It's just nice to be in tempest keep, it has a good feeling to it, you're on a space battleship filled with Kael's baddies. VR is very nicely tuned for where he is really, it's a survival, dps race which requires poeple to actually watch their screen instead of just standing still and collecting epics.

Just about bosses people say are "loot pinyatas", it's frustrating to hear poeple in guild chat or vent complaining because your guild couldn't kill a loot pinyata in 1 or 2 tries. We actually had someone in our guild complain because we didn't one shot the trash waves in hyjal and kill rage winterchill in one try. He is defined as a "loot pinyata" by uber guillds; but guilds don't tell you about the waves of trash which are actually pretty intense if you have no idea what to expect the first time.

The point of this post was, I hate the type poeple who complain about not one shotting a "loot pinyata" to the elite uber guilds.

I wonder if this happens in other guilds as well.

Edit: I hate apostrophies apparentily.

Gear have always made fights eassier, but in my opinion it doesn't change much in this fight. As long as you have some decent geared tanks you should be fine. Healing isn't really that intensive in this fight, if you got "bad" gear, you would just have to use some more mana potions.

I've seen guilds with mainly blue/heroic epics take him in like an evening (that would be within the first 10 tries), but in my opinion that doesn't make the fight more challenging, it will just last longer.

Usually the only reason people wipe to this encounter is due to people sleeping and dying to bolts. Focus for 5-10 min and he is down

Horribly off-topic, but you can also just stay 30 yards away from Lair Brutes and they wont charge off.

What I meant with gear was mostly dps gear. As I said, our raid lost a bunch of people to the bolts. I actually didn't believe that we had enough dps to finish him at 50%, but in the end we even had something like 30 seconds to spare. Then I read about guilds hitting the enrage timer, so apparently they don't have enough dps. Since more than half our dps was dead, this either means they lost almost all of their dps, or their dps classes were just dealing much dps. So that's why I'm assuming it's the gear, or maybe it's the dps classes being more experienced at doing dps (although we still kinda suck at that). The encounter just felt as if it was tuned to a lower gear level than ours, I'd say we haven't learned a new encounter with that much tolerance to deaths since some of the early karazhan bosses.
And challenging was probably the wrong word, but with worse gear I'm pretty sure we would have had a lot longer to down VR.

Honestly, this is how every boss should be, at least toward the front of each instance. Skilled, coordinated raids should be able to progress without having to farm Attumen and Maulgar for weeks, while slower guilds should eventually be able to brute force the dungeon. I'm not saying you should be able to outgear it to the point where no one even tries to click cubes or avoid Orbs, but you should be able to lose those few "dead weight" guys you carry because you're a casual guild and they're your GM's spouse or whatever. One of the main reasons people despised raiding pre-2.1 was because this wasn't true; you could be in full tier 4/crafted epics and still need to flask out the ass with zero deaths to down Hydross. I think at this point, Blizzard has the difficulty curve pretty well sorted.

That's pretty much why we held off on even trying SSC until 2.1. Flasked to the tits, perfect execution, no deaths? No thanks. Reading the horror stories here or watching a nihilum video where Awake has every elixir imaginable and several world buffs was enough for us to say, "Let's just wait, they'll nerf it in 2.1".

It's weird, I go back and forth about the changes that cater to the more casual. While I think a lot of the changes in the 25 mans were positive, I wasn't a big fan of some of the stupid nerfs. Do the guys in kara that ice tomb really need to be shackleable? They were pretty easy to begin with. The 2 Defenders +more pulls in heroic pens? There's tons of little changes like those that were completely unnecessary.

I totally agree. I am incredibly pleased that my guild only started working on Gruul after the nerf and cheap flasks in 2.1. On the other hand I think it's just stupid that they took out the double robot pull in regular Arcatraz. And a lot of heroics hit like cotton balls now...

Oh, and on topic, I'm thinking once that once my guild gets Gruul down and on farm (need.. more.. dps..) we can start working on SSC and maybe make a fun run to VR. There's definitely no rush for casual guilds.

We raid three nights a week. Have Gruuls lair and Magtheridon pretty close to one-shot status. We went into TK last night before the reset to give it a try.

I kinda hate the trash. We got no drops from them, which didn't help. Void Reaver though, was another story.

It's gonna take a few attempts for your ranged/healers to really understand they need to move away from the orbs. Melee should grab the Violet Badge and a piece or two of Arcane Resist gear. We had a few instances of them trying to run out for Pounding only to take an Arcane Orb. Just stick a shaman on them and keep them in.

