Players are obviously not entitled to participate in every raid instance in the game just by virtue of wanting to be there; nobody should expect to be able to bring passengers to the later bosses in Black Temple or Hyjal.

However, players like the ones described in the previous few posts, who can generally perform their role well but occasionally (or even frequently) miss the more unique elements in a fight, should be able to meaningfully contribute in the 25-man raiding game to some degree. There is a decided lack of 25-man "learning content" in TBC, and with any luck Blizzard agrees that this is an issue.

This is the problem. Ideally no one should have to bring passengers but the fact is before the expansion she wasn't a passenger. But the bigger problem is that in classic there was a lot more content for her to do and a lot more meaningfull content. Killing ragnaros bring to a close a huge amount of lore. It is an event in the story not just free epics. You have worked towards it. Nefarion is an important boss. Both are more important than C'thun, to the lore and afford just as much of a feeling of accomplishment. She could understand not being able to manage Kel'thuzad because he was the final boss of the game. But there were other bosses that were final bosses in your own right.

With Burning Crusade you have only 4 encounters that matter in this way. Not one of them is doable to her. And she probably couldn't even be a passenger for the ones that are final bosses in their own right rather than lieutenents. All that really matters and is relevant in this expansion are Archimonde and Illadin, and Kael and Vashj, who are only really relivant as steps towards Illadin. From the announcement of the expansion you knew that this game was about Illadin. I think it is reasonably for people to have an expectation of seeing him. Each of the pre-BC instances was stand alone and completing it meant something. All of the real raids (25 mans not 10s) lead into BT and Illadin, except MTH which is stand alone.

So yes it is not necessarily reasonable for her to expect to experience the highest end raid content. She never felt entitled to it.

On the other hand it seems very reasonable to be able to experience Illadin. After all he is right their when you boot up TBC, right there every step of the way. He is the end of the story. Cheese the encounter for them and make the loot crap, that is fine but still let them experience the content. Make a new instance with harder challenges and more loot. That wouldn't matter that much to her. Just don't make the instance and encounter that was the advertised as the #1 main selling point of the burning crusade and make it inaccessable for 99% of the playerbase (which at this point it will be if the current trend continues).

Are you suggesting there should be a BT heroic mode (current difficulty setting) and a BT normal mode which features one or more of; larger raid cap, simplified boss abilities, lower iLvl loot drops?

My wife is pretty much in the same boat as Faust's girlfriend. We are now in a small guild who is only running kara at this time so we don't have many issues.

My wife has gear better than most everyone on the guild because she devoted time to tailoring on both her mage and her priest. Her strengths are consistency. Her weakness is awareness and reaction time.

The interesting thing is my wife has all the problems described by Faust but is still giving it her all. Its true that I have to tell her things specific to her before a fight, call things out for her off of vent when they happen, do her specs, nag her to get enchants, and inform her repeatedly about skills she isn't using. But she slowly "gets it,"

She is also slowly improving on moving and general environmental awareness. She has recently joined arena teams with my alts and easy going friends with her mage and her priest (painful to me and I'm an ass sometimes when she freezes or uses some random ability which makes it no fun for her, obviously...but we haven't given up).

The bottom line is she CAN do anything but the truly twitchy bits and there aren't many of those. It takes her some time but she is solid in the end with my mentoring. Outside of pvp I don't think there is anything she couldn't get down.

So I think Faust's girlfriend is likely just in the wrong guild with too much pressure on progress and performance which really hurts players like my her and my wife. Hopefully she can get back to the things she enjoys and excels at and slowly adds to her skill set.

I'm sorry but ilidan was never advertised in such way. It was said long before tbc came that Black Temple will be the hardest raid instance Blizzard ever made. And even if that so called "1% of playerbase" will kill him i cant see how its bad thing.

You are not prepared!

It sounds that way to me too. The atmosphere in a progression oriented raid guild can be quite stressful in itself, even if people are well disposed. That actually hinders some people from feeling relaxed and confident enough to learn new skills.

We had a priest in my guild who was in a similar situation. The guys eventually just found reasons not to take her to Karazhan on progression nights when we were learning it because the pressure stressed her out and made her panic (just for the record, we had two or three other female priest players who were brilliant and adapted well, it isn't an 'all girls are crap' thing).

She did eventually leave when a few guys split off to make their own guild. I think there, in an atmosphere which was more social and a progression that was less rapid, she found it worked better for her. Like your girlfriend, she was always a reliable healer. She did end up handling all the farm content, including gruul et al - it just took her more time to get comfortable enough to feel her way through.

