Guild drama, and lots of it! I was listening to the archive of Blue Plz last night, and an interesting topic came up on the show that I can relate with. TotalBiscuit, who will be appearing on The Rawrcast Show on the 30th, brought up the topic of choosing between easy modes, hard modes, or 'medium modes' in Ulduar.

Now, this is interesting because I've heard a lot of guilds say that they want linear progression. Straight forward, you know what you have to do next. I know that one of the top end guilds lost a lot of world firsts because they tried to start on hard modes. I mean think about it, we've come from having to progress straight through an instance, knowing which boss to kill next, to picking and choosing which bosses we want to do, and now we're all the way to not only picking and choosing bosses, but the difficulty of those bosses as well.

TotalBiscuit noted that his guild was having a large amount of arguments as to how they should do Flame Leviathan. Whether they should leave 1 tower up, 2 towers up, or just blow through him to get to the rest of the instance. This is a perfect example of one reason linear raid instances should be brought back into play. There shouldn't be fighting in the raid over what boss they should do next, and how they should do it.

The way I'd like to see instances mapped out is this: The first time you kill a boss you can only kill the regular mode. Once you kill the regular mode of that boss the hard mode becomes available the next raid reset. Add to all of this a straight instance progression from boss to boss and you have a better style of instance. Of course there's issues that arrive with this, but nothing that can't be easily handled.

Having expressed how I feel about how you progress through instances, I'd like to note that I love raiding no matter the size or shape of it. Now, difficulty is another matter all together. I'll be happy with whatever Blizzard implements as long as it poses a challenge. Ulduar was on a higher difficulty level than Naxxramas, not much higher, but they're getting there. Hopefully Blizzard is learning from all this, and maybe eventually we'll see some Sunwell level raids that actually pose a threat. Until then, I'll be sitting in Ulduar deciding if we should try hard mode on the next boss.

~Aenorn