I think Gurgthock hit it dead on, every boss so far feel like just another step toward Illidan, instead of being an achievement by itself.

On the other hand, i do still see cheering when we down something new, mostly from the members that joined us in TBC, who didnt get to experiement Naxx.
Myself, being there from chromag to KT, it does feel like "finnaly... next!" when we kill them now.

I've come to this conclusion a while ago and I still stand by it. With 25man raids, there's no room for a raider that can't make it to 95%+ of the raids. With 40man raids, everything was less strict and such people could get by.

One issue that annoys me somewhat with the change to 25 man raids is that it simply doesn't scale up as well as it did before, you had 5man, 10 man, 20 man and then 40 man that were just natural increases of the previous ones, so you could have two small guilds who could do zg getting together to do mc or something.

Now the situation is 5, 10 and then 25, so you have the situation of needing a fair few sitting out of karazhan runs if you run 2 or some sitting out of 25 man runs if you run 3 karazhans. It's a shame they didn't design karazhan for 15 and then make the large raids with 30 people in mind as then you would still have that natural growth to fit into the next level more readily then.

I would be very curious about this one as well... literally every raid group I know and a few new ones have a recruiting ad up almost constantly now on my server...

Wonder what it'll be like when the poaching/leeching starts (again) because folks will probably not want to attune anybody (think Hyjal) because it requires farming too many places.

I disagree here. It's not attendance that matters. It's performance. You can't take people with you who only perform 90% of the maximum and still expect to beat tightly tuned encounters with super-quick enrage timers.

Player that plays 3 days a week can be really good. Few of the best players I know played even less, and I'd still choose them any day over some of the 24/7 guys I know. If you are good enough, you'll easily overcome a little gear difference and perform better, Not to mention that by choosing your loot wisely, you don't even end up that much behind in gear.

I suspect that things will look a lot different to people who roll a new character now and join a newly formed raid guild. Maybe it really was a full reset, so much so that the churn we are seeing is just a stage in the adjustment.

So maybe the thing to do is take 6 months off, then come back and reroll a differnt character on a different server

The size of the group doesn't make it epic. An epic feat in getting enough people online at the same time, maybe. But that's not a task worthy of reward, in my opinion.

I always saw the lowering of the raid cap not as a boon to casuals but as a gift to horde players. The lower horde populations on most servers means fewer raiders, which made it far more difficult to get 40 decent players of the right types together than on alliance. But on top of that, it meant far fewer raid guilds, so if your guild died you weren't left with many options. The change helps lower the "startup costs" for alliance guilds as well, of course.

ZG and AQ20 demonstrate that you can design fun, challenging, and "epic" encounters for smaller raid sizes. The stuff about 25-person encounters needing to be more difficult than 40-man encounters is bull. By that logic, Karazhan should be the hardest content in the game. And the class stacking problem is a result of poor encounter design, not smaller raid sizes. I think ideally a 25-person encounter should never *require* more than 1 of any class, and should be able to function regardless of how melee-heavy or -light the raid is.

Praetorian commented that we're jaded. I agree, to an extent. But I'd rather phrase it as such: a lot of the raiding players have matured, the expectations have grown, the game however hasn't delivered -- for them.

People complain about itemization but let me say that itemization in WoW 2 is amazing. *Unless* you look at the raiding game. Up to KZ the itemization is outstanding. PvP is good, 5-mans is great, quest rewards are bloody amazing. This is a *good* thing. The problem is that Blizzard hasn't developed the itemization for the sub-game that is raiding. They never really have. Raiding gear has always been "just better 5-man gear". And since Blizzard wants to limit the gear difference in the game, raiders get mostly shafted. The upgrades are side grades or relatively weak upgrades -- especially when you compare to how it was in WoW vanilla.

The solution to this predicament is *not* to make raid gear "even better 5-man gear" as they are doing now. When you PvP you get gear to be better at PvP, it's not going to be amazing for 5-mans, why should raiding be any different? Why can't T5 be a huge *raiding* upgrade to Frozen Shadowweave, while the sets are fairly identical in five mans? They can't because Blizzard just doesn't see what corner they've painted themselves into. Let me offer some ideas on how to reitemize TBC raiding gear as a solution on how to reward raiders while staying true to a flat curve of upgrades.