Our final attempt was met with an enrage at 7%. Our tank with shield wall up was like 2 shotted.

Your DPS is definitely gonna need the gear from Kara, Gruul, and Magtheridon to make a decent amount of progress on the fight.

It happens. I think we got one trash epic the first night. Then we got a pattern and 2 vortexes the next.

On our first few attempts, we had issues with people seeing VR target them to fire, they would run away, the ball would materialize...and basically everyone was just dragging the ball to another player. Once our raid leader said, "Let the ball materialize, then run away. This way you won't drag it over to someone else. Run out and away from the circle if necessary," things fell into place. Your melee will figure it out after a few tries, and yeah, chain heals on melee does wonders. I'd refrain from the AR though, it's completely unnecessary.

Nah, melee dont need any AR whatsoever, just a couple of healthstones, a shaman or two, and/or a tree druid will keep them alive just fine; the problem arises when your ranged guys can't learn to move out of the way of the big blue orbs o'death. Twice in a row. Yes, accidents happen, yes even the best of people will zone out and get hit once or twice through the course of the fight.... but twice, back to back, is just stupid.

However, once our ranged guys got used to moving, we went from ~7500 raid dps to ~9500 raid dps and just destroyed the guy. We had 5 tanks and 7 healers I believe, so that's a good 1k additional RDPS that we had in reserve if we decided to swap our two Ferals to cat gear.

Theres an addon (I'm pretty sure it Deadly Boss Mods) which makes you say 'ARCANE BALL coming to me run away!'

With speach bubbles on, its very easy for people around you to see the danger.

I'd agree that for casual guilds this fight is not easy. Its on par with Gruul maybe a little harder in terms of DPS requirments, but its not trivial. Worth going tho, in two clears we've had 4-5 epic patterns or drops and everyone has really enjoyed the change of pace.

Its definatly worth the time to experience both SSC and TK once before making any hard choices. If you find that your guild is lacking gear, a usefull method is to form a few 5v5 arena teams and some bg trains. The season 2 arena weapons will be an upgrade for all classes excluding the possibility of Master blacksmith weapons. Arena gear provides heavy stamina and damage but severily lacks in the endurance department (int, mana regen, spell hit / penetration). It will still be better than the majority of blue gear choices. This will allow your guild to fill in any gear holes while waiting for more PvE frienldy options.

The place where the vast majority of these discussions fails is in the attempt to decide "What's a casual guild?"

The obvious place to start would be "Well, how many nights a week do they raid?".

Casual: 1-3
Raiders: 3-5 (few 7).

So there's still the overlap at 3 days of play.

Let's then look at "How much time do they put in outside of raiding?"
Casual: 1-3 (2-5 average counting non raid days) hours a night.
Raiders: 3-5 hours on top of raids (maybe 4-7 average if you count non-raid days).

So, again, you see a fair bit of overlap.

How do they spend their non-raid hours?
Casual: PvP, chatting, instancing with friends, farming.
Raiders: Grinding gold/quests/rep/material requisites to make their raiding experience more fulfilling.

Is it how they act in the instance itself? Going AFK, joking around, not taking progression seriously, wasting their compatriots' time and money?

Calling yourself "Casual" or "Hardcore" really doesn't mean much of anything. I've known "casual" players to log 60 hours a week, whereas I've known raiders (granted, those that bought copious amounts of gold) to log only the 20-25 hours they were expected to be raiding.

I've known guilds who raided 3 days a week who got up to and/or through AQ40 and up to 4H in Naxx. I also knew guilds who raided 6 hours a night who couldn't kill Emps and Maexxna.

Also: keep in mind that most players don't even do 75% of what their gear can. Enforcing specs or casting-cycles never makes people "happy", especially in a casual guild, but maybe try something like this with someone who is typically halfway down the damagemeters or lower, but doesn't get themselves killed:

/w AwfulMage Hey, I just heard that 10/48/3 is a better spec than 41/20 for raiding. I was wondering if you'd be willing to give it a shot for Mag/Gruul this week, and I'll offer for the guild bank to pay for your respec if you don't like it? Let me know.

Boom. Little cost, big benefit, and the person no longer has the risk associated with trying out a respec for the weekend (if that's really what's keeping him from doing so). Maybe he'll like it better for his daily farming/pvp or whatever as well. Try doing that with a couple of players who are obviously trying but might have suboptimal specs, and the overall efficiency of your raid should go up by a huge margin.

