Well thanks for this. Seems people think I try to make the point that Moroes is hard. That is not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make are indeed much more about the stressors of the social type that you describe, and raid setup sensitivity is just one of the aspects of this, which is where the Moroes example comes from.

More than most other bosses in Karazhan, Aran just really demonstrates if you have any weak links in your raid. Some guy moving during Flame Wreath? Caster sitting there firing away merrily with a Blizzard on his head, or trying to outrun it in the same direction? People LOSing or otherwise causing him to run around a lot? Etc. It just feels like (especially Flame Wreath) that most other bosses there are more forgiving of bad players.

Can anybody convince Jeff Kaplan to never ever put in choke points into raid design again? Kara is one, Naaru trials are the next. The full array of 5-man content is mandatory for raiding in some fashion or another.

That's not just one point decision. It's all across the board. And it's totally new compared to Vanilla. Wasn't it kind of obvious that this was going to fragment folks?

We put in 30 tries before we really "learned" him, 2 of our warlocks quit the guild because of the pressure they felt to perform. It wasn't until after that we had a paladin RF and try to get the attention of the elementals that we started to 1-2 shot him every week.

Our problem was we were focusing so heavily on the flame wreath / blizzard / etc that we were not properly dealing with the elementals and that was our huge problem for a few weeks and too much magic immune trash making our guys QQ

Aran seems to be the one where you can pretty much guarantee wipes whenever you have someone new (to raiding) in the team. I know it's seemed harder for us because it made the whole guild churn issue stand out, to the extent that the more experienced players could be wiping on him for 3 weeks if they ended up with lots of new people in their group.

It has this classic thing that if you have it sussed, you can get your part right every time and be one of the last ones down, and still know that the group can't hack it.

I like the encounter, but if the trash was on a 4 hr respawn it would make it so much easier for new people to learn it. (and less painful for the experienced raiders too.)

The thing about people quitting because they felt pressure to perform is something I have also seen. In a 40 man raid, you could probably find a role for people who didn't want to be too pressured. But if I have a priest who is freaking out because she doesn't want to shackle on Moroes, she's SOL and no raid leader will ever willingly take her to Karazhan.

Rogue Cripple/CoEx nuke first add . hunter trap other add, pally rotate fears on other, tanks on other two mobs..sorted?

Blizzard should just whip together another ZG "learn2raid" type dungeon, make it 20 or 25 man, and throw in items on par with Heroic loots as a stepping stone. Have encounters that begin very easy (first boss has an enrage mechanic, and a stacking wound debuff like Fankriss) and as the instance progresses throw in new mechanics like LOS of AOE, maybe an NPC deeper into the instance that you can talk to for a major resistance buff, then you can do another boss (but you could skip with sufficient gear), etc?

Add in some decent rep rewards and a new rep, and some longish quest items like ZG that rock (the trinkets) and throw in heroic level blues as well. Make the dungeon "difficult" but nothing that 20 people who have done a heroic before couldn't do. Then ramp SSC down a bit (mostly hydross and Leothras, Vashj too) to match the curve put in place with this dungeon (i. e last boss of this instance is almost on par with Hydross once he is nerfed) and this would alleviate alot of problems.

Well, they could always pull another version of the AQ20/40 split and quickly refactor/retune content currently under construction to fit the role. (Zul'Aman would be the candidate we have in mind here)

The question is how far out from live is this stuff?

Well the thing is development time could be severely reduced just via reusing alot of boss concepts from older dungeons that most (I think?) smaller/"casual" guilds did not see like Naxx/late AQ40, or borrow some concepts from Heroics as well. all it would require is terrain design (presumably finished for Zul'aman) animations (Its a troll dungeon... just borrow more from ZG) testing (Hell we do that anyways) and itemization which would take all of 30 minutes and an intern to do. Have a lore writer do some overtime, and they *could* crank it out in 2-3 weeks I bet.

I'm sure this has been mentioned already, but for me the most dramatic aspect of the smaller raiding sizes is how important it is to balance healers/DPS. With 40-man raids, I always felt like there was a large amount of space to play around with the number of healers in the raid. I think we only ever really felt the crunch of too many or too few on fights like Patchwerk and Loatheb.

