Lavode your setup for Hydross is no unusual at all. In fact I'd say it's almost ideal for this encounter. Having 5 tanks makes this fight a *lot* easier than having say 3 tanks.

I know it was a decent setup for it - thats why we went for hydross. Point is that it was accidential and that ssc is actually quite forgiving re: raidstacking - not all bosses are reasonable for a given raid but if you have lurker down, you can cherrypick targets on a given raid night, and this is a good thing.
And yes we are less casual than we were - we didnt up our attendance requirements much, but we actually enforce them now (which we never really did) and we require people to be specced for what they are doing on a raid (and pay for the respecs when we ask them to do something else), and noone gets invited to any raid untill we have taken them trough a few of the harder heroics and they have refrained from screwing up. I dont really see this as a bad thing, really, as the raidgame would be dreadfully boring if we had to redo MC after the much more involved fights in the heroic dungeons.

They really do need to add 3 or 4 Elite Ogre/Gronn bosses to Gruul's Lair, with a small Fork before you get to Maulgar that will let you attempt these Bosses + a modicum of trash. These Ogres should drop KZ ilvl items and be an "introduction" to 25 mans.

Worth mentioning, incidentally, is that although Staghelm has two Kael'thas killing guilds Alliance-side, there is exactly one guild that's even to Vashj on the Horde side - my guild is third, having killed Lurker Below and cleared Gruul's Lair (#2 didn't kill Lurker, but did kill Void Reaver, Magtheridon, and Morogrim.)

Recruiting is a nightmare. It wasn't fun pre-BC, but at least you could take a recruit through easier content and not have too bad a time of it. What do you do now, though? I'm thinking of Gruul, whom we have one-shot exactly one week out of the three or four since our first kill, as an example. We've killed him with 23 people, but having two people who aren't-so-good makes attempts substantially harder. (This is to the point where I fraps'ed attempts and a kill last night so that I can upload a demonstration of me surviving Shatter after Shatter after Shatter because people dying on the first or second Shatter is so common.) How do you recruit when the first thing that people experience is a fight where they die a minute into the encounter, probably killing someone else in the process, and then the raid wipes because DPS didn't work? Yeah, many of we folks on this forum found Gruul easy - I've never died to a Shatter, though I never experienced pre-nerf Shatter. How do we deal with those who don't?

Worse still, any attendance problem is an enormous setback - when you have one resto Shaman in the guild (your only Shaman) and no room to recruit more people without demanding that folks sit out of raids, what happens when he doesn't show up? No windfury for the melee, no GOA for the tanks, no chain heal...It's like the bad old days when Druids were so unpopular that we used to run with 1-2 of them, except we have that same problem with every single class. I'm the only Paladin we have ever had who has maintained >50% attendance (and most of ours eventually either quit to leapfrog to a further progressed guild or were removed for being horrible). There is an enormous difference between having Kings and Light/Might on the tanks and just having Kings. I'd love to throw Blessing of Light on everyone and play 'Awake" when I'm asked to spot heal the raid, but that means that our DPS runs without Salvation and our tanks without Kings. How often, in a 40-man raid, did one person missing a raid dictate a change in healing strategy? Every single person in the raid might as well be the main tank now, because you're going to have serious problems no matter who is missing and they're all incredibly hard to replace.

Yeah, raiding's a lot more fun in many ways. Let's just say that I'm glad I'm not an officer, because the headache this shit gives me from a distance is bad enough that I'm reaching for an Aspirin.

I'd like to echo that the cockblock is happening far too soon in content, by the way. Karazhan is absurdly easy to clear once you get ten competent people together, especially after the nerfs. As soon as you step into the 25-mans, though, it becomes difficult even with competent people. The fact is, we have three raid nights devoted to learning out of four raid nights instead of farm encounters on any week where we don't perform so pathetically on Gruul that we need to waste two days on him. (We've already moved Karazhan to an offnight thing, except where numbers don't allow for a 25-man, because the vast majority of our raiding core goes in there for 1-2 items.) How are you supposed to keep people going when three nights a week are there for "Hopefully we get a boss down this week, if not, trash epix!"?

This post has turned into a bloated monster, so I'll let it go, but it is seriously irritating. While I do thoroughly enjoy the "micro-design" - the encounters themselves - the rest of the raiding game is really poorly designed. Gruul is honestly a harder fight than Nefarian - arguably harder than anything in BWL for 25 of the people in the raid. Why is he the first 25-man encounter you do? Why do they scale up from there?

