Balkoth

If we're offering anecdotes, my guild killed Vashj before Al'Ar or Solarian.

Of course, we also cleared Hyjal before killing Naj'entus. We might be odd, but the point remains that the example he provided is true in at least some cases.

 

Galred

I think that there is a level of detail being missed here - I would imagine that the idea of having 20 attuned people allow a raid to get the last 5 to zone in is fine, as long as those 5 people don't actually BECOME attuned.

Yes, there would be some weird/lame stuff when running back to zone in again, but this wouldn't be prone to exploiting. I can even imagine some kind of gate item that the "non-attuned" players have to click in order to zone in at all.

Personally I'd love to see the above idea implemented along with BoP attunement scrolls on, say, Azgalor and Gorefiend.

This would allow guilds to a) bring tryouts in without spending the time to clear 2 'old' instances and b) permanently attune new players who perform well.

Having the scrolls on the first pair of non-trivial bosses would ensure that total scrubs won't get attuned, as having 5 lousy players is going to prevent a kill pretty effectively. This backflag MH/BT attunement should be a 2-scroll quest needing BOTH scrolls in order to permanently attune a player. Making them BoP ought to be enough to prevent a few guilds from attuning their entire server - and if there are a ton of players in non-T6 guilds who are good enough to kill Azgalor/Gorefiend, in my opinion Blizzard should be doing everything in their power to get 'em into T6 content!

 

Maczor

Yes most guilds currently go 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC, but that is not really relevant at all to what anathor is saying. It doesn't matter if you were 1/4TK when you first killed Vashj or if you were 3/4 when you first killed Vashj, what anathor said remains true, and that is that "Typically there's quite some time between the first Vashj kill and the first Kael kill".

Being 3/4 TK before you kill Vashj doesn't magically allow you to kill Kael in any fewer attempts nore does being at the "end boss" of both instances mean they are are the same point in progression. It's not like Al'ar or Solarian teach you anything or drop anything that makes killing Kael any easier.

The reality is a lot of guilds end up with 4-8 (some more then 8) Vashj Kills before getting their first Kael kill and thats why going back to Vashj after finally getting into Hyjal sucks.

As far as the OP goes, there are a lot of good ideas in here. I know my guild will soon struggle with having to go back to Vashj after getting deeper into Hyjal (2/5 currently) because it's only a matter of time before we lose enough attuned people that we get forced to recruit and accept applicants that do not have Vashj vials.

 

Grogzor

Just like mudflation, it should get signifigantly easier for people to go through content as time passes. Saying something like, I did this so everyone else who follows in my footsteps should do it too.

Imagine if Blizzard made a mistake and required a massive attunement to be allowed to level to 80. Eventually some people would do it but should Blizzard maintain that attunement any longer when they realize they were idiots because Joe Leet doesn't want his work to be "trivialized?"

If Blizzard got rid of the attunement requirements to BT and Mount Hyjal tomorrow, nobody in those zones would feel any pain but a lot of people could be potentially gratified. Also, it allows your guild a new way to get geared recruits if needed.

If people want to kill Vashj and Kael, they will. If they don't, it doesn't matter. If they can kill bosses in BT they should be allowed to.

 

Darkmgl

If they want to avoid the Everquest mess, they can just have nonoverlapping attunements.

Make some zones require attunement, make some not; and make the ones that do tie into quests from the ones that don't. Then you end up without a huge chain of attunement where you have to play an expansion from 5 years ago to raid in the expansion that came out today.

The attunements may have been (and still are) a bit tedious, but they could find ways to make it less burdening. Make items for attunement dropped and guild taggable somehow; or make it so you don't need a fully attuned raid but just a certain number of people. Theres lots they coulda done without removing it completely, hopefully they consider some of it in the future.

The flaw with complete removal of attunement is you risk people skipping over content altogether. How many guilds who are able to clear most of SSC and TK would just leap into Hyjal and Temple and start working on that instead, never having beaten or some never having even trying Kael or Vashj. It may seem like you're doing a favor at first; but to some degree you're just pushing them closer to exhausting all the game's content if alot of it is skippable.

 

Grogzor

Along those lines, if a guild ends up breaking up due to their attempts on Kael, they won't be able to consume anymore content at all.

In my opinion, Blizzard should leave a majority of how fast someone consumes the available content up to those players and not put artificial restrictions in the way.

Imagine Blizzard requiring non-raiders having to complete their Dungeon Set 3 prior to attempting any of the outdoor content provided so they could limit how fast they consume content? There would be an outrage among most non-raiders.

 

Whiteknight

Your suggestion requires a slight modification in order to avoid the obvious exploit. If the vendor is at the start of the instance, you can enter with a single toon and purchase the scroll - meaning you can double the number of attuned people every week.

