Wait... casualization? Did I miss something here?

I think calling the current raiding scene more casual is an extreme misnomer. If anything, I feel that it's more hardcore than it ever was pre-TBC. The lower raid sizes seems to have encouraged encounter design and a raiding atmosphere that is far less forgiving than most of the content pre-TBC. You could lose half your raid in many pre-TBC encounters and still have a perfectly good chance at killing a boss...whereas nowadays, you have a plethora of fights that just fall apart if you lose so much as a couple people too early. Aggressive enrage timers, DPS checks, many movement aspects, etc. all feel very much more hardcore than most pre-TBC encounters.

(Not saying this is a bad thing, either. Many of the encounters, like Vashj, are extremely fun. However, they certainly aren't more casual than Nefarian.)

Also, you certainly didn't have the majority of semi-hardcore guilds 2 instances back in progression compared to the very high end of guilds pre-TBC. The gap now is significantly higher. I remember pre-TBC when Naxx was getting cleared out, we had 1 wing and a few extra bosses down in Naxx, getting ready to work on Patchwerk. Yes, we were a fair bit back--but we weren't a full gear tier-level and 2 instances back.

I think the effect on many mid-tier guilds (and we're talking as high as in the top 10% on WoWJustu probably) who may still be stuck on Kael when Sunwell launches at being two full gear tier-levels and 3 instances back may be a bit extreme.

Not to mention, it's extremely disheartening to be stuck on a single, extremely challenging encounter for months with no other options instead of slowly crawling your way through a larger dungeon with a few "gimme" encounters along the way.

Imagine if they didn't retune Gruul. My own guild never got to experience pre-nerf Gruul, but the fact that fewer people had killed him than had killed Kel'Thuzad pretty much sealed the case that he was too hardcore for us. If he remained that insanely tuned, the victory wouldn't have been sweeter, because there would have been no victory for 99% of guilds. They'd have all crumbled.

Smaller dungeons usually mean "really quick to clear" or "so difficult that most people will hit a wall."

I think you misunderstood, I'm speaking purely theoretically here. I mean I'm not trying to propose to merge TK + SSC or MH + BT as they are or something. I'm trying to say if the aim is to slow down progress, then lenghtening the amount of time it takes to clear to the bosses you're currently trying to learn is a way of doing that. That has nothing to do with the currently existing trash:bosses ratio or the quality of design of any existing encounter, that's a completely separate thing. A sucky boss is a sucky boss in any instance as is too much trash.

How would having stuff split up in separate instances change farming anyway? Say K'T was the endboss of Naxx 1 and Sapphiron that of Naxx 2. You'd still spend the same amount of time in total clearing them and would need to kill just as many uninteresting bosses to get there, just as you do for MH/BT or TK/SSC now. It's fairly unlikely you'd want to drop doing either of the instances until months down the line anyway, when you've it down to science and it's a very fast clear anyway.

Anyway the argument is without point and I'll just stop it here on my part.

Oops, I'd missed this. Part of it is shaped by our personal experience. Out of the fights that you list, Gluth took us a couple of days, Thaddius took less time -- more like 5 hours total (Horde world first fwiw), Loatheb was one night to learn the Spore/Doom timers and make a mod for it, and then one night to kill him with consumables (no world buffs). Gothik was three nights. Then summer ended and we started canceling raids and falling short of manpower requirements for some of the later fights on certain days -- 4H took a month (plus 2-3 weeks not seriously trying), Sapp took a month, and Kel took 6 weeks, and that got us from August to killing Kel the Sunday before patch 2.0 hit. We had 12/15 Naxx bosses down when we killed Loatheb on August 8th, 6 weeks after Naxx opened. Then it took us four months to get the last 3.

And there is no question that in every possible way our raid group is better today than it was then. For us, Naxx was back in our "we're stubborn jerks and we don't recruit ever" period. For the most part, our roster today consists of roughly the best 20-25 or so players we had in Naxx, plus another dozen new additions to the guild who are, on average, equally strong players.