The problem is people tend to confuse "casual/hardcore" with "less skilled/more skilled". People automatically associate casual with less skilled and hardcore with more skilled. No doubt people who put more time in have the potential to accomplish more, but a lot of times they simply don't through lack of good leadership or lack of skilled players. On the other hand, it is rare to see a 3 day a week raiding guild anywhere close to the leading edge, but it is does happen on occasion.

I'm willing to bet Nihilum is fairly casual now. I know for most of WoW raiding, the top guild ended up raiding less than the other guilds, due to having everything on farm and having so many nights off at the end. I guess its not really a fair perspective though, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Going from 5-6 nights a week to only 2-3 would be fairly depressing. Real life is scary, raiding is a good substitute.

Would poeple define casual as only playing WoW for 20 hours a week? I am in the boat that Kytrarewn described, raiding 5 days a week but only logging on for less than 25. Although in the long run I didn't get my epic flying mount, but that deficit gold has kept me raiding this long and for another few months I'd imagine.

Honestly, I'm glad that "casuals" get in and kill void reaver. That kind of motivational boost is great, "Damn that guy has t5, his guild must be decent" mentallity could even be good for smaller guilds to pick up new players. No reward for loyalty is the bane of casual guilds. Unless you know 25 poeple in real life who can show up all the time and won't abandon you, Trouble is right, very unlikely to be bleeding edge with 3 nights a week with random poeple who will probably scoop some loot and leave to a higherly progressed guilds.

Blizzard needs to come up with a system that rewards loyalty to guilds, or perhaps its up to the guild to reward loyalty, or perhaps in this morally corrupt society big guilds will always feed off the little ones for filler.

I think "raiding" as a guild adjective is an important distinction from say, a leveling guild, (pure) PVP, or pure social guild. If the guild's goal is to go into [Karazhan/SSC/BT] it is a raid guild. Your metric-exclusionary example would be where I would define a social raiding guild (importantly noting social's change in adverbial use). Leaving casual raiding guilds and hardcore raiding guilds, which I think are most usefully distinguished between peak mandatory time committment. I think 20 hours with 80% mandatory attendance, or 16 hours/wk is probably about the peg for "hardcore raiding guild," and anything significantly less then that is casual raiding guild.

That's based on my own ancedotal observations of the character of many guilds, and the general metrics that seem to hold true - variations are easily explained as guilds-in-transition from any of those states. Nihilium if they're farming everything in ~10 hours is not casual, because when something new appears (and this of course presumes there will be something new to raid, it has been a reasonable supposition thusfar) their time committment will shoot up.

Long, rambly, but I've yet to encounter a guild whose character makes this taxonomy useless.

Sure, don't get me wrong there. I'm in a casual raiding guild. I put raiding in quotation marks to denote what alot of people were talking about in this particular thread. Raiding guilds are distinguished from casual guilds in this particular thread (since truly casual guilds would never have a thread devoted to casual progression since it's nonexistant) by the way they recruit and the way they make raiding rosters. It's that, way more than time or virtual money, which sets them apart.

What exactly do you mean by this? I'm part of a guild that raids 3 to 6 nights a month (we try and do every Sunday if we can, then follow it up Monday if there is interest, but there's always one week where we end up not raiding), and we've cleared all of Karazhan.

We're only 18 lvl 70s, so anything beyond Karazhan isn't possible, but we're probably the definition of Casual guild, there are no raid signups, we run with whomever shows up (including not even having a Prot warrior in the guild, so we Druid and Pally tank everything). Just because you are "casual" doesn't mean you don't want to see content, or want to succeed at the game.

It does mean that we do not jump through any burning hoop just to be able to see every content, like most guilds now raiding BT probably do. I think it is a completely different mindset of players. You do have those who push as hard as they can to achieve the goal and others who just considered it to be too inaccessible.

This isn't about content being to hard or to time consuming. It's just the question how much do i have to change my gaming experience from the last 2 years so i can raid current raid content. For many players the answer is: too much. That's the flaw of the current endgame design in this game.

By casual I mean the vast majority of players who either never get a level 70 or get to 70 and run a couple five mans. If you even know about this site you're neither in the majority or casual. If you've ever crunched numbers on how much dps you need to do or compared spirirt regen for your class to mp5 you're not casual. So you're certainly a casual raider but not casual in the larger, more real sense.

Incidentally, we decided to pop into TK last night. That trash is... oh man. Brutal. No Void Reaver kill, alas.