All the enrage stuff has just got to go.
In Naxx only a limited few bosses had an enrage timer and no one ever complained that it was too easy or forgiving. The enrage just means that you lock out less perfectly balanced raids. I would like to have some raid to do if we happen to have one or two healers too many in raid that day. I can do Karazhan with 5 healers without a problem. I even remember at one point doing parts of Naxx with 21 healers. Sure, it was horribly slow and you couldn't do ALL fights, but at least a lot of them were possible.

In addition, a few people are always low on dps just because they haven't been gifted with the greatest skill. They may be very dedicated, friendly, mature, intelligent, whatever, but they just can't quite seem to output the dps. In the past, I could give them that one spot and it was ok, now it's just impossible.

The enrage thing is great for the good players who are challenged by it, but it's a curse and the end of raiding for an enormous percentage of the people that play.

Again, I'm perfectly fine with DPS being challenged once in a while, but there are other ways than timers. Add spawns, different targets, movement, interrupting,...
C'thun for example was just as challenging to dps as to other players (maybe even more) and it didn't need an enrage timer just because of the way the fight was designed, yet it tested both your dps output and the ability of the dps people. Absolutely no need to do it every fight.

I think clever uses of berserk (thats enrage to most people!) are far better mechanics.

Accumulating wraths, Hydross's adds (possibly the most clever balancing tool, as its not "gets harder over time"), Gruul's Growth, Leotheras's 15% phase...
The berserk timer is superflous in almost every situation (not that everything has one). Leotheras for instance, your true timer should be the amount of stacks your demon tank accumulates while in phase 3.

Situations where you would need one might be: Void reaver, FLK.
The rest I just think are silly. "Its been 10 arbitrary minutes, I am now 20 times stronger. RAAAR YOU DIE. No skill scrubs... do it again with flasks, same buttons, same execution, and now you win!"

Berserk timers should be done to prevent healer stacking and increase crisis.

Let's go over Naxx bosses:
Anub'rhekan - inherent add dps required - attrition overcame the need for a timer.
Faerlina - clever use of inherent "enrage" (not berserk). Quite survivable.
Maexxna - built in enrage at 30%, no timer, just limited chances, aka high dps.
Patchwerk - healer stacking is a possibility - first berserk timer!
Grobbulus - retarded, I guess it needed a berserk timer... like perhaps Hogger does - second berserk timer.
Gluth - berserk on third decimate, required execution to be sound.
Thaddius - berserk so that you couldn't overheal the expected damage and people dying actually mattered to reach the DPS mark/stack.

Notice the abomination wing uses all berserk timers, and the spider wing uses none.

Razuvious - No timer... damage on adds generally dictated dps requirements initially (semi gear balance of healers to dps - initially the adds would die due to lack of heals as people oom'ed or fell behind).
Gothik - Phase 1 acted as your DPS check, no timer.
4H - No berserk timer ... 20 minute enrage timer, that didn't make much of a difference if you weren't already having Blameux down. No real reason for this enrage (NOT A BERSERK).

No berserks in deathknight wing.

Other wing:
Noth: no berserk timer - just phase 1 timers that really stressed a particular kill style. You could certainly add more phase 2's.
Heigan - no berserk timer (did it need one? maybe). The retard factor here was your biggest killer... and also the way that the teleport to the hall of death worked was that some people were ultimately guaranteed death, and this ensured that you'd have attrition.
Loatheb - Inherent timer from the impending doom... no berserk.

So out of all the initial 13 bosses in Naxx, only the abomination wing had berserk timers (maybe this is the guy who didn't quit and is still working on TBC raids - seriously, might be something to this *tinfoil* - but so many fights in BC do have that thaddius style feel where someone dies, and you know its over before it has begun).

Anyway:
Sapphiron: Berserk timer, to prevent healer stackage...
KT: No timer needed - fight itself had low percentage enrage like elements that really required you to kill before you were killed.

I dunno, seems to me like the only time berserk timers are required is when you have to really stop healer stacking (beyond some reasonable level) - or your fight is lacking serious teamwork elements, and you don't want a handful of people to pull out a victory... which seems more like poor encounter design - too simplistic... seeing that a lot lately?

The devs should not be using berserk as artifical elements for difficulty. Naxxramas had basically a quarter of the bosses with berserk timers, and was very difficult. BC has about three quarters of its bosses with berserk timers. Maybe they're out of ideas...

To start my post with the change to 25 players in a raid, I think this is a positive change. On our server, almost every raid had trouble having 40 players ready in wow classic, which led to lots of problems. Raid management seems definitely easier now, so I'd say that Blizzard accomplished their goal with the reduced raid size.

