• songster

Actually, days/week scaling should be at least somewhat close to linear. The 6/week guild can still only get one lot of loot from boss X per week, same as the 3/week guild. Thus loot income gets at least somewhat normalised. Once you've learned it, assuming you can repeat that, you get the same loot as anyone else that can kill it.

That holds right up to the point where you have to drop content. A 6/week guild can continue farming old instances for "that last drop" much longer than a 3/week guild can. Once the latter progresses a bit, they have to drop farm content before it's been farmed out, otherwise they get no progression learning time.

But the bigger factor is percentage attendance. Let's consider guild A on 4 days / week with 100% attendance, and guild B on 4 days a week with 50% attendance. Members of guild B see each encounter half as often as guild A. That means twice as long just to learn it, but also twice as long to gear up once you can beat the encounter.

If all the factors were multiplicative (which if course they aren't), then you could say that progress will scale approximately linearly with days / week, but as the inverse square of attendance percentage.

 

constantius

I already explained why this is patently false.

Every single time a 6-day guild beats a cockblock boss fight, they will gain a much higher than linear representation of loot drops every week until the 3-day guild also passes that cockblock.

Here's an example for you. Let's assume both guilds kill bosses in a static average amount of time. We'll give the 3-day guild the credit of "finesse", so they kill bosses like Gurg does -- /flex, and the boss dies. :p I'll call this a 4-hour kill. Every raid is a kill, all things being averaged out, from Maulgar on. They raid 12 hours a week: 3 days of 4. They're also really efficient, and once they've killed a boss, we assume it averages to 45 minutes to kill it in future, including trash before it. This is obviously high for Gruul/Maulgar, and possibly low for something like Kael, where the trash itself takes 25-odd minutes. Just call it 45 minutes and humour me. 3-day guild is GuildFin.

We'll give the 6-day guild the credit of "brute force". They raid 24 hours a week, 6 days, 4 hours a day. It takes them 8 hours to kill a boss. Once they've killed a boss, they are able to farm it roughly the same, but let's assume they're nubs and wipe a lot, so call it 1 hour per boss. 6-day guild is GuildBrute.

We will, however, put in "special" cockblock bosses, and I'll try to show you why they matter so much. A cockblock boss takes 12 hours to learn for GuildFin, and 18 hours to learn for GuildBrute.

Time begins. The universe begins cooling. Your mum is born. :p

Week 1: GuildFin kills Maulgar, Gruul, and Magtheridon. (11)
GuildBrute kills Maulgar, Gruul, Magtheridon. (11)

Week 2: GuildFin farms Maulgar, Gruul, and Magtheridon, and learns Hydross and Lurker. (15)
GuildBrute farms Maulgar, Gruul, and Magtheridon, and learns Hydross, Lurker, and figures out half of Leotheras. (15)

Week 3: GuildFin farms T4 + Hydross/Lurker, and learns Leotheras and half of FLK. (18)
GuildBrute farms T4 + Hydross/Lurker, finishes learning Leo, and learns FLK and Morogrim. (23)

Week 4: GuildFin farms T4 + Hydross/Lurker/Leo, kills FLK, and kills Morogrim. (23)
GuildBrute farms T4+SSC-pre-Vashj, and kills Vashj (16 out of the assumed 18 hours). (27)

Week 5: GuildFin farms T4+SSC-pre-Vashj, and spends the first 6 of 12 hours on Vashj. (23)
GuildBrute farms T4+SSC and learns VR and Al'ar. (32)

Week 6: GuildFin farms T4+SSC-pre-Vashj and kills Vashj. (27)
GuildBrute farms T4+SSC and learns Solarian, and puts in the first 5 of 18 hours on Kael'thas. (34)

Week 7: GuildFin farms T4+SSC, and learns Al'ar. (29)
GuildBrute farms T4+SSC, and kills Kael'thas. (39)

Week 8: GuildFin farms T4+SSC+Al'ar, and learns VR. (31)
GuildBrute farms T4+T5, and learns Rage and Najentus (rounded up). (43)

Let's evaluate total # of epics here, over 8 weeks.
GuildFin: 177
GuildBrute: 220

And here's the kicker ... GuildFin is completely out of time. The only way they can put in a *full raid week* on Kael is to completely lose all their other epics for the week. If I extend my example to the first time GuildFin kills Kael, they drop behind even more.

