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.
Twenty three Nef kills by the time the instance had been out for 1.5 years. I know this is pure speculation, but according to wowjutsu there are 31 guilds with a kill in SSC on that very server (Argent Dawn). You're telling me that you don't think, given another 10 months or so, those guilds will be able to down Vashj? Seriously?
Gothik is a great example of a difficult encounter that couldn't be explained/taught with a guide, and the sort of thing that forced a great deal of coordination and high performance on everyone BC-style. I remember Gentleman's Club had a popular video from a Warlock perspective that listed the make-up of spawns for every wave and showed how they set up their CC...but even with all that information, the fight was very complex and how you dealt with each wave depended on your specific raid make-up that evening. Short on Priests but heavy on Mages? You can't Shackle as much, but you'll have additional Polymorphs to buy you DPS time on the Undead targets. The "Living" side was all about planning...putting together a very specific script and sticking to it
The "Spectral" side on the other hand was a balls-out free-form DPS race, where you never quite knew what was going to appear in which spots. It even had the hilariously manipulative design tactic of separating the raid into two distinct groups so you had blame flying all over the place every wipe. For most guilds, the Living side would slowly wipe over the course of the fight while learning, as mobs would pile up and eventually overwhelm them. Meanwhile, the Spectral side would be effortlessly killing whatever mobs made it over, and bagging on the Living side for sucking. Then, when the Living side finally got it right, the Spectral side would get completely crushed by all the mobs coming their way and only then could they really learn the fight. Not only that, but shit was GUARANTEED to hit the fan every single fight, that's just how it worked.
Now, I realize that this post is a big de-rail. The point is that demanding high levels of individual performance and coordination from every single raid member is not something that's unique to BC level design. I'm with Lodekim in hoping Blizzard puts together some more really innovative stuff for the Sunwell. If not...well, that takes away most of the impetus the hardcore raiding guilds have to keep investing so much in the game.
What TBC has not done is teach DPS how to do high levels of sustained damage, and that is holding the T4 guilds back.
Alternately, Karazhan did not teach people that they need to relatively brutally stack their raids to achieve the DPS needed for later content. Also, if you are missing some key element (say a Shadow Priest) you are badly hurt.
Twenty three Nef kills by the time the instance had been out for 1.5 years. I know this is pure speculation, but according to wowjutsu there are 31 guilds with a kill in SSC on that very server (Argent Dawn). You're telling me that you don't think, given another 10 months or so, those guilds will be able to down Vashj? Seriously?
Raid guilds are half the size because of the raid cap change. Nefarian is the equivalent of Kael, not Vashj. Are you seriously telling me that there are likely to be 46 Kael kills in the next 10 months, on a server with 31 guilds in SSC?
This is before we get to the (well-documented and trivially confirmable) fact that Wowjutsu vastly overstates the number of people raiding low-end instances because of the effect of guild alliances.
Why are people still trying to argue that there are anything like as many raiders now as there were pre-TBC? Anyone who's ever looked into it knows the answer. There are many many fewer people raiding 25-man instances than there were raiding 40-man instances. This is not arguable.
Alternately, Karazhan did not teach people that they need to relatively brutally stack their raids to achieve the DPS needed for later content. Also, if you are missing some key element (say a Shadow Priest) you are badly hurt.
No, I'm talking more about DPS who only does 400 DPS when they should be doing 800. It's a very common problem at the T4 level. Look at all the WWS parses provided by T4 guilds asking for help on Gruul. You'll see DPS not packing spell hit, using an improper rotation, and generally under-performing.
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?
What in the world does your guild have to do with casual anything? You raid 5 nights a week for 4 hours a night and have mandatory 80% attendance. There's nothing remotely casual about that, that's like a second job. The raiding scene in TBC is extremely hostile to casual gamers or guilds that play casually, as shown by the various numbers people are pulling for how many players are in various content. If what you mean is 'raiding now requires somewhat less time for hardcore guilds', the phrase 'casualization of raiding' is just confusing, especially since TBC raiding is brutal on casual guilds and players.
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 don't know of anyone who skipped 5-mans and jumped straight into 25-mans, but that doesn't make the 5-mans into raids, unless you're going to claim that all 5-mans are also raids, which reduces the term 'raid' to uselessness.
