Nezralix

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a "casual player" in the strictest sense, in that I play quite a bit. However, I don’t raid any 25-mans. On my realm, with my schedule it really isn’t possible for me to raid actively (a bit more on that later). I have experience killing everything in Karazhan, and a small bit on everything prior to Tempest Keep, but that’s the extent of it. My closest acquaintances in WoW are on a similar or less-progressed level, and those friends of mine who progressed more deeply into the TBC raiding game have largely quit. So I’m clearly sympathetic to the crowd that doesn’t raid, and this post does originate from my personal issues with the raid game. I do consider the issues I’m about to raise to be pertinent to casual and hardcore players alike, in spite of my bias.

It is my belief that the current raid game requires too great a time investment for a basic or minimal level of participation. My evidence for this is somewhat anecdotal, but I’m confident that it’s an experience that others players can relate to. On my server, practically every Horde raiding guild with any progress past Karazhan explicitly lists raid times from 7:30pm to midnight, with a very small variation (i.e. from 7:00pm to 8:00pm in the start time), and the most-progressed Horde guild demands an additional number of hours beyond that. This represents an average expectation of 4.0+ contiguous hours spent in a raid instance, with attendance expectations typically at or exceeding 4 nights a week.

When I refer to a “basic or minimal level of participation”, I mean to point out that this block of time represents essentially a minimum expectation for many guilds participating in 25-man raiding. In the common scenario for anyone wishing to raid, it is not possible to commit less than 4 hours in a sitting to the activity of raiding (even if not all of that time is used in every scheduled raid). Setting aside comparisons to *overall* time investment for competing interests in WoW, namely PvP and 5-mans, it’s clear that the minimum *contiguous* time investment is much lower in those alternate. You expect to be done with a given Heroic instance in two hours. You expect to complete your set of Arena games in two hours, since beyond that it’s probably rather common to lose the focus required to compete with other high-ranked Arena teams. Raiding has settled on per-sitting time investment of four hours, and I’ve observed this as far back as my time in Molten Core. While a very fast run of many large raid instances can be accomplished in two hours or less, it’s just much more common for the average guild (i.e. not over-geared) to complete one with negligible wipes in the area of three hours, or an intentionally fast run in two hours or so, or a typical, imperfect run in some amount greater than three four hours. Although Blizzard has been fairly silent on how quickly they expect players to be able to clear instances, presumably the expectation of 4.0+ hour time investment is based at least partly on this trend.

Clearly, this expectation is substantially self-governed by the playerbase. Although raids certainly work within the confines put forth by Blizzard, there are few implicit suggestions or restrictions on how much time a raid should invest (although there are some). My question essentially boils down to: How difficult would it be for Blizzard to shift this “minimum time expectation” for the average guild into something smaller than it currently is? To what degree is it dictated by players, versus dictated by the nature of raiding? Is it possible for Blizzard to shift raids into a two-hour or three-hour block, more similar to what players expect to spend in other areas of the game? And would players prefer it if they were able to do that?

There is no question that raiding is a time-consuming endeavor from start to finish. A quick enumeration of activities that take some non-negligible amount of time includes some of the following:

• Marshaling and summoning players before the raid begins. This certainly depends on how punctual players are, and can additionally depend on whether the right classes are available at raid time, waiting on key players, people forgetting key reagents or items, and so on.
• Clearing trash monsters in preparation for a boss attempt, which may sometimes proceed more slowly due to the raid composition for the particular type of trash (i.e. AoE packs, or crowd control availability).
• Discussing boss strategies, assigning roles, or possibly even lecturing the raid for bad behavior / poor performance.
• Attempting a boss encounter.
• Assigning loot. This can be a sticky subject if there’s a great deal of contention for an item, or complicated mechanisms for deciding priorities.
• Refresh time after wipes, including travel time to the wipe point followed by buffing (which is often restricted by the last player to reach the wipe point, as buffing is less efficient if not done to every potential buff recipient at once).
• Finding and summoning replacements for players who have to leave early.

