Hydross and Lurker are definitely the wrong way round on there. I was surprised that the drop off to Vashj and Kael'thas was as small as it is.
One does have to weight the drop-off gaps in terms of what percentage of the previous value they represent. I probably should have included those points in the graph as well for reference.
For instance, the jump from Vashj -> Kael represents a 44% difference in progression. (7.83% with Vashj cleared working on Kael, and 4.39% having actually killed Kael.)
On the other hand, while in raw percentages, Hydross is a huge leap, it still "only" represents a 29% difference from the previous value.
However, the leap from Gruul to Void Reaver is about the same as Vashj to Kael, being around 44% difference compared to the previous value.
Edit: Here's a version of the full chart with the differencial included. I have also taken the liberty of "removing" Solarian from the progression (I put equal with Void Reaver) as her new version is a lot different and probably way easier for intro guilds now due to the lower DPS and gear requirements.
For those of you interested to what these learning gaps average out to be at on a Tier-based level, it's the following:
It's a bit odd that basically the learning time differencial in T5 is higher than T4 and T6 content combined when looking at it on a boss-count/learning type scale. So, realistically, people are spending most of their time learning in T5. T6 is a lot less taxing when looking at how many bosses vs. how much learning time is involved.
It is probably worse than represented in reality as a number of the guilds that have made it to point X have already collapsed and will never kill Vashj/Kael/whatever. The question now is will enough of those raiders get back into guilds (or form guilds) capable of downing Vashj/Kael/whatever or are they just lost to T5+ raiding forever?
It takes Blizzard what? Months to plan a new raid instance? So if they were going to create a new MC like raid for TBC, then it would come out right before WotLK which would make it worthless. So any real discussion would be about how they can do things differently in WotLK and lo and behold, a retuned Naxxaramas is going to be the first raid that people will see.
They will have two choices with Naxx vs. 25 man. They can either maintain its difficulty and make it into a 25 man or they can turn it into a 25 man MC. Both these choices have drastic downsides. A) if they maintain the difficulty, it will alienate the people who are just getting into real raiding or B) they reduce its difficulty drastically which totally ruins one of those parts that made Naxx so wonderful. People will be wondering why the 40 man raids loved Naxx in the first place.
Edit: It was a mistake for Blizzard to assume that everyone knew how to raid with TBC and there should have been an easy as pie 25 man raid instance to teach the basics.
Example - Lucifron, the learning curve for that fight was quite literrally decursing and each attempt the decursers got better because that is what that fight taught. Each fight taught something valuable that future fights would build on. HKM on the other hand, requires extensive knowledge of how this game works, your tank needs to be immune to crits, your warlocks have to be top on with enslaves and such, you have to pull off a relatively complex pull etc etc.
I think Blizzard should heavily, and I mean heavily nerf SSC so that it becomes a MC like instance. This would open up the door for raids to go, "Hey, there are easy epics in there, we should go and get them." which gets them used to the raiding life and then they go on into TK which should be harder but they will push through that because they have now had a taste of the good 25 Man Raid Life.
I completely agree. However, that's not what we're talking about at all. The 'real' first boss in SSC isn't Hydross, it's Lurker. Lurker's just as easy to explain. Get in the water when he begins to spout. Kill/CC/Tank adds. Beware of getting knocked into the water when he twirls.
But, you can either water-walk + summon past Hydross OR you can clear the trash right up to him and walk right past him without pulling him because he's "too hard." And Hydross's level of complexity is probably higher than Majordomo's--more comparable to Ragnaros honestly. And even Lurker is probably more on a Garr level of complexity than anything else... in spite of what you say, many never saw a boss before they got to Lucifron, and the level of trash you need to clear to get to him as opposed to Gehennas was probably slightly less, or at most equal.
To those who say that you can't draw comparisons between SSC and MC... Well, you can compare anything. If you're trying to say "SSC and MC had totally different design philosophies and wildly different levels of difficulty!" then, yes, that's exactly what I was trying to illustrate.
To Gurgthock, my apologies if you see this as leading the thread astray... I do to an extent as well, but I did feel that acknowledging the lack of an introductory raid-sized raid zone was somewhat crucial to discussing how pacing has worked in TBC because it places a significant barrier to entry/startup.
So! Back on-topic.
