You get equal or better loot (to compare to what you could get at the time in MC//BWL//AQ) for less work. Is that something thats terribly wrong for the average or below average guild? Dont forget, the faster you gear the faster you can progress on SSC and The Eye. Would you rather work through progression a-la Naxx for what is (imo) Teir 2? I prolly should of added Kara into the grouping also, as it has tier 4 in it.

Maybe I misunderstand what a Average or Below Average guild is. To what I understand, thats your guild of casual players (below average) or that group of semi-hardcore players (average). You know, the guilds who killed Spider, Noth, Instructor, and maybe Patchwerk//Grob? Those are the guilds that I think of when I think "Average". They can easily kill (after rethinking it some more) Hydross, Fathomlord and Morogrimm, maybe Lurker (with the proper time commitment) as an "Average" guild. I wont guess on The Eye as I have not seen any of the encounters.

To what I see, there lies the problem of the Casual, the entire "I want everything, but I dont want to put forth any effort to get it" attitude. If you want the progress, put forth the effort. If all you are gonna do is piss and moan on the forums, I hope you dont even see the artwork of the first boss.

Please, can we end the discussions of casual v hardcore? First, it pops up in every other thread these days, and even as a viable topic it should be contained. Second, the arguments are going purely in circles: I have yet to see posters acknowledge the points of others, concede points of debate, clarify the argument and move on.

Well, we could get into stereotypes, but that's not terribly productive. They're not very accurate and are pretty much formed 90% by people on the official forums, which are the biggest waste of time possible. Casual stereotype: I want to play 5 hours a week and have full Tier 3. Hardcore stereotype: You shouldn't even bother playing if you can't raid 5hrs a night 6 nights a week.

Very few people actually feel that way. I believe the actual casual viewpoint is essentially "There are a massive number of raid zones in-game right now (relative to the majority of the life of WoW). It makes sense that a healthy portion of those raid zones are somewhat accessible by average guilds, since there is still plenty of content left for hardcore folks."

Of course, above average guilds want a real challenge, and they should be able to get it. Casual guilds (which I personally, do not define as having multiple bosses down in Naxx) should also have access to raid encounters. Where to put the line between "challenging" and "accessible" is pretty unclear. I personally think that dumbing down encounters over time is a decent idea, if done deliberately. Not overtuned/bugged and then nerfed, just harder for bleeding edge, and then progressively easier as the more skilled guilds have little use to be there.

This comes from a casual viewpoint so take it with a grain of salt. I am only able to play 4-5 hrs a week, 12-18 hrs every other weekend these days, so I don't expect to see mid to high end raiding for a very long time (if ever), but that's just fine. With my playtime and guild structure, I'll have to (and probably will be) content with Kara and heroics and the eventual 25-man Ony-esque PuGs.

Please stop. Your are not contributing to this thread at this moment.

Average: modal(a): relating to or constituting the most frequent value in a distribution

http://www.3hoys.com/raids/sixty.html

As an off the cuff average, adding up RPI (which for not all values is equal, but is essentially one point, one kill), dividing by the number of Alliiance guilds (sample sizes, people, sample sizes), the result is ~25. Two guilds at 25 have killed Fankriss and Nefarian.

And before you get lost and that average definition gets legs, fully half the people raiding Alliance side on that server, by definition, did not even get that far.

While I am with everyone in avoiding the casual versus hardcore, I thought I might throw an empirical number at something demonstrably untrue.

Let me fix that for you. We're on the hardcore shade of casual. We wipe just like you do to get our epics.

If Patchwerk is "average", than my server of 14,000 players had about 100-120 players in average or above average guilds. The guilds that farmed Maraudon for NR gear and Scarlet Monastery for Shadow pots need to understand that running DM for Loatheb buffs is not "average" behavior.

At what point should a guild look at doing Magtheridon? Right now my casual raiding guild is working on Aran/Prince we are going to start working on Maulgar monday or so. I don't see us having too much issue with him. I assume we could get Gruul down after a few nights of attempts. So is Magtheridon going to be feasible once we are consistantly downing Prince/Gruul everyweek? or can we start a bit sooner>?

Brilliance, I honestly cannot believe I read that... do you even think before typing this crap? Is it ego? or just stupidity, because something isn't clicking upstairs son.

