Angerz

These conversations always beg the question, "Why have attunement anyway". Or at least anything harder than what MC, BWL or Naxx required.

Tune the bosses to require a certain gear level. If you walked into BT and tried Najentus with your Kara gear, you will get wrecked. You cant skip 2 levels of gear with consumables anymore.

Just do it like Naxx. Put in some bosses equal in difficulty to the middle of the last tier. Have them drop items 3 or 4 iLevels below T6. Have a gateway boss 2 or 3 bosses in that will require a group of near full T6 level loot to execute very well to beat (illidan farming guilds can have a little easier time), then ramp it up even further.

Let us beat content by being good players and gearing up. Adding the extra obstacle of backflagging was dumb in Planes of Power and it's dumb now.

Naxx worked. You could come in in BWL gear and kill Anub and Razuvius. You may even be able to do gothik and faerlina. Get a little more gear and you can do Maexxna and Heigan. More gear and you get Pathwerk, Grobbulous and Gluth. More and you kill Thaddius. Then Gothik and Loatheb. Then 4h, sapph and KT. Perfectly tiered. Pay your gold, get your bosses. You didnt have to kill Cthun and Nef and turn their heads into the Argent dawn.

Having to recruit from off server or sacrifice a raid night (or 2) to key a recruit to continue raiding is dumb. Sorry if my rant is off topic.

 

Dawme

If only this was true... fact is, if you walk into BT and try Najentus with Kara gear, you'll do exactly the same thing everybody did : you'll wear 2 arena pieces. And kill him.

 

Maledict

Dropping attunements at this stage would be a bad mistake, as it removes some of the best fights in the game from progression. (Vashj and Kael). Unlike Gruul and Magtheridon, which people still do for loot, no-one will ever touch them ever again. Whilst it's fine (and good IMO) to invalidate old content when an expansion is released, invalidating it part way through the expansion seems foolish.

They could do many things to make the process simpler. Make only Vashj's vial required for Hyjal, and Kaels' for BT. Put scrolls of attunement on Rage Winterchill & Najentus (Not the end bosses, attunement breaks the guilds that are progressing throuhg the instance, not those that have finished it). Put in the 20 attuned 5 get in for free rule.

EQ solved these issues a long time ago, it seems strange that WoW hasn't bothered yet,

 

Grogzor

Why should people have to fight Kael and Vashj to go on? Cthun was a great fight, one of the best yet it wasn't a requirement to get into Naxx. In fact, people would probably mostly agree that it was good he wasn't.

All they have to do is give a reward seperate from attunement that is good enough that people will want to do Vashj and Kael. Its not that hard.

People should be allowed to play the game, if they want Kael and Vashj killed, they will attempt it. If they don't, their penalty is they won't get the experience and gear they offer.

Forcing people to spend an extra month in TK and SSC to kill two bosses to "earn" them the privellege of going on is not fun and totally unneccessary.

 

Trouble

Have you guys on dead servers considered transferring your guild to a more populous raiding server? I've considered trying to advertise my server to try and build a "PvE server raiding mecca" so to speak similar to what Korgath and Mal'ganis are for PvP. I believe it is beneficial up to a limit to have a number of high end guilds on the same server. It makes your guild more attractive to cross-server recruits, it invigorates the economy, and it creates a vibrant server community. The main limit is the point when it starts to cause lag but a server can support a large amount of raiding guilds before hitting that point.

 

Eph

Part of the problem, at least with the Hyjal attunement, is that you have to clear both instances to get to the vial boss. Perhaps if you could just collect say 10 gate key fragments or something from previous Kael/Vashj kills you could just clear some trash, skip the other bosses, and be right at them, saving several hours.

 

Melador

Why not just have a single-use attunement scroll dispenser at the beginning of an instance? Then you could attune one person each week. Then you can get apps in, or old members of the guild that have come back, or one clutch alt each week. It's dead simple to implement, straightforward to apply, and doesn't mass-attune so many people that the actual attunement quest becomes irrelevant.