I continue to insist that fights back then only seemed like they took longer because we had to be the strat innovators for the most part. It took us like 6 hours to kill Heigan, not because the fight was so hard, but rather because we spent easily an hour figuring out how the hell to do the gauntlet clear, and then another two hours learning exactly where the fissures appeared and their pattern. Then three hours practicing and killing him. If that fight had occurred in the TBC era, being a bit behind the world firsts, we'd already have had three videos from Euro guilds that I could've studied in advance and prepared diagrams of all the flame zones on the floor. That would've cut our learning time on Heigan in half. Loatheb would've died on our first night if we'd had a premade Bigwigs mod to handle the spore rotation for us and if I'd known his Doom timing without having to see it firsthand. Or I'd have looked at a WWS parse from the first guild or two to kill him and seen when they used their consumables and mimicked that rotation because I'd know it worked.

There's no objective way to answer this question, but that's my impression at this point.

I disagree. I personally would rather shower in prison than go to Molten Core again for my dragonstalker leggings (assuming there was no TBC). Having to run long, boring instances just for one drop was awful. It wasn't fun. It wasn't getting the experience of the content. It was several hours of pain followed by the disappointment of watching them shard the eleventy-third double-drop of stormrage (which is all that ever dropped- at one point, everyone in my guild could have had two pairs of stormrage and a Bonereaver's edge if they wanted).

It was, in a word, AWFUL. Which is why I love the new token system so much.

Just a few thoughts in regards to "being bored" and the apparent gap in high end raiding...

Most people are driven not so much by the encounters in the game (just a generalization, exceptions DO exist) as they are by "what's in it for me". In other words, loot. It's human nature, if there's nothing concrete in it for the average individual, then their interest will wane. Take a look at the people who are missing raids, or seem to be "burning out" and I think you'll see that they are more loot-centric than some of the other people who continue to show up and help farm instances to help their teammates out even though there is absolutely nothing they want from those instances themselves. This isn't an overt criticism of those personalities, it exists in even the most altruistic person to a certain extent, but the current gap will bring to light who is more concerned with personal progression over guild progression.

I don't need anything from SSC/TK/Hyjal, and I offer to sit for those if needed, but I'm willing to help out in those instances over and over because it's an opportunity to get pieces for teammates of mine that will help us when Sunwell comes out. I don't view it as a chore, but as an opportunity to improve the team overall. Would I rather be raiding BT? Sure, it contains actual upgrades for me still. However, if the positions were reversed, I'd want others to help me out in SSC/TK (or even Kara for the mage trinket off Illhoof) because it makes the team stronger. The whole "do unto others" thing that so many people seem to ignore.

My point is pretty simple. From a team perspective, I personally don't care how soon or late Blizzard releases content. My goal (and the satisfaction I get from MMO gaming) is being part of a top notch team that works together to get things done. If someone on my team gets everything they need then "burns out" and doesn't want to help the rest of us, the sooner we find that out the better off the team will be in the long run. There are negatives to having a long gap between content releases, but there are positives too, it's up to the individual guilds to maximize the positives while minimizing the negatives.

Killing Illidan a month ago, it's the first time for us being in this "waiting for more content" situation (we were a poor guild before BC - 8/15 Naxx).

I agree with what as been said about pacing.

For me, another reason to fear this farming time is the lack of 25-man perspective. We know the name, number of boss of next instance (and possibly name of end boss)... but i don't find it's something really exciting.
From blizzcon where BC was announced to the realase of naxx, we get some informations creating an emulation around the instance, making player realy excited by entering Naxx. I don't feel a real thrill about sunwell. I think in a first time, Blizzard should hook people with some kind of preview of artwork, lore story or even new items. Then for the second xpack, i agree that raiding tier should be more wisely space out.

There was a post above that said

"If switching to periodic raid content additions, it would then imho be crucial to make instances not the length of Hyjal or BT, but at least the length of both combined"

while i agree that for some guilds this would keep them occupied and make getting that last piece of tier from the final boss that much more special (ie people who actually have their T3 ring to complete the set), creating an instance that is close to 15 bosses completely cuts off many guilds from the end of that instance. Anyone raiding 3 days a week would probably have a lot of trouble getting to the end of a place like this. Even if it took 45 mins per boss kill (including trash) youre looking at roughly 12 hours for one instance. The kicker here is if youre raiding only three days you probably arent good enough to do the bosses in 45 mins either. This means in the mind of a casual raid leader the prospect of getting to the end of this instance is almost impossible barring a week or two where you really buckle down.