Move the vendor to after even a single boss and you solve this problem. I think the ideal location is the Vendor camp right after you kill Supremus, and the Horde camp in BT/Hyjal respectively.

 

Digo

Entering a raid instance should be like Frank Dux's entrance exam in BLOODSPORT.

Warlord Na'Jentus: If he ready to raid Black Temple, then show us the Dim Mak.

Applicant: What the hell is a Dim Mack?

Warlord Na'Jentus: Death touch.

Digo: Hey, App. Choose a brick.

Applicant: Uh, how about this one?

<Digo breathes deeply, prepared to smash the brick.>

Warlord Na'Jentus: NO! Bottom one.

 

Metrosexuelf

It all depends on when Sunwell is released in relation to the next expansion. If there's less than a four or five month gap they will just drop the attunements to Tier 6 instances. At a certain point Blizzard isn't going to worry about crafting an elegant solution to the problem... they will just open the floodgates.

 

Giske

Starting to get very tired of having to go back to SSC & TK to attune new people now, I wouldnt mind if they lifted the attunement at all.

 

anathor

Coming back to this thread since we got Vashj yesterday (and yes, I got to kill Kael before Vashj, don't ask). It's a really fun fight that people should get to experience, same with Kael. And it's a real challenge as well, so that specific part of the attunement process doesn't bother me at all. What bothered me was the pain (and time) it took to clear 5/6 in SSC to get there. People still needed the loot so it wasn't too bad, but clearly everybody was having more fun on Winterchill than on Leotheras. From my point of view the best would be that the Medaillon of Karabor (BT attunement) would work as a key, opening some kind of shortcut to Vashj and Kael, so that guilds don't have to clear all the "trash bosses" again. That would allow for much faster attunements for new recruits, all the while keeping the fun aspect of doing these two fights, that are really awesome.

The other confusing part is how easy the BT attunement is in comparison. Winterchill can be killed on first try by any guild that managed to get there. Really weird.

 

Dustwhisper

It is quite evident that the attunement-process is broken. We are currently working on KT and in the 3 nights we've been there we've had like 5-7 diff people and 3-4 of our main raiders have atleast 2-3 MAIN alts (aka alts they use in main raids like one has druid, pala, mage. One has priest, pala. One has druid, rogue, and so forth). So we are looking at needing to attune around 40 characters for Hyjal/BT whenever we get KT down to have 25 man people the 5 nights we raid. It won't be pretty >_<

 

Kink

Yes, but most guilds do not break up do they. Most guilds play that extra 3 weeks to down the boss and then continue to the next stuff. Yes some guilds collapse and you hear a lot about it when it does as people are naturally louder when they are angry at something.


But this is not possible in this business. Artificial restrictions are there for the simple fact that Blizzards developers cannot churn out a new 25man instance every month. It takes time. Slowing people down buys them this time. This is the single largest reason for this so called "artificial slowing". Also, people would just rush to MH and there would be no "reason" to fight the tougher bosses like Vashj or KT if you did not need to for any reason, why not just go farm T6 stuff!




Imagine Blizzard made every boss drop T6 equivalent loot and made all fights Kara difficulty! You suggested something rediculous and then said how shocked people would be. Well duh? The current progression is there to extend the life of the current content. In the future it would not surprise me if they tuned encoutners down to open it all up a bit more. If all artificial blocks were removed the cries would change from "We want to see more content" to "We want to see more NEW content".

Now as others have suggested I think being able to carry non-attuned people in to an instance that requires attunement is great. Especially if it means that person can become fully attuned to the next instance (i.e. carry someone into MH, allowing them to be there for a kill and be attuned for BT). This way recruiting people into MH/BT guilds is not so painful, it also means that you do not permanently have to carry them, but they will eventually be fully attuned and will catch up via leapfrogging a step or 2 in the attunement chain.

*edit*
Well, the main part of BT attunement is really Vashj and Kael. It seems TBC has paired 25man instances. Mag, Gruul (and kara) for T4. Then SSC and TK for T5, and BT with MH for T6. All basically require the same effort to be attuned for =).

Also a lot of the people asking for attunements to be removed have not yet downed Vashj, or KT. Many saying the attunements should stay have killed both. However as I stated above, these roadblocks are there to slow down our consumption of their content, so the best we can hope for is some way to help attune new members. At least until sufficient people are done in BT and MH and it gets "opened up" to allow all to experience it.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Krennick

Lots of ideas that could fill the gap. Here's mine (which I know echoes that of others):

Enable 'attunement' mode runs of SSC and TK where only Vashj or Kael'thas encounters are present (no trash or other bosses)

Make it so that the first person who zones in to create the instance has to be MH attuned (assuring Vashj/Kael'thas kills in his past), and then anyone can fill in. Either we need a new dungeon mode, or this can be tucked underneath the heroic label also, so if he zones in in heroic mode it'll create an attunment mode instance.

