I disagree, there have been numerous posts from people in progressed guilds who've stated that they've managed to kill almost all of the bosses that they've attempted in 5-15 pulls, a fraction of the number of pulls per boss kill compared to vanilla WoW.

Itemization is also very guilty in all this process. There's no (at least not till 2.1) sense of progression. We killed hydross in march, we should basically destroy him 2 months later but no, he still feels almost as hard than 3 months ago for me. We kill him in 2 3 tries, but still, it's hard. And without this progression, the margin of error stays very tiny, which means you can't invite more than 2 3 new people if you don't want to chain wipe.

I don't know how express exactly my feeling (especially in english ;x), it's like bc raiding is a job and a HARD job that is. And I'm raid leader since 2 years now, but I never had this feeling except maybe during the last weeks pre 2.0 when we still tried to beat kt before the expansion. Fights are very hard, you can't bring whoever you want because even with the perfect raid, your chances to succeed aren't that high... We're the second french guild, around the top 20 euro probably, which is not that bad but i'm still afraid of almost every ssc encounter. We can one shot everything but sometimes we just wipe for whatever reasons. Like a paladin afk 5 sec distracted by something around him and, damn, your warlock tank just died. A healer who casts a big heal just when hydross crosses the line and gg 8 adds, go wipe. We SHOULD feel very confident on encounter like hydross that we killed 10 times or so but we're not because we can wipe every second because of a little mistake.

So, what can blizzard do ? I don't know :/ A major step, and they're doing it, is to massively buff items. Guilds who beat fights should be rewarded and well rewarded. Guilds should feel much stronger after 1 month of SSC farming. Other than that, well I don't know how to keep the end game challenging while raising the margin of error. Difficult design job...

Agreed. Part of my frustration with raiding at the moment is how (SSC+ level) trash requires the raid to be executing at WoW 1.0 boss levels. I realize there's a significant portion of the raiding population that thrives on a slim margin of error, but for the rest of us, we need our raiding night to be varied in difficulty so when real life happens, one person doesn't wipe the raid on filler_trash_mob_23. My gut feeling is that blizzard should have never presented the entire raiding scheme; it's like reading the last page of the mystery book before even buying it.

Take a step back and think of how unfriendly this game is right now to someone who just dinged 70 that has an interest in joining their friends that are somewhere in the Gruul downing category. Not only would you have the entire karazhan key chain to do, but you're going to have to convince people that have accumulated 200+ heroic badges to run a _normal_ version of the instance. Five times. Scratch that, 20 times. Sure, you can get a pity run in here and there, but between farming for consumables, pvp, and real life, it's a pretty lonely place to be.

My concern, admittedly only based on anecotal evidence, is that raiding isn't attractive fresh blood. At the high end, guilds are continuing as they always do, speeding through content. But at the low end, where's the fresh blood entering the raiding end game? It just seems that it gets choked off somewhere between Curator/Aran/Nightbane/Maulgar.

For all practical purposes, Shadow Priests are essentially a different class from Holy Priest. They use completely different spells and have a different purpose in the fight. Because the shadow priest's role during a fight is group mana regen and no other class can do that, the talent build fills a specific raid need. To me that makes it a different class for the purpose of theory crafting.

I agree. For practical reasons shadow priests and holy priests are like completely different class, but the thing is, it's a heck of a lot easier to change a spec and some gear than it is to change a class. I guess I tend to look at things from the standpoint of a bitter hunter who doesn't have the option of being able to switch a spec and be almost a new class. I know it may be somewhat narrow minded, but I really enjoy my class and would like to feel like I'm contributing without having to reroll.

I think you're validating his point. Difficult does not mean difficult for the powerguilds, it means difficult for the average player. 10-15 pulls for powerguild_z is quite a different story from familyguild_a. Difficult in his example would be something along the lines of what a powerguild would call an "ok" encounter. Let's face it, difficult content for most of the powerguilds means basically "broken beyond reason". Yet, they are the ones baselining the content. Perhaps it's part of the problem?

Yes, if you only give the very best a chance, then that's what you'll see. Those same guilds (if starting from scratch now) would likely one-shot every WoW 1.0 boss through to mid AQ40, gear issues aside.

Say the aliens just beamed down and shot everyone under 6 foot tall. The world would be full of tall people saying "What are you talking about, they never hurt me".

Judging all raiders by the experience of the successful ones is a classic statistical fallacy which these boards should be above.

Anyone that reads forums like these, or even the official boards, gets the overwhelming impression: "SSC/TK bosses put you on farm."

