Aggression

Agreed, ZG was fun and some of the items (Peacekeeper gauntlets) were as irreplaceable as the enchant and was greatly geared towards casual (until Hakkar or Jindo, but if you had the 1/3rd exceptional casual mixed with good players, only a few wipes were really necessary)

 

deneba

How far do you think a two nights a week raid can get with current content?

We currently raid two nights a week..... Thursday and Friday, about 3.5 hours each. (Karazhan not included.) Our accomplishments so far are clearing Gruul--convincingly with a full roster, less convincingly with lots of subs. We've only tried Mag once or twice, never a true honest shot. We've been focusong on Void Reaver the last few weeks and got him down to 17% the attempt this past Friday.

I'm trying to understand what a two night a week raid can realistically shoot for in terms of progression. It seems to me that our best effort is clearing one of the T5 instances eventually but not more than that. It also seems to me that as a result, I may never see Hyjal or Black Temple just as Naxxramus passed me by. I guess I'm in a very casual raid (most of the "casual" folks here talk about as many as 12 hours a week) and am wondering how far other 6-7 hours a week raids have progressed and what your secret(s) were.

 

aleyro

So, it sounds like you have two "progression" nights, and relegate "farming" (i.e., kara) to another night in the week. Assuming that your going to keep up this schedule, I think you can make pretty good progress (actually, I'm banking on it; my guild has a similar raiding schedule).

Step 1: Move Gruul to your farming night, and spend 7 hours per week on Magtheridon, Void Reaver, or Luker Below.

Step 2: After about 6 weeks, you should have the 3 above mentioned bosses down. Devote 1 night to farming Gruul and those 3 bosses, and your second night to progression in SSC.

Step 3: After about another month, eliminate Gruul, Mag, and VR from your schedule, and focus exclusively on clearing SSC, devoting an entire night to Vashj.

Step 4: Once Vashj is down, move to 1 night ssc, 1 night eye.

Step 5: one night eye, one night Kael.

Step 6: Kael down, begin hyjal.

Basically, your (somewhat conservatively) looking at about 6 months before you reach t6 instances. This assumes a relatively stable core team of at least 20, with a few swingers coming and going. This also, obviously, doesn't take into account the impact of ZA from a scheduling/gear standpoint, or the any nerfs that significantly trivialize content.

If all goes perfectly, you'll be reaching Illidan about the time sunwell comes out, and be working through sunwell just as WotLK gets released (assuming pessimistic release times for both of those).

 

Grymm

My guild runs 2 raid teams. One raid team is fairly dedicated with a regular roster. The second raid team is mostly West Coast guys who can't do the main raid team times. From what I gather, they are about 12-15 consistent guys and 10 fill ins per week. They raid 25 mans 1.5 times a week (Tuesday/Wednesday but miss days due to lack of healers). They run Karazhans with the rest of the guild or separately. Karazhan is not really a tracked/focused event for us.

They have cleared Gruul, got VR down to 14% when they were focusing on him for a couple weeks, and recently downed Mag for the first time. I suspect they will have SSC down through Fathom Lord within 6 weeks. I know they have their Hydross resist sets made.

If you run a consistent, skillful group you can progress in limited raid time. If you lack either of those, you become prone to treading water while you gear up people who don't show up or don't play well.

 

Maledict

As Aleyro says, making sure that you move on from farm content to progression content is the key for casual raid time guilds progression. You cannot keep Karazhan & Gruul & Magtheridon on your raiding schedule for long periods of time like other guilds can, you need to keep focussed on your end goal.

We only raid 3 nights a week, and by shifting Karazhan off the roster, and then Gruul, and then Magtheridon, we've now killed Lady Vashj and just have Kael & Solarian to go in the Eye. Making people realise that you don't need *every* item from a tier to be viable in the next tier, and sensible loot allocation, is the key to casual raiding. It is very do-able, you just need to keep focussed on that end goal and try to make progress towards it every week.

(Also, you'll find people will run Karazhan on non-raid nights once you have 25 player stuff on regular farm, as the gear trivialises large parts of it).

 

Jokie

Just wanted to thank you guys for the advice on the casual progression front. In the past 2 weeks we've killed Mag, VR and now Morogrim Tidewalker this evening. From reading the SSC thread, it looks like I'll take us to Karathress next as opposed to Hydross. Any thoughts on this?