I definitely can't agree that players of every skill level have a place in progression content. You can make the argument that players should be able to experience the "celebrity encounters", but as I'm in the camp that believes raid groups shouldn't be directly facing these major lore characters at all due to how it cheapens the atmosphere of the world, I certainly can't agree that it should be the right of every player to kill them. Moreover, I think the attraction of sight-seeing is short-lived once you've been there and done that once or twice.

I do believe that there should be max-size raid content for players of all skill brackets, but what I think I'm hearing is that people have friends and relations who want to be participating at every step of the way in a progression-oriented guild, and that's pretty much a losing battle in any MMO; there generally is (and should be) content at the top that demands a high level of participation from everyone. That's great, and good for the game (although it's obviously much preferred if it's not the sort of thing that rewards an time investment for the sake of time investment, etc.). It's definitely not reasonable to expect that *all* raid content should have room for some people who just can't play at the same level.

It is reasonable expect that there is *some* raid content with room for those players, so that they can still mesh into the social aspect of the guild/game and, in more progression-oriented guilds, contribute to content that's already been largely mastered or out-geared.

EDIT: As for "Heroic mode raids", I just don't see that being good for the game in the long run. It definitely takes away from the mystique and feel of the raid instance if you've already conquered it on "easy mode" and, as I said previously, I think sight-seeing for the sake of sight-seeing is short-lived. In some cases, it makes legendary characters in game lore feel like theme park attractions.

I'm quite intrigued by this thread, and after reading the majority of replies, Anedris' assertion that "Skill is a measure of how fast a player can turn experience into competence [...]" about hits the nail on the head in finding the biggest obstacle causing raids to fail at a basic level. Essentially placing greater truth in the maxim "teams can only progress as fast as their slowest member".

I personally call myself a "casual gamer" these days, yet I come from a hardcore background in previous games. I played CS for many years and WoW became my first serious MMO (after flirting with Ryzom for a matter of weeks), and once I started raiding, 25-30 hours of raiding quickly became "normal" pre-TBC when we started clearing multiple instances per week. Being a student at the time such a time investment was certainly doable, even with the vast bureaucracy associated with being GM at the time. Now, 18 months on and wearing a different tag with my studies behind me, I raid 12 hours a week absolute max and rarely log apart from for raids. My pot/flask/food/oils are generally farmed in a one-day-per-month epic farm session where I prepare all my materials for the following month.

Fair enough my progress isn't amazing, we're only working on Vashj at the moment, yet it may be odd to read that I fully expect to see and kill Illidan before the next expansion. Blizzard's apparant insistence that "every raider must be able to jump through set hoops" to be able to beat an encounter may stifle some raids, but seems to shine for us due to a low player turnover from one raid to the next, and a guild generally formed with "progression raiding" in mind. While we arn't fighting for server-firsts any time soon, we're looking to make the absolute best use of our limited time and keep knocking down those bosses. TBC raiding, post 2.1, feels exactly how raiding should be, challenging yet also rewarding.

I do have to conceed that many players are likely to hit a brick wall when they come out of Karazhan. 25-man raiding is a significant step up, with the first "big three" (Gruul, Magtheridon & Hydross) being especially brutal on those with poor positional/awareness skills. In fact the two A's - Awareness and Adaptability - have become absolutely critical in TBC in order to get any regular raiding sucess and have since become a regular staple in our new recruits' internal feedback. Do they understand the requirements of a fight? Can they adapt and plug gaps in an encounter without being asked? How fast do they pick up the basics? To be perfectly honest these requirements have utterly eclipsed gear in a manner not seen (at least for us) pre-TBC. With so little PvE loot progression and the relative ease of Tailoring "bumping" players up to a tier-5 level of gear (for casters at least) it makes recruiting feel a lot like it did back in my CS days. How good are his reflexes? Can he adapt well to quick tactical changes? Is his movement and decision making good enough?.

Unfortunately, the answer to many of the above seems to be a resounding No for a small amount of members of guilds previously able to comfortably coast through BWL/AQ40 and early Naxx in WoW Classic. Whether many are in the situation of Faust's girlfriend, where they are desperate to "get their foot in the door" and enjoy 25-man raiding, but are being denied due to the game requiring a playstyle more reminiscent of the acrobatics of a multiplayer Max Payne than the stereotypical "press your buttons in the right order" method of Classic raiding I can only speculate and offer conjecture. Though the previous numbers posted in this thread of the number of North American players killing bosses in TBC, if accurate, would certainly seem to paint a fairly bleak picture as far as accessability is concerned. Even at the first supposed "entry level" 25-man raid zone. From talking to "casual" players, and I realise this is anecdotal, many of them appear to have resigned themselves to TBC raiding ending for them after clearing Karazhan, and even though they expect a minor rekindling with ZA, I doubt this will be enough for them to keep playing into the next expansion.