Unfortunately, they made several other mistakes that hurt the raid game pretty badly.

I wouldn't count Karazhan as such a mistake, a 10 man raid instance allows lots of smaller, less experienced guilds to do some raiding, even if they only kill Attumen. However, what's definitely lacking is a comparable 25-player-dungeon. The start into "real" raiding is pretty tough, and it doesn't help that there aren't many encounters to start with. Gruul post nerf kinda works well, however, after farming Gruul, you seem to hit a heavy bump. After all, the raid finished an instance, which, traditionally, meant we spent some time farming it and gearing for the next challenge. now, suddenly, it's just a little step, not even completing t4. And then there is Magtheridon: An encounter where you see almost no progress for a long time. While learning the adds Magtheridon stays at 100% hp, this hurt our morale pretty bad. Most people don't believe that the hard part is almost done once the adds are down until they see it, which is a vicious circle. And the fact that you have to travel to an entirely different instance in another zone doesn't help either.
If there were an entry-level raid instance with 3-4 relatively easy encounters that got more difficult towards the end (meaning around the level of Magtheridon), it would give the guilds a much better picture of raid progress than the situation right now. Farmin Karazhan seems just too disconnected from "real" raids, and those Onyxia-Style encounters somehow lack something without the presence of an MC-like dungeon.

That's not really raiding, though. Kinda pointless, since nobody really benifits from it. Karazhan is well designed, but should have been larger-scale in my opinion. If Kara was a "guild event" rather than a "team event", I don't think TBC would have the problems it has right now. Don't get me wrong, I like Karazhan...however, it's place is not sufficient to hold people at bay like it seems placed to do.

As it stands, the introduction to actual -guild- content is way too long. Period.

Hopping into Gruul's Lair for 45 minutes every week does not constitute guild content...that's the real issue here. Until a guild can get SSC going (which, let's be honest, is a very narrow margin of guilds capable or willing to do what is needed for that right now) there simply is no real guild content. That's a serious issue.

I was getting fed up and worn out with the constant struggle of keeping a 40-man raid force working smoothly as much as anyone, but honestly...it has been harder keeping the guild motivated now than the year before TBC launched.

I think it's right for people to be harsh towards Blizzard, because they obviously failed in many ways. Beyond that, they failed without admitting they failed and commiting to getting things fixed. Sure, things might get ninja'd back to being something decent over a while--but that is extremely different from them coming out and delivering a comprehensive report of what they think the issues are and what they're planning on doing about it.

At this point, Blizzard can't really be given the leeway they were in WoW 1.0 launch. People expect an expansion to be building on the original product, not resetting to launch quality and giving excuses about why the content isn't ready/tuned/whatever.

There is no problem with Karazhan per se. As content it's actually great stuff. The core design problem is its funnel function. If Karazhan was optional content and there was a full length 25-man starting at the same level as mandatory progression content I wouldn't see a problem at all with Karazhan. It would both serve its current function and not have the symptoms we have now.

It would be really useful to have a 25 man intro to raiding dungeon. This gets more important now than at TBC launch because ... a lot of experienced raiders have quit the game. Maybe some have moved to more hardcore guilds or switched servers after guild collapses, but from a non-top raiding guild perspective, you're going to be recruiting a lot more people now who never raided before.

Taking healing as an example (because I know it), it isn't that healing in raids is harder than solo healing 5 mans/heroics, but it is different and it takes time to learn to heal efficiently as part of a team.

I'm in agreement that Karazhan would be a big success if only it weren't so intertwined with raiding guild progression. My pre-TBC guild never got past Firemaw. We only got that far as a part of a guild alliance because we never had anything close to 40 people. We couldn't even field 20 for our own ZG/AQ20 runs.We were the type of guild that was yelling for an instance like Karazhan, and there were an awful lot of guilds in our situation. I'd put my own bets that there were more people in guilds like this than there were in raiding guilds pre-TBC. That would be my personal feeling however, with no real data to back that up.

When Blizz announced Karazhan, we were all elated. We really thought Blizzard was making content for guilds like ours. Then they made the 25 man announcement, and we were even happier. Guild alliances are usually a logistics nightmare. Merging our small guild into a 40 man guild was never appealing to us because it felt like a loss of identity. With Karazhan and 25 mans as the raid content we could find one other guild somewhere just like ours and raid.

