The recent start of school year probably affected a good deal of guilds out there. For guilds that are 2-5/5 Hyjal and 2-8/9 in BT this has been an extra cause of stress. As a rule, I like to have a little bit extra manpower to ensure that losing people doesn't cause the guild to collapse. To me, having around 35 raiders seems ideal. 9 healers, 4 tanks and 23 dps is the numbers I wanted to keep in the guild. It worked well throughout learning SSC/TK and when a person can no longer play, we'd be able to replace him/her fairly quickly as we have a decent reputation on the server/battlegroup.

In BT, I feel the attunments are getting in the way of adapting to the changes a guild goes through. In pre-BC, I'd interview the app, decided whether he's a good addition or not, and got him right into raiding. In early BC, all I'd have to do is take him through our next 45minute Gruul clear and our Karazhan over the weekend to get right into SSC.

In T6 content, however, it takes a little bit more than a 45 minute raid and a weekend 10 man to get a replacement. I'd have to schedule 5-6 hours of raid time into otherwise useless content just to prepare an app that may or may not continue to raid with the guild. We raid 22.5 hours a week. For a guild that's halfway through BT, that leaves very little room to progress time for the week.

For us, and we're 7/9 BT, this hadn't been a problem. We had to do one round of attuning after killing Archimonde and this group is still around as we're killing council Sunday and Illidan shortly afterwards. I feel Blizzard made a great choice in allowing non raiders to have gear good enough to jump right into raiding via craftables, heroic badges, and arena gear. I do feel, however, that attunmets can be done better.

A simple solution, off the top of my head, is to have the attunment boss be in a short, Gruul-like instance. The instance could have several things to ensure only a raid that's beaten previous content can enter it such as a gear check first boss, or a quest item (like the molten core vials required to summon Majordomo) to summon the boss of said instance. I liked the SSC attunment as it required little raid time to get people prepared, I don't like that losing one paladin means I have to spend 5-6 hours of my raid time just to replace him.

Having Magtheridon require T5 dps for P1, a T5 tank to survive through P2-3, and require three people to have completed vials of eternity quest to be able to summon him means a raid can simply do a full Hyjal clear then a quick attunment run for that third paladin who's replacing the one you just lost for the new school year/start of summer...etc

The only reason the 25 man attunement quests are worse is because you can't require applicants to have it completed (Unless you're one of the very top guilds). If you're the only guild able to kill Vashj or Kael, you'd have to rely solely on cross server applicants if you require the vials; and really what person interested in raiding is going to xfer to a server with such stagnant progression? The heroics on the other hand were actually a good filtering system and it was a reasonable expectation to have of applicants.

They could always add very difficult 5 man encounters as alternatives, but design them expecting everyone in the group has max t5/some t6 gear. That way me and 3 guildmates could run an applicant through attunements on a weekend instead of wasting raid nights.

Something like the Zul'aman timed finish would be another good choice for attunments. I actually didn't mind both parts, a scroll on Archimonde wouldn't be bad either.

Simply put, attunement should work as such: If at least 10/25 of your guild members are attuned, everybody in the guild is attuned by proxy so long as they wear the tag. Attunement should be about proving you're ready for the next zone. Not proof that you can grit your teeth and farm trivial content,

I've always held a utopia of raiding with the same 25 people every single day - it doesn't work. Granted, I came close and we survived with only 27 people for a decent amount of time but, ultimately, when just a small amount of people need the same time off you suddenly find yourself unable to field a raid.

We recruited a few cross server people and did another attunement run and held together with about 30 people until we got to Illidan a few weeks ago. Let me tell you something, standing in front of a passive, slouching Illidan without enough members in the raid is a very humbling experience. So, we recruited and attuned seven fantastic new members and made our first real set of attempts at Illidan on Thursday night (19%...).

I think Zipher's post above really summerises the entire situation perfectly. Our server is dead so people don't want to come here. We've been the only guild in BT for over two months and, after merging with two other guilds, the second best on our server has finally made it in there too, without great success I believe. If things don't work out with us, it's a long way down. Not that we can even consider transfers - we're transfering ourselves to Mal'ganis in the middle of November.

So where does that leave us? A tiny pool of talent to pick from, a server nobody wants to go to, no real right to demand people have the Vials and no other guild to do it for us. The thought of personally doing SSC and Vashj again right now along with putting up with all the bitching of my guildies who feel the same way makes me want to off myself. Which sucks, because I'd like to fill a few holes I believe we still have.

I really want them to do something with attunements sometime soon. Remember all the bitching when they lifted TK and SSC attunements? Can you imagine how it would be now if you had to ensure that anyone you wanted in your BT raid had to do all the Naaru trials, the full quest line in Karazhan then go through all of SSC and TK with you? I don't for a second think they should allow people to just stroll into BT and Hyjal; Kael'thas should never become something to truly circumvent, but they need to do something to allow us to backflag new members.

I'm curious as to what the attunement for the Sunwell is going to be. It would be nice if Blessed Medallion of Karabor is all that's required, but then that gives us the same problem if there's no method of backflagging in the future.

