First of all I am not sure any conclusion to subscription numbers can be drawn since my picture is that most subscriptions are not raider subscriptions and the non-raiding game is actually very rich.

Secondly, my view is that the current raiding problems cannot really be nailed by talking about one or two factors (or disect them individually). It is the compounded picture of several small pieces that cause the trouble. And the way these pieces interact.

Thirdly, the sad part is that I am not sure this can be fixed since the social life of so many guilds have been hit very hard. That social fabric will not magically heal once Blizzard gets their hands around this. That does not mean that WoW will do bad as a business, but it will mean that many of the most loyal customers of WoW1.0 will not be there to enjoy the ride.

Aye, indeed.

Casuals fall into many categories. Casual for me, on these forums, means someone who raids 2-3 nights a week and where skills vary from top of the line (ie, can join any hardcore guild and compete) to "what's an addon". It's about attitude to the game. I've seen signatures saying "fun is for casuals" and while very much tongue in cheek it's quite apt. Casuals as I see them play this game to have fun, mostly with buddies. They don't min-max raids for a specific encounter, they don't use consumables across the board, they don't all deliver top notch performances. But, pre-TBC that was fine. Heck, those people did Naxx.

Then come TBC, we're told "accessible by all"! We're told smaller caps, easier groups! We're excited! Aaaand no. You got a tank who spits out 400tps and you're suddenly stalled. You might have a mage that deliveres 500dps on a good night, and his rogue buddy who barely scratches 400 in his blue pre-KZ gear. And you've played with them for two years, you completed BWL, you did some AQ, maybe even some Naxx. And now you find KZ hard.

This is a reality for some friends of mine on a RP server. They're stuck in KZ because their guild has some people who just aren't that good. What's their MC? Their ZG? Their AQ20? What *is* accessible to them? There were a lot of promises and I don't really blame them for being upset.

Yes I do suggest that, at least for me. My problem with your post is that it put everybodys problem in one basket and put a bad label on folks ("you believe the hype and don't even try"). I personally never believed in not trying so the whole setup of the argument for me is at best unfortunate.

For example we didn't cancel Moroes and Curator because on paper the raid setup wasn't up to par. We canceled after hours of wiping when it became blatantly clear that execution made no difference.

Good for you. I wait and see. As someone else has, I think quite sensibly argued above, the situation in TBC raiding/endgame is very different for different playing styles. If your setup is hardcore enough there isn't all that much to be worried about. If you are all casual it's the same. For those of use who actually like to be in the space inbetween, it's rough.

Tested it and found it insufficient for me to come back. The daily quests are fun once, not daily. I hope you are right though that other people actually consider them bringing worthwhile stuff to do in for them. I can definitely see that.

I gave the one that is valid for the group I'm talking about: semi-casual = downing twin emps in two nights of learning. Gave another definition as well but no need to repeat it.

Fact is social groups come in a heterogeneous mix. People may have different opinions on this, but just like for all of vanilla, TBC should be accessible for heterogeneous groups, not structured around homogeneous peak performers. I do think 2.1 will improve some of this, but the core design did still overlook the basic premise even then.

People are stuck for various reasons.

Where are they stuck ? On Magtheridon and on Hydross. Now I think it's safe to say Magtheridon is a lot easier than Hydross, yet large amounts of guilds are either not making any progress on him or simply not attempting him (at least on our server).

On Hydross I can be quite short: the guilds that beat him have excellent dps players and may not understand what the problem is, other than the use of loads of consumables. Most guilds, for starters, don't have the dps quality required for this boss. It's not only about consumables, gear, and even spec. Some people can put out x dps and others just can't seem to manage it. I'm sure they need to learn to play and stuff or whatever, but that's the way it is and makes the fight not hard to learn but just impossible for the guilds with said people.
Why ? Because you cannot make progress on it because you can never get the required dps.