SSC and TK except few fights (and all t4 content) are not harder than BWL and AQ40, But lowering cap maked most of guild less tolerant to bad players.


A bit offtopic: Faust, what mods you girlfriend using? Maybe let her try some clickcasting addon (Clique), tweak raid frames, install Grid, download good boss modes. Tweak all raid warnings and sct so all major events willl be anounced by huge message and loud sounds. Gather some stamina gear to increase survival chances. Run more heroics like SH, SL, Arcatraz as single healer (while they are nerfed big time, i think every healer will agree that this heroics is pretty good training with non-epic geared group). I cant believe that she cant improve, you just need to put more work on this.

WoW has already ended for my girlfriend. She only logs on for social reasons at this point and this won't change for her any time soon. This has made me very sad but I'm not going to bring her into the game and train her up to get her through a few more encounters only for her to hit another brick wall. If there were 2 25 mans she could inherently do this would be different but no matter what she really wouldn't be able to contribute at all on more than half the fights in SSC and only on Void Reaver in TK.

Five main points have conspired together to make WoW a very impractical place for casuals with visions of glory in their head. In no particular order:

1. The incredible ease of the core game. Lets face it, having a pulse and an IQ over 70 are the requirements for attaining max level in WoW. A seven year old child could do it. You have to learn how to press maybe 10 skill buttons. Its true better players will pick up on and learn how to integrate the "frills" into their playstyle, but the truth is you don't HAVE to learn until max level.

Bear with me here, I'm gonna talk about Everquest a couple times. With the exception of perhaps one or two classes, you HAD to learn your class in Everquest to reach maximum level. The kind of Molten Core tank/spank/heal (which is very basic and fundamental) was an absolute requirement by the 30s and 40s in EQ. To throw in a couple anecdotes, I had a gnome warrior to 60 before the expansion as an alt. I never left assault stance or whatever the basic one is before 50. I would throw on a 1H and sword and tank ANYTHING before Zul'Farrak perfectly fine. I liked having more powers, and charge, and it wasn't as "fun" to play defensive, so I didn't. That I made it to 50 without exploring or learning anything about what was a fundamental role of my class is atrocious. Thankfully it was just a hobby alt of mine, but many other people I can see falling into the same trap and wondering why they can't "do" endgame content after they hit level cap.

With my current character, a blood elf warlock, I did all of four instances before 70. RFK (because I never went there as alliance,) Scholo/DM for my epic mount, and Ramparts as soon as I got to Outland. That was it. I skipped my way gleefully to 70 without ever truly exposing myself to working with a group. I knew how to because I used to be in raid guilds, but once again, its easy to picture my character in the hands of someone who hadn't.

Tanks never had to go into defensive stance necessarily, healers never really had to learn how to heal under pressure on a boss fight, warlocks could just throw shadowbolts without needing to keep DOTs up or appropriate curses for group composition. For the worst failure of the game never telling someone what they had to do, ask the enhancement shaman and retribution paladins that made it to level 60 just fine figuring they were gonna be rough-and-tumble melee DPS brawlers how much fun Molten Core was before they cancelled their accounts.

Once you had mastered UBRS it was onto Onyxia/MC. Fucking ouch. In retrospect, of course they weren't objectively difficult, but the transition was atrocious. In the beginning UBRS/Scholo/etc. was an alright training ground, being fairly difficult for people at that time. That era was fleeting. Fast forward to nine months after release and onward (i.e. the majority of the lifespan of vanilla WoW) and you could find PUGs for UBRS all day every day. You could practically stumble across the instance portal and beat the instance in spite of sheer ineptitude from the 9 others pulling you along. For most casuals like this, the transition to Onyxia/MC was stunning; like the gap between the end of American elementary school to some academy for the gifted style middle school, you went from horseplay, kids-will-be-kids, some-of-us-are-smarter-sure but-we're-all-gonna-pass to shut-up, sit-up-straight, structured, organized periods where your homework matters and no-you-can't-turn-that-in-late.