It's not a linear scaling. It's not directly time-vs-reward. The resets on Tuesdays take care of that. Otherwise, it would be just like pvp (regular honor) -- direct correlation between time spent and reward gained.

Week 9: GuildFin farms T4+T5-pre-Kael, and spends 3/12 on Kael (31)
GuildBrute farms T4+T5+ one new BT boss. (45)

<assume we drop T4 at this point>
Week 10: GuildFin farms T5-pre-Kael and spends up to the 9th hour on Kael (20)
GuildBrute farms T5+ two new BT/HS bosses (38)

At this point, we're up to:
GuildFin: 228
GuildBrute: 303

You see how much faster GuildBrute climbed while GuildFin was stuck on Kael? And they're not even done yet! They'll need one more week at this scaling while they're stuck on the cockblock boss before they even get *into* BT/HS ... in that time, GuildBrute will have killed yet another BT boss, and have gained another extra 30 epics per week.

Hope the logic makes sense. It's quite obvious where I've made assumptions, but the rough gauge (and the logic behind why this is NOT linear) should be clear.

We are directly experiencing this situation right now, as there are two guilds on our server which raid 5-6 days a week, 5-6 hours a raid. We raid 4 days a week, 4 hours a day. I fully believe we are as *skilled* as those guilds ... we just don't have as much *time*. We killed Vashj 2 full days faster than one of them, and we're on track to do Kael in the same amount of time. But they have 3 BT bosses down, and are pushing for a 2nd HS boss this weekend as well. And we're still on Kael.

The faster you move, the faster you can afford to drop the T4 instances. We still ran Gruul weekly up until last week, because we still *need* the shield/DST/magus-blade. And we'll probably swing by Gruul after we kill Kael on Monday (/pray) and try once again for those three epics.

 

• songster

I think I summed that up much more succinctly as:

I still think that the scaling is even worse with attendance% though. In practice the two usually go hand in hand - the groups with fewer days per week also tend to have lower individual attendance rates.

 

Vazu

Honestly, for most anything in BC, I think 4 days/week at 4 hours/night is pretty hardcore. I've never understood guilds who raid 6 days/week. How do you not experience burnout? It's not like Blizzard is churning out new content fast enough for you to progress raiding that much. I think once we start Hyjal / Black Temple fully, we've discussed maybe doing this:

Tues, Wed, Thurs - Hyjal or BT (4 hours/night)
Sunday night is a full clear of either SSC or TK to continue helping with vials and gear.

 

Athemeus

The crux is, while I would also consider 4 days/week on the verge of beeing hardcore, 3 days is the bare minimun to have considerable progress.
We raid 3 days/week at 4hours/night and we have to focus completly on new content in order to progress. This means we stoped killing gruul as soon as everybody was keyed to SSC and now that we killed Vashj , we just plan do SSC until everybody in the guild has the vial an to never come back.
As I see it, there's no other way to even stand a chance to kill Kael, besides to lay down vashj for after he is down. And then try to squeeze both vashj and keal into our 3 day schedule for the keying process.

It's realy hard these days with all the content out. It was no problem to raid 3 days until Naxx came out and suddenly there was just too much to do. We killed Rag, Nef and CThun, until we hit a wall at 8/12 Naxx a month before BC came out. I have to admit never the less, that it would have been close to imposible for us to kill all those bossen in Naxx and make progress at our schedule. And I expect to experience the same in the next large instance, that is BT.

 

Furion

I know I'm a bit late in this thread but maybe my experiences with this issue are of help to encourage people to make a more balanced raiding team than ours.