Before people slam the current state of raiding consider that this is probably what the current entry level instance was designed around. (And I am in agreement, it's a mess. I've since moved on to a guild that desired to be more raiding focused and the 10/25 man issues have caused us problems) The difficulty level of Kara is perfect for catching up a group like this on the basics of raiding. Blizz needed to be able to progress content, and be able to bring in a new field of raiders at the same time. Kara basically teaches guilds that never got past Twin Emps what they needed to learn there. Mobility, real coordination, communication, and situational awareness. This was exactly the kind of instance I was craving in my old guild.

Blizz tried to hit a homerun here, and make the expansion a great thing for the raiding guilds as well as smaller guilds. That's where I feel the failure happened. It's been hashed over a lot why that is, I won't repeat that. Again, if Karazhan were on its own and designed for guilds who couldn't yet hit the raiding game on their own it would be a smashing success. Instead, its just a logistics problem as the entry level raid for guilds that want to field bigger raids. This is a shame. You just can't please everyone with the same thing. I agree blizz should have had an alternate entry level 25 man that also allowed keying to SSC. This would have solved the problems.

I think Elsia is hitting the nail on the head as far as Karazhan is concerned. It has genuinely improved and expanded the available content for a lot of the playerbase, but what it didn't do was make a good gearing up zone for guilds with endgame aspirations. Just about every guild found that faced with the 25 man cap, running 2 parallel teams was not for them. And yet then we had no option but to start running 3 10-man teams, with all the grief and logistical lock-out problems that causes, and for most of the week to start with.

The lesson to be learned is if you're going to make smaller raids, don't make them progression instances. Give us real 25 man progression, and lower capped instances at a lower progression level but with a few items of interest (eg ZG enchants). At least we're closer to that now, and there's an opportunity to make ZA fit into that 10 man ZG role without repeating the Karazhan trap.

I'd agree with the last couple of posts - we still struggle to field 2 Kara teams over 3 days. We're currently trying to stabilise Nightbane kills to give us our attunement. Some groups are okay and can down him some just can't get it to click.

The fact that we're not handling the 10 man very well is probably our fault but I find 25 mans so much easier to organise, the frustration for me is I can't get enough people attuned fast enough to stop people who are attuned bleeding from our rosters and heading to the SSC groups because they feel the overall progress of the raid group is holding them back.

I'd love to sit back and enjoy Kara just like I enjoyed ZG, as a sideshow to the main raiding game. Some people went participated and some didn't - there was no stress about that. Instead I'm having to manage multiple lockouts and teams and far too much admin about attunements raid optimisations and drama. If the Nightbane keying was not there I think it would be a far less stressful instance for me and I could enjoy running it again. Although give me another few weeks at Nightbane to stabilise the kill and I'll probably look back and laugh at this, until I have a new trialist to key up.

The simple Kara fix for me would be to move the SSC attunement out of Kara. Killing Gruul meant we were feeling ready for some new 25 man content and while we're working on Magtheridon our progress there is a little slow, it would be really nice to see a proper 25 man instance - even though SSC has all of it's issues as reported at least we'd be in there together.

That's a really simple fix actually. Remove nightbane drop from SSC attunement. Should easily be in 2.1 but afaik it isn't. Can anyone gently poke Kaplan about this idea?

Result: Karazhan is there but optional, exactly what would help those overextended and squeezed 25-man raid groups.

You will still need Karazhan for gear upgrades, removing drop from bane doesnt solve that.

That sort of misses the point of a social raid group really though.

Also on Kara the problem there is the tightness of encounters on top of parallel tracks. It's easier to pull 25 out of a pool of 40 than 2 fully balanced 20 out of the same pool considering that additionally you handle fluctuations and lockouts over 3 days.

The whole trickery of Kara is that you have to run parallel tracks while at the same time handling lockouts. You do no such thing for 25-mans.

People may be perfectly competent, but if by the 3rd day due to lockouts you just have a bad raid composition there isn't really much you can do.

On gear upgrades, if the group has gear to kill Gruul and progress at Magtheridon I don't see the issue. Getting the Nightbane drop is a formality. Noone is saying to drop Karazhan. The point is to take the pressure valve off. If you run just 1 per week it's no big deal because keying your 40 folks isn't why you squeeze yourself through that place.

If one person hasn't seen a nightbane drop it doesn't impinge on your 25-man planning.

That wouldn't be to hard to understand. From what I have seen in TBC there is really only 2 fights that have "new" mechanics for WoW that I have personally seen. Those being Akama and Gorefiend in BT. Most boss fights are just rehashes of older bosses with different spell graphics and ability names.