Back in vanilla WoW, a few guilds would ultimately get stuck on Twin Emps/Ouro/Cthun and when Naxx came out there was nothing stopping those guilds from going to Naxx. And they did, they were more then easily able to beat some of the bosses in Naxx and when they got the gear they needed to overpower the AQ40 end bosses, they did. I don't see why this wouldn't work now, do you?

We were in more or less this same place about a month ago and it sucks I feel for you. We had Archimonde down, and were around Bloodboil or so in BT then lost a bunch of people to various things. Recruiting on a server that has one other horde guild killing Vashj, not Kael, but Vashj and has never even had 2 guilds farming Solarian at the same time... bleh. Since the push through BT/Hyjal started I think we've picked up maybe 5 or 6 people from our server and that was only possible because one of the mid level SSC/TK guilds fell apart at an opportune time for us. Other than that you have to convince apps to come and try out, which is a slow process when you explain to them that getting them keyed is one of the last things on your priority list and if you decide not to pick them up their only option is to try and kill Kael with a different guild that is working on him as 99% of our transfer apps were in 3/4 KT guilds, a shock I know.

Obviously the issue is the entire Hyjal attunement which to me doesn't even make sense from a lore standpoint. We need to go get the remaining vials of water leftover from the Well of Eternity in order to help the Scales of the Sand... do what in Hyjal? Has anyone ever figured out why we are there, or why we need the vials so desperately to enter? From a game mechanics standpoint this is the bottleneck (duh). Clearing all of SSC/TK to get an app to enter this instance is time consuming and annoying. When your options are go attempt Illidan or attune apps in T5 instances no one is happy.

I have no new interesting ideas on how to circumvent this issue. Various decent ideas have come forawrd such as the stack of BoE vials on KT/Vashj, an attunement scroll on Archimonde, and some others. I do not believe these will ever make it into the game at this point (prove me wrong blizzard) but I hope we never see such a guild straining sequence of events in the future just over keys. Difficult encounters should make guilds stress when they are progessing, not the fact that even a guild raiding 6 days a week has to devote roughly one third of their dedicated raid time just to going back and attuning apps, if you only raid 4-5 days a week this gets even more daunting. Blizzard can learn lessons, hopefully they will learn this one.

I think dropping the vashj vial requirement would be a good start. Most guilds have been doing vashj for some time before they kill kael and the vashj part of the attunement seems unnecessary considering kael is essentially the BT/Hyjal gatekeeper. Vice versa or only 1/2 vials wouldn't work either as a lot of people would just skip Kael. Kael is the ultimate t5 challenge and killing him should give you access to BT. They could just lift the attunements ofcourse which I wouldn't mind either, but I am guessing they are afraid of BT/Hyjal losing their glamour as a new wave of 4/5 Hyjal 3-5/9 BT guilds becomes the normal.

As for attuning recruits, while we have felt its effect on us and the whine involved in doing ssc/tk one more time, guilds who are keeping a roster below or close to 30 people are really asking for trouble. Weird things happen all the time and as it was generally concluded in this forum on another thread keeping a roster below 35 people requires knowing and trusting your people more than most guilds in wow can I believe. We now have 42 raid members and while putting something on farm or learning it is taking a bit longer indeed, we at least never had to cancel a raid during most of TBC and generally whine about standby hasn't ever been significant. But each to his own I guess.

Dropping the Hyjal attunement in 2.3 would be fine in my opinion, I really don't mind them dropping attunements as long as they don't do it too early, but once the instance is well and truely beaten I don't see much point to keeping them there. I do think attunements are a good idea though in general if they are done right, as long as Blizzard release raid instances all at once they are needed, or guilds will skip the lower tier raids and go straight for the higher ones.

I don't know why they didn't extend the scroll idea from Vashj/Kael into BT/MH, it doesn't make any sense.

Preferably though, I'd like something along the lines of 20 people in a raid require the attunement done and then have 5 free slots where you can put non attuned people in. When you defeat the final boss, you then get a BoP item to attune these last people.

One of these two approaches would be good and are in fact needed. The pain of re-running SSC/TK to attune applicants is a real problem. We have so many applications and they all read "I'm not attuned to BT/MH I just need Vashj + Kael." and I grit my teeth every single time, because it basically means it'll be a week with close to no progress for us if we decide to recruit that person. We've had people on trial for two to three weeks waiting to get their attunements done, simply because it's not a huge priority to do really when you only have one or two that needs it. You always want to stretch it that further that you can get all your recruits done in one go.

Was the scroll idea such a great one really? By the time we were killing kael we would hardly recruit anyone who hadn't done those heroics once for gearing/attuning purposes. It was kinda redundant really, maybe some people missed magtheridon but that was honestly something not at all hard to get for them. Same for vashj more or less, even if that attunement was much much easier.

I don't see how putting scrolls in Illidan/Archimonde would really help as by the time you kill them it's unlikely to recruit anyone who isn't attuned. Ever since we passed RoS we have pretty much have found an attuned person to replace people who quit, the problem is more persistent when you are new to the instance, and scrolls on Illidan won't help you much.