Most casual guilds put in a lot of effort. Almost every guild on our server puts in quite a bit more raid time than we do, and yet they are behind us in progress. Surely, those lower life forms must be punished for their impudence. Surely there are not other mitigating factors; surely they don't deserve anything. They just want to get free loots!

Nezralix made a valid point... 27 out of the 30 encounters will be tuned for a tiny handful of guilds. How in any possible way is that appropriate?

I believe there is some confusion over 'casual players' and 'casual raiders', or 'average players' and 'average raiders'.

An average player may of done Nef, Fankriss.
An average raider has most likely gone abit further and ventured into Naxx.

Putting in anything between 2-12 hours a day playing wow I never thought I'd feel like Joe Casual . I'm just more.. relaxed so to say.

Anyway, the flaw in this argument has allready been pointed out by others.

For me it sums up like this;

* Blizzard is making the game to make money
* Blizzard will tune the content in such a way that they'll keep making money
* 1% of the playerbase is not where their revenue comes from and thus not who the entry level content will be tuned for in the long run
* 80% of all statistics online are made up on the fly

Sorry for contributing to taking this thread far, far into the magical land of off topic.

Do you mind? I'm trying to enjoy the extremely productive casual vs. hardcore argument for the thousandth time.

But theoretically speaking, I have the same question more or less. =P

Like others have said in this thread, Gruul post-hotfix is significantly easier then Magtheridon is now. Gruul takes almost no coordination now, and doesn't require much dps. Magtheridon actually had some challenge in killing the adds before, now the only real challenge is getting 20 people to learn to click boxes in rotations. Still, getting 20 people to click can be a real challenge in itself for most guilds. If your guild is coordinated you could probably work on him now and see progress, but don't expect a kill if you can't farm nightbane with ease by this point.

As for his damage, I don't remember what he hit me for before. I seem to recall it being around 2kish. He was hitting me last night for 5.2-6k. A paladin reported 5k cleve pre-hotfix and 13k post (healing gear both times). Seems like a hell of a lot more then the 40% some people are reporting.

I'm sorry for throwing this thread into a Casual V Raider debate, I didnt mean for it to go that far. I guess that my statement that SSC seemed to give off the wrong idea, or I might of just worded it wrong (or I could be an egotystical jackass, which is probably true), and sparked this entire thing. I wont add anything more to the fire, rather, I'll just correct what I said.

I dont think they will nerf SSC because everything that I have personally seen seems very killable by anyone out there, as long as they can organize and put in the time.

And in the spirit of the REAL topic...

I dont know what the exact requirement of gear is, but I would suggest just take 1 night to go in there (Hell, it would be like 50 min of work) and put in an attempt or two. If you can kill 2 - 3 of the channelers before he becomes active, then you should be on the road to killing him. Although your MT's gear could be a stopping block, since I hear that he hits pretty hard now, i.e. Someone vent said our MT got hit for 10k last night, before (monday night) we had a bear tanking him ~.~

Mag, since the rewards (T4 BP) is better then what Hydross can drop. Or atleast I think he drops better loot.

Magtheridon and Hydross are both doable by a guild that has killed Gruul for the first time this week. Both have different requirements, to wit:

- Hydross requires you have a lot of good tanks that are properly geared. This involves a mix of frost resist and nature resist gear, and not stuff from maradon either. You can use bear tanks (again though, with some frost/nature resist) to tank the adds Hydross spawns periodically. You need very high DPS. You need some warlocks for banish. The trash in SSC is very painful and respawns rapidly.

- Magtheridon has less of a gear check and more of a skill check. You will have to create groups of people that have very specific jobs every few minutes (clicking cubes), healers that need to heal these clickers, all the while the ground is earthquaking below you. Missing the cube clicks will wipe the raid. Once you click a cube you start taking 800 dmg/sec plus you get a debuff that won't let you click it again for 3 minutes (hence the group rotations). Its kind of like C'thun stomach on crack.

I would suggest you should start gearing up a few tanks in frost/nature gear (not really sure what the best source is? Naxx resist gear or outland frost stuff? Green nature resist?) while working on Magtheridon, once you have a couple tanks geared up try out Hydros.


fwiw SSC will definitely get nerfed when patch 2.1.0 comes out, most likely along the lines of trash respawns/amount, and then the bosses themselves a few weeks/months later. The formula has been the same since WoW launched as proven this week with Gruuls hotfixes.