Interesting graph but I'm not sure about the validity of the purple line after it gets into Tier 6 since it intersperses Hyjal and BT bosses, and implies a set progression path when there are many different ways to move through this pair of instances. The set progression path also makes it imply things that may or may not be true, such as the idea that Teron Gorefiend is substantially easier to learn than Azgalor, simply because only a slightly lower percentage of people have killed him than Azgalor. This may be true, but it may also be true that many people clear Temple through Shade and then clear Hyjal through Archimonde before making further efforts at BT. It also makes Bloodboil look like an easy boss simply because only slightly fewer people have killed him than Archimonde, when in reality many of those who have killed Archimonde have probably not killed Bloodboil yet, and many of those who have killed Bloodboil have probably not killed Archimonde yet.
I'm not sure if it's possible or necessary to fix this, but if not perhaps making the graph smaller to disinclude T6 could improve its validity?
Well, even if you changed the order of the bosses you don't particularly change the fact that the kill-time gap and time spent learning seems to be substantially smaller as a ratio of how many are actively "working" on a boss.
While you are correct that one being a low point doesn't make the boss easier than the previous boss per se (although they might very well be) it does say something about a smaller learning time gap present in T6 vs. T5 content.
Then again, simply watching the speed at which guilds progress through T6 content once they get past Kael is enough to tell us this without really using a graph. (As does looking at the average number of guilds stuck on Kael vs. the number of guilds 5-6 kills into T6 content.)
The only thing I hope is, since there will be only 6 bosses in Sunwell, that we don't see 2 supremus, 3 akamas and 1 real boss. This zone is pretty much the latest chance for Blizzard to convince "hardcore" players than there is a future for them besides owning their instances in 3-4 weeks and going afk for 6 months so.... they should better not waste it.
First of all, I want to highlight this again because I think this is huge. Personally I'm quite disappointed with a lot of the content they've given us so far. Yes looking back there were cockblocks in pre TBC, but there were also fights that took time to learn because it's not a "live for 90 seconds and you know what to do" like Shari pointed out about a lot of fights.
Look at some of the gems of TBC, Reliquary each phase is different, there are new mechanics in each phase that you're not used to, there's never been a "you can't heal" fight before, or a real spell reflect fight before, phase 3 is the most straight forward and it's a big dps check. Illidan has multiple phases, and while it's probably a little under tuned, it's put together very well, Kael'thas is an amazing encounter, but then really, how many grobbulus fights are there? I remember doing Anub'rekan on test servers and having people having no idea what to do about locust swarm, do you heal through it? Does the tank have to shield wall and you burn him? Then eventually you figure out kiting him works, and that's the first boss in Naxx. The lack of fights with something you have to think about to figure out how to overcome is lacking in TBC and I do think Sunwell is their big chance to show they've still got good creativity on their dev team.
I also want to chime in and say that there's also a very good point about the lack of introductory raid content, and that it is a mistake to assume people already know how to raid. While yeah I'm a bit disappointed by the relative lack of complexity of end fights, the early fights just didn't let new people get to understand raiding, and there needs to be a progression, not having each instance be the same difficulty but less gear required.
Why don't they just patch in a bigger Gruul's Lair, make HKM and Gruul the last 2 bosses, with 4-5 "easier" bosses in the zone - maybe even have HKM's adds show up as induvidual bosses - but more buff. This way you learn what each boss does, and how it works - then when you get to HKM, you are all prepared with the "necessary tools" to handle HKM. Throw in 1 optional harder boss ala Ouro (a female Gronn maybe who is almost T5 level vs Gruul's T4 tuning), keep the trash low like it already is, and you have the recipe for success right here. Then tune Gruul down a bit more, and make that curve almost equal.
I'd expect SOME drop going from 10 -> 25 man, but not the levels that are displayed here.
Actually, the jump from 10 -> 25 man is fine. The jump from Malchezzar/Nightbane to HKM is relatively small (80%+ conversion rate). The big roadblocks are Gruul and Magtheridon. I was quite surprised to see that actually. I was expecting a much larger drop-off between Nightbane and HKM.
The biggest problem in early raiding is that T4 level DPS does not know how to perform close to their full potential. And this shows up on fights like Gruul.
I think people are over-estimating the learning curve in raiding. Karazhan did a pretty good job teaching people to raid. What's HKM but Moroes writ large? What TBC has not done is teach DPS how to do high levels of sustained damage, and that is holding the T4 guilds back.