In vanilla I used to be in an arguably casual guild who had 3 40 man raids a week (4-5 hours each). On the one hand we had 10+ GMs and a few core raiders who were all outstanding players and on the other hand being on a RP-PvP server we had those hardcore roleplayers that had no problem skipping a raid to attend to a friends' ingame marriage (unless we were killing a boss dropping their precious missing tierx set part) and reliably failed any task assigned to them while never farming anything to prepare for raids.

They did not attend raids reliably and would cause drama if left out or not getting their favourite equipment piece and it got worse whenever we decided to stop farming old content as some would never complete their sets. During Ouro submerge they would keep running inside the dirt and die every time no matter what we told them. Some had to go to bed at 9 PM. Our hunters were more interested in melee weapons than shot rotations. I won't forget how I had to explain our 2nd maintank on Vael how to bind an action to the keyboard using the standard ingame menu. You name it we had it.

Still we steamrolled through most content due to our excellent core raiders and it took us about 10 month from starting MC to killing 3 bosses in Nax with 30 people (because we just could not get any more raiders to attend to raids and we basically dragged everyone with us who was willing to come).
While our success was decent it was still way too painful and frustrating seeing how much potential from the core raiders, who all gave their absolute best was wasted by players apparently not even remotely interested in improving themselves or progressing the raid. I can imagine raiding and having a few people who can only attend a low % of (full!) raids just fine as long as they don't screw up and don't complain if they have to warm the bench. But I can't recommend to raid with people that have vastly different skill levels and expectations about raiding (about half of our typical raid was only interested in farming items and the other half was mainly interested in progression). Seeing the same players fail over and over will just grind you down and take away your raiding fun no matter how tollerant and patient you might be (tollerating and gearing slackers will eventually encourage similar behaviour from other players, anyways).
The frustration was on similar levels for the more casual players but obviously for different reasons some of which I have touched briefly.

 

◊ Neone

Attendance for me has ended up being the most important factor for our 25-man raids. People who were flaky and only came once a week have been dropped, and when we are short and they end up filling a spot they don't get any of the desirable loot.

To make the 3 day/week raiding work you have be sort of an asshole, but just make that very clear upfront, and stick to your guns. And, you're never going to be able to stop recruiting. I keep feeling that I have all the people we'll need, but then.... some stop showing up, so I'm always looking for new recruits, so that I can gear new people one at a time, and they won't have as big an impact as 4 new people at once.

 

Kyroro

Our guild started off as "casual raiding" and has tried to maintain that label for more than a year, but a few months back things came to a head and for us, a whole group of people decided to leave, and for us these were the "casuals".

They never really understood the concept of raiding, I came from a more experienced guild and in less than 3 months under my direction we had cleared ZG, AQ20, MC, BWL and the 1st boss of AQ40. Basically they never had to learn strats, they got epics fast and all in all it was very easy. Then came BC and everything was new and the endless wiping that most guilds go through was very stressful for them being quizzed what they were doing wrong, adjustments to the strat, tweaking the stuff and generally days before we saw a first kill.

In short, I really have to take my hat off to the people who are able to maintain the "casual raiding" tag to their guild. It's just so hard to balance interests. Some of the more top level issues that caused people to leave was writing off KZ because we wanted to spend more time in 25 man content, and starting new content in general. The general attitude there was "I like KZ we should just do that and have fun rather than being all stressed in SSC and TK".

Luckily for us the guild split enabled us to redefine the guild into "casual progression", pretty much meaning that we're not going to raid 6 nights a week, but we will push forward and not sit on our laurels. We still got casual players that sometimes disappear for weeks, and the players who aren't really all that great and still manage to become the best geared in the guild (something that I think is causing a lot of grumbling, which I think does need to be addressed). We just recruit to fill the void. I've made it known that if we don't see the numbers we'll recruit, it's very simple. We don't track raid attendance. We have a raider rank that basically outlines acceptable behavior, and we use that as justification for criticism when people don't do what we expect.