One of the other raid size issues is the transition of two Kara groups to Gruul/Mags is a bit odd. We ran into a stumbling block where we had optimized out our Kara group with only two healers in each raid. With a backup healer for each group, we get to Gruul and have six healers in the raid... so our DPS classes that can heal slap on their healing gear. It worked for Maulgar and somewhat for Gruul (post-nerf) but it just wasn't an option for Magtheridon. So we had to spend a few weeks recruiting healers, because Kara*2 just doesn't provide the healing needed for 25-mans later on.

Not even close. That still doesn't fix the "passenger ratio" aspect that's screwing over the casual friends-and-family type group. We need to be able to have 15 good people pull 10 semi-afk-ers through the place. Feel free to throw brickbats and call people lazy epicwhores if you like - I tell you straight: that's what's needed.

The "simple fix" is to drop SSC attunement in total, and nerf it so hard that you can kill at least the first boss with a group of mixed level 69-70s wearing not-quite-maxed quest reward kit, if you execute perfectly. Because that's what you could do with ZG and MC. You could walk in even before you hit level 60, and get the feeling of "yeah, a bit more work and we can make progress in here". So you go away, get DM-quality blues in all your slots, and come back able to kill 2-3 bosses off the bat.

Yes, level 70s in full Dungeon 3 / Heroic gear and some crafted purplez will annihilate the first few bosses and cruise straight to Vashj. What's the problem? When 2.1 is out, there will be a further three large instances after SSC for people to work on. Having one out of four raid instances be puggable isn't a problem, it's a solution!

So yeah, either nerf SSC to holy hell and back and throw away the attunement entirely, or release another 25-man instance with minimal attunement, and which you can enter at that kind of level of skill/gear/progression. That's the where the hole in the line-up is. Any news/rumours on Zul'Aman?

I am. I have scores of druids and paladins who want to tank, and no warriors (period). I also lack fear ward (hello Horde), and tremor totem isn't cutting it (yes, we're noobs - that meet your criteria).

Actually, I feel the main issue that makes Kara so awkward isn't the "passenger ratio", but instead the lockout hell and class balance/availability issues.

It's one thing if you have a guild to throw together a working 25-man raid and shuffle out a few people the next raid day. It's a whole other thing to split that force into two halves, try to predict and accomidate people possibly no-showing, and then make sure both groups have an equal chance at success due to related issues.

For may part, I have to make a bloody spreadsheet matrix every week to try to figure out what the best day(s) for Kara are, how I can safely distribute the teams, and how I can plan for and prevent possible failure situations due to no-shows. It's not easy. We have been running successful dual Kara runs for quite a while now, however it is a LOT of work to make sure things run smoothly.

I'll give an example: For Gruul's Lair, you only need 3-4 tanks for Maulgar, preferably only 2 Warriors and the rest as hybrids that can DPS on Gruul himself. However, if you have to plan for multiple Karazhan days, you need 6 tanks available, but only 4 tanks per night--the reason being, you almost always need 2 tanks and cannot risk someone no-showing and having to cancel a raid.

In a certain way, running multiple Karazhan groups encourages overrecruitment to sidestep lockout and class-balance issue, which can lead to multiple guild issues on both a social and practical level.

I mean, you always want 1 Warlock--but due to limited spots you usually ONLY want 1 Warlock--but you need backup locks otherwise Aran will be next to impossible (for a guild trying to do it at first, anyhow) without one...so you have to be prepared for a no-show--which means, hey...someone has to sit out. Fun? Not really. But, very much more a problem in the world of multiple 10-man lockout groups.

In that sense, Karazhan actually makes guild management harder for smaller or progressing guilds that cannot solidify guild activity or progress in the larger and more unified 25-man instances. (Of course, none of which exist for smaller or progressing guilds in many cases.)

I do believe that making Kara optional would help a ton. That doesn't mean that the whole design is what I find desirable, but that is a whole different topic all over again. In some sense you can look at it pragmatically and ask: How can they fix the situation with what they have set up. ZA isn't around the corner. Itemization gets some helping in 2.1. Difficulty gets some retuning (though I don't know if they touch Kara).

Keying and funneling are really the parts that stand out as not being addressed from what I have seen in 2.1, this includes backflagging.

Removing the nightbane drop is just one helper but I personally find it preferable to keeping it in there by a lot.

Then you have a 25-man progression Maulgar->Gruul->SSC and people attuning through Gruul drops. This isn't horrible and helps 25-man raids.

I'm not even against dropping all attunement for SSC. I think there is a lot to be said for doing that. But Gruul isn't a raid size squeeze and a logistic burden. Kara induces way more symptoms than Gruul does, especially in his current state.