Casters are fairly easily fixed. Remove the -resist from CoE / CoS, up resistances of all bosses in a raid and make their resistances grow as we get further into what amounts to the current endgame. Now give the raiding tier sets -resist and you've got raiding gear that doesn't affect any other bit of the game. Remove some stamina (and retune random AoE) to avoid the sets being used to counter resist gear use in PvP if one worries to much about that. FSW will be fine in KZ, but T4 will be better in SSC. Tier 5 will blow them both out of the water, even in KZ since you won't have resist problems any more. For physical DPS, use glancing blows in the same way. Hunters should get more and more effective mp5 (hunter DPS is okay[1] if you can sustain it, but this change should not in any way make their sets less effective dps wise, add procs like 6/8 CS to avoid itemization costs or whatnot, the technicalities are solveable.) Healers should get more staying power, better set bonuses to ensure better handling of "oh shit"-moments to make raiders feel like they're actually making farmed loot feel farmed to a greater extent. Tanks get more survivability and more threat gen, this is a mixed blessing in 5-mans anyway, you'll use bits of DPS gear in five mans to let yourself get some rage. There you go, you invite someone in FSW to do TK? He'll do okay, but his lack of -resist will seriously hurt his DPS. You do a 5-man with him, he'll fight you tooth and nail for the charts. This is a good thing, his gear *is* made for 5-mans, that's what craftables should be for. They should be gear for non-raiders that *for their purpose* is damn close to what raiders get from their venue. So, that's itemization out of the way.

Now to the 25-man bit. Yes, everyone matters a lot more now. It's a mixed blessing. As we all know, the idea of using a 10-man (and hell, 5-man heroics) to attune to 25-mans wasn't dumb -- it was completely bonkers. Most people seem to settle on around 35ish people to do 25-mans in a stable fashion. That leaves 10 people on the sideline every night, pretty much as many as you'd have in a 40-man raid. You need 10 people because you need a spare in every role, you miss a tank? No can do. You miss a warlock? Sorry, that's painful. I can't for the life of me imagine how someone in Blizzard could design this and with a straight face say "raiding in TBC will be easier for casuals". The *only* positive change is that you only need 25, er, I mean 35, people. However, every one of those 25 people have to be on the ball, every night, every boss, every pull. One person having a bad night, be it from a bad day at work, a bad net connection or just not really being all there? In a 40-man, even in Naxx, that was possible to live with. You could say "meh, sorry man" and pull. In TBC, you very often can't justify doing it. And that really fails on a social level.

It's easier to get 25 people, yes. But is it easier to get 25 people who can do SSC than getting 40 people who can do BWL? I really doubt it is. And the added strain of expected and required performance doesn't help people who said "25 buddies and I" for raiding.

To add insult to injury we have to hobble around with attunements that are mindnumbing and so much easier to do with certain setups than others that I still boggle at their design. Can you do Heroic SH with a tank, a resto druid, a fury warrior and two rogues? Yeah, sure, but it'd be a might bit easier with another group setup. And you know, what *is* leftover from the raid is often what you'd like to use to do a heroic or something. It just doesn't lend itself to be that way. Yet, everyone has to do this. I can imagine how much certain tanks and certain healers love seeing group requests for these instances. Let's just hope that the attunements go away like Blizzard has hinted. The damage has already been done though. Losing momentum right now is bad for Blizzard, as soon as people start looking elsewhere they'll find competition. They'll find something fresh. Or they'll find RL. And I don't see many people coming back with the same intensity after taking some time off.

We're not complacent. We're not jaded. We're experienced. We want more. If it was about being jaded why didn't people go "meh" to Naxx? It was the fourth big 40-man. Why did people go "meh" so quickly to the stuff following Naxx? We'd just had the raiding experience of the game so far, hands down, not a lot of people argue that point. Personally, I'd put money on Naxx *being* good and the current content being less appealing. And we're seeing a lot of people vote with their feet.

Blizzard has had three years of learning with this game. I think it's about time I don't feel like a crash test dummy in their design process any more.