But to make the claim that the 10 mans aren't raids at all? Come on.
I don't consider 10-mans raids at all, neither do an awful lot of people in these types of discussion. The gameplay style is basically the same as a 5-man, just slightly bigger; you don't need the kind of tiered leadership that you do in a 25- or 40- man, you don't need the the scheduling and out-of-game coordination, they're small enough that you can interact with the 'raid' as a whole, unlike 25- or 40- mans (at a party, you might see 10 people split into a group and have a conversation, you won't see 25 do it).
10 mans don't require a raiding guild, don't require multiple raid coordinators, don't appeal to people who identify themselves as raiders, and do appeal to people who don't like 20-40 man raids. The only reason to call 10-man raids is because of Blizzard's choice of terminology for making a group larger than 5 players; even 'raid lockout timers' don't mean 'raids' unless you're also going to say heroics are raids.
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?
That's pretty much what Blizzard did, and moving from 40-25 was always talked about as moving to smaller raids. If Blizzard were to ditch 25-mans and move entirely to 5- and 10-man content, I don't think the response would be the same.
Why are people still trying to argue that there are anything like as many raiders now as there were pre-TBC? Anyone who's ever looked into it knows the answer. There are many many fewer people raiding 25-man instances than there were raiding 40-man instances. This is not arguable.
I have noticed that there doesn't seem to be the same number of recruits as there used to be. It used to be that even a guild starting up to do MC would easily find 10-15 more people to flesh out their ranks, but now trying to get 5 more people to flesh out into 25 mans is near impossible.
My server for example, literally every guild but one or two is actively recruiting and they have a hard time filling in their slots. True, they are mostly all looking for healers but overall, there is a lack of people who want to get into raiding. Or so it seems.
I don't think it's a lack of people interested in raiding. Rather, it's a consequence of Karazhan being so easy to raid and maintain a schedule in. Whether or not you want to dub Karazhan a "raid instance" is a semantic question--at the most basic level, it's a place where a group as small as 10 people can get together and farm purples for their characters with a minimal investment. That's what a lot of people who play the game casually want, and I would want the same were I in their shoes.
Think of it this way: a bunch of people hit the level cap and want to play PvE to advance their characters. If they don't want to band together into one guild and play together (maybe they don't have people with the right organization skills/ambition), what are they going to do?
Pre-BC, there's nothing for them to do in a unit smaller than 40 other than Molten Core, so you have 40 people available to join raiding guilds and play. In BC, those 40 people can form 4 Karazhan guilds and all they'll really need is a handful of people with an impetus to organize them. The organizational barrier is far lower than ever before if all you really care about is the basics.
This is to say nothing of PvP advancement. Basically, you go from a system where the only decent way to advance your character is full-scale raiding to a system where full-scale raiding is the most difficult and time-consuming advancement path available, out of many paths. Like Tigole's said, Karazhan is a huge success. It's probably the biggest success in WoW's PvE history, all things considered. That's why they're doing Zul'Aman...not because it's intended as a stepping-stone to higher raid content (unlike ZG, which was), but because it's legitimate end-game for so many people. That's where your recruits are going. They're all content to plug away in Karazhan and ZA.
I have noticed that there doesn't seem to be the same number of recruits as there used to be. It used to be that even a guild starting up to do MC would easily find 10-15 more people to flesh out their ranks, but now trying to get 5 more people to flesh out into 25 mans is near impossible.
My server for example, literally every guild but one or two is actively recruiting and they have a hard time filling in their slots. True, they are mostly all looking for healers but overall, there is a lack of people who want to get into raiding. Or so it seems.
But does that reflect people not wanting to raid, or people not leaving their levelling guilds, and instead moving into Karazhan together?
Both hypotheses would explain recruiting drying up for the raiding guilds.
What in the world does your guild have to do with casual anything? You raid 5 nights a week for 4 hours a night and have mandatory 80% attendance. There's nothing remotely casual about that, that's like a second job. The raiding scene in TBC is extremely hostile to casual gamers or guilds that play casually, as shown by the various numbers people are pulling for how many players are in various content. If what you mean is 'raiding now requires somewhat less time for hardcore guilds', the phrase 'casualization of raiding' is just confusing, especially since TBC raiding is brutal on casual guilds and players.