My guild is semi-hardcore and we didn't bother much with SSC until after 2.1. We only had one kill pre-2.1, which is Morogrim. I don't think I'm very far off when I say that the first 3 bosses in TK aren't very hard and even casual guilds can make it to KT. The caveat is that 2.1 was only released 2 months ago and attunements removed around a month later.

The lack of guilds on KT isn't so much because of the current difficulty in getting to him but because of time constraints. For most guilds, there really isn't that much of a point in working on SSC/TK until after 2.1. And after 2.1, it really makes more sense, from a loot and progression standpoint to kill loot reaver, then 5 SSC bosses, before even bothering to go back to TK. Even then, many guilds opt to kill Vashj first before killing Al'ar and Solarian. I think it's still too early after 2.1 for there to be a ton of guilds attempting KT.

1 boss a week isn't slow progress... go a month or two on the first boss of an instance with a full night of wipes and no rewards for players attending, that's what breaks a guild and burns out players.

Raiding with one of any class is more difficult than it needs to be - why on earth would you *not* bring 2 warlocks?.

In the case of hydross you've only got one banish, which would be a big kick in the teeth, but that's all the issue I can see. 1 warlock for tidewalker should be doable as long as you've got a bajillion mages (5-6 AoE).

We always have two warlocks and we seem to do ok.

Rogues on the other hand.....4 per raid. Guess we'll be ready for Shahraz once we kill RoS

I'm not sure why it's so grossly overlooked, but Primal Mooncloth is grossly OP for what it is. Much like people put heavy emphasis on Spellfire/Shadoweave, Primal Mooncloth is an amazing set. However, it was the only tailored set to get a free epic upgrade when Blizzard put that through, thus making it even better. The set itself is overlooked and undervalued for sure, and I'm not sure why. Before the epic upgrades it was on par with the other 2 tailored sets, but it got a buff and was made even better than they are.

I'd be really interested in seeing where the average server progression lies treating Horde and Alliance seperately. Seems like treating the two sides as their own unit would show the raiding conditions that people are actually working under.

Shadoweave, by nature, has a tonne of stamina on it. Combine this with both Warlocks and Spriests only really _needing_ shadow damage, and you get a set that people just use all the way through to the end of raiding. Primal mooncloth has very little stamina as a set, and just isn't that impressive stats-wise. While most spriests/warlocks probably wouldn't take the t5 pieces over the shadoweave pieces, healers using the mooncloth certainly will because of the massive stats upgrades.

Stats for healers are, imo, much more important than stats for DPS.

That's a balance issue for those classes, and they've been that way since release (it's hardly the gear alone). Spellfire is in a worse case than Primal Mooncloth in terms of stats, and mages are by far the weakest link in terms of survival. Too much balance is around flat +dmg for shadow priest and warlock where other classes have to base themselves around everything available. If there's one complaint I have about this expansion, it's the lack of development in how stats work, where some classes now gained the ability to ignore all stats but one. I'm not asking for shadow priests and warlocks to get a nerf, I'm asking to fix the other fucking classes. Viper aspect (and the upcoming change) is a very nice step in the right direction, but where's the love for the other 5 mana user "classes". Still using spirit as your mana regen, while other classes scale directly with their output stat? Laughable.

We run with two holy priests and one shadow priest. The shadow priest does not have the tailored set (and never has), while both holy priests have the tailored set. The only fight to date that either priest has used any sort of hp gear was Naj'entus, not even during learning.

How important single classes are is a bit irritating. 2nd and 3rd holy priest? Why? 2nd and 3rd resto shaman? Yeeeeeeeeeeeees, pls.
Raiding without three paladins? Hah, good one. I know at least one guild that would surely be ranked top 10 worldwide if you look at kill dates all the way through TBC that had to stop doing progress for some times as they could not get more then 1 paladin to raids. And good luck doing RoS/Mother with just one blessing, would be majorly painful.
Especially paladins and shamans offer so much with their buffs, it's really ridiculous if you use the word 'balanced' when comparing them to similiar classes.

Doing gruul with cloth users having only salv and no kings explains a lot for your shatter deaths. And for training recruits, that is what karaz is for. If it is possible I want to see recruits first on old farm content where everyone else knows his job, muc heasier to get an opinion on new guys that way.