These are major considerations, and can certainly be done more efficiently with the right approach, but other times are just unavoidable time losses. And they must be accomplished within the boundaries of existing pacing mechanisms:

• Trash monster respawn and clearing times. However, these are typically linked to a single boss, and don’t affect the overall raid time investment if steady progress is being made.
• Length of time required to reach the wipe point.
• Encouragement for faster clears (i.e. the Zul’Aman style time-based rewards). For many players, a faster clear is not a reward in itself.
• The number of bosses in the instance, and the length of time required by each.

This is at least a partial set of the reasons why raids have settled on the time expectations that they have. Blizzard has strong control over some of them, and very limited control over others. However, for better or worse, this average time requirement has a negative impact on many players with more restrictive schedules, who are not affected in the same way by endeavors in the game with smaller minimum requirements, and Blizzard has at least some control over all of these factors.

One question that needs to be asked: Is this really a problem? There’s a very stark barrier of time commitment between raiding and non-raiding, and it has stratified players who are capable of participating and not capable of participating, which has only been mitigated to a questionable extent by Arenas. It doesn’t matter how much time you put into the game; if you can’t offer the large minimum contiguous block of hours to the game, then you typically won't be able to find a successful raiding guild, and essentially have no path to the tangible PvE progression route (a route that heroics simply don’t offer, as they’re all basically on the same tier of difficulty). However, to many players this can be justified by the difficulty of raid content and the difficulty of raid organization; if players can’t put in the time, then they may also lack the motivation to succeed in difficult content anyway.

Another question that arises from that is: Would any change that Blizzard attempts to make to the average time investment of raids effect any positive difference? As noted previously, the current time investment model is player-enforced, if not entirely player-created. If individual raids can be completed in one hour (a highly implausible prospect, of course), then would players simply put in four hours to complete four of them? Wouldn’t this still penalize lesser-progressed guilds, without necessarily giving them more opportunity to raid? Couldn’t a shorter, more streamlined raid just drive up the intensity level to the point where it’s uncomfortable for raiders? Would smaller units negatively harm the quality of raid instances, potentially trivializing their completion (albeit inadvertently)? Is it even worth trying to reduce the time investment, if weaker guilds are always going to take much more time than more organized, more skilled, and better geared ones? Would a smaller unit of raiding make it less worthwhile to go through the overhead of setting up a raid in the first place?

These aren’t easy questions to answer, but I’d say they’re worth considering anyway, and I'm sure some players on this board have good insights into them. The essential question is whether it’s even possible for Blizzard to effectively break the raiding game down into smaller, more distinct units in such a way that they can encourage more casual or more time-sensitive raiding guilds to feel comfortable making slower progress in them, and without feeling that they're wasting too much time just getting a raid together. What mechanisms would they use to accomplish this? Would anyone care that they did it, or would they continue to ask essentially the largest amount of time that they can out of players in hopes of getting that much more progression time? And most importantly, would it improve the game?

 

Agrimat

That's a long post.

I'm afraid you're going to get a lot of responses along the lines of "Well, my guild does this, and..." so let me be the first. My guild raids nine hours a week (3 days of 3 hours) and we're working on Kael'thas, so it's definitely possible to raid effectively without a huge time commitment. It's not Blizzard's responsibility to break it down - it's players'.

If I could make one request to Blizzard, it would be for fewer trash packs. Figuring out trash is interesting, but once you know how to do it, there's little danger to it, and making you do 8 packs instead of, say, 4 just adds time to a raid.

 

Groglox

Spacing content out more is a good way to do it, so there is a noticable shift between progression time and farm time. I know there are a lot of guilds who have pretty much been in non-stop progression mode since start of BC.

 

PSGarak

One question to ask is, in the current raid content, if you were to split the four-hour blocks into two-hour blocks, would it take twice as many? There is a matter that contiguity is a matter of choice, not design. It's hard to coordinate the schedules of 25 people, even a self-selecting group of 25 people, and it's generally accepted that you can get them all out there only a few days a week, and thus you need to push further on those few days. Even a 2-hour raid would probably destroy any one person's ability to do any other social activity of note that note, so people tend to want to make the most in WoW of the night they're dedicating to WoW.
I'm sure there are definitely cases where doing four-hour chunks is preferable. It's a question of how modular the instance is. To take an old-ass example, in MC if you kept going after Garr, you pretty much were going the entire rest of the instance, or else you would have to double-clear Pain Packs that week. Modern instances tend to be more forgiving, in that all the trash before a boss is linked to a boss. Not all of the modules are equitable, though.