Heroics have somewhat improved on this by making a better transitional "bridge," but are also fundamentally flawed in that they're all the same content, just you're fighting the RED ninjas instead of the GREEN ones and they take 3 flipkicks to kill. Its kinda disheartening after running the easy-modes enough times to get revered. I think it would have been smarter to keep at least one wing of the hubs sealed tight until you have the heroic key; Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs, Mechanar, and so on could have been "rewards" in the sense of refreshing new content, and it might have helped build up the tension to facing the "boss" so dreadfully lacking in finally fighting Kargath, Pentathlon, and so on. At the very least piecing together the Karazhan key should have required visits to the *heroic* instances listed instead of PUGing it to some silly pots to fight off silly trash mobs (thus ramping up the difficulty more smoothly.)

2. The very basic three-pronged design of WoW classes. Tank, healer, DPS. End. Vanilla WoW very much pushed people into doing those three things, and pushing hybrids toward doing the one thing they did best, other specs be damned. Prot Warrior, Holy/Disc Priest, Mage: the holy trinity of vanilla WoW. If you brought those three to ANY instance (or double for the 10 mans at 60) and they weren't low-functioning autistics, you were gonna beat the instance.

People praise Burning Crusade for making leeway, and its true: a wide number of specs can succeed (at the hardcore level.) In the real world, and the eyes of the public, lets be honest: its meant a difference for feral druids and shadow priests... no so much others. If you are a moonkin or elemental shaman looking for an instance PUG (esp. heroic) you're gonna get skepticism or subtle teasing if you're not a Big Name Guild on your server, if not outright asked to play the role you're not specced for pretty pretty pleeeeease... add in Nihilum beating the world and touting the virtues of eschewing off-specs and its all business as usual for the impressionable casuals.

3. The changing nature of the internet. Back in the days of EQ, it was a small, cut-throat competitive playerbase. Ninjas/traitors weren't forgotten in so much chat babble in Orgrimmar or Ironforge. People were proud of their strategies and some of them were kept precious internal secrets, or closely guarded pacts for alliances shared with the officer corps of another guild. Point is, there were strategic minds of some level in every raiding guild.

Now, in conjunction with point one on my list, we come to WoW. There are so many servers and so many players people race to conquer content and spread the strategy across the internet as fast as possible so they can have the joy of saying "We told you so!"

Guilds like Nihilum and Elitist Jerks here, that walk into content still having to learn what they're up against and apply some elbow grease are now thought of like tiny Einsteins, pros so far beyond the level of "Our Guild" its not worth trying to face them on that level. Once you drop out of the top 100 guilds, I swear to you, dollars to donuts, I can tell you what you'll find: interpreters parsing a script to do what they need to do. People doing their damnedest to recite from the holy tablets of raid strategy (now WoW web stats) the prophets have handed down. I don't why doing X, Y, and Z spell in that order does the most damage while not moving me over the threat of the tank, but it does, and it works every time, so I must follow.

Of course I'm exaggerating a bit for effect, but that was very much my impression compared to EQ. It seemed like, back in the day, there were at least a few lucid strategic minds in each endgame guild that could go into a new encounter and figure out why what happens happens. They weren't all on the level of Death & Taxes now or anything, but winning something knowing what you had learned getting to max level was at least part of the real reward, alongside loot and progression. Along with point one on my list, the majority of new raiders to WoW reach max level either as very rough but talented players or totally awful, and very few ever attempt to (or even want to) become strategic calibre players. Rote memorization is easy, like the modus operandi of a mediocre teacher, but it also leads to burnout; failure, instead of seeming like "Man, this hard... bravo to Blizzard for designing this" (like the top 100 or so in WoW do) becomes an exercise in analyzing where the group has deviated from the scripture.

4. Cross-server transfers. I can't fault them here, it was opening Pandora's Box as a concept, but I think I can judge aspects of it now. I think Nihilum, Death & Taxes, and so on could better be called "corporations" at this point than "guilds." Indeed, what happened to WoW reminds me a bit of the industrial revolution in an esoteric way. At the height of the Renaissance, guilds were localized groups that tried to monopolize talent and work against each other to dominate an area. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it did mean they had strong incentive to stay loyal to the talent in their ranks that had proved itself. With cross-server transfers, the administration has become management and the grunts have become the cogs in the machine. If you can't bring this level of gear and DPS output or effective healing:overhealing ratio to us each day, theres a queue 10 deep that can in the recruitment forum.