 

Tyrn

Agreed. Or even add items that make certain fights easier or offer some boon (like medivhs staff) that only drop from certain encounters that will want to make people finish content or even go back. Hell, you could even bring in the option of unlocking optional bosses with those items that you cannot get to without those trinkets.

I see nothing wrong with attunements, but at this rate its only going to hurt guilds the farther down they go into progression.

http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/8412/tar2fv0.jpg

 

sovelis41

On the other hand, in my opinion, some raid groups (like mine) WANT to prove they are good enough for Black Temple and Hyjal. We were almost done legitimately keying everyone for The Eye when *poof* attunement gone, 20 guilds on server kill Void Reaver while none of them had killed Magtheridon (we had Mag down for a bit and were slowly knocking out peoples TotN:Mag week-to-week as they finished heroics).

2.3 is still too early. The buffs there (and ZA) will go a long way in helping guilds out that are struggling with T5 or just finishing it off. If 2.4 rolls around and we're still floundering about with KT (I sure hope we aren't!), then I'll concede that we just weren't good enough to beat him, and we'll move on with an asterisk next to our progression and come back to him later perhaps, but whats the point really? A lot of guilds here talk of killing him at most 3-4 times and never go back unless they need to desperately key someone.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Whitemane

The only reason that the scroll idea could work for MH/BT is the fact of the BT attunement quest. You don't have to go far into SSC/TK to get the necessary quests, but the MH takes a lot of time as you need two fully cleared instances. On top of that, MH is usually cleared relatively fast and as such you won't be too far into T6 progress making the attunement of new people irrelevant.

Edit: And most people that you would consider taking into a MH/BT guild has definitely killed Karathress and most likely Al'ar.

 

spronk

I'm pretty sure Blizzard is well aware of the dead server problem, after all they haven't introduced a new server in US/EU since TBC launched. They gave hints at Blizzcon they are working on solutions to the problem, my guess is a combination of server merges to create "mega-servers", new servers that are intended for new players only and offer free transfers off anytime to any other server, and possibly even going so far as to offer cross-server instancing within a battlegroup with the new expansion.

The server hardware has grown tremendously since WoW launched, on a recent weekend I noticed on Korgath there were over 49 (max you can see) of any given class in Karazhan, plus hundreds more people in 25 man instances. Thats thousands of people in raid zones on a single realm, no problems at all. Whereas in early WoW having more than a few guilds in MC usually spelled disaster. Who can forget the times when you zoned into MC and ran into the other faction!

 

Dax

As i see it the best solution to the attunement issue is to make guilds attuned instead of players. This would remove the problem with getting new recruits in while still retaining the challenge attunement's bring to the game. We are currently working on Kael, and i see this as the challenge we have to beat to "earn" or T6 content. I have no problem with this, having bench-marks for guild to push for is a good thing. But forcing them to go back and spend raid time attuning 1 new recruit dos not make sense. Blizzard has mentioned the idea about guild attunement and i for one hope they implement this idea in the future.
To add to the speculation about Sunwell attunement. My bet is the Illidary counsil, they are Blood elfs and it would make sense they would hold the key to that place.

 

Goggles

What would happen if you killed Kael'thas with people from 25 different guilds? While it's probably not happened to quite this extreme, there is certainly a raid group on my server in Hyjal/BT with members from 10+ guilds. I'm in a similarly organised raid group who are at Kael'thas. Some of us are in the same guilds as people in the BT/Hyjal group. If they got attuned, would that attune us too (this is obviously open to massive abuse)? or would they not be attuned and have to forever be stuck or form a single guild?

Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.

 

◊ Sorrowheart

It's an interesting idea and to play along with it, how about this: Guilds with more than 10 players at a kill are "attuned" and each individual player there is also attuned. This will allow players the freedom of changing guilds later if they like while allowing guilds to recruit.