I don't know if ZA is a plan for raid instances in general in the future, or just for "casual" 10-man instances, but it favors less-than-four-hour completion, with a far smaller proportion of trash and a heavier instance on varied and attentive fights rather than mechanical threshing through to the next point of interest. There's also an element here of how much easier an instance gets once it's on farm status, and whether the trash time investment should be balanced for farming, or for learning.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

opheliac

Well, I think it would be less time-consuming with the raid-preparation if the raiders want to do it fast. Too much of them are too lazy just to place their character in front of the instance.

My last guild has their raids about 6pm to 11pm on wednesday & thursday, 5pm to all bosses left defeated on sunday. This just includes Mt. Hyjal and Black Temple.

The trash in all TBC raid instances was a few times harder when we had the first raids in there. Also the trash had a faster respawn-time. I'm sure many of the guys here remember this wicked time but in my opinion the players were far more concentrated on this trash because we had to clean it fast to have more attempts on the new bosses.

It's all about concentration and I like the concept of time-based things like in Zul'Aman because it maybe motivates the players to clear the instance in a decent amount of time. It would be nice if Blizzard integrates some rewards for clearing the 25-man raids, too, if they clear it in a few hours (which is possible if all raiders are concentrated). But for me it's normally enough motivation to have more hours in my real-life that I may spend in an other thing, isn't it? :P

 

Xerophyte

I was about to state something about how such a change could well make the instances lose their epic feel and cheapen the experience ... then I realised I'd sound like the folks who made dread pronouncements amounting to the same thing for the 40 > 25 change and were quite wrong.

Besides all that, I'm not sure I agree with your premise that long, contiguous raids are something encouraged in the game's design. Karazhan can be naturally divided into various combinations of Attumen > Side Entrance, Side Entrance > Aran, Aran > Prince which at most levels of progress is divisible into handy 2-hour segments. On your first couple of raids you might barely clear Opera in that time but Kara has enough alternate entrances to not necessitate any full clears for efficiency. In the 25 man game both Gruul's & Maggie's seem designed for 2 hour clears and Tempest Keep is also handily done in a similar timespan. The first instance to seriously reward alloting a larger chunk seems to be SSC which gives good efficiency gains from offing Leo, Moro & FLK in one go and as such isn't easily split into 2-hour segments.

Overall I think the tendency of most raid groups to go for 4 hour is more often a reflection of player preferences than a reflection of the game's design. I may be projecting but at least personally I'd consider my evening about equally devoured by a raid from 20 - 22 as one from 20-24 and so I'd rather divide my raids into 4 hour segments. They fit equally well with my schedule and allow me to get more raid content done without having to dedicate quite so many evenings to wow.

 

Barraind

I'd argue it isnt an issue, or isnt an issue that is fixable if you want a healthy amount of content.

I've been in guilds raiding top end content in games where my total time played in and preparing for raids was substantially less than what my WoW guild needed to struggle through the midsection of AQ40 pre-expansion.

If you want zones with flavor, zones with a challenge, then you're going to get zones that require you to spend a decent amount of time to learn. Once you learn it, hey, clear the top few tiers of content in 3 days and call it a week.


This is probably (I have no concrete proof, just experience) completely and totally false. Players want to do things faster, because it means they can spend time doing other things, in game or out. I personally would get mydaily workout in after raid times, finishing a zone at 10 was substantially different than finishing at 11 or 12. It was the same for pretty much everyone, in any of the guilds.