Come to TBC, and getting down to the minimum number of healers for the encounter is very important. Wether it's enrage timers or dealing with adds, adding even one DPS class to an encounter can change the pace of the fight dramatically. People have also noticed that in Kara, where a three healer group is ok but a two healer group is just better due to the more concentrated DPS. It's annoying to lose the flexibility of even one healer slot. The 7-healer Mags raids is going to do dramatically better than the 8-healer one, and if your group can cut down even more it's in even better shape. From a raid leader standpoint it sucks and from a healer standpoint it sucks- every fight the healers need to be pushed to the limit (in consumables and concentration) because the DPS is trying to beat the enrage/adds timer. Then if the healers get good enough that they can start to relax... cut one from the group to try to make the fight easier!

It isn't choke points, it is choke points that require a completely different social environment to complete. Attunements were there pre-expansion, but they were never that difficult to complete and you didn't have to invent a new social structure in your guild to do it. Compare Ony (effectively a few partial BRD runs and a UBRS clear for Alliance) to killing Nightbane and Gruul. You could PUG Ony attunement in a few evenings, where as Nightbane requires months invested in a 10-man raid with a one week lockout.

We need a sane progression, where the block on SSC/Eye/whatever is gear and strategy related, and those of us who don't have it can work on an instance with a 25-man cap until we do. Sadly, 2.1 will do little to fix this situation (besides what has already been mentioned - make Kara a bit easier) and it may be too little to fix it now anyway.

Blizzard has two things to work on in the raid game - trash/consumable/boss tuning for the high-end raid instances is clearly one. An environment for the casual raider to play in is the other. I see evidence of the former in the shape of 2.1, but I see no evidence of the latter.

I haven't read every post in the thread, just the first page and last page, so I apologize if these points have already been brought up. Also, I'll say that I am posting from the point of view of a raider, warlock class lead, sometimes raid leader.

I vastly prefer smaller raid sizes. I would be happy if the max raid size was 10 man. That is just me, but I prefer encounters where everyone counts and where you really know the people you play with. I did the whole MC/BWL/AQ40/NAXX raiding thing and I really didn't even know 70% of the people I raided with. I usually knew the other warlocks pretty well, some officers, and the mages who were always trying to steal my gear, but the rest of the riad was just kind of there and I didn't really pay attention to them.

The smaller the raid, the less that happens. Raiding karazhan I really have a good feel for what a hunter actually does in a raid. I really know just how viable it is to have a holy paladin offtank, and I quickly learned which classes could kite undead mobs and which ones couldn't. While my opinion is not shared by most of the other officers in my guild, I love karazhan with a good group. It's fun and there shouldn't be any/many wipes at all.

While IMO 10 is optimal, 25 is better than 40 so I see the BC raids as an improvement.

I really don't see the validity of arguments like "25 man raids are harder, so the lock out casuals". If the 25 man raids are harder, it is because blizzard decided to make them harder, it's not because they require fewer players. IMO difficulty is not really associated with raid size at all.

Regarding raid content difficulty:

I know my view on things is pretty much as close to toeing the line of on a sensitive subject as anyone can be, but very, very honestly, I'd say that other than the consumables issue which I take to be a seperate consideration, a -lot- of the content was overtuned and turned into timesinks (see:heroics difficulty, trash, 1 t4 per 25man boss, 4 vials off Vashj) for the sole reason of filtering the number of people that would get further into untested content.


Heroics? Magtheridon? Limited number of people in TK-The Eye.

Nightbane? Gruul? (Keeping in mind these two bosses were the ones that received the biggest nerfs of all our currently available content, thus far -and- they were the two gateway bosses) Limited number of people doing SSC.

Amazingly mind-numbing trash with overabundance of HP? Less attempts on otherwise progress-able bosses. Less people get to see Vashj.

AAAAAND, the kicker - if some guild(s) is(are) mad/dedicated enough to blow past all expectations and put Vashj/Kael'Thas on farm, we had the ultimate timesink in the form of 4 vials per kill, making sure that no one can be readily attuned to content that's still being developed/tested. I.E. Hyjal and the Black Temple.