Another attack at my guild for no real reason, I don't get it. I'm not claiming my guild is casual, and the closest I've said is "what might be considered a fairly casual raiding guild on these forums" (emphasis added). Also, stop making assumptions about me and my experiences. My raiding in Vanilla WoW was with a completely casual raiding guild, by anyone's definition. I have experience in them. I have experience in casual non-raiding guilds. I don't have experience in super-hardcore guilds, and have never claimed I do.
If you go back and read my post, you might see that my comment was directed merely at the state of trash, and not at where my guild was, how much we've accomplished, or anything of the like. MC required substantial trash clearing for every new night of Rag attempts. Vashj requires none. This has nothing to do with my guild in particular, or how hardcore we are, or whatever. And if you look at the beginning trash in SSC, it's much more forgiving than MC. I remember with dread the days we got double-flame dudes on the right-hand side across that first bridge there. And there's a total of 5 pulls till the first boss and 10ish pulls total till the easiest boss in the zone. That's far less than the initial pulls in MC.
Originally Posted by Karamoon
I don't know of anyone who skipped 5-mans and jumped straight into 25-mans, but that doesn't make the 5-mans into raids, unless you're going to claim that all 5-mans are also raids, which reduces the term 'raid' to uselessness.
I didn't do a heroic till I was well through kara, and still haven't done many.
Originally Posted by Karamoon
I don't consider 10-mans raids at all, neither do an awful lot of people in these types of discussion. The gameplay style is basically the same as a 5-man, just slightly bigger; you don't need the kind of tiered leadership that you do in a 25- or 40- man, you don't need the the scheduling and out-of-game coordination, they're small enough that you can interact with the 'raid' as a whole, unlike 25- or 40- mans (at a party, you might see 10 people split into a group and have a conversation, you won't see 25 do it).
10 mans don't require a raiding guild, don't require multiple raid coordinators, don't appeal to people who identify themselves as raiders, and do appeal to people who don't like 20-40 man raids. The only reason to call 10-man raids is because of Blizzard's choice of terminology for making a group larger than 5 players; even 'raid lockout timers' don't mean 'raids' unless you're also going to say heroics are raids.
There are a whole lot of comments here that I just don't agree with at all. The gameplay in a 10-man is much closer to that of a 25-man than a 5-man. You have (potentially, and perhaps even ideally) all the classes represented, and they need to play nicely with each other in order for shit to be accomplished. Tiered leadership goes a long way toward success in 10 mans. When I tank Kara, I let a healer do healing assignments. Is it the same as a 25-man where you have 8 healers? No. Is it different than a 5-man where you have one healer, and hopefully only one healing target? Quite a bit so. And I think you missed my point about kara being a multi-day event. Last I checked, that requires some significant amount of out-of-game coordination and scheduling. Sure, once you become 'leet, you can just roll through the place in a night, but when you're starting it takes several night to get through. Heroics are a lockout timer so you don't farm the place. Kara's a lockout so you have a chance to complete the place. Again, a significant difference.
Finally, why do 10 mans not appeal to real "raiders?" I consider myself a raider, and given your insistent comments on how un-casual my guild is, I'm assuming you'd agree. But I love doing 10 mans, I like the amount of control each person has on the gameplay, and the complexity that having a full complement of classes allows. Am I getting sick of kara after having run it for 5 months? Sure. But I, and many "raiders" I know, really enjoy the 10-mans and are looking forward to the ZA release.
I don't think it's a lack of people interested in raiding. Rather, it's a consequence of Karazhan being so easy to raid and maintain a schedule in. Whether or not you want to dub Karazhan a "raid instance" is a semantic question--at the most basic level, it's a place where a group as small as 10 people can get together and farm purples for their characters with a minimal investment. That's what a lot of people who play the game casually want, and I would want the same were I in their shoes.
Think of it this way: a bunch of people hit the level cap and want to play PvE to advance their characters. If they don't want to band together into one guild and play together (maybe they don't have people with the right organization skills/ambition), what are they going to do?