As to assigning loot and forming strats, this is stuff that you, the player, or the guild, should be able to do quickly, and should NOT be a factor of how your raid moves. I remember anguish clears in EQ where someone would be running from ture's room to Harrower (about 1/3 of the zone) to loot the piece because the raid didnt stop. That was one reason we cleared the majority of 3 expansions worth of content (in WoW terms: BT + Hyjal + Mag + Gruul + TK + a harder Mag - some trash) in 1 sitting on a sunday, we just didnt stop for things we didnt have to stop for. It was more or less nonstop pulling, boss kill, repeat, and do loot as we went.


Quite honestly, players create a lot of the time issues in raids. The vast majority of guilds suck at streamlining the arrive/buff/pull to boss process, and that alone wastes the most time. Following that closely is res/rebuff. If your time between pulls/attempts on the majority of content is 20 minutes, you should really evaluate that, for example.

 

Galred

In most cases I don't think that Blizzard can really force guilds to spend less time raiding, though having 25-man instances which could be cleared by decent-but-not-Nihilum/Forte/D&T/rock stars in 2 to 3 hours would definitely allow for more players to experience endgame raiding.

However, the biggest change which would help reduce overall time investment is trash which stays D-E-D dead. Having to re-clear trash, even epic-dropping rep-giving trash, is just too punitive in exchange for a shorter raid. If trash were to stay dead, players with less time to invest could just 'come back tomorrow'.

There's a thread on here somewhere which mentions that the world-first guilds actually spend LESS total time raiding, due to spending an excessive amount of time up front to defeat encounters but making up for it later with a minimal raid schedule for farm content. And even with changes from Blizzard, a dedicated group of players spending more time on an encounter is going to produce faster results (assuming the group doesn't get burnt out).

In conclusion, I don't really think there's a way to reduce the contiguous time needed by raid guilds without radical redesign of endgame raiding by Blizzard.

 

Mirajj

Well, from what I've seen, there is so MUCH to do, that you spend a lot more time doing it. As someone else mentioned, they've been "progressing" since TBC launched. For the majority of the raiding class (I realize, that means few folks here) there's always at least 2 instances they feel they 'should' be working on. There's no time to take a break and say "We got this guys, let's skip SSC this week."

Everyone wants to be in BT and/or Hyjal. So you push and push and push to master content faster so you can move to harder stuff faster. So you raid longer, and you raid more. In the end, you might just catch up in time for them to launch something new.

I like how WoW classic spaced it. You'd been farming for a bit before the next zone was released. You had a chance to really learn and enjoy a zone before 'blowing through it' for the next latest greatest.

Now, it's "Hurry and kill Vashj so we can get to Illidan!" I'm kind of in the same situation as the OP. Due to a change in work schedule and the time difference between my server and myself, I find myself not really able to raid. I can't go to any of the 'big' guilds, as I am at work when they start, and the folks I normally run with are, pretty much, falling apart.

I think that part of the problem is that the instances have so few bosses in them, as well. With the 40man instances (and Karazhan) there are very good "first night" stopping points. With the TBC instances, it feels like you SHOULD have them all down in one night, so you rush, making more mistakes, and costing more time.

~Not all who wander are lost~

 

Spazmo

I would just love to see a bit of flexibility with instance reset timers.

My guild has been working on (read: trapped in) SSC for months. We raid 3 nights a week, 3 hours a night. Due to realm difficulties in recruitment, some attendance issues and the loss of key raiders along the way we're continuously challenged to even get to Vashj let alone get a night of attempts with a good raid makeup.

Allowing guilds to extend their raid instance reset timers would allow time-limited guilds the extra practice on bosses that are further into the instance. It would actually slow the rate of item accumulation from earlier bosses, so surely it wouldn't unbalance things. Unfortunately I doubt it will happen.

 

Nezralix

That schedule is certainly commendable, but at least using my realm as a reference, it's very uncommon. If three-hour raid guilds were more common, I think you'd double the number of people at least attempting to get involved in 25-man raids. It becomes more of an evening activity than some sort "oh crap I have to hurry up and skip dinner because my raid is starting, and I'll have to raid until I go to sleep" ordeal, once you get away from the 4.5 hour raids that so many average guilds seem to gravitate towards (and every guild I've been in has been average, even though I consider myself a pretty good player).