On the flip side, like Goggles said, I can easily imagine someone starting a guild, getting it attuned, and then proceeding to sell membership in the guild for Hyjal attunements. The trick would be at what point does the individual get the attunement - maybe after a certain number of boss kills in the guild (something non-trivial to prevent abuse?) or maybe after they kill the boss themselves:

For instance, suppose you join a Hyjal/BT guild and get the benefits of the "guild attunement" - after 10/20 kills with the guild in each zone, you're now attuned on your own to them. Alternately, you could always go run Tempest Keep and kill Kael'thas yourself for a faster "self attunement"

 

Dax

Well i can see several solutions to this issue. You could for instance have the attuments quests so players get attuned individually, then open it to the entire guild if 10 to 25 (or any sett number) of the members have quest done. While there will be ways to exploit a system like this, raiding in WoW is centered around the idea of guilds as raid groups. And this would help guild who need to backtrack to attune people. It will aslo cater to raid groups that are not guilds since the attunement follows the character as well. Id see a system like this harder to abuse but still being able to cater to groups who are not guilded. I wont make up and statistics but i would say "a huge majority" of raid groups in WoW are based on guilds. This is why id like to see a change to this system to be based around the same idea, while still being able to work for non guilded groups.
For smaller instances like 10man, i don't see any issue with attunents like the Karazhan one. I don't see how anyone who want to raid 10 mans can complain about a attunement thats as easy, and also interesting lore wise as Karazhan attunement.


EDIT: Sorrowheart, im slow at posting it seems you beat me to the punch. Some interesting ideas there aswell yea. In general as said, having attunement for 25 man content more focus on the groups/guilds progression aswell as the individual players.

 

Cybelirrae

I really think the "right" answer is the Archimonde scroll for just Hyjal attunement. We had a raft of retirements or "taking a breaks" right as we got RoS down in early August. Having to go into fulltime recruitment/attuning/gearing mode basically caused us to get hardly any work done on pre-patch mother for 3 or 4 weeks after RoS was down. We got through it and at least killed Mother once pre-nerf for our Masochistic Merit Badge (lol) and are now working on Illidan, but it was a bit demoralizing to watch a lot of guilds that got Kael after us blow past us for their Illidan kills.

The Archimonde scroll would help a great deal b/c at most you would have to kill A'Lar to get a new guildie attuned to BT since most servers have other guilds doing SSC and it is pretty easy to get a recruit into another guild's instance to talk to the NPC before a soft-reset.

 

Zindel

Scrolls were a really great idea for this particular issue, I don't see any problem against putting a scroll drop on Azgalor and Gorefiend/Shahraz.

 

anathor

The problem with Vashj + Keal in the attunement to MH is that Vashj and Kael are not at all at the same point in the progression. Typically there's quite some time between the first Vashj kill and the first Kael kill. Whenever people finally kill Kael, what do you think they want to do? Run to MH and start exploring BT -OR- run SSC yet again when they've been "over" that part of the content for more than a month? I think this is a common problem - guilds that are starting MH/BT and need to recruit are still running TK regularly, but they are quite happy to leave SSC behind.

Right now the bottleneck in MH attunement for my guild is not Kael'thas, because we are only at our 3rd kill so it feels ok to attempt him again for a few more weeks. It's going back all the way to Vashj that sucks, especially the 5 bosses before (compared to the easily one-shottable 3 bosses in TK). That's another problem - even if Kael is not yet on farm, it's fairly easy to kill the 3 first bosses in TK quickly and still get a couple of hours of tries in Kael. Where it takes already one night to clear the "trash bosses" in SSC, and then another night of tries on Vashj :/

 

Nurru

Actually, on Tichondrius most of the raiding guilds that are pre-T6 get 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC before they down either boss. So in that respect they're pretty much identical insofar as progression is concerned now that TK has no attunements.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Meltface

They really should have made the BT / Hyjal attunements like the SH key. Only one person needs to be attuned to get into the place. This would mean your guild still has to kill the "cockblock" bosses in SSC/TK, but you wouldn't have to go back and rekey applicants if you recruit new people.