Pre-BC, there's nothing for them to do in a unit smaller than 40 other than Molten Core, so you have 40 people available to join raiding guilds and play. In BC, those 40 people can form 4 Karazhan guilds and all they'll really need is a handful of people with an impetus to organize them. The organizational barrier is far lower than ever before if all you really care about is the basics.
This is to say nothing of PvP advancement. Basically, you go from a system where the only decent way to advance your character is full-scale raiding to a system where full-scale raiding is the most difficult and time-consuming advancement path available, out of many paths. Like Tigole's said, Karazhan is a huge success. It's probably the biggest success in WoW's PvE history, all things considered. That's why they're doing Zul'Aman...not because it's intended as a stepping-stone to higher raid content (unlike ZG, which was), but because it's legitimate end-game for so many people. That's where your recruits are going. They're all content to plug away in Karazhan and ZA.
This is a little misleading. On the one hand, you say you don't want to get into the semantics of whether Karazhan is a raid or not, but on the other you use it as evidence that people like raiding.
I'd say that you'd have to qualify exactly what "raiding" is from your first statement, since the definition definitely varies from person to person, especially on these forums.
I'm not saying I disagree with you. I do think that the success of Karazhan has pretty much cemented the idea that not everyone wants to do 25-man raiding, and is more than happy to wait for more 10-man content, especially since Blizzard acknowledged that. I think that instead of using the term 'raiding' as a blanket term, you've got to start differentiating the target audiences.
In WoW 1.0, you had the choice of raid or nothing. If you wanted to PvP, you had to raid for gear. If you wanted to experience new PvE content of any type, you had to raid.
In TBC 2.0, you have a number of choices:
Arena for PvP advancement.
Heroics for 5-man content (still needs work, IMO. Reward scheme is too skewed for effort involved)
Karazhan for 10-man content (small raid content, if you will)
25-man content (large raid content)
The attitude among many players is that (excepting pvp) these are all rungs on the same ladder of progression. Proponents of this mindset think one would naturally go from 5-man, to heroic, to karazhan, to 25-man raid content. However, if there's anything WoW has taught us, it's that players like doing what they enjoy, and prefer not to do stuff they don't. I think that Blizzard's finally realizing that they aren't all rungs on the same ladder, but rather separate ladders that different groups of players prefer to climb.
One of the big reasons that 25-man raids are seeing fewer ladder climbers is because a lot of players who were railroaded into climbing that ladder before are probably happier with their new ladders that suit their particular playstyles more. They just like doing that stuff more than they like raiding.
Another attack at my guild for no real reason, I don't get it.
Describing your guild as "not casual" because of its schedule not an "attack", I don't get why you think it is.
I'm not claiming my guild is casual... MC required substantial trash clearing for every new night of Rag attempts. Vashj requires none.
You used the fact that your non-casual guild has an easier time raiding because of shorter trash times as a justification for your claim that raiding has been 'casualized' in TBC. I think it's silly to say that TBC raiding is 'casualized' on the basis that it takes less time and has advantages for non-casual guilds in light of the barriers to even getting a casual guild off the ground, so I pointed out that your guild is in that category. Trash clears at Vashj are irrelevant when most guilds, and especially casual guilds, are giving up around Maulgar-Gruul.
And I think you missed my point about kara being a multi-day event. Last I checked, that requires some significant amount of out-of-game coordination and scheduling.
"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."
I don't think there's really anything productive to add to this thread of discussion at this point.
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.
In my opinion, KT is the hardest fight in the game. If Illidan had some sort of enrage timer things might be different, but you pretty much have to keep everyone alive for KT, which is far from the case for Illidan: I think our first kill we had 9people dead at the end; Kael'thas is much more unforgiving of raid deaths.
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In my opinion, KT is the hardest fight in the game. If Illidan had some sort of enrage timer things might be different, but you pretty much have to keep everyone alive for KT, which is far from the case for Illidan: I think our first kill we had 9people dead at the end; Kael'thas is much more unforgiving of raid deaths.
Illidan has a timer, just ask <Humble>.