Even if you don't believe the "25% of the playbase" figure, we *do* know from a variety of sources that at the time the expansion hit, around 50% of raid groups had killed Nefarian. So, when WoTLK hits, then the Wowjutsu figure for Kael should be around 50%. He's currently at less than 5%.
Looking at my server's pre-TBC progression (according to wowwikki guild progression):
- 23 Guilds with Nef down and some AQ bosses killed
- 17 Guilds with Naxx boss kills
Post TBC (accoring to wowjutsu):
- 3 guilds in MH/BT
- 2 guilds currently working on Kael
- 3 guilds currently working on Vashj
I'm guessing we'll see maybe 9 guilds with Kael kills by the end of the year. Maybe. I doubt we'll see see 17 guilds playing in MH/BT before the next expansion.
It's hard to know if the relative lack of progression is based on people, in general, losing interest in raiding or if it's a tuning/pacing issue.
Actually, the jump from 10 -> 25 man is fine. The jump from Malchezzar/Nightbane to HKM is relatively small (80%+ conversion rate). The big roadblocks are Gruul and Magtheridon. I was quite surprised to see that actually. I was expecting a much larger drop-off between Nightbane and HKM.
The biggest problem in early raiding is that T4 level DPS does not know how to perform close to their full potential. And this shows up on fights like Gruul.
I think people are over-estimating the learning curve in raiding. Karazhan did a pretty good job teaching people to raid. What's HKM but Moroes writ large? What TBC has not done is teach DPS how to do high levels of sustained damage, and that is holding the T4 guilds back.
I'm going to speculate a little bit here. (And given that my guild blew up on the trying to enter SSC wall, this may be a poorly informed bit of speculation)
The Gruul drop off is probably as stated: a DPS problem. This is (mostly) caused by the *drastic* difference between a "decent" dps player and a "very good" dps player. Hunters display this most starkly, but every DPS class has this to a significant extent. Back when we learned Gruul, our Rogue class lead changed computers. *JUST* changing computers took him from ~500 DPS to ~750 DPS. It's not just that the game doesn't teach you how to do excellent sustained damage, but also that very small improvements in play and timing have very large payouts in performance, and Blizzard has to balance around those higher numbers.
The VR drop off (which seems odd, since VR/Lurker aren't particularly harder then, say, HKM from a coordination standpoint) is a "playtime" problem. I think that dropoff indicates where the amount of consistant playtime a guild has is important. If you get 30-35 solid people for 3+ nights a week who are willing to learn content, you get past that point. If you don't, you fail. (We didn't, and I think it indicates just how many players don't want to or can't schedule time that much)
The Kael drop off is the "excellent raiding skills" drop off. I think that's fairly accepted, Kael is hard, everybody needs to be on the ball, if you are, not only do you defeat him, but you are going to eventually plow thru BT/Hyjal and kill Illidan.
I think people are over-estimating the learning curve in raiding. Karazhan did a pretty good job teaching people to raid. What's HKM but Moroes writ large? What TBC has not done is teach DPS how to do high levels of sustained damage, and that is holding the T4 guilds back.
Thats over-simplifying things quite a bit. Moroes' adds are all 100% full CCable whereas Maulgar's each has a gimmick and requires precise separation at the pull or the fight is over before you even get started. I'd compare Maulgar to Wizard Oz more than Moroes, and thats in the middle of the zone.
But thats way off topic. The difficulty scale in Karazhan is great. It goes from a 'kill on your first pull fight' to fights with finite phases. Each fight teaches something basic. Cleansing, CCing, Assist-train and kill order selection, 'soft enrages', hard enrages, etc.
You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.
Actually, there are a couple of pivot points. One is Kael, but the far larger one is Gruul/Magtheridon. Take a look at Wowjutsu's stats. The drop-off between guilds who can kill High King Maulgar and can kill Lurker/Void Reaver is massive. Kael is a blip on the radar in comparison.
Actually, that's not really guilds who CAN kill HKM, that's guilds who killed him at one time; a guild that managed 1 or 2 kills, then lost some key people to another guild, then decided that 25-mans are too much annoyance would show up in that set too. I would guess that a lot of the guilds 'stuck' on HKM are not really continually trying to get any further, but instead barely eked out a HKM and maybe Gruul kill at one point and decided 25-mans are too much of a headache.
