Insanity/Immortality and their validity in the raid scene

This has been a pretty hot topic recently amongst the wider WoW raiding community, especially as 3.3 still looks to be a while away and the majority of guilds are working on completing/farming tribute runs of ToGC. The upshot of it is that just one disconnect can be the difference between a kill and a wipe, causing you to lose out on cloaks for that week and substantially affecting your guild's ranking.

Part of the problem is how WoWProgress and other progression tracking sites rank achievements over actual boss kills. Many guilds, including Nurfed, who recently claimed server first Insanity on my own server Blackrock, have voiced complaints about the tracking methods.

Paragon, ranked world 4th during Ulduar, managed to nab the world first Anub’arak kill. They are currently ranked #13 behind a guild called The Fallen (who are at #12). This is a problem, because The Fallen was ranked world #234 during Ulduar, and also killed Anub’arak 53rd in the world.

I'd have to agree with them. Tracking progress based on gimmick achievements is a horrible idea. And it is a gimmick. Yogg-0 at least changed the mechanics of the fight, and made it significantly more challenging. The only thing challenging about Insanity is praying hard enough to whatever deity you believe in that one of your healers or tanks doesn't disconnect at a crucial moment due to something out of their control. And it will almost always be out of their control, as this instance has horrible stability and has been plagued by constant disconnects since it has been launched.

Why the fuck is Insanity in the game in the first place? We didn't need it in Sunwell, because the content was actually hard. We didn't need it in Ulduar, because it would have encouraged guilds to abandon hard modes in favour of the easy modes. The way they ended up doing it for Ulduar will hopefully carry over to Icecrown, plus the added distinction between normal and heroic modes (i.e. 4 seperate achievements). As it is now, Insanity type achievements are an excuse to make content easier.

I'm fine with the limited attempts mechanic and I hope to see it used in future. However, Blizzard can leave out the X attempts remaining gimmick achievements. Or at least provide nothing more than gimmick rewards (mounts) from them. It would be nothing to complain about. If nothing else, it would mean the content would be hard again.

~P