Some of their Blizzcon comments came across to me as "we learned our lesson here, attunements = not so good". I would not be surprised at all if they ended up dropping the Hyjal/BT attunement requirements in a couple months, as there is a stratification between Kael killing folks in Hyjal/BT and those still working thru SSC/TK (see the BT recruitment threads).

I really think attunements are a "bad idea" because they prevent raiders from jumping into raiding. If you're a BT/Hyjal guild, and one of your guildmates re-rolls to <needed class here>, how are you going to get your guildmate attuned? Well, there could be a back-flagging mechanism... but maybe the guild hasn't beaten Arch/Illidian yet. I mean, there are issues here with having attunements: barrier to raiding, guild stratification, recruiting problems, selling attunments, etc, so I'm not sold on what, if any, benefit there are to having them. What "fun" are attunements?

I've always liked the suggestion that attuning one character on an account will attune them all.

If Blizzard were to completely drop attunements and open BT/hyjal to the masses they would have to re-tune the first couple of bosses in BT and certainly rage in hyjal a bit to make them less than brand new VRs. Though in all honesty I would be against dropping the attunement for BT and maybe hyjal too, because as the last raid instances of BC it makes sense for you to have to do something extra special to get inside, like finish the previous couple of instances.
Wiping attunements from SSC/TK makes a little more sense, because SSC is the first real 25man( and since they nerfed nightbane/gruul, its not that hard anymore) and the TK attunements were a huge pain in the ass, particularly if you were apping to a TK guild, and were missing a few trials still.

Keep attunements in as they currently are, but also include a Scroll of Attunement on a Rep vendor at revered on a 2 per instance reset cooldown timer or something?

This way it still feels like an accomplishment reaching the attunement required zones, but also later on it isn't a hassle to key people once you go have to recruit and have had the instance on farm for a while.

The difference is that in PVE, no player has to lose but in PVP overall roughly half of your players have to lose every time. If every guild on the server runs KZ, every one of them can 'win' even if they're not at the top of their game, but if every guild hops into WSG, half of them will lose the game even if they're all playing better than they usually do.

So while PVE has only a limited 'reward for non-success' (epics, mats, recipies, and reputation from trash counts for that IMO), it also doesn't have a built-in 50% non-success rate for the player base as a whole. There's a ton of incentive for a group to attempt PVE content even if there are higher geared groups farming it, but in PVP there'd be no reason to bother facing a team that has gear that much more advanced than yours without getting something for losing the hopeless fight.

Why's that ?

I don't get the sentiment that "you'd have to make it harder because more people would have access to easy loot that should only be available to a select few". It just doesn't make sense to me.

As for the attunement part, attunements in general have allways felt a bit like a pain when they require a raid to complete.

Naxx attunement? Group content.
MC attunement? Group content.
BWL attunement? Group content.
BT & Hyjal attunement? Damn hard 25 man raid content.

Anyway, I'd venture a guess that BT & Hyjals attunements are removed when sunwell plateu is introduced in 2.3.

I somehow belive your idea of "hard" and the majority of the playerbases idea of "hard" is fairly different .

Blizz has said that they design 'gimme' bosses as a reward for completing a particularly tricky attunement.

Rage Winterchill, Naj'entus and Supremus are pretty much a 'good job, you killed Kael, have some easy stuff to get you started'.

Personally I'm in favor of keeping the attunements - I think there's value in them. The model of: defeat the endboss of one dungeon to move up to the next is good, and to break that entirely defeats the purpose of having lots of content - people will just skip it all.

But, backflagging - that is a real pain-point right now.

I always found nightbane to be way harder than Prince, of course by the time we killed nightbane we'd killed prince several times though... could be why.

Attunements are 100% fine. Catching people up 3 months later because they took an unavoidable break during your attunement process is not ok. Having to do a T5 instance for an applicant so they can raid with you is not really ok either.

I am completely for the idea of guild flagging or a system where say 75% of your raid group has to be attuned for you to zone into an instance etc.

There is a third option, of course, between removing all keying requirements and opening it up to everyone. They could simply leave the current Black Temple chain in place and change the Hyjal keying chain to be "loot the vial from the font in Kael's chamber/in Vashj's chamber."