Magtheridon is a bit more complicated. People are discouraged by the trash repops. It means they don't want to reclear for a few more attempts when it's late (but earlier than they would normally quit), and that they really don't want to spend repair costs on trash they have problems handling. In the learning stages (apparently though we had not that many issues with it) many guilds can barely clear adds before they repop and are left with half an hour of attempts.
Then they get to the Channeler stage and they notice oh, we can only kill 2.5 of these before Magtheridon breaks free. So healing fails, people die, dps drops even further behind. This is repeated X times and the result is usually the same. The encounter also gets exponentially easier as dps goes up. In our earliest tries I composed balanced raids with 4 warlocks just so we could control the infernals for long enough (they are the real killers), and we managed to get 3.5 adds down before the first Nova, which was almost a guaranteed wipe. Since then we have focussed a lot on dps and as you kill adds faster you not only need less healers and less warlocks, but since the 5th add dies before the knockback, people have plenty of time to get in position to cubes and sort things out. The dps increase also causes a lot less infernals to spawn.
So, we have a second encounter where dps makes things exponentially easier. Most raiding guilds of average ability (Lets say those who were learning AQ or maybe on the first Naxx bosses, meaning most raiding guilds in general), lack the dps or some other component for this. This is where most people are stuck at and that is pretty much the reason. Clicking cubes is just the learning of the encounter and takes a few wipe nights, but people are not stuck on this cause they can't click cubes, it's because they lose people to infernals because their dps is too low to prevent them from popping.

There are other problems, such as time. Doing Karazhan with 3 teams consumes a lot of time, cause your third team, especially in a non hardcore guild, will be progressing slowly. They will need time to learn things and time to farm things. Take out an extra evening for killing Gruul and they are left with most of their time consumed. In standard wow you had nothing to do all week but do Molten Core. Most people didn't even go for Onyxia until they were halfway through MC, some even did her after Majordomo.
And that time constraint is a big problem for many guilds as well. Ye ole average raid guild raids 3-4 days a week and are happy with that. They don't do weekends cause people go out, and maybe have a day off in the middle of the week. So you have 1 day a week, maybe if you are really doing well, 2 days left for some Magtheridon attempts. Better hope your locks are on those days or you don't stand a chance.

Making Heroic dungeons and Karazhan was all a good idea, but making them part of the natural raiding progression has just made a lot of things that were already bad ideas even worse.

It's just too hard in every conceivable way for non-hardcore raiders. If you believe things are fine, well, they are for you perhaps but if you step down a bit, you'll see how bad things are going for the average raid guild.

I think you've understood it just perfectly.

In vanilla Wow you could affort to have 10 mediocre and 20 downright bad ppl in your raid, and still expect to get up to Huhuran / Twin Emps eventually. Even long to the Naxx, assuming that you had maybe 10 good and not too many "completely worthless" cases with you.

Now even a single bad player is a liability in almost every encounter. Remember that even Gruul is hard for some guilds even in it's nerfed state, and while we 1 shot Magtheridon every week with little to no troubles, the DPS requirements for phase1 are still very high for bad players. And majority of players (I really mean majority, Kiezlow's bad-player-hat-constant states that 4/5 of the players are bad, really) are bad in terms of gear-optimization, talentspec and playing skills. If you loose 10% in each segment, you'll end up being 30% behind, which is really bad for current fights.

There is very little content for bad players at the moment, you can hardly do easiest 5man heroics, raids are out of question and you suck in arenas. Oh well, luckily we still have BG's...

I agree with these statements. I'm not sure which part of the new raid scene killed my love for the game (probably the rep grind combined with the fact that the guild that I was a part of for 2 years turned into something.. different, and then dissolved). I was one of the first people to leave the guild and have been part of a guild built from the ground up in BC. We've been doing fairly well, but I just don't want to logon anymore. I miss a lot of the people I played with for 2 years (though some have joined us), I just cannot invest in the current raid content like I was able to before BC. I've never "quit" before, but something about the raid scene in BC just isn't fun, so I guess that I'm probably done :/

Anyway.. I'm certainly going to check things out after the patch, but I doubt that it will change my feelings much. Too many people have already gone

Emperor was different though, because it allowed you to split your DPS radically. Emperors demanded a lot from your warlock/warrior tanks, a fair bit from your healers who had to last the entire time and not die to blizzard/bugs, and almost nothing from your bug tanks/bug DPS/DPS, who basically had to kill bugs.