This has its own effects at creating tension on the middle ranks of raiding guilds, oftentimes worser still. When you're fighting with all of your ability to be number 3 or 4 to kill Kaelthas on your server instead of first, you have a morale handicap to begin with. The difference about the calibre of player recruited to the bleeding-edge guilds is that they are confident they're good, and the expectation is that they're good and consistent, so theres a bit more "leeway" for them (definitely not in terms of execution or anything, but in terms of skepticism/not being expected to be utter trash.) When you look at the middle ranks of raid guilds on servers that might not be the best in the world, alongside my point in number 3 on my list, it can become very disheartening for the officers as they dredge through trashy applicant after trashy applicant, never expecting very much, just hoping to find someone that can keep them sustained for a week or two in case they have to dump you. This was my experience as the warlock officer for what is a raid guild somewhere in the 200 ranks, and I have heard similar stories from many others.

In the end I am not denigrating the Burning Crusade raiding community at all. I would never want the transitional feudal state to ever again dominate the world economy, and I am wholeheartedly a market capitalist. The way the top guilds work now just works better, and I can't deny that. There are always exceptions as well, organizations like Elitist Jerks that only pursue replacements after their talent has moved on, so don't think I am making an absolute statement. If we didn't admire EJ, I don't think any of us would still post here =)

5. Modability. The elephant in the room few want to mention. Every once in a while you'll get someone hardcore talking about running with only the basics, but I would wager they are very much the minority for the hardcore raiding set. The difference in capability I have between the default interface without macros and the 50 or so Ace mods I run with is staggering, even with no delta in skill. I can evaluate my output on the fly, adjust it, track my banishes/seduces to within a few seconds margin of error, present buttons and unit frame information in a way that is more suited to how I digest information, the list goes on and on.

As a programmer, I am very enthusiastic and amazed by the freedom Blizzard has given the players. As a gamer, some mods are just like genies I can't cram back into their bottles. To go after the biggest culprit, the rise of the aggro meter is a complete abomination to me. On an immersion level (admittedly a very personal point) the genius of the creation of the aggro system was that it was a computer emulating the malice an entity had in survival mode. With the numbers clearly displayed for the eye to see... it doesn't move me.

Take Vaelestrasz the Corrupt, for instance. That encounter was like night and day for me as a noobie warrior. With only your gut instinct, it feels kinda like you're fighting for the attention of a dragon slowly going insane as you fight to keep him from slaying a ton of your compatriots because he got distracted. With a threat meter, it feels more like a data input analysis for me: I monitor the numbers, know the keys I should press to put me in the right spot, and act on it until I have numerically outdone the machine. Going in and trying to evaluate gear and personal skill to determine tank transitions and seeing how your hypothesis was different from the actual result was mildly entertaining, just on a social level. By evaluating the numbers concretely, you can shuffle people around based on their results and finetune until theres very little risk of your order being "wrong" anymore.

...But I digress. To get back to the thesis of my text here, Burning Crusade has demonstrated very clearly the aftermath of such amazing, capable mods as KTM or Omen. What was, once upon a time, a little boost for people is now almost mandatory. Whereas once you could be a good player and play by ear or an okay player and adjust based on your mods, the widespread popularity of such mods now demands you be a very good player while still paying attention to the meter or something of a prodigy (for most classes) to be able to go in and do it without. I would be shocked to learn of a top-end guild at this point where most people were running without one of those mods.

You can very much see that WoW was based around the expectation of aggro being obfuscated. The whole advantage of having a hunter, which is hard to keep up respectable numbers with, was that they were safe DPS. You could bring a mage or a warlock but you might end up with a wipe whereas a hunter could play dead and keep up the burst. Now that threat is laid bare by the meters you can ask hunters about their experience raiding in the expansion... its like looking at a slow downward slope, dull and predictable. If encounter has wacky aggro or requires safe DPS or extreme range, a hunter might have a shot; Else bring a better DPS class to the encounter and have the hunter on standby. Now the developers have to struggle to find ways to make viable a class like that, with its main gimmick so weakened. (Shaman have long struggled in the same way, with totems being an interesting idea but not very good in practice. I can't say with absolute certainty having not played one at max level, but I very much get the impression that 90% of the reasons they're brought into groups isn't for abilities coming from that main selling point of the class)

The effect on casuals is pretty bad as a result. Can you imagine someone wanting to play Legolas and having started a hunter just like a year ago? If they wanted to transition to a raiding guild at this point the deck is stacked against them. Hunters are expected to be very bad just as a social stigma, they have to learn how to a complicated and lag-dependent shot weaving process to be able to pull their own weight (which is not taught or required at all the whole way 0-70) and even if they make the transition successfully, they will probably spend a great deal of their time benched and not raiding. Its better for other classes, but for the majority it still requires a transition to adapting to new mods and better ways of cycling/outputting damage or paying attention to healing priority/mana regen that can be very confusing by virtue of being so new to them. And its expected to be down as early as Gruul/Magtheridon, which is essentially out of the frying pan and into the oven. I do not envy them at this point.