If someone tries to enter the 25 man raid in heroic (attunement) mode when it has not been initialised by someone who is MH attuned he'll be told that heroic mode is only possible if the instance has been initialised by someone who is already MH attuned.

All who enter the instance (including the initialiser) is locked to the instance as if they'd done a boss kill the second they enter. As in, they cannot enter if they're already locked to SSC or TK this week and if they've gone in in attunement mode that's the instance they will return to if zoning in later in normal mode.

BT attunement I wouldn't touch.

Yes, it makes it so that a guild that hasn't even cleared Karazhan can get some big brother person to let them all into SSC and try Vashj. I doubt they'd succeed.

Any guild that's working on SSC or TK and who can get a big brother type person to do this for them would have to give up normal SSC or TK runs for that week. And generally speaking they'd need a little more help than the big brother to succeed probably.

 

Kallisti

Hm we did Kael'thas only two times and attuned all of our 33 players (killed him in the first try with 8 new players in the second week - i was really suprised). Now we are 5/5 hyjal 5/9 BT with a 2% wipe in RoS phase 3...

Considering the fun of the fights, it is sad that you only have to do Kael'thas 2-3 times and never come back there because it just takes too much time for a neck item.
We raid three days a week for four hours and once for seven hours and to attune one new recruit, we have to skip two full progression nights.

I can see that Blizzard does not like solutions like this "20 people attuned, 5 for free" approach, since it would basically allow you to take any one with you to sell items or to fill free slots and it would really remove the point in attunements as not only limiting full raid groups but also individual players from progressing anywhere.

The scroll approach seems to be better, but even if just one scroll drops per week, it would allow two guilds to attune 30 members of a third guild after four months. So the early Black Temple guilds could now just sell their attunement scrolls for like 1k-2k gold each, which Blizzard surely wants to avoid.

The approach of doing it on a guild basis like flagging the whole guild as being attuned if a special number of members did the quests would be bad for raid alliances which also exist, so that's no real solution either.

A new instanced dungeon only containing the endboss for the attunement quest would feel silly lorewise too... additionally it could lead to other exploiting (get an attuned warlock and two others, port a whole unattuned raid there, attune all of them...).


Nearly every approach can either be exploited or has major flaws to be a convenient solution for the problem. I think that is exactly the reason why there is no other way of backflagging players so far.

If we want to see a decent way of solving this topic, we should maybe not just look at the advantages of some method, but especially at the disadvantages because those are the reasons why Blizzard does not implement it. It is surely not easy to come up with a nice solution, but maybe someone here has an idea that Blizzard employees did not have so far - just consider the flaws of your method before looking at the pros.

 

anathor

Well not really: SSC required Nightbane and Gruul (t4 10-man + t4 25-man), TK required several heroic runs + Magtheridon (non t4 content + t4 25-man). Basically each of the t4 end bosses (Gruul and Magtheridon) opened one part of the t5 content.

The equivalent for t6 would be that Vashj opened MH, and Kael opened BT, which is not at all the case. If you transpose the attunement for t6 to t5 content, it would mean clearing all heroics + full Kara + Gruul + Magtheridon (huge bottleneck) just to get access to SSC, then make Hydross a simple tank and spank fight to get access to TK.

The transition from t4 to t5 was smoother because the attunement was split, guild could try t5 content (and get t5 loot) before trying Magtheridon. The transition from t5 to t6 is for one half a huge bottleneck (Vashj -and- Kael) and for the other half a real picnic (Winterchill).

 

Amonra

They might do well by stealing what turned out to be one of the better ideas from EQ.

Basically, provided a certain percentage of the raid is attuned for a zone (say 80%) then everyone in the raid can zone in. And if the raid kills the end boss in the instance then everyone gets attuned for the zone.

 

MalkuthSB

The 20% rule sounds good in theory but I have horrific memories of trying to make this work for our guild in EQ.

It might be because EQ had a primitive Raid interface or because EQ was buggy. I still wake up a night sweating hearing:

"OK everyone, the raid is bugged everyone disband and I'll invite"
"45 invites later.."
"Um, I didn't get invite and I'm kicked from the zone"
"Me too!"

etc etc

I want to add my yes vote to the idea of the 20% buffer, but can anyone else from EQ remember why this idea was bad in practice (excluding the bugs above).