We could routinely get away with placing our worst healers on healing the bug tanks, one or two undergeared hybrid tanks on the bugs, and just placing most magic dps on handling the bugs.

A raid like Magtheridon on the other hand has a DPS timer that is a lot harder. For Mag, our tipical raid has 7 or 8 healers, 3 or 4 warlocks, 5 tanks, and 9 or 10 DPS. This means that if 2 of your DPS are poorly specd and underperform, it will hurt you much much more than on raids like Emperor where as long as they were not retarded you could still carry them through. It is quite common for our guild on SWS stats to see as much as a 50% split between the top DPS and the bottom one. In a vaccum, I applaud the idea of having every player feel required, needed, and be crucial to the outcome of the raid, in practice this is quite troublesome in guilds that always had a social component where casual players could tag along and fill in when there are empty raid spots.

My guild is somewhere in the middle between casual and hardcore; We're killing Mag fairly easily now and are working on Lurker in SSC. In vanilla, most of us have seen Loatheb die. We pretty much see 25-man raids as a good thing, for most of the upshots already listed in this thread.

Marching onto Hydross after killing Mag and feeling like we were on top of the world was a very rude awakening, however. We had a couple of tries at Gruul pre-nerf and would have taken him down in due time and with heavy pottage, but Hydross blows that out of the water. The DPS requirement for him feels like a wall, plain and simple, whether due to the fact that our DPS doesn't play like superstars or because potting up fully with flasks is still a big deal to most of us. My two greatest worries at the moment are overtuned bosses and consumable farming.

In this position, the coming patch is Christmas, the Holy Grail and ice cream rolled into one. I can't say I'd still be playing after Hydross if not for the announced patch. One of our former members is considering taking up raiding again once the consumable grind is eased. The guild's fate is pretty much tied to 2.1.

Taking all this into account, it's rather sobering when you take in the big picture; Hydross is a block for us, but we can take him down if we seriously go all out for our standards. That's barely a tenth of the kills needed before we can see Hyjal, let alone the monster of an instance that BT is going to be. Gurg hit the nail on the head when he said that every boss feels like another step on the road to Illidan, and Hydross is an entry boss to boot. We'd dipped our toe in the water and found it to be scalding.

Reading EJ often makes me feel like we're basically nowhere at all, but . . . along with another guild that's killed Mag, we're the most advanced on our little backwater RP server. 2.1 had better deliver.

Nuveena - let's take a look at the Twin Emps fight and why at least I think the fight is ok. The first learning for a new guild is that tanks need to pot up in a serious way. Apart from Rag and GFRPs this was one of the first pot up fights we had (and we killed Twin Emps quite fast after the leading guilds, before C'Thun was downed after the fix).

Initially, this fight is hard for two reasons: Healers need to heal alot AND move, secondly DPS need to be constantly high. The DPS issue becomes significantly less so after a few clears up to Twin Emps due to the DPS boost your raid gets from drops. So in essence the DPS race is actually not that tough. Thirdly, this was the next to last boss of the end-game at the time so it should be challenging. Guilds had AQ20, ZG, MC and BWL to clear and farm at the same time.

This meant that guilds that were less well at executing fights would eventually clear the gap through upgrades in the very same dungeon as long as healers learned to move correctly and tanks potted up in the next to last boss in that current end-game.

Net-net I think that fight was well tuned for where it was in the raid progression.