[1] Yes, I find hunter DPS fine. In pure numbers. It's inane to keep up, it's reliance in a good latency and staring at bars is insane, the mechanics need fixing, but good hunters do produce good DPS. The main problem is sustainability. Oh, and of course making it so pets can actually be used everywhere. Sigh.

That may be an issue with mid-level guilds, but for most bleeding-edge progression guilds it's pretty much expected that all your players are good players and given same gear indistinguishable from each other (more or less). If you've got 3 hunters online and only 2 can make it into the raid, the 2 100% raiders will get in every time over the third one that is 90%+ (and rightfully so). This pretty much kills any prospect of semi-casual gaming. You're either 100% or not and I've chosen the not and have quit raiding as of this week.

I could see how you'd end up loosing a lot of members that way. As a guild leader, enforcing something like that would seem like pissing your pants on a cold winter day.

It is clear to me at this point in time that the idea of the Burning Crusade making 25 man raids available to the casual raider never entered the minds and thoughts of the devs. They did not make the raiding game accessable for more people but rather, they just took it away.

On my server I would define a causal raiding guild as one who raided about 3 nights a week and was capable of clearing all or parts of BWL. Not one of these types guilds has cleared Karazhan yet or defeated Gruul. No boss in SSC has yet to be downed by the Horde even by the hardcore Horde guilds. Everyone is recruiting and many people are just giving up and leaving the game.

It was much easier to put together a 40 man raid that it has been to form two Karazhan runs for my guild, heck, even one for that matter on some nights. We just can't seem to get excited about Karazhan and with no other raiding content available there is just nothing going on in the game for alot of guild members. Instead of funneling people through 5 and then 10 man zones to get back to raiding Blizzard should have made a 25 man Karazhan level zone so more people could have gotten back into raiding quicker. Not that it had to be easy, just available. Gruul is a gateway zone. SSC is the first full 25 man zone and accessable to very few.

Is Blizzard stupid? Is this is what they want the end game to be? Guild raid management nightmares, limited 25 man raid accessability and all the other problems and disapointments that have been voiced over and over again since TBC was released.

I am the GM/Raid Leader/Class Lead of my guild. We raided 4 nights a week, 16 hour a week pre-BC. Our progression cycle started late (we started BWL in DEC of 05, We cleared all of AQ40 Visc included/farmed weekly, and were 5 bosses deep in Naxx before we ran out of time due to the expansion.) After server transfers we were the most progressed guild on the Horde side of Medivh. We used consumables to learn Rags(mostly fire pots), Nef, Emps, and C'thun.

The most important part of the consumable usage is these were the last bosses (except Emps) and they dropped outstanding loot, The extra cost, was worth the extra reward for many. As we continued to kill them with tighter execution and substantially better gear they became easier. The consumable requirements became less and less each week.

Fast forward to BC. Potting for Gruul, Magtheridon, or anything in SSC was no where near the opportunity cost for my style of guild. We are completely interested in consistent and efficient progression within the parameters of play time that we chose to commit. Because we are not interested in playing this consumable game, we have only downed Gruul and devoted almost zero time to Magtheridon. The raid game right now is ridiculously limited. How can you be excited about killing something that drops void crystals most of the time but requires more consumable usage than C'thun? The truth is you can't be excited about it. The real feeling you have is relief. "Thank god it only cost me 10 pots and a flask this week." People are not going to be resilient to wiping on a boss that drops crap and takes a large quantity of consumables every single week. They will even be more frustrated and aggressive towards guild members who may be learning their role on a 2nd or 3rd kill because its their fault that this week it cost 25 pots and three times as much in repairs. 2.1 needs to be the solution for my guild, or the majority will probably quit.

Regarding a comparison of Pre-BC raiding to Post-BC raiding. I think the key point people have not addressed is that there is no stepping stone in the BC raid game. It is all Naxx/C'thun difficult right of the gate. People who spent their raid nights in MC or BWL, are now involved in 7-12 minute fights, where one death is a wipe in many cases. They have zero experience or exposure to such stringent requirements. Their spec is now inadequate, or their gear, or their ability. While I don't think we should devolve to MC fight design, I do think that SSC, and TK especially should have tiered the difficulty correctly front to back.