Anyway, eh, we've had some horrible Kael'Thas kills. 10+ people dead. I've heard plenty of stories of situations where K'T pyros the MT during the 4-->5 transition and then K'T kills a few people and some DPS warrior or druid picks up aggro and tanks the remaining 50%. Kael is long, and you cannot make bad mistakes in the first parts of the fight or you'll be in trouble. But honestly Thaladred is the only remotely unforgiving element of the first 5-10 minutes of the fight. It's very repeatable and controllable. We killed him immediately after we got through p3 intact, pretty much. Having a tank who could soak pyros from the start helped. If you never DPS through the Shock Barrier, and you never DPS phoenixes until they turn into an egg, there is a massive amount of leeway on that fight.
I personally still feel that Kel'Thuzad is the hardest fight Blizzard has ever designed given its overall tuning relative to the tools available to raiders at the time (not counting stuff like pre-2.1 Vashj that got nerfed).
We've never experienced a vanish/insta-gib, and I am unsure if it is avoidable by positioning (I know some guilds tank the rogue near the raid, whereas we pull it well off to the side away from everything). Flamestrike + Envenom is generally easily handled in most situations with proper personal survival and quick healing. On the rare times that envenom ticks for the large amount immediately on top of a flamestrike, causing a death, you simply battle rez the 1 death and move on.
On any given pull, "random or unlucky" deaths are sparse and easily handled with a battle rez, or simply ignoring the death and moving on. The only people who absolutely can not die in the fight are the tanks, and they have enough health to avoid being insta-gibbed or dying from 8k worth of aoe + envenom damage.
To me, a random or luck based encounter is one that has the ability to wipe your entire raid instantly with 1 particular ability or unlucky string of combos, or can kill off your tanks with a single, unavoidable ability. Single deaths that may or may not be avoidable in no way make a fight luck based.
I would say thats the case, but in terms of randomness on IC tonight walked in, about 9 minutes into the fight, Consecration+Blizzard+Flamestrike all within 1 second of each other lead to 5 dead melee instantly.
This is the recurring theme, there are very very few skill required fights in TBC, and more luck fights.
Now lets say every fight in every raid instance requires a little more gear than previous, but requires tons of skill to kill. Would raid turn-over be higher? Would there be less and less top guilds?
Describing your guild as "not casual" because of its schedule not an "attack", I don't get why you think it is.
You used the fact that your non-casual guild has an easier time raiding because of shorter trash times as a justification for your claim that raiding has been 'casualized' in TBC. I think it's silly to say that TBC raiding is 'casualized' on the basis that it takes less time and has advantages for non-casual guilds in light of the barriers to even getting a casual guild off the ground, so I pointed out that your guild is in that category. Trash clears at Vashj are irrelevant when most guilds, and especially casual guilds, are giving up around Maulgar-Gruul.
I was making a point about trash in general, sorry if mentioning Vashj made you focus on that instead of my point. I said nothing about the difficulty of the trash, although I do think it's far easier, and I don't ever hear anyone complaining about it. In Vanilla, I heard (and did my fair share) about MC trash constantly, and it was a major cause of casual burnout in my guilds.
Originally Posted by Karamoon
"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."
I don't think there's really anything productive to add to this thread of discussion at this point.
You're mixing and matching quotes and responses unfairly here. I said that comparing Kara to MC. A group of my friends being a strong core that's run it a number of times, have some decent gear, and aren't r-tards. When we first started running it, we certainly did need a set schedule, a RL, class leaders, etc. If you're going to quote me in such a manner, are you also claiming that MC isn't a raid? I'm tired of pointing out how you're not reading my arguments throughly.
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). Or perhaps the bulk of these people simply aren't interested in raiding 25 man content at all.
Running 2 or 3 "happy" Karazhan raids is hard work, Recruiting from from a base of say 2 Karazhan raids for 25 mans is hard work, recruiting good raiders who want to spend more then 2 days raiding a week, 25 man or otherwise is hard work. People dont care if its 25 man or 10 man its just about how much time commitment they have.