I firmly believe that you are wrong on this one due to the various reasons mentioned before. You did not have to pot up in MC or BWL when they were released. You could loose multiple people in basically all fights in both instances without wiping. And as a reference we cleared all those dungeons with the blues etc that they originally were designed for back in the days.

One thing I notice is that a lot of people I raid with have never really been on the cutting edge. So you are seeing people who aren't used to seeing content with no "known" strat, with inferior gear, with the need to just get lucky a bit to get that first kill, etc.

It is very disconcerting to people who did MC/BWL 6-12 months after the initial wave and think "geez we didn't get that boss down teh first night we tried him this is really hard."

Perhaps this is one of the core issues? BWL pretty much forced the bad tanks out of the tanking business. AQ40/Naxx cut out the healers who couldn't do Emperors / Patchwerk, as well as everyone who couldn't do anything but stand still & spam bolts (Thaddius). TBC puts a lot of strain on the DPS, so now there really is no place to 'hide' anymore, though arguably you can still bring a certain % of bad healers. I don't really know where I stand on this development, after all my personal trial by fire came with BWL tanking (Tank Neffy without fearward, and I challenge you to find any job in TBC raiding to measure up in difficulty :P) so it was a very long time ago.. I happend to think Naxxramas set the target too high, forcing everyone to perform at maximum skill (DPS & healing on Patchwerk). Curiously enough, it seems like many very advanced Naxxramas groups find the current content a struggle, I don't understand why.

This is the truth. For guilds who had a lot of players who fit in for social reasons, but had large skill differentials, there is currently no longer an option to 'hide' the bad players in positions of very low responsability.

First off I think we should take itemization off the table till 2.1. The last set of changes nearly had my eyes bugging out. It's a pretty dead horse anyway.

I'd like to put a new comparison on the table - Raiding vs Arenas. I thought the original theory was that pvp'ers and raiders could 'pick their poison'. It's actually a nice contrast, because both methods can be useful in the other environment, and this is something blizzard WANTED.

Now the fact of the matter is that PvP is a far easier way to get gear than pretty much any PvE. I know most of you might find this hard to believe, but there are a ton of people out there who have trouble with Arcatraz and BM. Not heroic.

I know there needs to be some difficulty level involved, but then consider a patch note like this:

> The hitpoints of all non-boss mobs has been reduced. The boss specific adds should not be affected by this change.

TBC isn't hard, it's WAY too hard. Guilds like Nihilum and even EJ should be done with Hyjal and waiting for BT. Guilds with that level of skill and dedication and consumable use should have killed nightbane and gruul in mostly greens.

Guilds like mine should be where Nihilum is now. Tuning levels were a content cockblock and nothing else. The problem is they cockblocked almost everyone. I 'm sure this will be classified as a whine post from a semi-casual, but I'd like to be able to do more content.

Let me say this again. I personally never equated crap = casua -l this is a poor stereotype. All of our people are competent. They may not have top gear and may have only 30% attendance.

Twin emps for me is a great example of a boss fight exemplifying the situation and the trouble with TBC. Yes twin has the fame of being one of the hard encounters in vanilla. We beat that encounter with 2 alt healers in raid that had no better than pre-raid blues, some ZG epix and some few MC pieces on the first kill. Nowhere near the gear level of a full-time raiding main. We were a heterogeneous group with a minimum attendance requirement of 25%.

Twin emps was not a tight encounter design by TBC standards. If you sensibly executed you would make it before enrage when you naturally progressed to the encounter (mild potting if you will, but not even really needed. That'd compensate for 1-2 deaths). You could bring alt healers who did their job. The thing is beatable. Substitute one DPS for another, no problem.

Time warp to TBC: Lack a priest at Moroes, wipe for an evening. Lack ranged DPS at Curator. Same. These encounters are easy with the right group setup, their execution is rather simple (especially Curator). Execution is far less crisp than twin emps, yet these encounters are way more straining on a heterogeneous group. Why? "The right group setup".

