep them shut down with Holy Wrath), there are never more than two up at a time, and they always cast Shadow Strike in unison.

Phase 3 is where my irritate begins.  Anub'Arak casts an aura called Leeching Swarm that drains 20% of each raid member's current health per second (healing Anub for 50% of the damage done) for the remainder of the fight.  This isn't so bad, as once people get down around 5k HP or so, the swarm doesn't hit hard and Anub doesn't heal much.  Anub continues to cast Penetrating Cold (which ticks for 6k on heroic), but it's not terribly difficult to heal through.  What is a problem is that the burrower adds continue to spawn.  This leaves the raid with two choices: continue tanking and killing the adds, or tank them off the ice until they borrow.

If we choose the former, we lose a minimum of 2 of our dpsers, usually 3, to keep the adds under control.  This more than doubles the amount of time necessary to kill Anub, and often results in a wipe purely because the healers just flat can't keep up the necessary output for that long.

If we choose the latter (and this is where my peeve is), the major worry is keeping up to 4 adds at a time interrupted on Shadow Strikes.  This means that the off tank needs to watch for new adds and adds unburrowing, maintain aggro on all the current ones against the massive output by the healers and splash damage by the dps, and still manage to get a Holy Wrath off within a very short cast time every time one of them tries to gib a raid member.

This falls back to the point made in the post above: unmanageable precision.  Yogg-Saron was another example of this, with 3-6 mobs up, each of which casting an AoE spell that needs to be interrupted, and unlike Anub'Arak's adds, Yogg's aren't undead for an easy Holy Wrath stun.

Blizzard has gotten far to fixed on the idea of RNG difficulty.  There's a massive different between a fight that is complex and requires precision and focus to succeed and a fight in which you simply have to get lucky to win.

In the category of the former, Vashj, Archimonde (excluding his fear), Gorefiend, Val'kyr Twins, and Mimiron are awesome examples.  They require precision and focus, demanding the highest of all or random members of the raid, but the potential for an RNG wipe is very very low.

Fights such as Faction Champions, Gormok, Freya, Anub'Arak, Yogg-Saron, and Steelbreaker are poster childs of the second category, though.  These fights either require raid members to be watching 4+ mobs simultaneously for a split-second reaction or to be able to react to incoming damage in literally the twitch level of response times.  These fights are difficult, but for all of the wrong reasons.  They are difficult because they push past the actual limit of human attention or reaction time, and thus rely as much on luck as skill.  A fight in which a raid that has had the boss on farm for months can still wipe up just because they got a bad string of RNG is a terrible fight at it's core.

This brings me to another peeve: PvP in PvE.  The Faction Champions fight makes perfect sense in ToC from a lore standpoint, and the entire instance is effectively a giant arena (don't get me started on the 'OMG the Lich King! Let's ignore him and hold a gladiatorial arena on his doorstep instead!' lore failure).  However, I'd estimate that around 80% of PvE raiders, especially progression raiders, are among the crowd that would rather leave the PvPing to the arena folk and stick with their boss fights.  Blizz, twice in two expansions, has gotten the brilliant idea to force these PvEers to PvP in their instances, though.  Back in BC, Dalrissa was one of the least popular fights of the entire expansion, and Faction Champs likely would be for WotLK if Occulus wasn't such a nightmare.

Beyond that, the fight seems to be a hybrid of the worst parts of PvP and PvE.  The mobs have PvP crowd-control limitations and have many of the abilities and effects that PvPers of those class regularly use, but they also a damage output roughly equal to a geared PvPers against a zero resilience target, the base 115% move speed of normal NPCs (actually, I believe their speed is closer to 130%), a gang mentality on dps (often resulting in instagibs of raid members, the shaman and mage being primary culprits of this), and roughly 10 times the HP of a normal player.

What this leads to is that you need more healers than normal, and those healers have to have a ridiculously quick reaction time to saving people, and they need to maintain that reaction time for the entire fight.  The shaman can walk up to someone and nuke them for 30k damage in under 1.5 seconds, the mage can do the same thing in less than a second from 30 yards away, the warrior can do a similar level of damage in AoE with Bladestorm, and the rogue can instagib a clothie through a Shadowstep before anyone even notices he moved.  These are pure RNG deaths.  We'll have weeks in which we get a nearly perfect composition for the fight and down it without any problem, and then we'll have weeks with a terrible composition that make us feel like we're slamming our face into a brick wall.

Blizzard needs to move back to the complex and precise but manageable fights, instead of making success based on RNG (especially in an instance that gives rewards for less wipes).  They also need to get rid of PvP fights in PvE.  As a dpser, if I wanted to tank, I'd have spec'd for it.  Facing a fight that I, as a dpser, need to output my maximum as well as blow every cooldown I have to stay alive if I get focused...well, it's just plain not fun, and our healers like it even less.  Challenging the raid by making them need to look out for their own survival: ok.  Challenging the raid by putting random invisible guillotines peppered about the area: not ok.

Anyway, enough ranting for me.

Hello World! (and Raid Difficulty)

Ah, blogging.  That wonderful combination of private contemplation and public espousement.

The most recent article on the Blessing of Kings blog entitled On Difficulty and Guilds happens to be the driving influence for me to create this blog and vent my opinions somewhere other than the cesspool of the WoW forums.  That post (and the post on Larisa's The Pink Pigtail Inn, Why I Don't Want to Hear Another 'WoW is Too Easy' Statement, that spawned it) have caught my eye for possessing an uncommon alacrity of vision into the issues facing WoW in the current day.