Once again, please do not take offense at anything I have said. I do not have any hatred for anyone in the raiding community or think you are silly or deluded. I still find a good deal of fun in the game. I am just remarking on what I see to be the pressures acting against casual progression, having slipped into sub-casual lurking around since the end of last year.

That's a huge wall of text Opiod, and I have to say as an ex EQ raid leader at the high end, hardcore style, I really disagree with a lot of your points. I'll only quote one to keep the Gods of the Hammer happy...

Says two things to me. Firstly, you clearly never grouped in EQ much outside your own guild. Peopel talk about EQ as if it were some holy grail of player skill, where due to the difficult levelling times everyone grasped the basics of their class. Only, that simply wasn't true. Levelling wasn't hard in EQ, it simply took longer. You still had players of ALL classes at maximum level who couldn't do anything. It didn't help that in EQ, if your group had a skilled monk or bard puller, the group could basically be a bunch of starfish and you'd win. The person with the most AA points on my server was a necromancer who was absolute death to group with - one of the most useless players I have ever met in any game. Yet he was also a high end raider.

I think you're over-emphasiing what EQ was like with the tint of rose coloured glasses, and you're also under-emphasiing the challenge inherent in normal 5 player stuffs in WoW. You can do stuff on an alt that would get you killed if you were doing it first time through - there's no way you can just laugh and giggle at Uldaman's end boss if you are playing it through first time and at the right level. You'd be better off saying that it's easy to *out-level* the challenge in WoW instances, not that there isn't any challenge there at all, because that's what most players do.

I also don't understand your comments about strategic minds in the raiding guilds in EQ. Sorry to burst the bubble, but although FoH / Afterlife / Triton kept their strategies extremely secret, once the second tier of guilds had killed the bosses every person in any raiding guild out there had access to the strategy. We were the 3rd guild on our server into the elemental planes, and by that point guides were available for every single elemental god and every boss before hand. The difference between the two games from my perspective as a RL in both, is that although you can follow a guide in EQ to the letter and it will result in a win, you try doing that on Vashj or any other boss of that nature and you'll just die unles you get lucky. I have to make changes to the bosskillers / EJ thread guides constantly on boss fights, and I'm sure that most raid leaders at every level do. They are a handy starting point, but nothing more than that.

Opioid one thing I have noticed with WoW playerbase, when considering the need of actually know their class. Instances never did this nor did battlegrounds. People could go to instance and "freeride" trough em. Relatively it wasnt necesary to actually have clue how to play the class. There are few extreme examples where people havent found talent trees until lvl ~50 and such. Or you find lvl 70 people who can say "what feint? it doesnt do damage" or "what sunder? it doesnt do damage".

Arenas finally brought aspect to game where people need to think what they are doing wrong. They are personally so bound to the outcome that they are mentally forced to think what they did wrong. And what others did right to win them. I dont know if its just illusion or wishful thinking from my side, but after the arenas came, WoW playerbase have actually learned a lot about playing. Atleast thats what I have observed as old pvp freak.

EQ had a lot more guarded strategies and tiered progression because they didn't have instanced content. The top dog of the server locked every spawn they wanted because they were more efficient at assembling and played with a take-no-prisoner style.

The segreation that occured was incredibly difficult to beat, because you were left with only the scraps the top guild did not want.

As an cautionary tale, back in the days of plane of time flagging, when the PoW boss Coirnav was often the cockblock to get in, Township Rebellion used to set their alarm clocks at 3 AM to log in and kill it quickly to prevent the number2 guild from accessing plane of time. They went further and further, and even used to portal out of a raid boss in a zone they only had access too to go back and kill him as soon as he spawned to ensure nobody could touch their content.

Imagine having Nihilum on your server and having them portal out of an Illidan fight to take away Kazzak - that's the type of competition guilds in EverQuest faced.

Well, I can't speak to the EQ part, but as to the analysis of WoW, pretty much every word of that is spot on.

* 1-70 doesn't teach you how to play your class

* Mods, especially threat meters, make so much of a difference that they become obligatory

* Most guilds don't have strategists and theorycrafters in

* Cross server transfers have amplified the differences between guilds, meaning Blizzard now has a much larger spectrum to try and cater for

* Corollary to the above - top end guilds are overflowing with recruits, while the middle and lower end are squeezed. My ex-group has had two application in the last 3 weeks. One's an Arms warrior who isn't really clear why he needs hit gear... *any* hit gear. The other's a mage we don't need, without raid-ready gear.