 

Grogzor

But raid guilds do break up....all the time, all it takes is a spark to start drama and then it spreads like wildfire. For example, Vael and the Twin Emps back in the day, those were raid killers, they literally broke apart guilds.

There is a difference in Slowing Content by adding trash or requiring a certain amount of gear and attunements. Vanilla WoW did not require every guild to kill Nefarian before moving on to AQ40 and Naxx. Why is that? Because the instances were spread out they didn't need to worry about it. BT and Mount Hyjal have been out for months, Blizzard doesn't need to worry about it anymore.

Alot of guilds I have noticed don't like the lack of legitamacy to their success. Every single Server Forum has a progression thread, how many guilds out there do you think will want to be the only one that still has Vashj and Kael not in bold?

You are now arguing about the larger scale of pacing and content difficulty which has its own thread. This is about Attunements and Recruitment. But tell me, how would it hurt this game if Blizzard removed the attunement requirements to BT and Mount Hyjal tomorrow? Would hundreds of guilds be screaming in the street a month from now that they have no more new content to consume? Or do you think they would be happy they can actually kill more bosses then if they had to wait 3-4 weeks to figure out Kael?

Which in the end serves what? Guilds that can't get past Kael or Vashj will just pay the guilds who have reached the end of content to start running their characters through to get attuned. Congratulations, you have beaten the game, now you can make thousands of gold getting other guilds to where you are.

 

songster

Other way round makes more sense. Have a summoning stone inside the instance which only attuned people are allowed to click on. If 20 people click on it, they can summon someone into the instance. That means you have to get your 20 attuned people through the gate before you can start getting non-attuned people in.

On top of that, I'd say that anyone who's present at a kill of the end boss should get attunement, period. Sod single-drop scrolls: if you're able to be there to kill the guy, you deserve attunement.

 

sovelis41

I'll say it again, and I might be eating my words in a couple weeks, but if the Hyjal attunement is removed before we kill Kael, I will be very upset. Obviously that is a selfish comment that does not take into account the "good of the game." but that will be my personal reaction.

"So just keep working on Kael and kill him before moving on to Hyjal!" I'll preempt this question by saying that it's going to be very hard to convince people to come and continue spending money/time wiping to Kael when there is basically 6 bosses waiting to be killed that we are certainly capable of taking down. If it were up to me, I'd say "eff kael" and go to Hyjal and BT. That's where the real end game is at this point. The satisfaction of defeating Kael and unlocking another tier of content would be nearly gone.

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

 

Grogzor

You said it yourself, it would be hard for you to convince the rest of your guild to stay on Kael...I guess they don't consider him as fun and rewarding as you do and I bet a lot of people share that mentality.

But how can you be dissapointed if they remove the attunement to BT and MH if you admit that you are willing to say "'eff kael' and go to Hyjal and BT". Principles only matter when they are hard to stand by.

 

sovelis41

I guess I'll eat my slightly double-talking words, and simplify it to: I want to complete the attunement legitimately. Killing Kael'thas after that would be a big accomplishment, but would mean a lot less in the grand scheme of things as another distinction between guilds has been removed. The more I mull over it, the more I can't really decide what I would do/what my reaction would be if tomorrow the attunement to Hyjal was suddenly gone.

Like Tigole says (pretty sure it was him), it's every raiders dream is for their guild to beat all the content and for every other guild to be months behind.

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

 

Ralask

This topic has been covered to death but for complete game balance attunments is the only way to go. You can't have open attunements and balance the bosses around gear anymore. If you did you would have to have huge gear gaps and I think the game is better without them.

You cant have bosses like Azgalor dropping BT or Hyjal scrolls because people would abuse that system by making gold off of it which is not the intended use.

You cant just attune guilds because guilds break up and people switch guilds all the time.

Kael is harder than most of BT/Hyjal, long attunements stink, backflagging people is boring but that is what has to be done to progress a guild now. There has to be some sort of time sink with progression, it used to be consumables now it is attunements. I would much rather run people through TK/SSC then farm thousands of pots, food buffs and elixirs.

 

Grogzor

What caused the gear gaps of Vanilla wow was there was 1, only 1, there was only 1 way to progress your character - Raiding. Blizzard has since added alternate paths to progression even though they could use some work - like the harder heroics should have higher ilevels then the easier ones.

When guilds were able to go in to Naxx and kill Razuvious and Anub before killing Twin Emps, that did not upset the balance of the game at all. The only thing that these forms of attunements cause is a further stratification of the player base.

In fact, this causes more gear problems, all those guilds in BT and MH have gear far and beyond what drops in SSC and TK and their average ilevel of gear goes up in leaps and bounds compared to the guilds banging their heads against Kael or Vashj.