Where this fits in the pacing of content is the top guilds are probably occupied for longer having to farm far more bosses to complete their gear for the next round of first kills, but they are also probably getting real sick of the first 8 kills in that place. So is that really better in anyway even for the top raiders? For the rest of the pack the idea of finishing the place is rather daunting and might be so much so that the instance is given up on before getting close to clearing it. this leaves a huge gap between the bleeding edge and the bulk of wow customers that pay the bills. the bleeding edge is farming or done and the casual majority is sitting with a huge gear deficiency for the next release.

SSC and TK arent nearly as fulfilling as Naxx but in blizz's effort to incorporate more of the crowd into the raiding scene the way things are set up means if you really need to budget time you can literally do only TK for a week and nothing else, and at least make it to Kael, maybe not kill him though. This makes seeing these places in full a bit easier for ppl who otherwise wouldnt. I think from here out it will be very rare to see blizz cater to the minority.

On a side note the timed run in ZA should be pretty exciting if done correctly. Could open up some fun competition, especially server wide, and better loot for people who deserve it.

So apparently sleeping 6 hours means you fall pretty rapidly behind in a thread like this. Forgive me for not quoting, but I'll try to respond to the general comments I got.

First, I'd say that in TBC, it doesn't seem like we (as a casualish raiding guild) are falling behind at all. We're certainly not completing content as quickly as the top guilds, and are a full zone and then some behind them, but in the long run, it doesn't matter. Because Blizzard threw all the content out at once (except for BT which as I mentioned earlier seemed like a mistake on their part as opposed to a conscious decision), In Vanilla, if you didn't keep up with the raid release cycle, you did fall behind. Slowly or not, that sucks. In TBC, you just have a bunch to do and a ton of time to do it. Sunwell is going to re-introduce some sort of pacing on Blizzard's part, and I'm really not looking forward to that, because it'll put a pretty tight limit on what pace we have to achieve to see all the content. Right now there's a lot of content still ahead of my guild, but it appears we have a fair amount of time to complete it. Even if we don't, there's still the illusion, which a regulated Blizzard progression implementation quickly dispels.

As for the casualization for raiding, I stand by that comment. 25 people is a lot less to deal with than 40, 10 man dungeons mean it's a lot easier to get those starter epics, and the consumables change means a need for less farming and overall time-invested. Sure, fights have gotten more complicated, and you're less able to drag along dead-weight, but I think it's become a lot easier to raid in general. Not to mention I think Blizzard's learned from their previous models, and adapted to make life a little less painful. When I think back to MC, the starter 40-man, the main thing I remember is trash. Lots and lots of really annoying trash. Ignoring Mag and Gruul, which are Ony style, the starter 25-mans SSC and TK are fairly light on the trash, <10 pulls to the each boss. Instead of spending 50% of your raid on trash, and 50% learning the bosses, you can now spend 90% of your time trying the boss.

You're saying it, but you're not offering any reason why beyond the implied reason that you'd like it better. A 'should' needs to have something more behind it than one random guy's preference. I really doubt you can make a business case, or a case that the game would have a healthy population, if there's any moral argument it's on the side of making the game less addictive, and I really don't see any other grounds for this 'should'. How much of a "massively multiplayer" game is it if it stratifies the playerbase into groups that are realistically never going to play with each other because of the way advancement works?

WOW is the game that went for a massively bigger target audience, seeking to attract 'casual' (only 20-30 hours a week) and actual casual gamers. Games designed so that a new player can realistically never join in with the high end, and games designed so that once you fall behind the curve you can never catch back up, just don't have broad appeal.

What about the people that never bothered with it in the first place? My impression of EQ as a gamer but not one into MMORPGs was that it was mind-numbingly boring, involving a lot of sitting around doing nothing (spawn camping) and repeating unchallenging tasks endlessly for farming, and that you had to have been in the game from early on or you'd always be way behind. Everything I've read or heard about it supports that, like "But in the peak of my raiding days... (I then had a rather horrid breakdown that about killed me, but hey, it lasted for a couple years)".