We just got the frost and nature resist set made for our tanks so I assume we're just around the corner so to speak on being ready. Is it still the common belief to put the OTs for Hydross in mixed resist gear?

 

Giske

Lurker is the easiest boss in the instance, Karathress is pretty easy too. I'd say Morogrim currently is the hardest boss in there besides Vashj. If you can kill Morogrim you can kill all the other bosses easily. Hydross just needs the gimmicky resistance gear.

Your best course of action in terms of rewards would be to down Karathress as he drops T5 legs, however you can down Lurker in a couple hours of attempts. So my advice would be: Lurker -> Karathress -> Leotheras -> Hydross -> Al'ar -> Solarian -> Vashj -> Kael'thas.

Reason why you wanna leave Hydross last is because his drops arent that notworthy and Leotheras is very easy now. If you however dont have a warlock in full FR gear yet, you might wanna go Hydross instead of Leotheras.

 

• Chicken

I wouldn't call Morogrim the most difficult boss in there, most sensitive to mistakes being made yes, but not difficult. Learning the basic mechanics of the encounter is fairly simple, and the people that can make mistakes that will cause a lot of trouble is a fairly small group.

It probably depends a bit on your guild though, but I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone to try learning Leo before any of the other encounters in SSC you could possibly do.

 

Viv

Jokie - you may also want to give Al'ar a try if you're blocked by the resistance issues in SSC.
For a raid that has the "strength in depth" in the tanking department sufficient for Mag, and the co-ordination to down Morogrim, there's nothing at all to fear from Al'ar.

What Giske said about SSC is spot on. Definitely mop up Lurker on the way - not only does he have some tasty loot on him, you'll also save yourself some trash time on later nights in the place.

About Hydross OT gear, one of our OTs forgot his resist gear in bank the other night and tanked elementals in normal gear - we didn't notice much difference healing-wise.

 

Giske

Morogrim is a 10 min+ pure execution fight, if you can pull that off you can kill anything in there imo. Hes the most difficult fight to get done properly and the execution for the other bosses isnt that difficult, though its different from guild to guild.

Leotheras in his current version is really simple, theres no pressure to DPS him down anymore, all you need is a warlock in FR gear and people being wary of whirlwind and aggro resets. You need to learn to watch aggro on Hydross plus have resistance gear on tanks so it doesnt matter much which one you go for first, but Leotheras has better loot.

 

Jokie

Oh, forgot to add Lurker to that recent kill list. We had done Lurker before Mag/VR when I came back to this thread for advice. I paused SSC for us to get Mag/VR down and now went back to SSC getting Morogrim.

I'll have to start getting a warlock the FR gear as well in preparation. I think the plan we'll go with then for is to do Karathress -> Leo -> Hydross.

Many thanks to the late night (EU) crowd!

 

Danther

In our case we found Morogrim to be a bit of a pushover (got him to 12% the first night there, killed the 2nd night). But our first night on Karathress didn't go nearly as well. For the kind of guild we are, we tend to have a harder time on the simultaneous execution fights like Maulgar and Karathress. It's not that we can't do it, just that the learning curve is steeper for us.

*Well, assuming we can do it, since we haven't killed Karathress yet.

 

Zurgat

We're oneshotting lurker, tidewalker, and karathess, but Hydross is still pretty random.
Just starting on Leo, currently 50% best attempt, so he should go down soon enough. Healers lacking dps gear and proper spreading are the current 2 main issues.

Tidewalker is a pretty fun fight for sure.

-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.

 

Edghar

I really think it depends on the guild regarding which bosses are easy and which are hard in SSC. Everyone I talk to seems to have different opinions on SSC boss difficulty, so my advice would be to take a stab at each of them and find one that suits you to start. In my opinion Tidewalker is the easiest and Karathress the hardest, for example.

 

Safid

My guild is currently stagnating on Magtheridon and I wonder if it's because we still try to run KZ so much. We have one day for Gruul, another day for Magtheridon that gets lousy attendance, and then 2-3 days for KZ -- sometimes running two raids each.