Whether the whole attunement/progression system as it is now is great or not is a good topic and we went over that loads.

Right now frankly I'm quite happy with little changes that take the pressure off and make things more managable. Taking Karazhan off the SSC attunement is one such things and at least for 25-man raid groups I think is really the main one in terms of logistic burden and source of drama.

I'd say this is a big issue we didn't discuss much so far. Guilds that can recruit heavily did it or are doing it. The top 3/4 guilds in my server all have 35 to 40 people online every night, and close to 0% non raiders in there. This seems to be good recipe for success. We went from 20-30 online from 10 more each night (picked up the core of a gruul disbanded guild) and simply started killing bosses in SSC. Our setup problems are over. We could easily raid 40 men again and we have little more than 50 accounts.

Last week we did 2 KZ groups so we could attune the very last guildies. One of the officers stated "we won't make 3 groups yet so we can assure both get Nightbane". So it's like Jayde says: in order to keep good balance, you must overrecruit and leave people out. And this starts very early. A less advanced guild on our server only runs one KZ group to assure they keep progress up, even though they have members for two.

Even though our officers (and most thriving guilds i'd bet) are working well to give raiding spots to all and roundabout the over attendance problems, the issue is there. How to fit 35/40 avid raiders in 25 men instances?

This becomes worse as fights get harder, so thoughts on how guilds are facing this situation would be productive.

Oh definitely. Trouble is, the friends-and-family-and-the-afk-dog groups (FAFATAD) need two tons of help.

Making Kara optional would remove the logistical barriers to getting into SSC, for groups that are able to kill Gruul (and by extension the bosses in SSC).

It won't remove the bigger hurdle encapsulated in the second half of that sentence. I know ZA is a long way away, which is why I suggested nerfing the living snot out of SSC instead. Pipedream, I know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen eventually, if 2.1 doesn't deliver enough for FAFATAD groups, because that's a large segment of Blizzard's customer-base.

Another thing that would help immeasurably is to improve access to Heroics. One problem I've seen is that by the time you've got attuned to Heroic mode, you're so damn sick of the instances that you don't want to go in them again for a month or two, no matter *what* mode you can pick! That's something they could fix in about 30 seconds flat. Make it like Naxx, with the key being free at Revered and costing 100g at Honored.

Well I said earlier that for me heroics should be either a switch that is always available for everybody, or require just one key in party. I do agree that fragmenting through heroics access is a problem, but it's kind of one separate from raiding (except for attunement, which is an attunement design issue not a heroics access issue). Not seeing any motion by blizz to remove that separator and I agree it would be a good fix for 2.1. It's basically a completely unnecessary barrier that only hurts casuals (and has some hardcore folks gloating what the big deal is).

On helping casual raiders it's a weird situation and I don't have personal perspectives (my group is more semi-casual to hardcore than really casual).

My friends who raid with casual guilds seem fairly happy with Karazhan. Their main issue I hear about is heavy turnover with people quitting at a high frequency. But that's as much experience as I have.

Just hypothetically, an _easy_ (ZG/AQ20 level) and completely optional 25-man would be a good idea. People who want to raid but have limited commitment or outlook or anything can still go and play. TBC doesn't have it and I don't see it coming, so yeah if that's what you are asking I agree. I don't rail too much about this simply because I don't see a realistic way to fix this. Blizz isn't going to conjure up a full instance of that type by 2.1.

So I don't really argue too much about this because the return chance on this is so slim that I rather see them even just dropping Nightbane of SSC attunement. A change that is wholely realistic in terms of feasability for 2.1.

So if I can see one out of two helping changes that mixed and social raid groups need, I'd certainly like to see that one rather than none at all.

Making Kara a requirement for larger raids indeed yields some strange results. My guild raids with two partner guilds. Each partner had one Kara raid plus a twink raid when I joined with some fellows from my old guild. Luckily we were able to open another one which was very successful. Nowadays however we are one of two groups that actually did clear the last ID. Quite a lot of folks still don't have the Nightbane quest item (either due to having no group or having not picked up the quest when their group was more consistently performing).

Very strange indeed. We have folks who haven't killed Gruul yet (like me), others who as mentioned still need Nightbane. Yet we plan to raid SSC from next week on. Rotating members between the Kara raids (which tend to be pretty closed shop like) is probably a logistical nightmare. Kara is indeed a bottleneck that is a testament to bad design decisions imho in terms of progression design. The instance itself is really fun and I look forward to my next visit there.