Our guild still has a long way to evolve and I'm really glad I found these forums. There are lots of good ideas here which I intend to try out. We're currently 1 boss each into TK and SSC and should be looking at a 2nd kill in TK tomorrow, but we can do much better.

 

Europe

One of the newer things I'm seeing is that guild leaders will frequently exaggerate how hardcore/dedicated the guild is, in order to get hardcore players to join. and when you join and wonder why there are warlocks pulling 450 dps on Gruul (true story), they kick you. because you're "an elitist" and they "just want to have fun".

I hate Hellscream.

 

Daenerys

Wow...that sounds really sucky. =(

 

Osse

Short answer: No

Eventually you will end up making the choice whether you want to progress further in BT or keep farming SSC and TK. Doing all of those wont work for casuals as its 4 raids per week minimum. :p

 

afhouston

I recently took over the raiding aspect (i was a recruiter) of our guild. We've made fairly rapid progress in SSC and TK and we're 4/6SSC and 2/4TK.

I want to focus on Leotheras. We raid 5 nights a week but we only have 3.5hrs a night, which basically means 1hr for trash, and 2hrs for attempts and the last 30min or so wasted (raids end early).

Lately I've pushed to get 2hrs of learning in every night, for about 4 days a week. That's about 8hrs of attempts on a boss. That also means we're not doing any "farm" content.

I'm getting pressure to gear up people. We currently just skip bosses we've downed and focus on the next new one. We've only downed Karathress and Morogrim once so far (last week).

Should I be cutting back on learning new bosses in favor of repeating bosses we've done? Under the proposed changes (people want Mag, VR, etc) I see us doing about 2 bosses a night. So it would be something like Mag+gruul day 1, Alar and VR day 2, Hydross and lurker day 3, morogrim and karathress day 4. Day 5 would be the only progress night.

Can your guild progress if you are only learning a boss 2hrs a night, once a week? I'm convinced the best way to learn is to do the new boss every night so mistakes stay fresh and people remember it well.

 

Sepulture

I would strongly encourage you to not do what you are doing. You are letting upgrades that your guild surely needs rot each week. That loot is as important to your progression as practicing the fights. By letting that loot rot, you won't be able to down Vashj when the time comes because you won't have the dps and healing necessary to get past phases 2 and 3 with 25 raid spots. People who are more progressed than you are will always downplay the difficulty of the encounters you are attempting. They will act as if you can defeat it with L70 blues from TBM. They lie, you can't. You need to gear up.

Also, trying the new boss every night is a surefire way to burn out. You almost need to have off-nights where you steamroll farm instances, if for no other reason than wiping continually can kill morale.

Your style of raiding ignores two facts of the game, 1) people raid in large part because of loot, 2) people like to kill things and be successful

 

Natural

/agree

The more you farm content, the faster you get at it. Extra raid nights for progression should develop organically as you squeeze your farmable content into shorter amounts of time.

It seems much more successful to target X raiding nights per week of raiding and add an "extra" day for a progression week when necessary.

 

Cloudgatherer

Personally, I don't like going to new bosses till several of the farm bosses are down. Leo was last for us in SSC, how much time we had to work on him depended on how quickly we got to Karathress and killed him that week. Last week, we did Hydross->Moro in one evening. This week we did Hydross->Karathress in one evening (with a pretty gimped DPS raid setup of 5/8/12). I strongly suggest getting Moro/Karathress down to a science, the upgrades they provide (or at least "can" provide) are quite good, and with Karathress you have the T5 token argument, he's worth doing over VR if you're already in SSC, for example.

As far as learning vs farm, I hate reclearing the same trash twice in one evening. While learning a new boss in SSC, the respawn timer is a good indication of when to change objectives. Spend your 2 hours working on the new boss, but when the trash timer comes up, switch to something you can one-shot to end on a high note and have a few upgrades for the next round of attempts. Mag is a quick/easy target. Al'ar is close too, Gruul is quick as well. That allows you to mix learning with upgrading.