I'm pretty sure that even from the design phase, TBC was -planned- to have had content to cater for everyone playing the game at Nov 2006 - the small ZG/AQ20 guilds, the Molten Core guilds, the "Yay we killed Nefarian!" guilds, the guilds working on C'Thun, the guilds staring at 4hm spreadsheets, the guilds done with Kel'Thuzad and ripping apart BGs with their insane 2handers, etc.

TK/SSC would have been that mid tier content, except TBC was rushed. It's not just a case of the top 10 guilds tearing through both instances within the first three weeks (which is totally feasible if SSC/TK and before had been at their final tuning levels for their intended audience) and having nothing to do after that. Specifically with reference to Gruul and Nightbane, it's also a matter of tenfold the number of guilds getting to untested/untuned content which would have made feedback and tuning a lot messier.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard realized from before TBC where the capabilities of most of the raiding guilds were. As it was, deadlines and unfinished content tied down the available options.

Keeping in mind these are all my opinions on the subject, I'm still undecided if the generally shitty loot with the 2.1 across-the-table buffs is something that was also planned beforehand to help funnel down progression somewhat, or was something extra that was considered after seeing how things panned out, but it should go a long way to putting the lower and mid tier of raiding content well in its place.

So anyway, what I'm trying to say is... yes, Blizzard knows what the majority portion of raiders are capable of, and can/will deliver content for each tier. If it proves still too hard despite 2.1 changes, things will get toned down more.

We're starting to feel the chokepoint pinch. We've always been a smallish guild with a fairly tight roster, and we took it easy at the start of TBC so everyone got extensive experience in Karazhan, till we were running 3 groups a week farming Nightbane (with less than 40 raiding members). With this schedule it was no big deal to farm Gruul and Mag as well. The thing is, once Hydross dropped and we started to dig into the soft underbelly of SSC (Tidewalker/Karathress) there was less and less time for Kharazan. It's fairly boring, not particularly challenging and many of the drops are sidegrades or shards these days. The clear choice was to push Karazhan to the wayside and forge ahead in SSC.

The problem is recruits. Like any raiding guild we always have a couple apps to stay ahead of attrition. But our server is poorly-progressed enough that NOBODY we recruit has their SSC attunement done. The Gruul piece of the quest is very easy...it's no problem to make sure all the apps get in for Gruul. The problem is Nightbane...we're in the position of having to slap together an un-excited group (basically forcing players to go to Karazhan) to clear to Nightbane and kill him. It's a pain in the ass, and we haven't even been pushing people very hard to get their TK keys. There's just not that much time to work seriously on SSC, clear Mag/Gruul, down the occasional outdoor raid boss and get the entire guild attuned to everything unless we're gonna schedule events/raids 7 days a week. Hell, last night (Monday) we took the night off JUST to run Trial of the Naaru heroics. Could have been working on Leotheras, but put it on hold JUST FOR ATTUNEMENTS.

This is exactly where I ended up and is an excellent analysis of why I've seen a ton of the raiding guilds on my server break up/reform. They really just blew it with TBC raiding for people like me.

Edit: Fixed quotes

I'm not convinced it was so much an issue of SSC/TK stuff being untested (or more specifically, that Blizzard needed time to test it) more that it was an issue of content beyond SSC/TK not being finished. I believe they put in all these road blocks, whether we're talking about attunements, very difficult bosses and trash, or generally untuned/buggy content, to slow people down but still keep them playing.

The alternative would have been to release unbuggy content that would have difficulty that scaled logically, so you'd have bleeding edge guilds farming Vashj and Kael'Thas for many weeks now (but unable to access Hyjal) and most more casual guilds farming Magtherdon and the first few bosses in SSC. In hindsight that may have been the more reasonable thing to do. Going that route they may have lost some bleeding edge players from the boredom of farming bosses with no new content, but who knows.

Blizzards goal was to keep people playing while they finished content. I think they went about it the wrong way and have probably lost a lot of subscribers because of it.