I actually think that the Onyxia Scale Cloak was one of the better "cockblocks" we've seen so far. Mostly because in order to pass the block and kill Nef, you had to... kill Ony numerous times, something you were probably doing anyway, and something that was pretty fun, not to mention that Ony dropped loot that was similar in quality to BWL loot. It's not at all the same as having to kill bosses from 4 instances back, or running heroics you don't need loot from anymore, or farming thousands of low level herbs, or some of the other blocks to progression that we've seen that end up feeling boring and useless.

For the most hardcore guilds, there was still a hard-set timer on this, because you could only get so many Ony scales every few days. For the more casual guilds, at worst they would have to deal with the same reset timer, but there was also the possibility of higher-up guilds selling their extra scales/cloaks to speed things up a bit.

The last couple page's discussion of the 'casualization' of raiding content suffers from the same perspective bias that exists when referring to casual and hardcore players.

I was really down about the 25 man raid size at first, but now that I'm actually leading raids again (fun fun!), 25 man raids are infinitely easier to manage and monitor. I can identify problems and come up with solutions much faster than before. Also, making raid groups takes about 1-2mins of throwing the appropriate classes in with their correct synergies. We've recruited and promoted the raiders that don't have a problem being swapped out or have to sit out certain nights/fights because we want to favor a certain aspect. One of our officers said one night after a raid "how did we ever do this with 40 man raiding."

Rolling that into the current topic. Now with the increased epics in t5 zones, gearing a 25 man raid to be capable for the next big thing is very easy, and moving on becomes simply a matter of attunement. There will certainly be loot that is streaky and bad (Defender T5 for us as an example never drops), but when you get to Vashj, you are ready to kill her. If you get to Kael'thas, you are ready to kill him. I enjoy that there aren't gear checks that require my raiders to be decked before we have a shot at the boss. The old way of having those coveted items (rejuv gem, nelth's tear) that are STILL the best in the game in some ways is not the way to go.

Our raid group doesn't feel 'left behind' or cockblocked by the attunement process. We feel that we need to do it to prove that we are good enough. Almost all of us were legitimately attuned to tempest keep right before they lifted the attunements, and that was kind of a let down. Killing Mag when it meant something was really motivating. I really hope it doesn't happen again with Kael'thas.

What I would prefer is for them to hold back the raid zones in favor of tuning them properly, even if it means spoilers. People like raid-zone spoilers, it's a huge (here comes that metaphor again!) carrot to reach out for. Maybe if SSC/TK weren't put in right away, Gruul would have been properly tuned and tested (same for Mag), and who knows how well so many raid groups would have done had Karazhan not been a required t4 instance. All speculation certainly, but guilds that didn't have a really super-hardcore player base and philosophy got hurt there.

Blizzard has already learned a a lot from their first (and from an overall standpoint, extremely well done) expansion. Here's to hoping WLK is a much smoother raiding experience by actually testing raids properly in beta.

And since there is really no way to stop this dissemination of information, I think it makes pacing content that much more important. No matter what they release, assuming it is tuned, it will get beaten very quickly - far faster than it takes to actually farm it. So that means a guild having to farm the instance for a month or maybe even two isn't so bad (two I think is pushing it about as far as I would want to). Any more than that, though, and you're just raiding a zone to maybe gear up a few new people, alts, or just hoping for a few rare drops, and that really isn't so fun.

When you push out everything at once, there is a huge incentive to drop content the moment you beat it, especially given gear progression (or lack thereof). My guild was screaming bloody murder to drop T5 the instant we killed Kael - any time in T5 was just time we could be progressing in T6. Whereas if content release had been paced, we'd have been able to farm for a few weeks no problem, get some more gear, then hit the new stuff hard when it came out.

I'm actually surprised by the number of people who think that the front-loaded release is better for casual guilds. I suppose this is a personality/perspective thing - if I saw heaps of unbeaten content laying in front of me, it would be far more demoralizing than, say, working on BWL while AQ came out.

This is very noticeable on Mannoroth. I am in a 5/6SSC 1/4TK guild taht raids three nights a week and we are like 5th most progressed alliance side. Not only that we are watching some long-standing raiding guilds implode one after another and are currently having a mini-boomlet of apps looking for any raiding guild.

Another side-effect of the technical and difficult nature of almost all TBC raid encounters is that I think it is hard to get a new raiding guild started.