One could not simply... walk into Black Temple.

But it would do two things to make it a lot easier. First, you would simply have to be able to engage these bosses, not kill them. Second, you can attune more than 25 people per week and if the owner of an account can't make it at raid time they can easily come back in and get the item at their own leisure sometime after the instance has been cleared but before reset.

Would guilds eventually kill Vashj/Kael? Maybe they'd come back after they got BT/Hyjal loots. Maybe not. There'd be increased prestige for killing them and perhaps the loots could be buffed a little. It'd also mean these challenging fights could be preserved intact... they're incredibly well-designed and it'd be a shame to pursue the alternatives of either nerfing them or allowing people to totally bypass even seeing them.


I think something like that could provide a happy middle ground. In all honesty a guild that hasn't killed Leotheras, Morogrim, and Solarian has no business zoning in to Hyjal or BT. They've still got doable content right in front of them. But Kael and Vashj require a level of play beyond these lesser bosses. I think that's great but I also don't know that it's fair to say "haha you nubbies, you're good enough to get here but not good enough to kill these guys, you just sit here until you can instead of proceeding with this content you -are- good enough for." I also don't know that it's satisfying to simply nerf these bosses down to a Morogrim level of difficulty.

Attunements are great. The ones you see in WoW arent bad. They are pretty linear and easy to obtain. Kill Kael'thas and Vashj to get into Hyjal? No problem. You still raid those zones. And if you can't' defeat Kael'thas and Vashj, you really shouldnt enter Black Temple or Hyjal anyway. They are higher tiers. "Prove yourself" by defeating lower tier encounters to access higher tier ones. It's fine. Add a back flagging system (scrolls from Illidan and Archimonde perhaps, but I still feel it's too simple) for those that does not want to revisit SSC/TK.

As for Black Temple's attunement.. Do a fairly short quest line that anyone can complete within a reasonable amount of time + kill the first boss in Hyjal to access Black Temple is also linear and a simple attunement. I enjoyed doing it. Why should just anyone be able to step into The Black Temple (insert drum sounds here) ?! It makes the zone(s) seem more special and unique if not just anyone could enter them right away. At least to me. I know I'm not alone in thinking that.

In the end, you feel that you accomplished something. You worked to obtain access to these zones, but at the same time it wasn't tedious at all. Attunements in WoW are simple. Past mmorpg's could sometimes take it to the extreme. The attunements in WoW does not require you to play insane amount of hours per day or week to acquire. I honestly wonder sometimes why people think it's so tedious. You've obtained keys or whatever in games before. They werent just laying there for you to pick up most of the time.

Imagine if you started to play Super Mario World and you could just walk up to the final dungeon and kill Bowser? Where's the fun in that. Oh wait, you say it's tedious to play through all the levels to get there. Ah? Perhaps it's just you being lazy. Same goes for Donkey Kong Country, excellent platform/adventure game -- I'd HATE to bypass content just to "finish" the game. Or, bypass parts of Final Fantasy 7 or 10 or 12. It wouldn't even be possible anyway, you lack the levels. But imagine doing it, no thanks.

Or let's say you could take a shortcut in Bioshock and face the final boss right away, again, where's the fun in that. You bypass parts of the entire game. Same goes for WoW. It's also the lore. Not to mention... take into consideration the time it have taken Blizzard's Developers to make the dungeons. They want to see them being used. Not see people skip entire dungeons and just go to the final one. It makes sense.

I've played casually in mmorpg's and in wow in the past ( I also consider Nihilum to be semi-casual, only us in Nihilum know how we play, before you try to comment and say we play lots.. we don't. We play 6 hours or so 6 days a week until we have things on farm, then we barely play at all for a long time. Thus the word "semi". ) and things just took a bit longer to obtain. Even then I personally wouldn't have wanted all attunements to just 'go away' because we would gain access to a dungeon slower then another guild that played more. It's like that everywhere. Simply manage the time that is available to you and things will be fine. Be more efficient.

I personally hope there's a complex attunement to access Arthas's final dungeon -- it can be long, but still not 'tedious'. As long you feel you're part of the actual attunement and lore of Wrath of the Lich King / Northrend / WoW, it's fine IMO.