I've survived every fight up to Solarian (SSC clear, Al'ar, VR) with 3-piece PM, Teeth of Gruul, Luminescent Rod of the Naaru, and Jade Ring of the Everliving on. I have just over 8k buffed HP (raid), and it's fine.

The only fights so far in TBC that I've put stam on for are Shade of Aran (that was before I got the Mag staff with 51 stam) and Doomwalker (got it up to 9k just for survivability).

I will *not* be taking 5-piece T5 all that quickly. The 2-piece is amazing, but the net gain from the other 3 pieces is mostly stamina. I did the math, and I'd gain 70-80 stamina, 20-odd intellect, and a bit of +heal, and lose a solid chunk of Mp5. Except for survivability in fights where I take direct hits or predictable damage that is 8k+, there's no point. Yes, priests "need stats" -- we need intellect, spirit, +heal and +mp5. Right now, PM provides all of those. T5 doesn't provide anything new except stamina.

Very little? Try zero.

Then again mages will use Spellfire as long as they can get away with and that also has 0 (unless you go for the socket bonuses).

Heh. Heroism/bloodlust is grossly powerful. So many bosses we would have killed earlier had we 5 shaman like many guilds do. Just another heroism/bloodlust in place for one of our 4 druids would be enough to tip the scales. Totems are powerful, heroism/bloodlust is disgusting.

Not having 10k+ hp on supremus, bloodboil, teron, ros (regen gear here? yeah, right), illidan and astromancer, al'ar, morogrim is just foolish. Might have forgotten some encounters even. But pretty much every encounter these days requires everyone to stay alive and you win. PrMC stuff is good and our priests are also using it partially due to lack of alternatives, but t6 and other stuff with more stats is a LOT better.
Just looking at +healing and manatic is very wrong.

Eh, works for us. The only one of those bosses that can flat out kill you if you don't meet hp requirements is Naj'entus. The rest you can purely outplay. Don't know why you'd gimp yourself if you could simply play around it and win. I've never gone for a socket bonus unless it just happens to fall into the gems I wanted to use in the first place. I have 6900 unbuffed hp and only use hp gear on Naj'entus, but I don't even do that anymore. Warlock with imp covers that, and if I don't have a warlock to give to casters I just swap out a warrior to give us commanding, and then put them back in another group.

Why would anyone give salvation to clothies on Gruul ?

Other than that I tend to agree with that the healer class situation is a bit of a problem. 1 Holy priest is sufficient. 2-3 paladins are mandatory (we do almost every encounter with 2. You can assume that you need two blessings per fight and the third is bonus really). 1-2 resto druids, but two is really already pushing it a bit if you want to min-max. And then shamans, as much as you can spare. If you lack either shamans or paladins, you will have severe problems making progress, and this is something that is not entirely uncommon in more "casual" guilds.

When you get feared into a Doomfire with your trinket down, outside of a shaman group, take three ticks of the Doomfire because the fear is running you back and forth in it, and then get gripped, you're not going to 'purely outplay' it.

The fact is, the DPS and HPS requirements on almost every fight now are not hard to meet as long as you have 25 people alive. Every single fight now has a significant amount of random raid damage being thrown around. It's just stupid not to wear a sensible amount of health gear as EVERY class. Is your 60 more fire damage and 60 more crit rating going to kill a boss? No, but wearing 1k more HP could very well keep you alive through the burst and let you keep doing your job.

My experience is that I don't really gain a whole lot from maximizing my healing stats (stress on my mana pool just means I drink a few more potions, and I've never lost a tank to lack of HPS, only to poor judgement calls and timing on my part) so I may as well ensure I have a good hit point pool so that "Abyssal on my head + my ever-shakey interrupters missing a volley on the 5th channeler" and the like isn't fatal.

Which is not to say that the PM set isn't awesome, and were I a tailor I would be wearing it, but I find most encounters are generally a lot easier when everyone in the raid has enough health to survive some bad luck.

This is rather off topic, however.

I would agree with the general sentiment that we could use a bit more forgiving content. My guild has downed Lurker in SSC and working on Hydross and Morogrim (without much success on the former, expecting to kill the latter soon). We've dropped a lot of less skilled players since pre-BC and we're still finding it fairly slow going.

Teron can burst 9k+ with a crushing shadows. Bloodboil can burst 7k with a fel explosion + two bloodboil ticks. Illdari Council can burst 9-10k.

I mean these bursts could occur once every third attempt, but why risk it?