Just a little anecdote:

I used to raid in a "hardcore" 6 night a week guild that I left for RL reasons as they were learning Cthun. Eventually joined the group (July pre-TBC) that is my current guild and became their raid leader. The group I lead had a mix of some decent people, some newbies, some not so good. But it could field a decent mix of 40 people for a raid. Fortunately, we had an easy starting point - MC. It let me lead this group figure out who was good, who wasn't and most importantly build some success with this group for when things got hard. First week of raiding we cleared up to Rag, third week we killed Rag. By the time we quit raiding for the expansion (early December) we had cleared Huhurran and Razuvious.

This sort of thing would be very difficult to do now when you are looking at your second fight being a Gruul and then Hydross or Magtheridon. Nothing will destroy the confidence of a newly formed (or merged) guild like wiping for 4 hours with nothing to show for it.

Onyxia cloaks were a special case since you could actually trade them which means you could get additional ones and they were only needed for 1 encounter by the full raid and apart from that only sometimes by the tanks.

We got some for free from the only alliance guild ahead of us on our server so we didn't have to wait at all and for me personally this block never had any effect (especially since you didn't really need 40 people to down nef).

Assuming you were the only Onyxia killing guild things would have been very different so yes something like this could potentially be a hard block for hardcores and a more lenient one for casuals, although extra logistical effort typically hits the casuals harder.

In the end I think this kind of task may well cause braindrain and progression gaps as well as some servers would generate more onyxia cloak 2.0 than less raid-heavy servers so I'm not too sure about this solution being perfect. If onyxia cloak 2.0 isn't tradeable then it is ok, I guess, but if its required for all kinds of higher level raiding (and not just for 1,perfectly skippable, encounter like cloak 1.0) will still separate raiders into those that have it and those that don't (think Kael/Vash).

Pacing still seems better to me overall but there have been a lot worse things than the cloak.

I've said it before, the need to have a 'bench' of people who don't mind being stuck able to play on one of their raiding nights is pretty anticasual in my book. Someone who only raids 2 nights a week doesn't really want to spend one of them not actually raiding. Someone who doesn't mind clearing to a boss then skipping the real fight seems pretty hardcore to me, most people participate in video games to play them, not to sit out while other people play.

Hmm maybe we have different concepts of casual. From my perspective, casual doesn't necessarily mean worse/less skilled/less competent or anything like that. It's simply a time and effort deal. Most of the fights I've experienced thus far, while requiring people to pay attention, are never extremely complicated fight that test one's skill. If all is going well, all you ever have to do is your normal job, timely moving on occasion and the rare timely clicking of some object. And if all isn't going right, well the ability of certain players to adapt and save the day has been applicable for as long as I can remember.

As for off-specs, less consistent attendance, etc - I still think that all of these were worse in Vanilla WoW than now. From the perspective of a paladin, I didn't know _any_ pallies who raided high-level stuff in a non-healing role (They may have not been specced healing, but that was certainly their only role). It actually seemed like more classes were pidgeon-holed than I'm seeing now. I know our guild is even seriously considering getting a ret pally(!!). The comments about people not showing up and hampering the raid are pertinent, but comparing to Vanilla WoW, I don't think hold that much weight. You expected people in Vanilla WoW to be completely random, to ninja-afk, etc. 40-people was a _ton_ to get even the sameish group together on the same schedule consistently. Basically I think you're saying that people missing raids hurt less in Vanilla WoW, while overlooking the fact that getting that critical mass was far harder to begin with. As for the class requirement fights, where you can't do a certain boss with XYZ classes, I don't think that's any different than fights in Vanilla WoW either. Look at Garr and Domo in MC. If you didn't have enough warriors/locks/mages then those fights weren't really possible till you outgeared them. I'll agree those type of fights don't promote casualty, but that aspect hasn't gotten any less casual from Vanilla either.

Anyway, this has become far more OT than I had originally intended. I will say I'm sorta sad we don't have any statistics on this sorta stuff. It'd be highly interesting to see how many people considered themselves raiders in Vanilla vs. Now. And of those people how many are/were overwhelmed/satisfied/bored with the rate/amount of content out there. The other question is who Blizzard should be catering the content and pacing toward? I know they've gotten a lot of flak for putting so much effort into content that so few see, maybe this is a conscious design priority decision on their part to artificially slow down the raiding community. They put less time into the raid scene, the top-end guilds are left farming and bored, and the next time someone complains about raid content, Blizzard goes "Hey look, we made them wait for 6 months, while we added all kinds of new daily quests and a new 10-man instance for the more casual types."