What the hell, come on, you know you're just posting flamebait now. You have to. We have 7.5 or so hours of raiding per week from now until Sunwell, pretty much. That's pretty casual, but I'd never begin to claim that EJ is a casual guild, and we never raided more than 20-21 hours in any given week from Maulgar through Illidan. A 6x6 schedule is about as hardcore as most WoW guilds ever get. Don't be silly.

Anyway, I generally like attunements myself. They're necessary for pacing on some level. The only way to do away with attunements is if Blizzard goes back to a pre-TBC schedule of only having one tier of content in at release and then patches in additional tiers every few months. Then progression is forced via a different means. But I think if you had access to SSC, TK, BT, and Hyjal all automatically and hadn't beaten any of them, it'd be overwhelming and daunting trying to tackle all of them at once.

But you misunderstand the general complaint, I think. It's not that people want to skip TK entirely, but rather that after they've done TK a dozen times and moved on, they need to go back to get recruits attuned in order to continue progression, and directly at the expense of progression (because, amazingly, most guilds don't have 6 hours a day on 6 days to spend raiding -- if a guild has 16 hours, adding an extra 3+ hours of reclearing old content can kill progression for the week). And from the perspective of the individual player, it's not like killing Kael at that point really proves anything at all in terms of skill or plot fulfillment or whatever. A BT guild could 24 man Kael while their new recruit sits in the corner afk, and get the guy attuned. Does that mean that he as an individual has proven himself skilled enough to go to tier 6 content? Not really. It's just tedium. No, doing TK in general isn't tedium. Doing it for the 14th time, just to attune one guy, when you have other things you'd rather be raiding, however, is. Hence people's calls for some alternative mechanism for handling attunements. I don't think getting rid of them entirely is wise, but there are plenty of viable alternative approaches (guild attunements, allowing people to zone in if 80%+ of the raid is attuned, an item dropped in BT or Hyjal that lets you attune one person, etc.).

Off topic I know, but you can actually kill bowser in SMW with only defeating the first castle before. OK a bunch of weird star-levels are between you and him but they are not exactly hard.

Back on topic. My personal take, from someone nowhere near killing anything in current raid-content, well apart from old grullie boy. I like attunements, when they work! SSC attunements broke up our guild, but it felt OK, just because people were lazy I should not blame blizzard. TK was a bitch, think we had a few core people done as far as sans Magteridon, but ok fair enough.

Hyjal&BT seems compared to that OK actually. Why would we want hard 5man content in the way of raiding? BWL, MC and Naxx all had easy 5man attunement quests. TK did not - so ok it was dropped. Hyjal and BT require people to backflag through old content. maybe not ideal either. Still I like it. I like not being able to set my foot inside the temple. Would I like to some day? hell yeah! but then I want to deserve it.

But I think that given the situation of sitting in a BT guild, wanting to run BT and then be forced to go kill Vash and Kael just because we just lost `insert random class here` and needed to recruit. Bah! add backflagging in that case! they did it once for SSC and TK, how could they miss it for Hyjal and BT? that is the big question in my mind

I really like the idea of allowing zone-in if 80%+ are attuned personally.

I like the attunements. It's not just a means of controlling progression, it's also a way to ensure that the people in BT/Hyjal have seen the other content. I agree with Awake (I can't believe I said that) in the sense that it would be a shame for a new player to get invited into a reasonably progressed sunwell guild, told to stand in a corner as to not screw anything up, grab enough t7 offset drops to become a worthwhile member, and then have completely missed the entirety of karazhan, gruul, magtheridon, SSC, TK, BT, and Hyjal. To me I enjoyed the progression through those instances. I enjoyed keying up for TK through the trials. That was fun.

On the other hand, I'm pretty much done with SSC. I would like the helm and mace off vashj, but wouldn't shed a tear if we stopped doing it. We've only killed her 4 times now. We're working on Kael'thas, and when he's down I would be no happier than to drop TK from our schedule too. On a personal level, _I'm_ done with those instances. On a group level though, there's still lower attendance players who need things. There's still new recruits who've never seen a kill of Vashj, and someone's gotta pull them through it. The same with the TK attunement. It was fun for me to do once, it was a challenge and rewarding doing the timed SH heroic run. But after doing those damn heroics a few times, and having more people need help with them, I was quite happy when they turned off the attunement.