/wave

So, sidestepping pointless comparisons to bygone raiding content and arguments over who should get to kill what bosses, I thought I'd come back to the topic.

Last night the hotfix was applied while we were making attempts, and before the RnD post had been made. One attempt, he was hitting me for around 2k, the very next run abruptly shot up to 6-7k hits and cleaves. We actually thought it was bugged ala Netherspite at first, then came back after we saw the post. The only other observed difference was that the channelers went down more quickly-- they still appeared to hit/cast/getstrongerondeath the same as before. Mag's other spells also seemed to stay the same. Overall noticeably easier, but nowhere near the scale of the gigantic nerf on Gruul-- still relatively challenging (lrn2click, etc).

Following the raid progression chart, Mag = Gruul/Kara, whereas SSL/TK are above it, thus you should most likely do Mag right after Gruul, just make sure you read up abit on it first so people know whats going to happen :P

I personally made our guild wait on Mag till he got nerfed, because spamming flasks on Gruul, and then Hydross was more than enough without adding Mag there too when I knew he would be nerfed later.
So tonight after Gruul goes down we're going to play with Mag instead of going to SSL thanks to this now.


I have to give a different story about Hydross though, we've not found him nearly as easy as other guilds seem to be saying he is. We've used full flasks twice, tried 2~3 different tactics (that are known to work) and had a pretty damned optimal setup on the last time we flasked. Still not dead yet and its due to a shortfall of DPS only.
We are an 'above average raiding guild' with a fair mix of pretty 'hardcore' players, we dont have slackers in the raid and the general management of the tactic/raid setup was always pretty good.
Im unable to work out exactly what we are doing which is simply 'wrong' and preventing us a kill, whereas with other bosses thats normally pretty easy to work out.

Hmmm, I've not read anyone really saying Hydross is easy? I mean DnT is saying he is balanced fine which I can understand where they are coming from based on what they have said but never was what they said was Hydross is easy. Really the fight comes down to how can you best optimize your guild DPS (examples should all the DPS be on adds or would it be better if we left some DPS on Hydross all the time, should you banish adds or should you AOE them)

Hydross is not easy, but he is a great encounter.
I'd personally recommend guilds do SSC first, as there are 2 rather nice execution-based fights right after Hydross. Hydross himself is about as difficult as Magtheridon.
But Brilliance is right, Mag drops much better loot (Hydross loot is just terrible... 28 mana back on regrowth, chaching!).

Well Mag trash > Gruul trash, right? :P Since it seems like lately trash (and respawns thereof) has been dictating the relative frustration of an encounter. Mag still seems to require tighter execution by the whole raid, where as Gruul is more of just a gear check for your tanks, and to a lesser degree, DPS. (although if you DPS is great, you can lower the gear check for your tanks, and vice versa)

Mag being as difficult as a boss somewhere in SSC sounds right. The chestpiece is always the centerpiece of any set, you could kill bosses in Naxx before C'Thun, bosses in AQ40 before Nef, and so on. Plus even if he's the harder of the 2, TK seems to be intended to be after SSC for the most part, so in reality guilds can gear up more in SSC.

I'm really looking forward to going back to do Mag this weekend now. It sounds like they kept all the main elements of the fight in place, but lowered the DPS threshold needed, which is a good change. Before it was stupid that you needed Hydross-level DPS for the first 2-3 minutes of the fight, and then after that you just kind of crawled at a snail's pace against a giant Pit Lord that hits about as hard as a random melee grunt in a heroic instance. As I'd mentioned in other threads, I was not thrilled about the fact that we hit a point where we needed to use DPS consumables on learning attempts in order stabilize "phase 2." This change seems to remove that, which is perfect.

im pretty sure my original post was missed, but as i stated before. The adds HP got nerfed, trash HP got nerfed. Tank does get hit for like 6-7k which at least makes it more interesting in "phase 2".

Did Tigole not state that they expected Magtheridon to be farmed by many guilds already?

IMHO all bosses of one Tier-level should be roughly the same difficulty to allow not-so-hardcores to get their full T4 sets. If they want a tough blocker, it could be the first or second boss of the next tier, like Vael was.