In particular, the idea that guilds can be broken down into different 'tiers', if you will, or castes, and the health of the game judged based on the size and activity of those castes.  I've pasted in a portion of Coriel's post on BoK below to illustrate what is meant by this (my apologies in advance to Coriel if I've overstepped):

In Wrath, I think PvE guilds can be categorized as follows (for raiding purposes). All numbers are approximate:

Royalty - The two hundred guilds which can clear everything, including Trial of the Grand Crusader.

The Aristocracy - The three thousand guilds which can defeat at least one boss in TotGC--or some Ulduar Keeper hard modes--and thus are working their way through hard modes.

The Gentry - The ten thousand guilds which can defeat regular Trial of the Crusader, but haven't been able to advance into the hard modes.

The Bourgeoisie - The next ten thousand guilds which are working their way through Trial of the Crusader. Also includes those guilds working on Naxxramas and Ulduar. Basically any guild that is still working on normal difficulty content.

The Proletariat - Our beloved casuals. All the other guilds which are levelling or making alts or doing 5-mans, and haven't really gotten into raiding yet.

Now, his particular point in the post can be summed up with the following quote:

The real problem is that the Gentry is currently too large. Too many guilds are in that gap between hard modes and regular modes. It needs to be shrunk from both ends. The difficulty of the first two bosses in TotGC should be reduced a little bit, and the difficulty of the last two bosses in TotC should be increased a little bit. That should create a more gradual path.

This in particular is the point that drove me to start blogging my opinions on the WoW world and it's social climate.  I believe that in part this is a bit misguided.  In reality what is causing the issue is not the size of the step between normal and heroic (that step is meant to be a deterrent against 'casual' raiders), but the slope before it.  The difference in difficulty over the course of an instance has become to shallow in slope.

For example, in Ulduar, Flame Leviathan is one of the easiest boss fights I've ever seen.  Ignis, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, Auriaya, and arguably Iron Council (And Vezax, come to think of it), though, are all roughly the same level of difficulty.  There's no scaling, no slope.  Ulduar is subdivided into roughly 4 'zones' of difficulty:

Free Loot - Flame Leviathan (and arguably Ignis)
Mild - Ignis, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Iron Council, Vezax
Moderate - Hodir, Freya, Thorim, Mimiron
Hard - Yogg

Mimiron slightly bridges the gap between Moderate and Hard, and Vezax and IC slightly bridge the gap between Mild and Moderate, but for the most part, there's no scaling of difficulty.  The instance is roughly the same level of difficulty until you reach the Keepers, where it increases a bit but is relatively the same between each, then increases again noticeably for Yogg.

In contrast, Naxx, while overall a remarkably easy instance, has the scaling desired (as well as increasing gear quality to match).  The first boss of each wing is easy to the point of a brand new group with only moderate knowledge of the mechanics can likely defeat the encounter with not more than 1-2 wipes, if any (Patchwerk being the exception here).  The middle bosses often are more tests of coordination than anything else and are somewhat more difficult, but still easily defeatable.  The final boss, though, often has mechanics that the group must be watching carefully for to avoid wipes, increasing the overall difficulty.  In other words, the final bosses of each wing felt 'final'.  Once a raid got beyond all 4 of the wings, though, they entered the Frostwing Lair, where the difficult took another jump in Sapphiron, and yet another in KT.

This is the instance design I think is lacking in the latest tiers.  Ulduar I've already explained, but it's even more apparent in ToC.  On normal mode, Northrend Beasts is a remarkeably easy fight, Jaraxxus is a mildly easy fight, Faction Champs (until the recent nerf) was quite difficult, and now is still moderate in difficulty, Twins are a flat playplace, and Anub is mild to moderate.

In ToGC, Northrend Beasts are extremely difficult, arguably the second or third most difficult of the five encounters in the instance, serving as a gear check.  Jaraxxus serves as a dps responsiveness check, but once the dps can respond quickly enough to zerg the portals and volcanoes down in time, is barely more difficult than normal mode.  Faction Champs butts heads with Northrend Beasts for the second place difficulty spot, along with having an amazing amount of RNG difficulty.  Twins, just as in normal mode, are merely a playplace, with hardly any difficulty involved.  Anub is a straight and sudden cliff in difficulty, requiring a great deal more focus and performance from the guild.  In essence, ToC is a rollercoaster of difficulty where Ulduar is a very shallow staircase.

They should instead be ramps.  T6 was a remarkable example of this, especially Black Temple.  In both T6 instances, the first boss, while relatively difficult, was still fairly mild.  From there, though, the instance increased in difficulty in an almost linear pattern, with each boss being noticeably but not unreasonably more difficult than the prior boss.  It wasn't unexpected for a raid to get lodged at a boss part-way through the instance for weeks or even months on end as their gear and skill grew to finally be able to overcome a boss, much like an incoming tide slowly overtaking a beach.

WotLK raids have lacked this very important quality.  In ToGC (and especially ToC), if you can get past Beasts, you can get to Anub without much issue.  In Ulduar, if you can get past Ignis or XT, you can get all the way to the Keepers (and likely even Yogg).  Blizzard has reverted to a mindset wherein the intermediate bosses in an instance should be interchangeable in difficulty, with only the final boss being an increase, and I believe that this specifically has resulted in a large amount of the 'WoW is too easy' cries of late.

However, I agree wholeheartedly with Larisa's point in the above linked post: if you've not cleared hardmodes, you've no business even thinking that WoW is too easy, much less spamming the forums with it.  I've done Anub'Arak in ToGC, and I can say quite honestly that while it's certainly doable, it's not a walk in the park by a long shot.

I'd also like to point out two posts that caught my (and many others') attention on the Dungeons and Raids forums.  I'll be discussing the points brought up in them in my next post:

Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design
The Price of Accessibility in Raiding