If this stuff is punishingly hard for you guys, that scares the shit out of the rest of us. True story.

Excellent thread, thought I would contribute my 2c.

It's really the same story for us as it has been for so many guilds that have posted here. Pre-TBC, we raided 3 nights a week on new content, had MC and BWL cleared, AQ40 through Huhu, and 4 bosses in Naxx. I was very positive about the smaller raid size for exactly the reason Gurg posted; far painless to schedule.

What I am observing are a number of issues:

1. Kara completion for 25-man progression: This is painful on its own. We are a large guild, so further fragmenting the 40-mans, first to 25, and then further down to 10, left a bad taste in a lot of players' mouths. We juggle 2-3 Kara teams weekly, and some of us that are more casual can fill a spot when necessary.

That is, of course, if we aren't raid-locked.

A simple solution to this would have been to pull Nightbane out of Kara completely, thus allowing us more movement between groups to assist one another in the keying process. After all, we could help one another in BRD for MC attunement, right?

Not the case any longer.

One key to open the door to SSC would/should have been plenty as well. I understand, from their developers' standpoint, why they may want to slow early progression down, but it is still very painful.

2. The excitement surrounding Maulgar/Gruul/Mag. As mentioned previously, some have observed that it didn't feel truly as "epic" before. My take on this is that if they want to give us a sense of accomplishment, they ought to stop reusing models that wander the world and can be killed by 5 players.

When we all made our first kill of Onyxia, it was epic because there WAS no other Dragon to be killed (pre-greens/BWL). And she was a big girl. Really big. Zoning into Gruul's Lair is no different than wandering around Nagrand until you see Durn. Even Maulgar's model is already in-use out in Nagrand.

Mag may feel a little more epic, but I won't comment since we haven't killed him yet.

3. Gear gaps. Nothing really more needs to be said here, I'll just add my vote to the list -- they flatted the curve of separation between PvPers and Raiders, and as a result, the PvE's get the short end of the stick with poor/marginal upgrades.

4. The difficulty curve. I usually am at odds with our Raid Leader over this but my personal opinion is that it is still too sharp a curve. I like to use the Pre-TBC analogy. It my books, it should be:

Black Temple = Naxx
Hyjal = AQ40
TK = BWL
SSC = MC
Gruul = Ony

While I personally think that Gruul is (more or less) on par with Ony's difficulty, can you raiders that have pressed into SSC at this time really compare it to MC? Probably not. And it just gets more difficult from there? Yikes.

5. Guild Turnover. We have a lot of new faces, and I'm thankful for some of them; they've really shown that, at this point, they are dedicated, want to learn, enjoy raiding, etc. But there is still time to train them. And what about the long-termers who have been in the guild since day 1? My observation has been that some of them are in a depression-funk: They miss raiding with the old players that used to be with us, and cannot get over the hump of making new friends, or are simply hesitant/tired in trying to do so. Not entirely sure what I can do about that, but it is an observation nonetheless, and I do think it affects morale which leads to an impact on PvE progression.

And the overarching feeling from on high (Blizzard) is:

WE DON'T WANT THE CONTENT BEING BEATEN SO QUICKLY.

And I'm of the feeling that to me...I really don't care how fast it's beaten. They can say it keeps the average raider "engaged" or whatnot, saying that if something hasn't yet been beaten, it has a sort of mystique about it, and while that's true, I'd MUCH prefer the encounters to be beatable by a healthy margin - not by the skin of Nihilum's teeth.

KT was pretty much perfect. Hard enough to where only 1-3 guilds on all but the most talented servers could kill him, but still accessible and ultimately "beatable" by a average-to-good guild.

That may or may not be true. I hardly believe that the elite guilds spent more than 5-15 pulls on most bosses in vanilla WoW, including Naxx. However, the time spent per pull is where the investment has gone up drastically. Consider Aran, for instance. Arguably the hardesat or second hardest boss in Kara.

First, you spend an hour(give or take) clearing to him. Then you spend 5 mins per fight, then 10 mins running back and buffing up. That gives you roughly 3-4 tries per trash clear. So to get to the magical 15 pulls, you now have spent 10 hours on Aran.

Now take Vael, the gateway mob in BWL. You spend 0 hours clearing to him. You fight him in <3 mins. You take 5 mins to run back and buff. You fight him again. you can attempt him until you get tired of it and leave. I guarantee most guilds didn't spend 10 hours before they killed him. Same with any bwl boss.

AQ40 started the whole "large group of trash linked to boss" lunacy, and it needs to just go away, unless it is part of the fight(aka suppression room style), or it is a very small ammount of trash.