Because you cannot substituted a ranged for a melee dps at curator without feeling it impact. You cannot sub a priest for a druid healer at Moroes. Low on interrupts at Aran or missing a lock? Beatable but much much harder. But real life signups will dictate some such fluctuations.

This has nothing to do with _difficulty_ but with flexibility that is needed to be able to be heterogeneous.

That's why I don't like the fixation on the boss difficulty argument. It's encounter tightness not encounter difficulty that's the problem. Hence why tight hardcore doesn't feel the impact to the extend that more heterogeneous groups do. What's bad about the fluctuations is that they have nothing to do with skill but everything with logistics and RL interference.

The Moroes group was literally at no fault for wiping there (I lead that group btw). The fault was group composition. Next day we one-shotted him. Difference: Priest in raid.

Now tell me the same for twin emps.

Not so sure. You may have a point. But I give you that we entered MC and chain wiped at Geddon for over a month. I had no problem with that very simply because execution and learning was the defining factor. I have every problem with non-learning and non-execution factors dictating success, like tight raid composition or excessive potting.

To that I always feel like this: Blizz has much improve the leveling game. TBC questing > vanilla questing by a far stretch. Polish is very neat and a lot of things got improved. Why should we accept that there is no improvement in polish of released raid content. Even more so that more people will now experience it right away with matured raiding scene having emerged over the last 2 years. Even more why should we accept that the core design goes against what many raid groups need to keep their social fabric intact... again your focus on boss difficulty, but that completely misses the gripe here.

The question why many experienced raid groups have to go for 3 months without even stepping into a full length cap size raid instance is much closer to the problem though. That too has nothing to do with difficulty but just notoriously overdone linearized progression and the base design template that is TBC raiding, placing a mandatory 10-man Karazhan at it's root. To state that bosses aren't harder gives no indication at all that this is the actual situation.

Going back to your BWL point. It's like saying people wiped horribly at Vael while MC didn't exist but instead clear to Drakkisath would be the same as what we had it back then. Fact is that people could happily farm MC and Onyxia, reap rewards, even learn to improve the clearing speed while learning Razor or Vael and improving their chances to beat Razor and Vael along the way with good gear upgrades and resistances. The difference now is not boss difficulty, it's lack of accessible content at raid group-appropriate size.

So again nothing to do with difficulty. Having a gate-keeper somewhere is alright. Having it out of tune somewhere down the line is too if it is fixed sensibly fast (and not months down
the line). All of this isn't even the argunemt here.

This is an interesting design question. In WoW1.0, everything apart from C'Thun and second half of Naxx was a question of when not if, as long as you played the game and raided with a group. In TBC this is clearly not the case. I have not thought through my own position about this but it is an interesting point.

Indeed that's the reason my old guild died. We had a policy that whoever was in the coreteam could invite irl friends to the guild. Those friends could prove their activity and could be promoted to full time members. I liked this system because our guild was 1 great community with enough member to get a raid. There was one major flaw though, we allowed slackers. In MC, BWL and AQ this was no problem. So then naxx came and we struggled. Slow progress because people didn't do enough effort, were not geared enough, were bad players. So we had to recruit new players, during the next 6 months we mass recruited players but it didn't have a good effect (obviously). We managed to kill Loatheb somewhere in december and then quitted raiding.

A month after TBC release we had about 60 lvl 70s and we couldn't get a karazhan raid, because people wanted to play with their friends. We had about 15 people left from our early raiding days but we couldn't run karazhan raids because of raid policy. The guild died and split up in 3 parts. The core of the old guild, the slackers and the small part that wanted to continue hardcore raiding no matter what. This was my best moment in TBC so far, we were finally rid of those bad and annoying players :p.

Disclosure: Label this how you want, our guild raids 3 times a week daily with non-mandatory attendance and no DKP/point system. We currently are banging our heads against Aran and sometimes Curator (even though we have downed him 4 times, sometimes we just cant get past him).

