In Praise of Tier 14

One of the big disappointments in Cataclysm was the fairly anemic raiding scene. After a health 12-boss tier 11, we only got a grand total of 13 more bosses in the whole expansion (not counting Baradin Hold.) If you count absolutely everything, including bonus bosses and BH, Cataclysm had a total of 29 raid bosses, which is considerably fewer than the previous expansions.

So it is quite heartening to see Mists come out of the gate with a 16-boss tier, before you even count the world bosses.

Tier 14 has a clear progression to it as well. While my guild had to debate whether to hit up BoT or BWD in tier 11, tier 14 gets the best of both worlds. It has the small, doable in a single night quality of smaller raids, but also has the clear direction of a bigger raid.

While Karazhan was the first raid I ever stepped into, I really cut my teeth as a raider in Naxxramas, which was an enormous, 15-boss raid. The thing that was awesome about this was that even when you had a lot of bosses on farm, it still took you a long time to work your way through it completely.

The only downside of a huge raid is that, because it's all one enormous instance, you find yourself having to clear the entire place out every time if you want to work on later bosses. You might have great dps and know the fights backwards and forwards, but the sheer time it took to complete enough of the place to get to Sapphiron and Kel'thuzad would be very long, regardless.

So I think tier 14's divided tier has worked out quite well. You start with MSV, head to HoF, and then go to ToES. But if you've got MSV on farm, you don't have the clear the whole thing to get into Heart of Fear.

In the future, I actually think this would be a great way to bring back the old enormous instances of the past, like the very popular Ulduar or Karazhan. These places were pretty huge, but the size reinforced the epic feel. While attunements are a relic of the past that I think most people would be hesitant to return to (for one, they are awful for alts or new guild members,) you could do a kind of "soft attunement," giving everyone who beats the first wing of a raid some item or simply an attunement buff that would open access to the rest of the raid for everyone to come along.

Tier 14, I feel, has really helped deal with the inherent issues of the multi-raid tier, not to mention the fact that it has some very cool fight mechanics (which I've only scratched the surface of, as I've only been able to do LFR so far.)

I'll be very curious to see what kind of raiding we see in 5.2 (presumably the Thunder King raid) and 5.3 or 5.4, which I assume will be the Garrosh raid.