TotC – The Verdict

I have now seen my fair share of the Trial of the Crusader Instance. If this isn’t the first time you’re reading this blog, you might have noticed that I don’t like this dungeon. I never got around to explain why though. I always felt that I hadn’t seen enough of the instance, but now, with the first two Heroic Modes behind me, I feel like I can give my final verdict. I’ll do so in listing the pros and cons, which come to my mind.

The Good:

• The instance is short and trash free.
• The instances provides a lot of incredibly good Loot. This helps many players to catch up with other members of their guild, gear-wise.
• Hard Modes in both 10 and 25 man version of the instance offer a well balanced challenge.

The Bad:

• The instance is too short. While Ulduar was much too long, TotC is now just too short. Ulduar would have been a lot  better, if it had been split up into two separate instances. Remember TK and SSC? or BT and MH? It was just so lovely to have a change of walls from time to time. TotC is not only one instance, it’s one room! Also, trash isn’t only bad. It offers some time to relax, chat and clear your mind for the next boss encounter.
• The instances showers bad players with loot far too good. iLvL 226 would have been more than enough for the 10 man instances. This would have been still a decent jump in iLvL without completely destroying any interest in Ulduar for most guilds. I also think it isn’t a good thing, if someone gears up in Ulduar25 and the next thing he sees himself doing is farming TotC for 232 iLvL gear.
• While for myself, the TotC Hard Modes are pretty well balanced, I see a lot of guilds struggling with the difficulty. The jump from Anub’arak to Northrend Beasts on Heroic mode is absolutely huge and makes progressive raiding for many guilds pretty hard. A lot of guilds are caught somewhere between farming normal mode instances and failing and Heroic Modes.
• TotC has killed Ulduar in many ways. Ulduar is a beautiful instance, but it is long and it isn’t that easy. So on one hand we  have a long, pretty hard instances, offering 219 and 226 iLvL gear. On the other hand we have an easy instance, which nearly any pickup group can beat, handing out 232 and 245 loot AND Emblem of Triumph. It isn’t hard to see what happens. Ulduar dies, while a lot of people still haven’t seen Yogg-Saron.
• TotC has lead to a ridiculous gear-centric view of the game when it comes to pick up groups. New players in blue (omfglol!!!) gear find it terribly hard to find good pickup groups. People have gotten incredibly lazy and like to have the game as convenient as possible. Heroic dungeons has become a brainless farming of Emblems with 40k life tanks. 10 man pickup groups demand ridiculous gear standards.
• There is a PVP encounter standing in my path of progression! I think this is bad. I don’t like encounters, which are easier the more PVP interested guild members you have. I don’t like encounters which favor maybe 1-2 pieces of PVP gear. I don’t like encounters which are easier, if everyone had a talent spec shifting towards PVP. I have all my PVE abilites keybound, but a lot of PVP stuff isn’t even in my action bars, so a lot of not so PVP interested people have a lot longer to learn such fights and react fast to what’s happening. If I want to PvP, I play a first person shooter or a soccer game. I have no interest at all in WoW PvP. So please stop torturing me with silly PvP fights.

Conclusion

I have fun in TotC, because Heroic Modes offer challenging raiding. Apart from that, TotC is the symbol for everything, which is wrong with the game at this moment: Absolutely no interest in understanding game mechanics or boss encounters isn’t standing in the way of beating the instance and bathing in incredibly good gear.

The gear jump from Ulduar 25 to TotC10 is still so big, that right after completing my 4pcT8, I could throw it all away and start farming TotC10. This greatly reduces the attachment I have to gear, gearing up my character and thus reduces the joy of getting new gear.

TotC has completely killed Ulduar, it is nearly impossible to motivate people for Ulduar and even harder to motivate them for Ulduar Hard Modes. I know I would have more fun trying to complete Ulduar Hard Modes with my main character. But what I do is dragging three eighties through TotC10 per week. The result? Three eighties with six gear sets. All gear sets are rapidly filling up with 232 and 245 purples. And all this loot for three characters can be achieved in less than 3 hours. But am I having fun? No. Not half as much as I could have in Ulduar. Not a fraction of the fun I could have, if TotC normal modes would at least offer the slightest hint of challenge. Ulduar10 can’t be beaten with just any pickup group, why should that be the case in TotC, especially because it’s so short and without any trash!

TotC is one huge fail, in terms of difficulty (both, vs. the difficulty of Ulduar and vs the difficulty of its Heroic Modes), length and gear balance. If the Heroic Modes wouldn’t provide a decent raiding challenge, I would have stopped raiding until 3.3. Easy raid instances and easy loot will only offer short-term satisfaction, when you see your SP, health pool or AP go through the roof. In the long term all they will leave is shiny purples and a bad taste in our mouths.