31 bosses.

My guess: there's "32" bosses in Icecrown. 8 bosses on 10 man, 10 man hard, 25 man, and 25 man hard. Surprise! 32 bosses.

I respectfully disagree. However, now that the deed is done... well, we'll just have to stick with it. The first few pages are probably going to be a bit aimless now, though, since we don't really have anything to discuss.

As for Icecrown having 32 bosses? If it actually does, I would be very surprised if they didn't add some sort of wing or checkpoint system. Very, very few people would be able to kill 32 bosses per week, even on normal mode. It would just take too long to organize people.

I suspect this is more along the lines of Naxxramas' 4 Horsemen counting as 4 bosses. There's likely one encounter in there where you have 5 bosses, similar to Black Temple's "Superbowl of not standing in fire".

Let's say they design this similar to Naxxramas even, suggesting 4 wings. Each wing having a multi-boss fight. Assuming Arthas has another guardian like Sapphiron to Kel'Thuzad, You'd have 30 bosses otherwise, or 7.5 per wing. If you have wings that average 3 bosses in one encounter (maybe one is a double boss, another is a 5 or 6), that accounts for 12 bosses in 4 encounters, and if the rest are all single, that's actually only 24 bosses.

Perhaps there's also an event like the Northrend Beasts. That technically counts as 4 bosses, but all in one fight. I wouldn't doubt them putting a multiple-boss in succession fight into IC either.

What I'm getting at is there's alot of different ways to slice it. You could say there's 32 boss fights, or even as little as 8. One could even be somewhat random like the Faction Heroes in ToC-5man. There's 5 bosses there, but you only fight 3...

winner.

Although apparently Ghostcrawler is now just saying it was a joke. Or implying. (Implied, Lisa? or implode.)

So...it'll be like the first 20 pages of every patch catch all?

Anyone see this in the Dungeon and Raid Blizzcon panel today?

Cross Server LFG

* This will let you PUG 5-man instances and search for groups through multiple servers.
* It will come with its own reward systems. If you're the leader of a PUG and complete the dungeon succesfully you will be rewarded.
* It should be out for patch 3.3.0.

Interesting!

Indeed. Striked me as a bit odd too.
Oh well, not like I really want to ever join a pug, rewards or not

But if it gives any substantial rewards (I would assume bonus XP or similar), non-pugs would likely use it as well, and just make their premade through the LFG system.
I can understand what Blizz want to accomplish here, it just seems... wrong.

So now they are letting instance groups form across servers? How about they first get instances working for the single server groups.

This is exactly how I expect it to play out.

The situation is getting ridiculous for non-northrend instances. There was about an hour wait for instances to become available in the old world and last night I tired to run ramparts and would get DCed every time I ran through the entrance.

Its unacceptable the a prime piece of content is nearly inaccessible.

We actually suspect this change will alleviate the AICBL issue (Additonal instances cannot be launched.). In particular, when attmepting to zone in from multiple zones, it'll count under the less 'stressed' server. So if you have a pug from a random low population server, you should have no problem getting in, and it won't bog down the high population server to boot. Overall, equalized the instances launched per server.

As for the rewards, it'll really depend on what they get. If it's an xp boost and you have a few people at level 80, they won't care about getting that +5% xp, so making the level 79 leader. Same if it's a rep reward too, since a majority of players have already capped their reps to exalted.

If it's something like an additonal emblem of conquest though, that will likely cause alot of drama for those trying to collect them quicker.

Typically, since that's the only real benefit unless someone needs a specific loot rule (ie - master looter).

I've known PuGs that will state at the beginning of a run that they are running it for a specific item, but it's been a long time since that's been an issue.

It really doesn't matter how they implement a system for providing the group "leader" a bonus incentive. The WoW playerbase will try to game the system, and we'll end up with the same sum total of problems that we already have with PuG's right now. They'll just be different problems.

There either needs to be a reward system for the group, or no reward system at all. Honestly, the best incentive would be a group reward system that scales up with group size. Full five-person runs will get the full and appropriate reward, while smaller groups will get a smaller reward. This would incentivize getting full runs together.

Not that I like queues, but at least then we would be able to see the time and be able to go AFK instead of doing the instance dance for 20 minutes.

I agree. If the goal is push folks into using the LFG system then reward the whole group for completion.

You get a mount! And you get a mount! And you get a mount!