Blizzard typically designs its raid zones in three different sizes: you’ve got the one- or two-boss zones, the half-a-dozen boss zones, and the raids with a dozen or so bosses – give or take.
And then, in this thread, Ghostcrawler says (emphasis mine)
…once we say “tanking niches” players have visions of the DK who parks outside of Icecrown until boss 4, 17 and 31 (yes, IC is that big).
At the risk of sounding like a lolcat, ZOMG. No wonder they introduced raid timer extensions!
To put it pictorially:
That’s one way of making sure Icecrown won’t be cleared before Christmas…
(Edit: I’ve seen a few other wry posts around the traps from GC in the last day, and he may well be joking about this – which is unlike Blizz devs, who don’t usually make joke posts unless it’s very obvious that their tongue is planted firmly in cheek, but even devs are allowed to have some fun.)
Edit #2: My guildie Phyl (of Hunters Rhok) has pointed out the official debunking, where GC says
an example on how we don’t want raids to rotate in tanks, I wanted to pick what I hoped was a ridiculous number so that players wouldn’t try and and deduce from my answer how many bosses Icecrown has.
Sadly, my sarcasm doesn’t translate well to the forums. :)
(Unfortunately, if he wanted to convey a sense of “this is just a hypothetical number”, he probably shouldn’t have followed it up with an explicit assurance that he was being serious.)
I’m… not entirely certain what to make of it. The questions that spring first to my mind are things like : How many bosses does Illidari Council count as, then? or What about bosses like Freya/Sarth, with their badge-dropping minibosses?
The quote references bosses, not boss encounters. That fact just makes me wonder…
True – but it’s not like you can swap raiders partway through an encounter, so phrasing it that way is kind of a bait-and-switch if they’re really counting bosses rather than encounters.
Making IC huge makes a lot of sense to me: it’d be a bad idea to start throwing around the idea that there’s 31 bosses if there’s only 15 actual encounters, because players will feel cheated or gypped when the reveal happens. Also, Blizz need a way to keep us all busy til the next expack is released; they need Icecrown to last a looooong time, and hardmodes alone won’t do it, I think.
I don’t think so much that they’re gonna do a full bait and switch, but I’d still be very surprised to see 31 encounters. 20 (even mid-20s) are much more what I expect after a statement like that.
I mainly used an extreme example to illustrate the kind of extreme example Blizz may be using themselves. ;)
Er, wow. That’s a lot of bosses.
I remember that when Naxx first came out in Vanilla, they introduced a 2 week raid timer for it instead of the normal 1 week because it was considered so large at the time.
What’s also worth considering is how many of those 31 bosses (encounters, what have you) are optional. Trial of the Crusader seems to be very linear – one boss after the next. But Iron Council, Ignis and Razorscale are all optional in Ulduar. That takes the total of thirteen bosses down to ten kills to finish the instance.
GC was just throwing out a random number.
“Sadly, my sarcasm doesn’t translate well to the forums. :)”
“I think there are plenty of ways to make Icecrown epic without throwing an unreasonable numbers of bosses into the instance. I should have picked 114 as my magic number.”
@HolyPally – Yes, I read the same thing. However, he explicitly said “bosses 4, 17 and 31 (yes, IC is that big)” – as sarcasm or a random hypothetical, that’s very badly phrased.
yeah, you think that by now he would know better.
I’m glad 31 wasn’t a specific number. I for one can’t spend that much time raiding it that even if I was geared up I wouldn’t be able to finish the thing. Hopefully if they do have a lot of bosses, they’ll go light on the trash.