If they would expand on the "interaction with Arthas" line and make the world more dynamic they could open up new instances in a more linear fashion without making the product seem lackluster.

They need to change the "have a patch" of adding content after release with a foundation in the game world that the changes can be based on. For example the Malygos story could be started a month or two into the game, which changes that region (think Easter Plaguelands before/after Naxxramas). And Arthas unleashes Icecrown at some later point...

The thing that was nice about 40, and that I really missed as my guild was blowing up a few weeks after the expac was that we had one raid ID- not 2-4 as we tried to juggle Kara. That is what really killed us.

If you had x healers and y tanks, you could go with 30 "other." With kara, the first stuff you needed to do to have success in Gruul/Mag, most guilds had a really hard time fielding more than two balanced runs (and class balance became much more obvious). And then, you were saved to different raid id's, so if one person could not make it, you had to burn someone elses raid id- which meant they were not available for any of the other kara groups. It sucked.

I like ten man raids- but I hope in Lich King there will be true introductory 25 man raids that have loot that is parallel to any ten man raids they offer.

There's really 2 things that are creating a relatively large fallout to the guilds that have had Illidan on farm:

1. Loot comes too fast.

With 25 man raids instead of 40, and the bosses dropping the same amount of loot, people are getting their full t6 sets extremely fast. The only thing left to keep running instances for are those random boss drops that typically don't drop anyways because Boomkin loot takes up about 95% of the loot table(curse you Reliquary)

2. Bad timing

Many guilds had Illidan on farm before their summer vacation from school ended. When school began again, my guild lost at least 3-4 people because they are unwilling to stress themselves out by trying to fit school work in between raid times.

Overall, I think that TBC had a much easier learning curve than vanilla WoW. This may just be because it's easier to organize 25 than it is to organize 40. I think it also has a bit to do with the fact that if you can kill Kael, no boss in Hyjal/BT other than Illidan should take you more than a few attempts to learn.

I think that things also seem easier because of the 25 man raid limit. My guild brings the same 20 people to every single raid it seems, and the last 5 are just a composition of people that make it as much as they can, or really good applicants.

I think that one of the biggest problems is 2.2. Think about it, what did 2.2 bring to the raiding scene? Voice chat? A couple of revamped epics? It took how long to bring out a patch that pretty much did nothing for the majority of the game's population? Because of that, we're looking at the next real instance(Sunwell) being pushed back, and having to spend more time farming off-set tier6 for when i want to level to 80.

As a side note, didn't blue say that BT/Hyjal would drop the highest ilvl items in the game, or did someone i know just make that up?

Not to mention, it wasn't as brutal to be missing people. Back in the day we had some serious pulls on Lucifron with 20 where we did pretty well, and I think we ended up getting our first kills up through Garr with only 30-35 in raid. Now, obviously there were exceptions, i.e. Patchwerk, but I'm pretty sure we killed most other bosses from time to time with only 35 people in raid. This, in combination with the flexibility that a 40 man gave you in terms of composition, is what allowed people to maintain a much smaller bench/buffer portion of their roster.

My server has also gone from a pretty healthy collection of raiding guilds to almost none. Somehow before we had multiple 40-man guilds doing BWL/AQ40 still, even though Naxx was out, and the people in those guilds were content with their place along the progression. I would have like to do Naxx but I was satisfied with our progress through AQ40 with a 3-day raid week, even though we were always "months behind".

Now my (new) guild is in BT, and I'm not sure anyone else Horde side is even consistently raiding T5 content. There seems to be have an endless succession of guild formations/mergers/implosions.

I really don't know why this is - maybe if T5 had been "the end", more of those guilds would have stuck with it rather than feeling "hopelessly beind". I also think arenas have taken a lot of people out of the PvE raiding pool. I think some of those people PvE'd only to PvP, but found that they enjoyed raiding - just not enough to do it given the alternative of arena epics.