Where's the challenge?

There is such a plethora of bloggers out there now all posting great stuff about the new expansion that it has caused me to feel a little redundant. For the past couple of months I would have an idea for a blog post and then when browsing my regular reads find that someone else has already covered the topic more than adequately. Also y'all write too much! Seriously I am continously about 2 weeks behind on my feeds! I should probably prune my list of feeds back, but I am more likely to increase it since there are so many good blogs out there. This is very much the case given that I am also on the search for new reading material given some changes I have made in terms of game play.

As I've said before, I'm no theory crafter so I really value the work my fellow bloggers do distilling the wisdom of communities like Elitist Jerks into nice clear blog posts that I can learn from.

So what changes have I made? Well, Jezrael my lovely hunter got the love at first and is sitting pretty to enter Naxx 25. Levelling Jez was pretty much cake, I was T6 geared and able to breeze through the content mostly. This is a big difference from TBC where I spent much longer working on gearing for end game content. While my gear level starting Wrath made a difference I think it mainly comes down to the changes Blizz has made with making the rep grind much easier and having no attunements. It has also been interesting to observe the different commentary about the relative difficulty of the content in Wrath.

End game raiders tend to be dissatisfied with what they see as a lack of challenge but I also see posts where mostly non end game raider people talk about the challenges they have faced with regards to certain instances. From my perspective of being in the position of playing with a group of well geared, and more importantly skilled, players the content so far has pretty much been quite easy. To put this in perspective I've done all 10 man content except Malygos & Sarth and all 25 man content except Naxx and Malygos at least once (Sarth with adds down though). So far I agree with Zasp from The Egotistical Priest that Malygos definitely feels like the most epic fight to date.

I keep asking myself - is the content really that much easier than TBC? I've gained access to it more quickly, but this time round I'm end game geared and there are no attunements or serious rep grinds. It's hard for me to make the comparison. I do definitely agree however that the difficulty of trash pulls has been trivialised. Crowd control seems a thing of the past and like Flyv I miss the care and finesse we used to have to use to handle multi mob pulls. These days from a hunter perspective it just feels like 'lolvolley' all the time.

Tomorrow is our first official 25 man Badger Naxx and I'm looking forward to it, but also a little worried that we are going to smash the place easily. Seems strange doesn't it, but I'd like there to be a little challenge to the place at least. Of course I need to remember that Naxx is the entry level raiding encounter for Wrath and appparently is meant to be pretty easy but still. I still have fond memories of wiping on Attumen on our very first Kara raid. It was memorable because it was a challenge. If the challenge is non-existent then I am pretty confident that our raid will lose enthusiasm for it pretty quickly. Hopefully Ulduar will be released soon!

I got a bit diverted by talking about content difficulty I'm afraid when I actually intended to talk about something entirely different! Food for another post.