It's really hard to say. I enjoy having to do the attunement for myself. I don't like having to stop what I'm doing to go and do the attunement for someone else. And there's no way that that someone else can go and do the attunement without our help, without commiting a lot to another guild. And to leave another guild who's just taken you through killing kael to join someone in a BT/Hyjal guild is pretty low.

The content was clearly designed to be completed in a certain order; attunements enforced that order, and ensured that players experienced the appropriate risk/reward curve as they moved through the content. Content is also itemized assuming a certain progression, and removing attunements ruins that.

On Blackrock (and i'm assuming on most servers), the majority of progressing guilds completely bypassed magtheridon, back when the attunements were lifted. Today, we have a dozen or so guilds who are completely brick walled for 6 weeks of farming gruul, lurker, and VR. Every other night, we hear news of a gdisband, followed by a merger, followed by another disband.

In retrospect, I think the SSC attunements were perfectly fine, but the TK attunements should have been retuned- they should have replaced the heroic trials with similar trials in kara/gruuls.

From an itemization perspective, there are thousands of players who will be stuck with 3/5 t4(gloves, hats, pants) and 1/5 t5 (shoulders) for quite a while.

I suspect a nerf to magtheridon, a buff to void reaver, and possibly a relocation of t5 shoulders in the near future.

I suspect they do not give a damn about ssc/tk outside of either nurfing kael or removing the bt/hyjal attunement. They got really enough other stuff to deal with then looking back at old instances.

@Awake. I really don't buy this 6h raids story at times when there is actually progress to be done and several guilds are racing for it. I think I remember very well from chatting with nihi members who I was guilded with at some point that there were several 5 pm to 3 am raids after the vashj/kael nurf.
I am not posting this to argue about it. If I had a guild supporting that and I had enough time for it when the content is actually out there, I would certainly not miss a single raid (and I do have 99% raid attendance over a looong period of playing wow, so I am definitely in no position to flame here.). But I think you are making your lightning fast progress sound a bit easier then it actually was here.

I feel that going from playing quite a bit to basically nothing (i.e 4-8 hours a week) is something called semi-casual. It's like that with most things that you focus on; you go all out for awhile (within reasonable levels) and then you take it easy for a long period of time. That is basically how we as a guild play World of Warcraft. No matter how I word it or phrase it, people will still believe that we play World of Warcraft a lot after we're 'done' with the current content.

Either way, no it was not meant as a flamebait. But people take it that way sometimes anyway. Most people have their own idea of what 'casual' is. Casual to me is to play 4-10 hours a week. Seriously, that's not a lot of time -- some watch TV way more then that or play football or whatever.

Some think 'hardcore' means that you play WoW every day for several hours. To me and most in my guild hardcore is to have a efficient raiding schedule for a limited amount of time where you defeat every challenge there is and then stop. After that, it's on 'farm status' and we clear the end dungeon(s) only, which takes anything between 4 to 10 hours per week tops. I never play outside our farm raids these days. And it will remain that way until Sunwell. Perhaps I will spend some time in Zul'Aman, similar to ZG. But that is that.

As for Super Mario World - yeah, I expected someone to reply about the clever ways of bypassing content. It's not what the point of my post was though. I could've compared to another game where you can't bypass (without cheating, I guess) the content.

Also to answer Praetorian,

Yes, attunements make you feel more involved in the games lore as a whole. Not to mention to me they are part of the game. Just like the levels in Super Mario World are part of the game and leveling up in Final Fantasy is needed and also part of the game.

I feel that many posts on this board has a lot of value and interesting ideas are being thrown around.

BUT

A lot of people want too many large-scale changes. People posting here sometimes go too far. Asking for changes to the core of how World of Warcraft and mmo's has been for a long time. It's like wanting Coffee without caffeine. I don't like that! Or.. imagine Pizza without cheese, something I don't like either.

