Charity

[Edit]: The formating won't work as it should, but I hope it's understandable and readable nonetheless.

First of all, I want to say thank you Blizzard, for the interesting ca. 15-20h :) it took us to get gold in all instances.
I also want to thank my team for taking a shadow priest for utility (aka "PURGATORY! F*** he’s dying!" => Soul Shift => "Oh, thanks :)") if not for damage.

By the way for further notice, our team consisted of:
Tank: Blood Death Knight
Healer: Mistweaver Monk
DPS: Shadowpriest, Elemental Shaman, Frostmage

But that’s not what this post is about.

Stuff I liked about challenge modes:

The general level of difficulty, in combination with the relatively well tuned timers. Every Gold Medal was possible in our setup (usually within ca. 2 hours of our first try).

The adrenaline level in our group was decidedly higher than on most hc raid bossesThings that could, in my humble opinion, stand improvement in future instances:

Please reset cooldowns when resetting a challenge mode. It’s horribly annoying to stand there with 5 people, waiting for BL, Army of the Dead, Invisibility Potion(!!!) or whatever when you just failed your gold time by a few seconds and want nothing better than to go in and finish what you started.

On the topic of buff food, flasks and potions (especially invisibility potions): It’s nice that to make up for the mobs not dropping any gold you didn’t give us repair cost. However, eating 300 stat buff food every try also costs a lot of gold, as do flasks. It might be wiser to tune challenge modes to a slightly lower level (even though I’m not sure it’s necessary) and completely prohibit buff food and flasks.

Most bosses could be a bit more challenging. There are very few bosses that actually pose a risk of wiping if you play them more or less correctly – as opposed to some trash pulls, where stuff just can go wrong horribly with the tank dying (thinking e.g. of the wonderful first pull in Mogu’shan Palace). One memorable exception here is Hoptallus (although he was harder when I first met him in the beta), but generally, 95% of all our wipes were on trash mobs, which kind of defies the meaning of bosses.In our group’s feeling instances were tuned like this:

A bronze time was what you’d get on your 1st try, easily. We usually reset the challenge on the final boss when we had seen everything, because the bronze time seemed slightly humiliating.

A silver time was what you’d get if you wiped once or twice and/or did something totally wrong like pull mobs that were supposed to be avoided, screw up your invisibility potion cd or something like this.

A gold time was what you’d get after some tries, if no unnecessary stuff was pulled, no tank deaths occurred, the right mobs were left out and the tactics were executed correctly. If nothing went wrong, gold came pretty much by itself. There was no run where we missed gold and felt we had done everything right, on the contrary, on most gold runs there would definitely have been room for improvement (such as using Invisibility Potions in Niuzao Temple, something we gave up because waiting for the cooldown to finish after a wipe was horribly annoying; killing one mob too little in Scholomance and having to pull a whole pack of students to make up for this; etc.).This is why, while decidedly fun and challenging, the gold medal standards did not live up to my expectations to a 100 percent. After all the promises about gold times being so very, very hard, I would have expected them to be slightly more demanding in terms of perfect execution.