Do Expansions need more Raid Tiers?

[Khorm]

With WoD coming at least a year after Siege, repeating what expansions have done since Wrath, it is shown that Blizz cannot simply produce an Expansion on a shortened time frame. Is it time to have 4 Tiers per expansion? Each releasing approx. 6 months between with the last one allowed to run over a bit pass 6 months depending on when the knew expansion comes out.

[clevin]

4 tiers or not, they need 3.5 to 4 tiers worth of content. After all, if they dropped a 6-8 boss mini tier on us in February the fall release date would be fine. People who are done with/bored with SoO at this point would have something to do and even if that only lasted until May or June... that's fine. Same if it were 3 really challenging, interesting 5 mans.

[Racthoh]

it probably wouldn't change anything in terms of how long between a final raid tier and fresh expansion launch.

[Zyranthian]

Wrath had four tiers though (Naxx -> Ulduar -> Togc -> Icc) and it still didn't make the wait any shorter between expansions, because the team still isn't going to be 100% working on the next expansion till after the last tier is done anyway. Adding more tiers might make the expansion last longer, but if you're going to take resources away from the new expansion to make more raid content for the current expansion, its not going to make the new one come quicker.

[clevin]

Wrath had four tiers though (Naxx -> Ulduar -> Togc -> Icc) and it still didn't make the wait any shorter between expansions, because the team still isn't going to be 100% working on the next expansion till after the last tier is done anyway. Adding more tiers might make the expansion last longer, but if you're going to take resources away from the new expansion to make more raid content for the current expansion, its not going to make the new one come quicker.

Well, they say they added a bunch of devs... so they should be able to do this AND keep working on an expansion.

I think the point is that they historically leave us with half an expansion without any real content. Since they can't seem to shorten expansion lifetime, they should try to add more content so we don't have what we did this time, in Cata and in Lich King - a bunch of content in the first 12-15 months, then nothing.

[Posvio]

Depends on how many bosses and how long it is.

[Louis CK]

With WoD coming at least a year after Siege, repeating what expansions have done since Wrath, it is shown that Blizz cannot simply produce an Expansion on a shortened time frame. Is it time to have 4 Tiers per expansion? Each releasing approx. 6 months between with the last one allowed to run over a bit pass 6 months depending on when the knew expansion comes out.

A fourth tier would just mean you'd be waiting the same amount or time after the fourth tier release as we are now with the third tier release.

[Khorm]

A fourth tier would just mean you'd be waiting the same amount or time after the fourth tier release as we are now with the third tier release.

Unless WoD is being delayed by the raid team I doubt this.

[DenniZ]

Pandaria sure as hell does not. Time to get out of Pandaland ASAP and never return to it.

[Bllets]

I would enjoy something like Trial of the Crusader after SoO or ICC, because it shouldn't take long to do and killing 5 bosses without wipes or dying is a nice way to spend some weeks/months while waiting.

Also trash becomes so tedious to do when you are doing SoO or ICC for the 20-50th time.

[Zka]

With WoD coming at least a year after Siege, repeating what expansions have done since Wrath, it is shown that Blizz cannot simply produce an Expansion on a shortened time frame. Is it time to have 4 Tiers per expansion? Each releasing approx. 6 months between with the last one allowed to run over a bit pass 6 months depending on when the knew expansion comes out.

I don't care, but spacing the tiers more evenly would definitely help without any extra work involved. I don't know why they release all tiers in 1 year and then no new tier for another year. So stupid.

[Airwaves]

No they need less and more content outside of raids.

[MasterHamster]

What the game needs in the content-drought between final tier and new expansion is a small patch that encourages alt leveling. Better gear from Justice, for one (522 atleast). Perhaps a temporary reduction in experience needed to level until expansion ships.
Make people want to take a break from their main without feeling like they have a hundred item levels to wade through first.

Such a patch cannot possibly take much dev time.
inb4 "at the cost of a raid tier you mean?"

[Cæli]

With WoD coming at least a year after Siege, repeating what expansions have done since Wrath, it is shown that Blizz cannot simply produce an Expansion on a shortened time frame. Is it time to have 4 Tiers per expansion? Each releasing approx. 6 months between with the last one allowed to run over a bit pass 6 months depending on when the knew expansion comes out.

No expansion on a "shortened time frame", and that is a good thing. I still feel less than 2 years is not enough for an expansion, it should let the players play enough with it so that nostalgia happens when thinking of each older expansions, without having the feeling of the content moving too quickly.
Rushing content (without doing bad work) is not really needed I think.
Raid tiers should be released when it feels necessary. If they really want to rush something in the game it should be tiers, not expansion imo.

Then it is a question of money/business, maybe Blizzard use expansion/tier to somewhat control the playerbase. Not sure it is that effective.

[Deleted]

It all depends.

I would of preferred two 7 boss raids released over a year at the end of MoP instead of 1 raid tier with 14 bosses for 1 FUCKING YEAR with no other content at all.

I can not believe we all fell for it again.

I really hope they are holding something up there sleeve.

So in short they need to avoid content luls however they do that is up to them

Expansions quicker or more (I would not mind smaller) raids, I actually think 14 bosses is to much.

1 year with zero content after they released 50 bosses in a year confuses me so much.

[CptAwesome]

Expansions really only need 3 tiers but the expansions need to be shorter.

MoP would be feel perfect if WoD was coming out in about 2 months but the massive delay on the end of it means that SoO is dragging on forever. The timings on the first two tiers were fine they just need to carry that pace into the final one as well. If you look at patch dates, the first tier was 7 months (slightly longer to allow for initial levelling and the staggered content release.) ToT was 6 months, now SoO is 6 months old as of yesterday. So with a consistent timeline, the WoD pre-patch could be expected probably next month. Then a month or two of preparation for the xpac then WoD release in June or July.

That would make SoO 7 months long plus 2 months of people running it with new talents and broken item scaling that no one really cares about with the expansion's pre-event to keep us busy. Instead, it's starting to look like we won't see WoD until September or later. Leaving us in SoO for 10 months proper then 2 with the pre-patch. They've just dropped the ball on getting the new xpac ready, again.

[Frozendekay]

They could have easily alleviated this with keeping us in T14 for 2 extra months. T14 farm was ridiculously short and I wouldn't have minded being there for a little more time. Could have shortened this tier by 2 months.

[Pennoyer]

They could have easily alleviated this with keeping us in T14 for 2 extra months. T14 farm was ridiculously short and I wouldn't have minded being there for a little more time. Could have shortened this tier by 2 months.

GC said the primary goal for SOO was a lot of bosses, and now we see why. Too bad a lot of them feel slapped together at the last minute to serve as obvious filler trying to stave off guild progress as much as possible.

At this point, I'd rather have a new Sunwell-like tier in a couple months and a Nov/Dec release than nothing at all and a Sept/Oct release.

[zephid]

It depends on how long the wait for the next expansion is. It doesn't matter if an expansion have 3 or 4 tiers if the wait after the last one is the same.

[Baphomette]

The long wait at the end has nothing to do with the number of tiers. Creating a new expansion is more work than a patch and therefore takes longer.

Question is, since they clearly KNOW it takes longer despite their best efforts failing three times, why don't they space the tiers out better? 8mo+8mo+8mo instead of 6mo+6mo+12mo. They were doing so well with MoP right up until they ran out of things to release after 5.4.