But how is this different than Vanilla WoW? I think it's easier to find like-minded souls in TBC, simply because you need far less of them. An example: Some of my friends that live on opposite coasts run Kara on the weekends. Usually there's 6-7 of the 12ish of us on - which is enough of a group to get Kara going, without really needing a schedule. That's casual raiding at it's best.
I don't consider Karazhan a raid, a 10-man is a very different experience than a 25-man and you can consider all of my comments about 'raids' to be about 25-man raids for TBC and 40-man in old WOw if it makes it easier. Just ask yourself this: since this board is filled with people who love raiding, if Blizzard removed all 25-mans and replaced each with 2 10 mans, would the board mostly go 'cool, twice as many raids' or 'what? there's no more raids!'?
Karazhan is easier to get into than MC even though the encounters are harder, I don't disagree there, and there's no shortage of people running it. It's the 25-mans that aren't being run to a great extent.
The jump from 10-25 people means it has to be a lot more rigid and defined raid. Going from 25 to 40 would be another quantum leap. I'm pretty sure I could find 25 people to do an instance given a week or so to plan and spread the word. I'm also fairly certain I wouldn't be able to find 40 people to do an instance.Once you have a critical mass of 40, it's a lot easier to adjust to losing a few here or there, but I think you're underestimating the effort it takes to get there in the first place.
We're not comparing hypothetical 40-man-TBC raids to the current raids, we're looking at old 40-man raids versus TBC 25-man raids. Critical mass was not 40 for MC, it was more like 20-25. With 20-25 people that really know what they're doing, and another 15-20 in crappy gear who could more often than not manage to use an assist macro when told, spam the decurse button when told, or toss heals on the emergency healer bar when it flashes, you were in great shape to take down bosses in MC.
While in TBC, you really need all 25 to get started. You probably only need 20 'core', but you have to have much higher standards for the extras - having someone who keeps walking into crowds is worst than 24-manning gruul, and having a DPSer or two who don't stop DPS on mag and make the collapse hit during a blast wave is not fun. Plus the gear levels needed are higher, it was not uncommon to start MC with ST gear and only a handful of level 60 items, but for Gruul you're really wating your time to bring someone who doesn't have a 70 dungeon, good crafted, or 'exceptionally good' item in each slot.
(Out of order) I mean what's more complicated in HKM or Gruul than in MC?
HKM is more complicated than Majordomo IMO, and is certainly at a similar level of complexity, but is the FIRST raid encounter rather than second-to-last. There is nowhere to build up momentum for your 25-man raid, no 'training wheels' encounters to start working together and see who's pulling their weight and who isn't. You can't recruit anyone on the basis of your accomplishments, as your raid hasn't actually accomplished anything.
Why is forcing people to do things they aren't specced for more casual? I don't know about you, but when I specced something, it's cause I _enjoyed_ doing that thing.
Being able to make a run with the people you have online without any of them having to pay a 100g fine is more casual friendly than requiring respecs. This is especially true for a guild that is first attempting to field a 25-man raid, being able to have people cover needed roles without fining them a lot of money for being off-spec means you can get in and start actually raiding.
Rosy tinted glasses a bit much? My first days in MC were with 30ish people and we wiped a ton on the trash, and I think _saw_ Luci, but didn't attempt him. And if you had less than 35, with crap gear, you were basically screwed.
No, completely accurate memory. My first MC run was on my druid shortly after hitting 60 , as a healer, kitted out in mostly ZF and ST gear with some AH greens and at least one piece from good 'ol SM. I got in not by any hefty selection process, but by answering a call in /4 (LFG at the time) for more people. The guild got their first kill on Garr after 4 or so attempts in spite of filling out to 40 with around 10 randoms like me. And this wasn't a sign that the guild was hopeless, this guild hung around and kept vying for #2 in Alliance progression on the server, though at some point (I think around TBC time) they broke up and were then reformed by several officers.
I definitely had more than one canceled raid because we only had 30 people on at raid time.
Those raids were cancelled beacuse your guild leadership prioritized 'only current guild members' over 'run MC tonight', not because you only had 30 guild members on.
And I think if you can PuG Aran then PuGing random spots for HKM or Gruul isn't out of the question.
Can you point me to some guilds that do this, and especially guilds that have done this and gone on to later success? Just saying 'you should be able to do this' isn't really convincing, if no one does it odds are it doesn't work.