Having said that we used to do open raiding, where we could only field 1 Karazhan group, and we would have anywhere from 15-21 people show up, the most showing up on Tuesday (AKA Loot pinata). Once we hit Curator, we found success depends highly not on the raid makeup, but who comes with us (our highly skilled, well-geared players). After seeing this occur night after night, and being unable to truely learn Aran due to bringing along our lesser tiered players we decided to make a change in our Karazhan raid policy.

We left our first two nights as continueing to be open raiding, but leaving our last raid night as "invite only". This would allow us to focus on progression in the hopes that we can, in time (gear, strats), carry the other remaining people through Karazhan.

I can tell you from being an officer in the guild that we were far from happy having to make this decision. We are a guild built off of social interaction, whether that be from /gu, 5 mans, or raiding, we are generally low key people who like to have a good time, and get loot in the process without being on the cutting edge (we are fine with that). What were not happy with is hitting a wall, being unable to progress further because our "friends" just do not have the understanding on what they are suppose to do for said encounter. And we werent mad at our friends, we were upset with Blizzard putting us in a situation where we have to marginalize them out of what should be something everyone has access to do (IE raiding)

I think a lot of people forget this is not just a lack of WoW skills, or LRN2PLAY situation, this is a lack of "how the hell do I use a computer" issue. We have a few people that do well just to turn on their computer, and launch WoW. Anything like loading addons takes a concerted effort on ventrillo to walk them through how to do this. Then you start talking about hand/eye coord from people that have never played a video game up until there early/late 40s, WoW probably being their first game, and they just cant keep up.

I mean, I am almost 32 myself, but I have been playing video games consistantly from the age of 4, completely different scenerio when someone gets interested in PC games at 40 for the first time. It isnt easy for them, especially in the non-forgiving raid environment that Blizzard has designed. To make a long story short, you cant just yell at Blizzard because they arent avialable to be vented on, but your friends who miss a queue or arent putting out the dps, threat, or healing they are suppose to, are readily available to be vented on because they are on vent or in /gu. I honestly hate that Blizzard has done this.

In any event, this has caused a lot of our truely casual players to aviod the raiding scene altogether (play alts, tradeskill, run non-herioc 5 mans), quit, or just not play as much but keep their account active. The biggest complaint about WoW that I hear nowadays from guildies, is that TBC WoW is hard, something I didnt hear so much of in Vanilla WoW.

this all comes across as Survival of the Fittest...but yee gods, that no way to run a successful media business Blizzard..everybody has to have a reason to play.

Razuvious, Huhuran: hope your priests are around/ awake

Any fight that needed tranq shot: hunters

There were fights that hinged on specific classes being around and available.

You realize that the entire argument so far is predicated on the fact that it's alot easier to pick your required hunters from a pool of 60 than from 30, right? Not to mention the whole ten man thing?

I'm telling you that we had nights when we didn't have enough of the soakers on for Huhuran or didn't have enough mind controllers for Razuvious (we only had about 2 priests who were willing to do it). Are we feeling the restrictions more in TBC? Yes. Very much so. Especially on dps where we'd been used to being able to substitute one class for another.


I agree absolutely that it's the dps requirements that have been the main struggle for my guild.


But there were fights in WoW1.0 that had class requirements. 4 horsemen?

Yep, substituting 1-2 priests at Razuvious isn't a problem because you just need 2-3 with to-spell-hit gear and some practice.

Substituting 1-2 hunters for other dps isn't a problem because literally any encounter can be safely executed with 3 tranq hunters.

We talk about 3 role players out of a pool of 40 here, with sensible flexibility overall.

Lose that 1 priest in Karazhan... very different story.

That's one rigid role out of 10.

While 3-4 out of 40 sounds like the same ratio as 1 in 10, the fact that you have a relative granularity of 4 instead of 1 does make all the difference here.

Also encounters weren't designed to be needing class-specific utility (kicking, CC) as much in Vanilla as Kara already does. These encounter designs could have been less tight even at a number of 10.