There should be 1 to 4 or so ratio of bosses as far as difficulty with no margin for error vs those with margin of error in these initial raid zones. (Magmadar, Domo, Ragnaros)(Vael, Chrom, Nef)(Emps, C'thun) Ramp that up to 2 to 4 or 3 to 4 as an expansion progresses. Original raid progression had this. In MC you could win most fights with less than 10 players alive at the end for some time. In BC 1 death projects a loss in the future in almost every fight. This margin is unacceptable for every single fight. Even Naxx had this difficulty right from my limited knowledge (Patch, 4h, Thad, Saph, Kel).

Not sure I'm understanding this thread but I was thinking today about how inflexible raiding is in TBC because of the importance of group buffs.

For example, it's tricky to use more than 2 rogues because if I want to max out my rogue DPS, I'd want to give them an enhancement shaman, a feral druid and a fury warrior. I was thinking that it'd be a whole let better if it was 4 groups of 7 people instead of 5 groups of 5. Admittedly, I could probably replicate this group, or use a rogue, a protection warrior, a BM hunter, a resto shaman and a MM hunter... so mebbe the point falls down there. But pretty much everyone in the second group would want to be in the first.

There is so much I can say or argue with here.

I feel that the 25 man change was a good thing in theory, but the implementation of the events removed any bonus it might of brought up when Blizzard top dogs were brainstorming. The clearest thing I could say to paint this picture is that if Blizzard had not released any raid content at all, and only released everything upto Heroics TBC would of been considered a great expansion. However, many people feel that TBC was a major let down because the raid game is so piss poor. Between horrible trash, horrible loot, horrible attunements, horrible balancing, and terrible encounters TBC raiding has just left me very sour.

I'm tired that my class (Warlocks) are pretty much required to have atleast 2 for any encounter to have an easy, if not possible, chance at winning. I played a Warlock in Naxx before 2.0 I didn't enjoy being the "CoE bitch" but atleast only having 1 Warlock didn't end raiding for the night. Or how about Magtheridon where you need 4-5 tanks, yet on Gruul you only want 2. This is only a problem because of how closely a lot of encounters are tuned and how few raid slots you have.

I know a lot of people who are only still playing WoW because there isn't anything else to keep their attention... yet.

I've seen mag (and the whole structure of how the channelers increase in difficulty) as basically a way to force the issue of hybrids. It doesn't work with 5 prot warriors, but it does work with 2-3 and then "other tanks" (including, say, resto-spec'd druids in their healing gear for the first channneler) who can fulfill other duties when their channeler is down.

I see alot of people comparing Naxx to SSC/TK and drawing conclusions as to whether 25 or 40 man content is better. This isn't a reasonable comparison in my opinion. Naxxramas was the absolute pinnacle of the devs achievements, the encounters blew all previously implemented raid content out of the water.

I suppose there's several reasons for this; Naxx was the last 40man instance they were going to implement and there was a long gap between it's release and that of it's predecessor (TAQ). As such they must've had a lot of interesting and creative ideas saved up, and _alot_ of time to design and tune them.

With tBC came a huge amount of new content and it's my belief that they simply didn't have the time or the manpower to make the new raid instances as polished as Naxx was, particularly considering that the vast majority of the player base wouldn't progress past Karazhan anytime soon. Although in fact, Karazhan is a really well designed instance - despite being only 10 man it definitely had the "WoW" factor for me. The encounters are original and creative and personally I don't see how the smaller scale of things really makes it feel any less epic. First time I saw the opera event, for example, I was pretty awestruck.

I haven't seen much of TK yet but as for SSC, it's not even close to being as well designed as Naxx was. Neither the encounters nor the trash seem very original, the backgrounds and scenery are bland, the loot... bleh. Point i'm making is that you can't compare Naxx to SSC and conclude that 40 man raid content was better.. A better comparison would be MC to SSC, and lets face it, MC was unbelievably dull.

Speaking as a CL, officer, RL and now GM, I prefer 25 man raids to 40 man raids simply because logistically they're much easy to organise. Pre tBC I felt that guilds were too large - it was bloody hard work trying to manage a guild of 80+ members even with allocated class leads etc. It was also alot more impersonal, and the playerbase would change alot more frequently leading to slower progression etc.