And why can't you kill HKM or Gruul without any locks? You'd have to control the summoned demons in the HKM fight, but that's not that hard. I will say I'm confused as to why they basically made locks necessary for a lot of these fights though.
You have to down HKM to kill Gruul, so the question is really why HKM. It certainly wouldn't be outright impossible to control the summoner and his adds without any warlocks, but you're looking at 3-4 tanks to do it with damage rapidly jumping between because of all of the deathcoils, plus I don't know if the fellhounds do something nasty to casters if they're not enslaved. It's already difficult enough for a new raid to learn the fight without making it much more difficult. I'm sure my guild could handle it if we didn't get one of our infamous Maulgar curses, but we're hardly just starting out.
Not optimal and not killable are two different things though. Casual guilds, almost by default, won't have optimal groups. But I would argue that 25-man groups have actually been better in allowing for different strategies.
I'm not talking about strategies, I'm talking about simple numbers and I'm not really sure how to make that clearer. With equally good players who are equally geared, a raid with no shamans playing that night or with no paladins playing that night is going to have significantly worse DPS (windfury primarily), threat (no salv, no tank windfury), and/or tank survivability (kings and aura) regardless of who fills the slots.
EJ considers Illidan about farmed out at this point, but I think if they ran BT with no shamans or no paladins it would be way more difficult than normal, and they'd have significanlty less DPS showing on a WWS chart even with the exact same set of players. Effectively, they'd be severely handicapping themselves, and a casual guild is typically going to be stuck with this handicap all the time.
The casual alliance guild missing a rack of shamans or horde guild missing a rack of pallies is going to be at a significant disadvantage in putting out the needed number even at the same gear level. This simply wan't true to the same extent in old raiding. The benefits of synergy were not nearly as great, plus there weren't any real DPS checks until Patchwerk IIRC. Threat wasn't really much of a concern until BWL or Naxx, and even then it was mostly about funky threat drops, raid DPS was pretty much never threat-capped unlike TBC.
This isn't an issue, this is progression. If you can't handle fights like Vashj and Kael how do you expect to be able to handle a zone that's supposedly harder than BT/Hyjal.
What? Kael'thas is the hardest fight in the game, save for the non-existent 15min Illidan. Once you are attuned to BT the level of skill required to progress in raiding drastically drops.
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What? Kael'thas is the hardest fight in the game, save for the non-existent 15min Illidan. Once you are attuned to BT the level of skill required to progress in raiding drastically drops.
I do dislike this particular sentiment that I've seen regularly thrown around.. having gone through the crucible that is Kael'thas, quite a few fights feel easier than they would be without an encounter like him. He trains a raid group very well.. with that said, if you were to put alternate progression paths with Kael'thas and Archimonde on an even tier.. or Kael'thas and Mother Shahraz (even post nerf) or Kael'thas and Illidan, or Kael'thas and Gurtogg Bloodboil.. those fights would all probably take an average raid group longer than Kael'thas did. At least I'm pretty sure they would.
Kael'thas is a fuckton to learn, but your raid force you brought to later fights had learned those lessons and was a lot better overall than the raid force you first brought to Kael, I will guaruntee you.
Actually, that's not really guilds who CAN kill HKM, that's guilds who killed him at one time; a guild that managed 1 or 2 kills, then lost some key people to another guild, then decided that 25-mans are too much annoyance would show up in that set too. I would guess that a lot of the guilds 'stuck' on HKM are not really continually trying to get any further, but instead barely eked out a HKM and maybe Gruul kill at one point and decided 25-mans are too much of a headache.
This is very true and to be honest I don't think blizzard is entirely to blame here. Many of these guilds get gutted to the point where they can do nothing but HKM and Gruul for a long time. We keep losing geared players to RL or progressed guilds for whatever reason. The real difficulty is there seems to be no way to recover from it. Sure we can muster up the gruul/lurker/VR kill but anything else is too much of an uphill battle with 10+ new/irregulars each week.
If gruuls had 6-7 bosses, it would greatly help guilds like this get the coordination and confidence back but alas, 1 hour gruul and call it for the rest of the week.
I remember doing Anub'rekan on test servers and having people having no idea what to do about locust swarm, do you heal through it? Does the tank have to shield wall and you burn him? Then eventually you figure out kiting him works, and that's the first boss in Naxx. The lack of fights with something you have to think about to figure out how to overcome is lacking in TBC and I do think Sunwell is their big chance to show they've still got good creativity on their dev team.