Looking across to the Wowjutsu thread, there is some encouragement though. As per my recent post there, when you look at the top 10 guilds per server, progression on the average server puts the average guild somewhere in the middle of SSC and just starting TK.

This isn't a huge distance from where it was at this stage of pre-TBC, with guilds working on MC and dipping a toe in BWL. We can probably expect many of these guilds to complete SSC and TK, and have a look at Hyjal and BT before the expansion.

Where the big disconnect comes in is that guilds now are half the size they used to be. That's a lot of people not progressing as far (in relative terms) as they expected to.

I think you are over-emphasizing the requirement of mods. Mods become needed only if people start relying on them. Our guild does not use mods to a great extent (we are at Shade of Akama/Anetheron now after beating Kael last week). We do not use threat meters, ever. The extent of mods we use is timer warnings, which are - I must concede that - the biggest help you can probably have. However, this is *all* we use. We don't even use TS/ventrillo and never have.
So what you think is needed, is just needed because you at some point started to use and now are so reliant on it that you have in essence become 'addicted' to said mod. You can't function properly without it. We have had a few cross server recruits who pretty much said: "how on earth do you expect to beat Kael without TS ?", and yet we did it in just two weeks time.
This is not saying that it's *better* not to use it, but that if you are completely used to functioning without it, then that works just as well. Maybe you wipe an extra few times because you could have prevented person X from doing something stupid (which takes that person a wipe more to learn).

Now, I must also agree with previous postings: SSC and TK are not harder than AQ 40. Movement requirements, situational awareness, reaction time, they are just the same as on Vaelastrasz, Emperors and C'thun, and possibly even easier depending on the encounter. I have trouble believing that someone who was perfectly fine with moving out of Blizzard, Exploding Bugs at Emperors (as you say your girlfriend has), who apparently could move correctly on Heigan and Thaddius, would suddenly have problems stepping two step back or forward into the water at Lurker, or running away from an incoming orb at Void Reaver.
This is something I will not believe because it strikes me as impossible. If you can move at Thaddius/Heigan, you can move anywhere. (Yes, with practice !)

Every single guild on my server that has committed itself to raiding pre-expansion got to Huhuran. All these guilds + a few new ones have passed Magtheridon and Void Reaver at least, most of them also have Hydross and Lurker down.
Point there is: you, yes you, can actually do this content. No matter who you are, if you put your mind to it you can get at the very least Vashj down. Sure it may take half a year to do it, but it can be done if you are just willing to go for it. Kael may be another problem entirely, sure, but everything in SSC including Vashj is very doable and not harder to learn than Emperors.

On another note, I do believe there should have been an easier starting instance for 25 man raids. Or Heroic Zul'Gurub or whatever. The biggest issue is Karazhan which is really just a big mistake.

I tend to agree with Vohbo. There are plenty of fights to teach people environmental awareness and to train people out of their "panic" reactions. Are they going to learn it as fast as Joe McUber who cut his eye teeth on Unreal Tournament? Probably not - but that doesn't mean there's something broken in the game.

I do wonder where this disdain for Karazhan comes from, though. I noticed it in Vohbo's post, as well as Faust's. I'm pulling Faust's quotes out of context, but I think they illustrate something telling.

To make this argument strikes me as analogous to saying "Kindergarten isn't education" and in the next breath complaining that first grade is too hard. (And frankly, any child given that kind of emotional setup would feel inadequate to school; similarly, I can completely understand why your GF would suddenly feel like dead weight in her guild.) As someone in a position of leadership in a casual guild, I am a total fangirl for Karazhan. I think it's excellent for teaching players some of the skills they'll be using in later raids.

Maiden teaches my healers to be quick on dispelling, and to "pad" the tank with HoTs in anticipation of incapacitating effects. Enough encounters with Big Bad Wolf gets them over the "fight or flight" panic when something unexpected happens. Aran teaches them environmental/emote awareness. Prince teaches them environmental-in-relation-to-the-tank awareness. And the best part (particularly for healers) is that there are only 9 other people in there. It's easier to take the time to explain fights and offer advice - and there are only 9 health bars to watch.

These aren't innate skills, and no they aren't things you'll necessarily learn until you hit 70. But I think Blizz did an excellent job with the AI on the Outland bosses - if one of my players is just not able to master strafing out of Charred Earth, off they go to Grand Warlock Nethekurse. And I'd imagine the relationship between Karazhan and Gruul's+ is similar (heck, I've heard Maulgar is a pushover compared to the late-Kara bosses).