I don't feel that smaller scale encounters have to be any less "epic", in fact if anything they are potentially moreso. By reducing raid size you're reducing the need for coordination and placing more emphasis on individual skill/execution. For me that's a huge step in the right direction as it's incredibly frustrating repeatedly failing encounters when everyone has the necessary skill and understanding but the raid as a whole lacks the coordination to pull it off.

Really? Gluth was complex and technical for about a half-dozen people -- the tanks swapping aggro and breaking fears to keep the debuff manageable while keeping him tanked, and the people directly kiting the Chow. Everyone else just hit the big undead dog or healed the kiters/tanks.

Gothik is the single fight that's closest to a TBC-style fight, actually. People had complex tasks that needed to be practiced and executed in parallel, and one person's mistake could cause a wipe. Also, because everyone was crucial, while you could have some late sloppiness, early deaths almost always proved fatal. If a deathknight broke shackle and gibbed the priest keeping it locked down 90 seconds into the fight, you had a serious problem on your hands. On a fight like 4H you can and did have a number of early deaths (Meteor, Void Zone, etc.) and still managed to pull it out provided that you didn't lose tanks too early or multiple healers such that you had gaps in your rotation.

5 people (1/8 of the raid) could die to Sapphiron's first breath and you could still win (hell, it just gave you more room to spread out during the air phases). If 3 DPS (1/8 of the raid) die to a bad Tomb 70 seconds into Hydross, you probably lose if you can't get them back up right away.

The problem with raiding right now is its numbers difficulty rather than the tasks to perform being "difficult". What I mean is while on some fights you could just not flask/pot up, for many fights its not worth it to not do so, since many of the enrage timers are far from generous, i.e. Magtheridon's enrage timer is pretty generous and I think it serves a fine purpose as enrage timers go - you shouldn't be able to win with over half your raid dead on any fight, and in that sense an enrage timer is fine. You can definately finish that fight with 5-7 people dead, for other fights, you can barely afford 2-3 deaths. Personally, I enjoy playing well, I don't enjoy how you basically need to hold your breath through fights and there is really very little breathing room. Gothik is a great example of this, because I never looked forward to that fight. Its not that I didn't feel I could accomplish the task every time we did it, but it really is a fight which depends on everyone performing at the same level, which for the time was reasonably high.

All the cap changes in my experience have done is created a funnel with very little breathing room on any fight. I also feel the problem isn't the number of people in it which makes it feel "epic", its that most fights really aren't anything new. What is Lurker but Ragnaros in water really. Hydross and Morogrim aren't really different fights - sure some details are changed but the end result is its kill adds as fast as you can and dps boss, repeat until dead. Almost every boss is just something we've done before, and I think people are looking for encounters that are actually entirely unique. I felt that way about Naxx, most of the encounters were entirely unique. Thaddius and Loatheb I felt were actually pretty interesting and creative encounters, and Kel'Thuzad is about as epic of a raid encounter as I have ever done. The stuff now is just harder hitting versions of things many of us have done already with a random mix of already existing encounter elements and that has nothing to do with cap changes really.

To a certain degree its a catch 22, creating content where classes use all of their abilities is going to come at a cost – you need to be able to rely on everyone to be on – in practice however the reduced size just removes the margin of error in raid planning.

However I think that for the most part the issues (and player burnout) that have been expressed on these and the official boards recently have more to do with bad design rather than raid size - In a least the first few instances whereby you need a significantly different and fairly specific raid composition per encounter offsetting the sole purpose of making raiding more accessible to casuals – If you can only play for a limited about per sitting you’re not going to sit idle outside a zone waiting for a spot to open up. This is compounded by tying keys and attunement to 5 and 10 men instances that each have their own balancing requirements.

It’s interesting to see the comments here saying that the pool of raiders per server seems to have dropped since TBC it certainly feels that way on KG, it will be interesting to see if the increase in loot value increases peoples motivation to raid…

A couple of the fights in TBC are the kind of controlled-chaos encounters that I really like. Maulgar is an example...though the fight was always easy you face a number of highly diverse enemies that you have to deal with in specific ways. Karathress is much the same...fewer adds, bigger numbers but still you have to deal with a number of diverse mobs with familiar abilities in creative ways. Karathress was a blast to learn and get down, contrasting with the rinse-and-repeat drudgery of Tidewalker. I doubt he would have been as fun with 40 people, simply because the nature of the fight forces you to break your raid into small groups to deal with things. Everyone's individual role IS more important.