Sure, but on the test server you didn't have a guide by Nihilum telling you exactly what his abilities were, which you probably did by BT. If you knew what his abilities were going in, how many attempts do you think Anub would have taken you? A hour's worth?
In general I agree more with Praetorian here, people have some serious nostalgia with the quality and difficulty of vanilla content. MC, BWL, and AQ were all cleared within weeks, essentially, up to the impossible content, and then beaten the day it was fixed. Naxx was a huge instance with a ton of bosses, but outside the 4H it would have been beaten in what, 4-6 weeks tops? Then a few weeks later by more and more guilds. And here you had videos coming pretty frequently, but mods weren't quite as ubiquitous, and full-strategies took a bit longer to surface. Now it is almost instantaneous.
There are certainly T6 encounters that are too easy, but I think there is some huge overstatement of the disparity here. I think it is more likely people are realizing that WoW is almost 3 years old now, and it is nearly impossible for the Devs to make it seem new again.
What? Kael'thas is the hardest fight in the game, save for the non-existent 15min Illidan. Once you are attuned to BT the level of skill required to progress in raiding drastically drops.
I think the only fights that might be harder for people to accomplish than KT in BT/Hyjal were pre-nerf Mother, RoS and pre-nerf Archimonde. Even pre-nerf archimonde, while tremendously frustrating and encouraging of raid stacking, was not as hard as KT.
The one question I have for Sadris is this, we will hopefully be doing our first Illidan pulls this reset after a long period of recruiting and attuning people after an unexpected batch of people leaving the game or the server, do you really think KT is harder than Illidan. I thought I had seen Praetorian and others here say that Illidan is certainly harder than KT, but I could be mis-remembering.
What? Kael'thas is the hardest fight in the game, save for the non-existent 15min Illidan. Once you are attuned to BT the level of skill required to progress in raiding drastically drops.
I think this might be true in execution, certainly not by raid damage needed and taken levels that will be what we'll likely see in sunwell. I also think Kael's difficulty is greatly exacerbated by the long setup and how much time a stupid mistake wastes. Most of our wipes to Kael while learning was "wow okay so we don't have the dps, good job you 4 retards who died to thaladred in phase 1." The reason this fight takes so long to learn (IMO) was that every time you had a death to something stupid early on you wasted a lot of time because of how long the setup was and all. The number of actual real attempts where you got to the point you did last time was a bit low and the time wasted when someone died early in phase 1, or worse yet, somehow died early on in the weapons phase just wasted so much time.
But either way it's still a point, if the gear levels required and execution are harder than BT, people probably won't get to far without getting past kael. Yeah Kael probably has more to it, but the numbers don't stack as high which I think might be a very valid point, I've personally gained a TON of stats from between TK and now, and I think that will be the big stopping point.
Sure, but on the test server you didn't have a guide by Nihilum telling you exactly what his abilities were, which you probably did by BT. If you knew what his abilities were going in, how many attempts do you think Anub would have taken you? A hour's worth?
In general I agree more with Praetorian here, people have some serious nostalgia with the quality and difficulty of vanilla content. MC, BWL, and AQ were all cleared within weeks, essentially, up to the impossible content, and then beaten the day it was fixed. Naxx was a huge instance with a ton of bosses, but outside the 4H it would have been beaten in what, 4-6 weeks tops? Then a few weeks later by more and more guilds. And here you had videos coming pretty frequently, but mods weren't quite as ubiquitous, and full-strategies took a bit longer to surface. Now it is almost instantaneous.
There are certainly T6 encounters that are too easy, but I think there is some huge overstatement of the disparity here. I think it is more likely people are realizing that WoW is almost 3 years old now, and it is nearly impossible for the Devs to make it seem new again.
Certainly strats speed things up, but the majority of things were already known pretty early in Naxx for most guilds. Knowing how Gothik works and finding the strategy that works for you are two completely different things. Knowing how Shahraz works and finding the strat that works best for you is pretty much the same thing minus deciding where you want to tank her. As I've said, there are great fights that aren't like that, Reliquary comes to mind, it's new, and it proves Blizzard can still be innovative, but so much else is just not at that level.