Well, that is a lot of our problem with Aran - I've been there both nights we got attempts in on him (before finals screwed our raids the past few weeks). The fact we need to clear an hour or 2 of trash to reach a boss we're wiping on to learn is a major downer. The free epics of the chess event are really the only boost, and even those aren't quite enough motivation, I think.

Our actual problem with Aran was mainly standard learning - the boss has a lot of abilities. We got down flamewreaths and interrupts pretty well the first try - I stressed them a lot in my explanation. Our physical DPS is also fine - we can consistantly keep his health below his mana.

Our initial problem was dealing with Blizzard, his pulsing silence, and the water elementals. We got used to the silence, and we're calling out the blizzard, so no one dies to it. It drains healer mana, but that's about it. When we focus, we can easily get him down to 40% with him still having half mana...

And then the elementals eat us. They're the hard part of the fight, and it's doubly so without warlocks. I got a good PM with advise to use a hunter with frost resist gear to tank them, and that ought to do a lot better than me trying to gather them up. The priest, the other warrior, and myself will also try to use our fears there.

But really? That fight with no warlock is like trying Moroes with no priest - it requires a form of CC in a 10 man which no other class can provide to win the fight without major difficulties. We don't raid stack - a lot of guilds strongly recommend to stack ranged on Curator, but we still do him with our rogue and feral druid. We don't even really have a lot of alts, so stacking isn't even an option.

But yeah, to answer your question, we'd probably be able to drop Aran with a better tactic on those elementals (going to try the frost resist hunter - I talked to our hunter last night, and he'll scope the AH for gear), and some more learning attempts on him. Clearing to him is a major motivation killer, though.

I kinda like it.

For example, it really simplifies recruitment. Applicant isn't karazhan keyed? Denied. You know that if the player is keyed for SSC that he has at least has a little raid experience. This is important because gear can't really be used to determine raid experieence anymore for a lot of classes, because boe craftables, bop craftables, and pvp/arena award gear make epic gear available without raiding.

What we ended up doing was have our holy paladin pop right. fury and spam holy lights until he was the focus of whatever elementals werent banished, then flash of light spam himself, with another healer helping a bit.

with the elementals all focused on 1 paladin they're almost completely marginalized. We thought at first the pally would need FrR, so started farming mats, but we tried first without, a good thing - because we found it wasnt desired. He kept conc aura up to avoid casting issues, and now with that way of dealing with the elementals, we 1-2 shot him depending on whos had too much beer that day.

Well, come 2.1, I think you'll have a far more attractive option for the fight; as will a lot of guilds that struggle on Aran: taking the Poly before Elementals, and then DPSing them down. The health on the elementals is reduced come 2.1 (making it the second time they've reduced their health), and I think the main reason for this was to limit the "warlock factor". The fight is a complete cake-walk with two Warlocks, easily doable with one.. but the difficulty ramps up severely with none. Come patch, this may be mitigated simply by allowing you to alter strategy for your composition and demolish one or more of the elementals in the standard assist-train fashion and easing the load severely on your raid.

And Aran aside, most of Karazhan really isn't too bad (I've, personally, never understood the problem with Curator; and we've done 3-4 melee dps classes for it), raid composition-wise and for a learning curve. Its mainly Aran that serves as the pinnacle of Karazhan in terms of difficulty; once you get past him, you -know- the rest is beatable by your group and the mood tends to get lighter during raids.

The patch is really fixing a lot of the issues; but the question becomes, "is it enough?" and "is it in time?". Of course, the biggest issue, which many of touched upon, still remains. The attunements and no MC-ish 25 man zone for guilds to get to know each other over a long clear and learn how to work in synch with each other on that scale.

I laughed when I read this. Not because it's unfeasible, but I just can't see Blizzard saying "Ok, let's whip this up." no matter how much it may be needed (which I agree it is).

That's interesting, and I think it might change now that the itemization for 2.1 has been revealed...Currently in my guild there are a small group of people (myself included) who are desperate for that one piece of Karazhan loot that they didn't get on any of the normal clears; this makes it easier to get attunement runs for new apps done.

On that topic, has anyone heard anything of the rumored 'back-keying' process? I've heard varying reports from different people, suggesting that the devs were planning on implementing something like this and others have claimed that no such thing was in the works.