Now, a lot of guilds/people run into trouble I think because of how this performance scaling affects different classes. For tanks and healers it's much the same...executing is a little trickier but your performance is a binary function...did you hold aggro or not? Did you keep your tanks alive or didn't you? For DPS, every last point of damage they can wring out of their characters becomes crucial and many of them aren't accustomed to that pressure. For our DPSers at least, they never thought of things that way. Their place on SWS (relative performance) mattered; their raw output (absolute performance) did not. Now it's not enough for a Mage to spam Fireball...they need to put together AB/Scorch/Fireball rotations and pot to hell and back while maintaining those rotations and keeping themselves alive. As Gurgthock said in the short-lived "EJ is recruiting" thread, DPS is more important now than it's ever been. I think a lot of players are uncomfortable with that pressure. Maybe it's just my holier-than-thou healer attitude.

Anyway, a lot of the encounters in TBC are really fun and pretty well-concieved. They are somewhat lacking in originality....SPREAD THE FUCK OUT was introduced in Sartura and has been beaten to death since then. They are poorly tuned and that topic has been beaten to death as well.

At the end of the day, 25-man raids have failed to accomplish what they were supposed to. They were SUPPOSED to make end-game content accessible to everybody, or at least more people than had been able to see it. Raiding is currently less accessible than it has ever been. Draw your own conclusions from that.

I'm not so sure really. Right now the content designers err on the side of overtuning content. This has thus far made consumables a staple in TBC raiding. We are, however, in a unique position of having transitionary raids versus the well-defined tiers we did before.

Pre TBC, progressive guilds had several months to gear up everyone with the last tier before even stepping in the next raiding dungeon. In TBC before the first person zoned into Gruul's Lair or Karazhan there was already an attunement quest for 2 tiers down the line. This has caused people to rush content and in many cases flasking just to beat an enrage timer is the only option. Now, if content wasn't frontloaded with TBC, SSC and TK would probably have appeared more tame. The double tokens change will certainly help, at least with the itemization improvements starting to show up.

I think from my perspective as a guild leader of a serious-but-still-friendly guild, the issue isn't simply the raid size but also the composition demands... The "unscheduled space" in a raid. We have a fairly consistent group of raiders, many with 90%+ attendance but also people with 50% attendance who we retain due to loyalty, friendship, and player skill. This means that we maintain more of a class than another more "business-oriented" guild might... Generally speaking we have about twice as many people rostered as we will need on any given day because this is necessary to have raids start on time with a reasonable composition.

The fact that so many encounters have such highly specific demands puts a lot of stress on guilds like mine. When forming a Naxx raid, you'd generally want say 5-6 warriors, 14-16 healers, and then assorted dps. While you might have a few specific needs, such as needing priests for MC on Razuvious or Shaman/Druids for Poison Cleansing on Faerlina, in general you could be pretty flexible and simply fill your raid based on a loose picture of what a raid should look like and individual player needs and merits.

Then comes TBC, with highly encouraged composition demands. For Magtheridon, you need 5 tanks/tanklike things, 4 warlocks is highly encouraged, you need 7 healers, you need multiple characters who can interrupt regularly (4 is nice, 2 prioritizing each spell), you need a Hunter for misdirects. When you finish filling a raid with what you -need- you find yourself with ~4 slots that have no particular requirements placed on them.

Making a Morogrim raid has similarly high requirements--but they're not the same ones! While we often take only a single mage to Magtheridon, 3 Mages are part of a desirable Morogrim composition.

I essentially feel that we've gone from having ~40-50% of our raid slots that we can fill as we choose to having 15-20% that we can fill as we choose, due to the demands of encounters and the decrease in size. I do like the 25-man size but I very much resent that more than one (1) of any class or spec is -required- for an encounter with raid size being so small. The way things are now requires me to sit a much larger portion of my guild than I otherwise would... with unstable raid attendance, we may have exactly as many as we need of a class one day and twice as many as we need the next. I feel very constrained as to what I can do about this and I know members are frustrated when they don't get one of those few coveted "optional" spots.