 

• Chicken

I tend to do the opposite myself, though only to scare away the obligatory "lootwhore" applicants we've seen since we killed Kael. For some reason saying "We actually regularly have a paladin in the top 10 damage done in Hyjal" is a good way of scaring people away, despite being true (Protection Paladin along with regularly aoeing 10 or so mobs in Hyjal will do that).

 

afhouston

On the topic of "farm content" - do you treat is as regular raid content? Like, making people flask/elixir? We still struggle to beat the "enrage" timer on Karathress.

I guess I've had a bad experience with guilds that declare anything "farm" content. One night of raiding was wasted the other week (I wasn't in the raid to lead it) when it was decided to go do "loot reaver". Turned out he never died because people took it too easy. Our MT wasn't there, and the remaining tanks were subpar on threat. The DPS couldn't handle orbs. I think part of the reason was some people didn't have their boss mods on.

It seems like our raids cannot tolerate anymore than 2-3 mediocre dps players. On farm runs that number increases and problems happen (they die early or their output is low). The only place where we can get away with this is Gruul's Lair.

Is part of farm content philosophy to allow less skilled players in? I don't feel our guild has overgeared our content yet, so we still need good players who can execute well.

Does SSC ever get to be as easy as Gruul? Is it just getting enough gear so you can carry the casuals?



Also - as far as Leotheras is concerned - how big of a learning curve is it compared to Morogrim and Karathress? One night of attempts and the best we got him to was 70%

 

sovelis41

This is really guild to guild. Leotheras took us 1 night's worth of attempts (last half of a raid, first half the next day), Karathress was killed on the 4th pull, and Morogrim (for us) took a while to get a strat that worked for us, and we spent probably all the learning time for the previous bosses added together.

 

◊ Tanilin

We raid 3 days a week, 3 hours a day. We're currently 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK (though we probably won't be working on Vashj until next week at the earliest, since we have too much left up in SSC to get to Vashj tonight). I expect everyone to flask for all fights at present, since it's just not that much of an expense to flask 3x a week.

We also routinely spend at most 1.5 nights on a new boss per week (say an hour one night, then clear to and play with until trash respawns on a second night, finish with killing something else for that raid night). This does mean that for a number of bosses it has taken us 2-3 weeks before we win (Lurker, Morogrim, Leotheras, Al'ar). On the flip side, we've had a number of surprise "we came here to check you out, but instead you died?" (Hydross, Fathom Lord, High Astromancer Solarian).

But for us, 3ish hours a week on new content has sufficied to keep us progressing at a decent (for us) pace.

 

Lenala

Sadly, our guild has just suffered the beginnings of what is sure to be a massive, irreversible fallout that has everything to do with this topic at hand. Tonight after we wiped on supposedly farm-content VR 7 times, our best-geared holy pally and class officer finally has it and decided to go ahead with the server transfer that he let the guild know that he was contemplating. This was due to our consistent inconsistency over the past few months in passing retard checks (Mag, VR, Lurker, etc) and subsequent hemmorhage of Type A players who saw Cs and Ds slow down our progression.

An hour after he left, our RL and best-geared tank left the guild along with the other RL which is the best-geared Shadow Priest.

I feel that all the cautions and warnings about what would happen if A/B + C/D players were to try to raid together were quite accurate in describing what has happened.

The kicker is that I found this thread a few months ago and I had a feeling it was describing our situation with uncanny precision.

 

Utherdoul

I think 3-4 hours 3 nights a week is standard fare for casual raiding. In order to fill 25 slots your player base will probably consist of people who can raid either one, two or three nights a week. About that I will make the following general observation.

People who's lives only allow them to raid 1 or 2 nights a week will have lives that consistently invade those nights. If you use these types of players to regularly fill 10 or more slots then your raiding efforts as a whole will probably fail over time for a wide variety of reasons.