Yeah there's nostalgia going on, I won't deny that, but it's still a shame that your last sentence seems to be coming true. I don't expect that the game is going to feel new again in quite the same way, I don't expect that every encounter is going to be brilliant innovative design like The Four Horsemen or the Twin Emperors, but I do expect not to be able to go into so many encounters and go "hey whatta ya know, this is exactly like this boss except they slightly changed the functionality of this ability, but you still pretty much have to do the same thing." If blizzard is out of ideas, then they're out of ideas, but Sunwell can be their opportunity to say "Hey we can still throw you some curveballs that make you think."
I've never bought into this point of view. Assuming you have to gear up about 30 or so people to effectively raid 25 man content I don't see the issues in using a 10 man raid zone to provide that initial step of gear. Two Kara groups rotating people in and out (either due to absences or intentionally to ensure an equal rate of gear progression) isn't that difficult to organize.
The real issue is not the size of the dungeons, rather, the players. Either people can't manage to find 30ish total people dedicated to raiding 25 man content or they do but some are unwilling to sit out/rotate for the good of group progression. The latter leads to 'break-off' guilds of players that want to be in a guild's 'Karazhan Group A.' Instances like that just lead back to the former: guilds not being able to get together 30ish people.
That's the reason there is such a stark cut off from the number of raiders in Kara to the number of ones in SSC/TK. Why people are so enamored with Karazhan loot I don't know. Maybe they get disheartened seeing the wall of content in front of them and figure it is better to loot it up in Karazhan (you see all of these people asking for the timer to be shortened) and bide their time to Zul'Aman rather than go through the task of organizing 25 man raids (outside of the odd 'alliance' raid on Gruul). Perhaps delaying the release of Tier 5 content in favor of an expanded Gruul would have helped. Perhaps even delaying BT/Hyjal to make the mountain seem less daunting to climb would have helped. Or perhaps the bulk of these people simply aren't interested in raiding 25 man content at all.
Looking at my server's pre-TBC progression (according to wowwikki guild progression):
- 23 Guilds with Nef down and some AQ bosses killed
- 17 Guilds with Naxx boss kills
Post TBC (accoring to wowjutsu):
- 3 guilds in MH/BT
- 2 guilds currently working on Kael
- 3 guilds currently working on Vashj
I'm guessing we'll see maybe 9 guilds with Kael kills by the end of the year. Maybe. I doubt we'll see see 17 guilds playing in MH/BT before the next expansion.
It's hard to know if the relative lack of progression is based on people, in general, losing interest in raiding or if it's a tuning/pacing issue.
I think it's both. People lost interest in raiding *because* of the poor tuning and pacing. Pre-TBC had a large, vibrant, "casual raiding" community. That community no longer exists, at all. The total number of raiders in cap-size instances per server has plummeted by at least a factor of two, more likely 4. I doubt they'll come back for years. WoW took two years to build that community and then threw it away. Only the hard core are still raiding at all. And yes, they are the hard core raiders, even the ones that are just doing VR and Lurker, and are thus too casual for this board's notice. >.<
Aside: since raid guilds are now about half the size they were due to the change in raid cap size, you should actually be looking at 34 guilds in MH/BT by the time the expansion comes out, if you want to maintain parity with pre-TBC raiding.
There are other factors besides the ones you listed here that contribute to that. You aren't really including attunement process at all in there. If Naxx required a C'thun kill those numbers would be very similar to where they are now. I.E. A very small part of the population (3-6 guilds on each server on average) able to access the uber-instance. As it is, all you needed was a few Strat runs and a bit of gold to get in to Naxx and the first bosses (Razuv especially) hardly required gear at all.
I guarantee if the BT attunement was lifted those same guilds that can make it to Vashj/KT or hell even Magtheridon, can surely kill the Naj trash and down him as long as they can muster 10k hp or so for each member.
Also, to stay on topic, MC/BWL/AQ/NAXX were spaced somewhat evenly over 2 years. When Naxx came out, BWL had been out for over a year. Within the span of 6 months in TBC every instance was released, this is also after the initial 60-70 period of a few weeks or so. Really all of that raiding and progression has been crammed into 8 months. Eight months after WoW was released, BWL wasn't even out yet.
My point is, if you look at those WoWJutsu numbers, and even looking at my own servers progression, most "casual" guilds are just entering SSC/Mag/VR progression. Eight months after release of WoW, most "casual" guilds were just finishing MC and getting ready to enter BWL. The casual progression hasn't changed, the problem is, those casual guilds feel far behind as they're watching the "hardcore" guilds progress 2 instances ahead of them, and it FEELS like a bigger gap in progression. That gap being introduced by the fact that no one sat around and farmed Gruul, or Mag or SSC or TK because there were bigger and better things to be tackled.