You say going back to X and Y dungeon is tedious or annoying. Well, a lot of things are annoying and a little bit tedious. But it's an necessary evil sometimes. In Final Fantasy (comparing) you have to 'grind' to level up sometimes. In past (and current) mmo's you level up by killing monsters and questing. This is also considering tedious and 'boring' to return/do the same thing over and over -- why not remove that as well? This is my point, asking for such changes are too much.

Try to view it from a designers point of view. They've spent many many man hours on developing said dungeon and they have a few clever ways for people to reuse the dungeons. I think it's fine. Really. Clearing through SSC or TK now and then isnt that bad -- is it really? Or how about killing one boss in Hyjal and doing a quest chain? That quest chain is pretty damn cool, everyone should have a chance to experience it. As for alts and such, if you've already done it -- well, make the attunement work for two characters on the same account. There, problem solved.

And yes, add backflagging like they did in EverQuest. I.e, if over 85% of the raid is attuned, the rest in it can enter the zone without being attuned. Then later down the road (if there's time) you can attune said people. It worked well. Even later I believe they also added another way of backflagging, the people that weren't attuned could loot an item from a boss in a higher tier instance through the backflagging system and do a one group quest chain to obtain access to said zone.

Awake, forgive me if this sounds patronising, but I don't think a "semi-casual" player such as you has any concept of the difficulties faced by groups with differing play styles.

Look how you've defined semi-casual. Either playing 6 days a week, or 1-2 days a week. When you're in "hardcore mode", of course it's no burden to you to go and re-clear the old content one day per week: you still have 5 days to do other stuff. And you only shift into a low-playtime mode when you're past the old instances and never need to go there.

Put yourself, if you can, in the position of a guild that plays three days a week. They take two days to clear Hyjal and the first half of BT. That leaves one day of progression raiding (practicing new bosses) per week. Now, say they want to attune a new recruit. They can devote 1 day to clearing SSC and getting the Vashj vial, and another to clearing TK and getting the Kael'thas vial. To do this for even one person requires giving up all their progression raiding time for two weeks in succession. Unless they do both old instances one week, and thus skip either Hyjal or the first half of BT.

In simplest possible terms: the lower-playtime a group is, the greater the marginal cost of backflagging. Nihilum, so far as I know, has never ever in the position of trying to progress with low playtime.

Squish: I'm afraid I did have to laugh at your post. It comes across as "Sure, the attunements broke up my guild and we never completed any of them. Wonderful!"

I think you slightly missed what people are saying. A lot of guilds never had a big 6 day a week push to finish. They had 3-4 (maybe 5) days of about 4 hours to do their raids. Getting a recruit attuned is essentially eliminating half your raid week if guilds go back and do the other two zones.

And, however you think you view yourself, guilds that get world/server first are hardcore.

Edit: Songster said what I was thinking, good game.

Especially given that Awake hasn't said he disagrees with the idea of backflagging, I don't think we need to have yet another "what does hardcore mean" debate. Nothing productive will ever come of that.

Was hoping to open a backflagging discussion in another thread rather than keep this monster going - but I guess some good points were discussed above. I wonder if there are easier ways to backflag than simply using scrolls?

I don't disagree with you but I'd like to make a few key points here.

From a developers standpoint - and the accountant's for that matter... it is advantageous for them to take old content (lets say levels 1-60 and later 60-70 in wotlk) and speed that process up. A newcomer to the game will look at 1-80 and see it as an insurmountable obstacle, and they will almost certainly be shunned or put off by the task. Further, it is simply boring, and they are indeed making this change to keep the new blood flowing to the heart.

They've shown that in the past that the developers can, and will (foolishly) destroy well developed content in creating the element of progression. The entirety of vanilla WoW was swept away by TBC. I'm not saying they should do it with kael/vashj myself. I think backflagging is critical, but the attunment process is just as critical.

They're really different things - and it allows the developers to keep their mid-tier content in use for mid-tier guilds, and it should make it so the end-game guilds do not need to constantly revisit these zones (but had to at one point). They also seem to always offer old-zone incentive through trinkets/rings/cloaks itemizatoin and whatnot where the "best" drops are in these prior zones - and this has been around for a long time now.

Still just some general ideas - keep attunements, readd backflagging, speed up leveling from 1-60, maybe make magtheridon worth something again.