We did 1 day of mc, then we did 1 day of MC, 1 day for Onyxia, then we did 2 days for MC plus 1 hour for Onyxia every reset(rotating). Later on it was BWL 2 days - MC 1 day, AQ 2 days,-BWL 1 day, Naxx 2 days, AQ 1 day. The pacing was such that we could move on and drop off older instances fairly easily
Ok 3 days a week, You have Gruul, Mags, If you then move onto VR, your killing double trash,If you move onto Lurker your kiling double trash, You average Casual raid is probably fully commited now, if they want to make progress they have to start dropping bosses, I know we dropped Mags about 6 weeks after first kill, which allowed us to get Hydross and still have 1 day a week for progression
Now? we just farm Karazhan and wait for ZA, while helping friends out with Gruul,VR etc if you are so inclined. Because recruiting and training a 25 man raid, who are commited enough to spend sufficent time towards that in a era where their is constant recuitment by dozens of guiilds became too much hard work.
Perhaps its off topic, and I would really to talk about pacing but its just not as simple as that.
The pacing was such that we could move on and drop off older instances fairly easily.
Ok 3 days a week, You have Gruul, Mags, If you then move onto VR, your killing double trash,If you move onto Lurker your kiling double trash, You average Casual raid is probably fully commited now, if they want to make progress they have to start dropping bosses, I know we dropped Mags about 6 weeks after first kill, which allowed us to get Hydross and still have 1 day a week for progression
Now? we just farm Karazhan and wait for ZA, while helping friends out with Gruul,VR etc if you are so inclined. Because recruiting and training a 25 man raid, who are commited enough to spend sufficent time towards that in a era where their is constant recuitment by dozens of guiilds became too much hard work.
Perhaps its off topic, and I would really to talk about pacing but its just not as simple as that.
I don't think it is off topic at all -- it is (as many others have pointed out) part and parcel with how fast raid content becomes available. Too many people blame the 10 to 25 man shift on why guilds flounder in TBC and, as you say, that is too shallow an analysis.
The topic begs the question of why the pacing in TBC is good or bad. There have been a few to dismiss it as just bored hardcores lamenting the fact that they have no content for a few months but the reality is the frontloaded pace is slowly and surely killing off raiding guilds.
WoW in the BC era is like Major League Baseball prior to limited revenue sharing or the National Football League with the advent of free agency. Cross-server recruiting (and I'm not arguing this is a good or bad thing) has lead to the coalescing of the better/more active raiders in WoW into the top tier guilds. When raiders in these top guilds burn out and leave due to front loaded content their replacements are culled from the middle tier guilds. As a result many of these mid tier guilds break up because the 4-5 day a week players they relied on as their core are the ones leaving for greener pastures and the instant gratification that is breaking past Vashj/Kael and into BT/Hyjal. Casual guilds eventually feel the trickle down effect as their players are often recruited by the failing mid tier guilds. That only magnifies the problems you already pointed out: a ton of content staring a 2-3 day a week player square in the face and having them ask whether or not it is worth the trouble. The game devolves into a frantic race through the content to reach higher level content and, as someone else mentioned, the satisfaction you get from killing bosses is dampened.
While it's true that WoW still maintains its 8+ million subscribers my guess is that the bulk of those numbers are from highly transient accounts. That is, someone will play for a few months, quit and have their slot taken up by a similar player. The pool of raiders has been on a steady decline since the launch of TBC and unless Blizzard reevalutes how they pace and structure endgame content in WotLK, I wouldn't be at all suprised to see the trend continue in an ever increasing amount of raider turnover.
I think Blizzard simply wasn't able to implement gear checks as much as they did with Naxx because of the new itemization paradigm they adopted with regards to the Separation of PvP and PvE.
The gap between someone in dungeon 3 and T6 just isn't as large as someone in tier 0 and tier 3, because even if you have PvP-specific stats like Resilience, eventually some of the PvE gear is going to spill-over to PvP if it's strong enough.
Granted, it might be possible to simply itemize to such an extreme that PvE gear still looks unsuitable for PvP (LOTS more damage, even less STA), but the shift in average player stats that that will cause is then going to affect your encounter design limitations (something like surviving Aran's Pyro while wearing Primal Mooncloth), and it still doesn't guarantee a clean division (two pieces of really good T6 with oodles of spell damage and making up for the STA in other slots).