I don't consider Karazhan a raid, a 10-man is a very different experience than a 25-man and you can consider all of my comments about 'raids' to be about 25-man raids for TBC and 40-man in old WOw if it makes it easier. Just ask yourself this: since this board is filled with people who love raiding, if Blizzard removed all 25-mans and replaced each with 2 10 mans, would the board mostly go 'cool, twice as many raids' or 'what? there's no more raids!'?
Karazhan is easier to get into than MC even though the encounters are harder, I don't disagree there, and there's no shortage of people running it. It's the 25-mans that aren't being run to a great extent.
I'm not going to reply to a lot of your post as we're going _way_ off topic in our little back-and-forths here. I'm more than willing to continue in a more appropriate topic, or privately, but I'm pretty sure we've begin to hijack this one into some other country.
As to the comments quoted above, umm what? Karazhan is most certainly a raid. Is a good introduction to 25-man raiding? No. But it is the only stepping stone to said raiding. I don't know anyone, and haven't read of anyone, skipping kara and jumping straight into 25-mans. I'm sure there are random souls out there for which this is the case, but I would be pretty confident in calling that the exception and not the norm. So no, you can't be some fresh-ding with half-greens and anticipate having much success in the 25-mans, and I think that making the 10-mans a stepping stone was a flaw in Blizzard's approach. But to make the claim that the 10 mans aren't raids at all? Come on. As to the question you asked me, I can only reply with another question. If Blizzard got rid of all 40-mans, and made them into 25-mans, would a lot of this board go "what, no more raids?," or continue to call them raids anyway?
I'm not sure why we're debating this anyway. My original comments toward casualty were with the basic premise that less time raiding and less farming needed meant a more casual gameplay. My guild's just hitting Vashj, and do you know the relief it is to not have _any_ trash to clear to get to her? Take all that time spent clearing trash and farming flask and pot mats, and apply it to attempts on a boss and it's going to drop a lot faster. 3 tokens and only 25-people to gear up means you can make the leap between zones a lot sooner. Both of these mean that the top guilds are completing content a lot faster than in Vanilla, making the jump to the next tier a lot faster, and flattening out a lot sooner. Because of this, farming instances gets a lot more boring a lot faster and even if you had spaced it out like it was in Vanilla WoW, it would have still been painful.
Originally Posted by Karamoon
No, completely accurate memory. My first MC run was on my druid shortly after hitting 60 , as a healer, kitted out in mostly ZF and ST gear with some AH greens and at least one piece from good 'ol SM. I got in not by any hefty selection process, but by answering a call in /4 (LFG at the time) for more people. The guild got their first kill on Garr after 4 or so attempts in spite of filling out to 40 with around 10 randoms like me. And this wasn't a sign that the guild was hopeless, this guild hung around and kept vying for #2 in Alliance progression on the server, though at some point (I think around TBC time) they broke up and were then reformed by several officers....
Those raids were cancelled beacuse your guild leadership prioritized 'only current guild members' over 'run MC tonight', not because you only had 30 guild members on.
I'm surprised that this was your experience (and apparently others), cause it certainly wasn't mine, nor most of the people that I knew on my server. I got into raiding a bit late, and we _never_ pugged progression stuff. Not because we were prioritizing an only guild member run, but because it wasn't worth the headache and repair bills that it would have entailed. Our first Luci kill was with nearly a full raid group (if not full, it's been a long time but I can remember those bosses that we downed with only 34ish and Luci/Mag weren't 2 of them). I think I saw /4 LFM MC maybe once from a group actually trying to do it, and it didn't even start clearing before it fell apart.
There are other factors besides the ones you listed here that contribute to that. You aren't really including attunement process at all in there. If Naxx required a C'thun kill those numbers would be very similar to where they are now.
Attunement and boss skipping/instance jumping aside, that's 23 guilds with Nef down on that server. There won't be 23 Kael kills, or probably even Vashj kills - whichever you want to consider the equivalent metric - on that same server by WotLK.
Sure, it's not an exact comparison, but what it generally points to is complete failure in raid pacing and tuning by the numbers alone. It seems pretty stark to me.
10/04/07, 12:51 PM
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