When people started to actually progress in 25 man content, how much did you run KZ anymore? I know it's essential in getting people up to an acceptable baseline level of gear, but in my case it seems like spending this many days raiding is just sapping the will of a lot of my guild members.

 

Giske

Morogrim is annoying because he hits harder than he should and the fight is so long and boring. You also have the random luck element in who gets graved or not, having one of your OTs be graved 8 times in a row isnt fun at all.

I guess I let my annoyance with the fight color my view a bit, but I still find the other bosses much easier. The suggestion of taking a stab at each boss is a good one, if you end up doing really well on an initial probe you'll likely end up killing the boss rather quickly.

Edit: We completely stopped with Karazhan after we killed Hydross. Its a complete waste of time staying in Karazhan after you start progressing in SSC. Similarly you can drop Mag and Gruul once you have most of SSC/TK on farm and drop SSC/TK once you have done a bit of MH & BT.

 

aleyro

I was under the impression that SSC was a relatively linear instance, but the last few posts in this thread suggest that its a bit more open ended, like ZG. Which bosses are accessible as soon as you enter the instance? it seems like you can "start" at just about any boss... is that the case?

 

songster

Pretty much, yes. You can kill them in any order until you get to Vashj. However each boss controls a chunk of trash, so you won't get many attempts on the "deeper" bosses per trash timer unless you kill some of the others first.

 

Edghar

If you're having trouble on Magtheridon for a while, I'd suggest taking a stab at Lurker or Void Reaver, which are arguably easier than Mag. Also, we dropped Karazhan from our schedule as soon as we started SSC. Just relegate it to an optional off night thing, where newer members can still get geared up.

 

Edghar

You can leash some of those deeper bosses making wipe recovery easier. Just be careful of additional trash in the hallways if you use this approach.

 

Danther

If you want to kill Magtheridon, why not make it so that you go to him on your good attendance days? Also, do you need 3 days in KZ? We tried KZ over 3 days for a few weeks, and it just burned people out. It ended up being two quality days and a crap day, so we just dropped one down, regardless of how far we got that week.

 

Siddown

I'd say to Karazhan only one day a week, just vary what optional bosses you kill. One week do the Maiden, the next do Illhoof, etc., etc.

 

Kaacee

I'm the leader of a guild that just downed Mag. FYI, we did VR first. Our DPS and tanks are great, and the trash drops interesting items (which motivates people), so VR seemed like a more a attractive option. After our second VR kill we went to Mag, and killed him on our 6-7th pull. If you need some tips on Mag for a casual guild, feel free to contact me. I will not rehash that all here.

One suggestion I really think helped our guild was to have a flexible schedule. Have people signup for days, not raids. Then plan the more difficult stuff for the days you have the best players. Huge huge difference on raids, bosses started dying much easier, and raids went much faster. The less skilled players also started to improve, so they would get invites. WWS is a huge benefit to provide an objective measure of performance, and reduces the complaints about descrimination.

We are now doing KZ biweekly, and will drop it totally after we make some progress in SSC. After it has been dropped for a few weeks, I plan to revisit KZ from time to time to hopefully gear a few of the newer folks, or find that certain item that never dropped. The gear from SSC and Mag should make it much easier.

 

Silmeria

What do other guilds do in regards to skipping Hydross? Sometimes our resistance tanks our out of town, or we're just having a bad night with Hydross in general but we've been kind of hesitant to skip him because we really hate his trash (we don't chain wipe on it or anything, but it does take a little bit of time to clear). But if you can consistently one-shot Lurker, and the trash to Hydross respawns, is it pretty easy to skip it to continue with attempts on stuff like Morogrim and FLK?

I vaguely recall the fish in the water will respawn sooner or later, so you can't "really" skip his trash consistently after a bit -- true/false?

Just looking to basically optimize time efficiently as a raid group on a casual progression schedule for whenever we hit the Hydross bump (his loot sucks so much too after you get the tanking trinket and one or two of the other pieces, I don't even know why I'd ever want to bother fighting this guy if I didn't have to. I just consider it raid training -_-).

 

Idris

The fish never respawn once you've killed Lurker. Hydross was the 5th boss we killed in SSC due to difficulties with getting all the resistance tanks online at the same time, and you can swim past his trash to all three others easily enough all week once Lurker is down.