Now some players won't have an appetite for that learning. Some guilds won't have an appetite for that kind of teaching. Both might want to skip people through these training grounds. But to blame it on the game itself... honestly, I think that's a bit of a cop out.


edit: I just wanted to clarify that I'm not arguing this as an l2play post at all. I guess it could be an l2teach post, but more I think it's about giving people room and support to learn what they need to know for raiding. Hardcore guilds don't have to worry about that - they get to recruit the ones who already know what they're doing. But for those of us who have strong social bonds that bridge different skill levels, I think there are a lot of things you can do to help your less-experienced raiders.

Now if someone doesn't want to learn those things, then I can definitely see how the TBC raiding game might be a bit of a surprise. No, there's no room to carry people through raids anymore. But I think the tools to ensure that they don't have to be carried are better in WoW 2.0.

Well I did not state that Karazhan was not a "real" raid or that it is trivial.
I liked Karazhan and did about 20 full runs there, and it's a pretty well constructed dungeon.
However, it is also extremely flawed because it is a 10 man raid that is required for progression. This means every single guild has to go through the learning processes in a 10 man raid rather than a 25 man raid, organization of this is a nightmare and there is just no way it is helping "casual" players (whatever that may be), as well as being very frustrating for more hardcore players to get through (though not an issue anymore now obviously).
At level 60 you learned to raid in Molten Core, not in UBRS. UBRS was just a zergfest. You learned to raid in Molten Core and get a side instance with sidegrades in the form of Zul'Gurub. It wasn't mandatory for anyone, it had no gear you "needed" to kill Ragnaros/Nefarian.

Karazhan should never have been part of the "progress ladder", should have just been a side step.

Well - Illidan, Archimonde, Prince Kael'Thas, Kel'Thuzad, Ragnaros, C'Thun, etc shouldn't really be killable by 25-40 players anyways. They're extremely powerful characters who have abilities that can insta-kill every single person in a 100 yard range, have killed thousands if not millions of guards and soldiers in lore-encounters, are masters of their lairs but for some bizzare reason won't summon every single being in their home to their side for help.

I view it more as Luke Skywalker x25 vs Palpatine, not so much skill but dumb luck and arrogance on the opponents side that leads to victory.

Its an interesting business challenge though, I wonder how exactly Blizzard models how many people they expect to run SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT vs. how much $$ was spent on developing it. Ultimately its all about numbers, they must feel that having high end encounters that only few defeat is better than having high end encounters that nearly everyone beats, and so far, their sub numbers confirm their idea. LOTRo I think took the opposite tack (ridiculously easy raid zones), no clue how its panning out for them.

LoTRO's got a whole different problem in that their future story has already been written, and the players weren't part of it. The moment they have you defeat Sauron, or even a Nazgul, is the moment 50% of their playerbase abandons it in disgust. A very interesting challenge for them to solve.

Warcraft lore at least is still open to finding out what happens to Illidan, Deathwing etc.

One thing about this, I think, is that people put too much emphasis on 'only 1%' of guilds currently in Black Temple at the moment.

Give it three more months and you'll probably see that statistic skyrocket. Black Temple has only been open a couple of months! I think it is a bit too early to completely write off the current raid progression model for that reason, and because so far, everything my guild has seen in the two months we've been in existence (G, Mag, VR, Hy, Mo, Ka, Le) is totally doable by casuals. Well, it seems doable to me. Will it take longer simply because casuals don't devote the same amount of time each week? Most definitely.

As for people who just 'don't get it,' so to speak, it doesn't really matter how many hours they devote to it, because the amount of time they spend isn't going to change anything about their situation. If they struggle and struggle, they are going to struggle throughout the game and it won't be an isolated incident specific to raiding/raiding encounters. Changing encounters or adding and subtracting encounters won't remedy their struggle with the game. There are plenty of things, as most or all of the forum goers here are already doing, that casual players can do to get a handle on the content, not feel so overwhelmed, and still be a 'casual player' in the process.

Edit: I, for one, would rather have hard content I've never seen than beat everything. The entire point of raiding for me, is to see new stuff; I don't know what I'd do in this game if I ever actually 'ran out' of content to see.

Who are you trying to convince? The average player reading this forum doesn't need encouragement to be competent at WoW, it's the other 24 players in their raid group that need it. There's no point giving some kind of ridiculous pep talk on the EJ forums. Even for those who could benefit from it, there's enough "stop complaining, everything is fine!" posts in virtually every thread that it's redundant to state it again. And also more than enough people who agree that TBC forces players to start off at a much higher level than pre-TBC.