Reaction to the Lich King Kills

If you haven't heard, both the 10 and 25 man versions of the Lich King have been downed. The first 10 man kill was by the US guild Blood Legion of Illidan on Tuesday night only hours after the patch went live on the servers. The first 25 man kill was by European mega-guild Ensidia who has a number of world firsts and is the result of merging the top two Burning Crusade progression guilds. Both of these kills have erupted in controversy in the official forums and elsewhere on the internet. Below is my take on this.

Let's start off with the 10 man kill. Blood Legion is a guild that normally does 25 man content, meaning that they had gear from the 25 man version of ICC. In my mind, this really diminishing their accomplishment. Blizzard has attempted to defend them by saying that the gear had very little to do with it and that it's a huge accomplishment skill wise. I'm going to have to call bull-shit on this though. Now I'm not saying that skill had nothing to do with it as I'm sure it did and I'm sure that Blood Legion is a very skilled guild, however, claiming that the fact that the better gear from ICC-25 had nothing to do with it is simply ludicrous. I honestly think that there should have been some kind of function to deny players wearing ICC-25 gear from taking on the Lich King until after he had been downed by a straight up 10 man guild.

Moving on to the 25-man kill. This has actually been revoked as of this morning as Blizzard says that Ensidia exploited a bug in the encounter in order to make the encounter easier. They have also received a 3 day ban and had all of their loot taken away. Ensidia claims that they were simply using the same mechanics and rotation that they have always used. Again I think that Blizzard screwed up on their handling of this matter. In this particular instance I'm inclined to believe Ensidia as from what I can gather from the info I've found, it would have been really hard for them to determine what they were doing that was actually bugging the encounter. At the same time Ensidia says that the bug only happened on about half of their encounters and they didn't start or stop doing what what causing the bug in any of them. I think what Blizzard should have done in this instance is revoked the achievement and the loot, and reset Ensidia's raid so that they had to do the Lich King again without the bug in order to get the achievement.

So now that the specifics are out of the way I'll move into general comments on the ICC raids. First off the fact that the Lich King fell within 2 days of release is simply ridiculous. While I appreciate that Blizzard is trying to make raid content accessible to those that aren't in hard core raiding guilds, this is not the way to do it. Now a lot of people are going to say it doesn't matter because hard modes are the true end game now days. I agree with this statement, but at the same time having the major boss fall within 48 hours of release just screams to me that the content is under leveled at this point. These guilds weren't even using gear from the first two bosses in that wing of ICC when they made those kills which in my mind really should be the difference.