Anyway, eh, we've had some horrible Kael'Thas kills. 10+ people dead. I've heard plenty of stories of situations where K'T pyros the MT during the 4-->5 transition and then K'T kills a few people and some DPS warrior or druid picks up aggro and tanks the remaining 50%. Kael is long, and you cannot make bad mistakes in the first parts of the fight or you'll be in trouble. But honestly Thaladred is the only remotely unforgiving element of the first 5-10 minutes of the fight. It's very repeatable and controllable. We killed him immediately after we got through p3 intact, pretty much. Having a tank who could soak pyros from the start helped. If you never DPS through the Shock Barrier, and you never DPS phoenixes until they turn into an egg, there is a massive amount of leeway on that fight.
This is really about what covers it for Kael, once you figure out how to handle the weapons, if you've got the dps, it's a kill. We wiped a few times to pyro's because we didn't know how to handle it, and then because I made stupid mistakes, but after like 4 times in pyro (all just stupid deaths) we just blasted through it and first time we got him to 50% it was a kill.
Kael has decent dps requirements for the weapons, if no one is retarded and dies before the weapons are down, you can probably kill it, but the fact is there's a lot going on and people make mistakes, that's where the difficulty is.
If they did that then fights would ultimately end up as DPS races or Endurance checks, aka very short fights or very long (either horribly dull or extreme execution based) fights.
If they implemented fights with high burst or spike damage then PvP gear would ultimately be required to survive it, and raid stacking would be a means to adjust the loss of DPS from doing so.
They have dug themselves into a grave concerning itemization (and yes we asked them for it mostly too) and its related links within PvP and PvE, I dont quite know how they intend to fix it but when WoTLK beta starts its going to be interesting to see how they tried (or if they did...).
Regarding Kael, hes really just a 3 phase fight with a long intro and ending.
You can survive fairly heavy mistakes in P5 (oops the MT and 6 DPSers died) because the DPS check is gone, the healing check is gone, all the risks are mostly removed (granted Phoenix'). Its not really a bad thing because when it comes down to it, the weapons will despawn and wipe you if you've crippled yourself too much.
This is a little misleading. On the one hand, you say you don't want to get into the semantics of whether Karazhan is a raid or not, but on the other you use it as evidence that people like raiding.
I'd say that you'd have to qualify exactly what "raiding" is from your first statement, since the definition definitely varies from person to person, especially on these forums.
I'm not saying I disagree with you. I do think that the success of Karazhan has pretty much cemented the idea that not everyone wants to do 25-man raiding, and is more than happy to wait for more 10-man content, especially since Blizzard acknowledged that. I think that instead of using the term 'raiding' as a blanket term, you've got to start differentiating the target audiences.
In WoW 1.0, you had the choice of raid or nothing. If you wanted to PvP, you had to raid for gear. If you wanted to experience new PvE content of any type, you had to raid.
In TBC 2.0, you have a number of choices:
Arena for PvP advancement.
Heroics for 5-man content (still needs work, IMO. Reward scheme is too skewed for effort involved)
Karazhan for 10-man content (small raid content, if you will)
25-man content (large raid content)
The attitude among many players is that (excepting pvp) these are all rungs on the same ladder of progression. Proponents of this mindset think one would naturally go from 5-man, to heroic, to karazhan, to 25-man raid content. However, if there's anything WoW has taught us, it's that players like doing what they enjoy, and prefer not to do stuff they don't. I think that Blizzard's finally realizing that they aren't all rungs on the same ladder, but rather separate ladders that different groups of players prefer to climb.
One of the big reasons that 25-man raids are seeing fewer ladder climbers is because a lot of players who were railroaded into climbing that ladder before are probably happier with their new ladders that suit their particular playstyles more. They just like doing that stuff more than they like raiding.
I'm pretty sure that Ghando specifically says: "people like getting purples, easily" not: "people like raiding, look at karazahn!". He backs this up by pointing to how popular kara, and arenas, and dailies, ALL are. You can get purples with a minimum investment of what, 6 hours of gameplay a week? That's a full Karazahn clear +5 dailies and 10 3v3 arena games.
Additionally; did you actually imply that heroics are too hard for what's offered as rewards? Please, you invest 30 minutes in heroic slavepens, and you've got yourself a primal nether, a pair of midnight leggings, a nice SHINY purple (purple) healing gem for your pally friend, a primal nether, and 3 badges. In 30 minutes. Th-ir-ty. I just did one tonight, wearing 2 green items, and not having tanked really much of anything in two years, with two mages wearing the ring of blood quest reward staff. If this is not what you meant by skewed rewards, my apologies, ignore the above paragraph.
Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.
I'm pretty sure that Ghando specifically says: "people like getting purples, easily" not: "people like raiding, look at karazahn!". He backs this up by pointing to how popular kara, and arenas, and dailies, ALL are. You can get purples with a minimum investment of what, 6 hours of gameplay a week? That's a full Karazahn clear +5 dailies and 10 3v3 arena games.
I think you over-estimate the amount of time and effort guilds at the low end of the scale put into Kara. My alt is in a guild that's just finished Kara. They killed Nightbane for the first time two weeks ago. It still takes them 3 or 4 days to clear the entire place, and sometimes they'll have a lot of trouble with one or two bosses (Illhoof, usually).
To them, they are raiding, not getting purples for no effort.
Very intresting topic for starters, props to Praetorian.
First off, my guild had a fairly disappointing progression through BT/Hyjal during the summer for a number of reasons, let's just say we didn't complete it nearly as fast as we'd hoped for. Regardless if that, since our first week of clearing all current content, it's became very obvious that the lack of content impacts us in quite a big way. Mostly, getting enough people/proper setups to do T5-content all of a sudden became more difficult.
It definatley feels like a stalemate at the moment, and the lack of new things to do ingame is growing on everyone. The discussions about small and somewhat trivial things pop up more often than before. Probably it's a way of venting frustration, you log on to play the game and have a good time, but you just feel it's the same old story.
Second, I would say the way content was released was a bit weird. From my perspective, I care little about Arena or similar things, the raids is where I have my fun ingame. I'd definatley say that the way TBC-raiding started out, this question stems back to a lot of frustration. It was quite far into TBC that T5-content got tuned well enough, the horrors of early SSC/TK left a bad taste in everyones mouth.
2.1 brought a new and fresh game from my point of wiew, but nevertheless, I still think the experiences in early TBC-raiding makes you a bit more sceptical, and that feeling did very much indeed stick around post-2.1. That along with the fact that some content in T6 was a bit untuned/overly punishing (Mother especially comes to mind), is reason enough for most people to be less tolerant with the pace of content being released.
I can only imagine how the game must feel somewhat dull for the guilds that only raid casually, and limit themselves to Karazhan, nothing new ingame to do for quite some time. I'd say the tuning of T5 could've been done a few weeks prior to the release of Black Temple, noone would've minded farming T5 for a short while before going into T6. After that i don't know, but to me it seems odd that Zul Aman isnt live as of yet, it's a perfect way to cater to the broad majority of raiders, and I bet even the guilds currently farming BT is looking forward to it just to see something new.
I'd say that in order to get the game back on track, ZA should be out very very soon, with Sunwell to follow at least before the end of the year, or else i think there's to many that will just give up. Also, the lack of info about Sunwell is very boring, we don't know much about it yet, even though i feel this hopefully is the Naxxramas of TBC, I'd like to know what to expect. Screenshots and teaser-movies serves a purpose, it makes you endure the wait a bit longer, at least for my part ;-)
Additionally; did you actually imply that heroics are too hard for what's offered as rewards? Please, you invest 30 minutes in heroic slavepens, and you've got yourself a primal nether, a pair of midnight leggings, a nice SHINY purple (purple) healing gem for your pally friend, a primal nether, and 3 badges. In 30 minutes. Th-ir-ty. I just did one tonight, wearing 2 green items, and not having tanked really much of anything in two years, with two mages wearing the ring of blood quest reward staff. If this is not what you meant by skewed rewards, my apologies, ignore the above paragraph.
I think part of the frustration he may be experiencing with Heroics is the utter specificity of the drops. Only the last boss in a heroic has a purple, and the other bosses of a normally 70 instance don't even drop anything different.
That being said, the Badge system is nice. So nice in fact that I'm quite spoiled for it - I'd be willing to pay 25+ Badges just to be able to buy a [Stormshield of Renewal] or some [Boots of the Colossus] right off the bat.
10/04/07, 6:03 PM
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