 

Gokey

We really just need scrolls again -- or SOME back-flagging system. There is no reason a guild clearing T6 should have to go back and do T5 again if they choose not to, ever. It's very, very frustrating to schedule a TK, log on 30 minutes before the raid and see 12 people online (we normally have around 35).

I can slap people on the wrists all I want, but the fact remains: This is a game, and it's supposed to be fun. Spending 5-10 hours keying someone that hasn't even earned his stripes is not something anyone wants to be doing.

The T5 placement of scrolls was good, but only because of the smaller number of bosses. Ideally, I'd say scrolls should drop off of: Kael'Thas, Archimonde, Bloodboil, and Illidan. 4 is enough to key a couple of new recruits and maybe an alt or two.

Things will get easier. SSC is clearable in one night, as is TK. I've heard of guilds that clear both instances in one night as well (~7 hours?).

There's a lot of obvious problems with this. Although, If they're planning to remove the attunements, I'd much rather have them do this.

 

Melador

As I said in my suggestion earlier, I don't see any reason why attunement scrolls should drop off the end bosses of instances. After all, if you've managed to get into the instance at all, you've passed the test, and you should be able to start getting other alts or applicants in as well. Why should you be required to fully clear an instance before you can start attuning other people?

Any percentage-of-guild/raid system is going to be prone to exploit and difficult to implement. Why couldn't you just have 20 attuned people rotate a series of 5 other people through the raid and attune the whole server?

Just put a single attunement scroll vendor at the beginning of the instance that's only usable once per reset. It prevents mass-attunement, it doesn't render the quest irrelevant for most people, but allows you to get apps in as well as important alts.

 

Neuromaster

Something my guild did with a pretty good level of success was accumulating 7-8 applicants over a period of a few weeks, then scheduling an "extra" raid on friday/saturday to knock out SSC/TK and get those people attuned in one fell swoop. While people weren't thrilled about the extended raid week or spending time on outdated content, they appreciated that we weren't sacrificing progression to key new recruits - we posted two new T6 kills that week.

We only ran a group attunement like that once (we're at the point where we can rely on transfer apps that're already attuned to fill the few gaps in our roster) but running something like that once every month or so might offer a solution to guilds that're reluctant to kill ten T5 bosses for a single person. I imagine it'd be even more sustainable if you replaced two of your normal raid nights rather than asking your members to show up on off-days.

That's all totally worthless if people don't really want to join your guild/raid on your server of course, but that's kind of a different problem.

 

Gokey

What we did was team up with another guild who was in BT and clear SSC on Saturdays. It actually went pretty well for the most part, albeit slow because of the language barrier. (They're French)

 

Starfire

It's all the flaw of pacing.

And I think lifting the requirement would be silly. It would completely invalidate T5 content, which I think is still valid content for a lot of guilds.

Using my server alone, there is one guild in BT (alliance), two guilds in Hyjal (alliance anad horde) and both only entered Hyjal this week with no other Kael'thas killing guilds. One other guild killing Vashj.

I think the viable thing for Blizzard to do is to make it easier/faster to get to Vashj. Perhaps a way even if its via the "Majordomo summon" to get directly to Vashj without having to run full SSC.

What I mean is, remember in Molten Core you needed 1 person with revered, but preferibly 4 people (or was it 8?) so that one person wouldn't have to run back to get the water from Azshara?

So like, make it so... you need 10 people or hell 15 or 20 or something require to have some sort of item, with, say a 1 week cooldown... and when 20 people use the item, it unlocks the bridge to Vashj from the entrance or a teleporter to Kael'thas or something. (Does this make sense?)

Like, 20 people can channel a portal to Kael'thas from the entrance of TK or something, but everyone can enter. Still have to kill Kael'thas to key up the other 5.