I think Blizzard is pretty set on trash clears being the length they are, although they could afford to thin it out a bit. I think the setup and refresh time is where they can really afford to streamline things. Reduced mana costs on group buffs, while making them not usable in combat so as to prevent spamming them in PvP contexts. Possibly a "summon raid" option that lets you summon the entire raid to the stone, with an expiration timer of 5 minutes instead of 2. Placing the summoning stone inside the instance would be nice too, to prevent those situations where two or three players go to summon someone and end up getting ganked for ten minutes. It's really those little things that add up. Amongst friends of mine who've decided not to raid, the most annoying thing to them is the large time commitment, and the second most annoying thing is how much time they just sit around doing nothing.

If they can find remedies to these incredibly annoying delays, then they've done raiders a big favor. If it means special facilities for raid groups and zones, then I'm inclined to go support that. If you have special methods for summoning raid replacements directly to your group, then I support that too.

I really hope their experiment there works well. I'd love to see people really get involved in the time-sensitive aspect. As people have stated in other threads, a way to encourage people to not drag their asses through everything that isn't a boss fight is long overdue.

There are two major issues that stand as barriers to splitting up most instances. The first is loot. Typically, the core loot items (helm, chest, legs, weapons) drop from the latter segment of an instance, to the point where you have no shot at the stuff you really want the most unless you clear the earlier segment. Molten Core was the most hilarious example, where people cleared every boss in it just for a shot at an item off of Rag. Relatively few people want to run an instance for a new pair of bracers.

The second (and related) issue is that a failure to clear an instance in one day means that you're either killing your next day's attempts on whatever content you do, or giving up on probably the best loot in the previous instance. In part due to the setup and refresh times mentioned earlier.

 

Nezralix

Well, that's actually a good point too. I can see why they want to prevent fast loot acquisition, but being able to decide whether or not to hold onto an instance would be pretty beneficial.

 

Linnet

I was thinking this also. This is a bit off-beat but given that it's under player control as to how long raids are, one other approach would be to look at how guild recruiting/advertising could be helped in game. I bet there are a lot of people who would love to find a raid guild that fitted their times better, but the time it would take to filter through forums and figure that out is pretty punitive.

What Blizz need to do is to make it easier for people to find others/guilds who fit their needs. I noticed when I checked out the EQ2 trial that there was a tab in game where guilds who were recruiting could lay out their pitch, say what classes they wanted, and who to contact in game. There's no real reason that you couldn't do this, and have the list searchable by server type, class required, raiding times (for raid guilds). With the number of people playing, there has to be enough to support the lesser raid time model.

 

Barraind

I honestly do not know why instance timers cannot be set up o reset 6days 22hours after the first loot dropping mob (boss, miniboss with guaranteed loot, ect. Basically, anything that currently saves you to an instance) inside them has died, instead of every tuesday. This used to be the case before the huge cascading cries (many of which werent actually cascading in the first place), and is the way it is handled in other games (which makes for a slightly more elegant system).

I think the current system is set to Tuesday because its just easy to do everything in one swoop, having a true 7day setup would never work out worse.

As for extending... thats a different bag. You start reaching the areas of "if you cant do it in a week, you need the reclear gear/experience anyway".

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

We've been trying to run a 2-day-a-week / 3-4-hour-a-night group. It's difficult to make progress; the only way you can really do it is to aggressively drop content. You farm the recent bosses (in our case Mag, Hydross and Lurker) and try and get time for attempts on the new ones (Tidewalker). We've killed VR and Gruul, but there just isn't time to farm them.

Clearly we're limited by self-imposed factors; we rarely start on time, we take too long to res and buff, and we take too long to get subs in. I'm not suggesting that Blizzard must alter the game for casual raids like ours. If they wanted to, then there's a few things that I think could help. The least important thing to address is the actual difficulty of a given fight; I've not see a boss yet which has felt out of place for our raid's gear and ability (we started 25-man raiding just as 2.1 hit).

• Downtime reduction. It can take 5-10 minutes to recover from a wipe, and the less progressed/organised groups are naturally more likely to wipe. If we halved our downtime we'd get an extra 15-30 minutes in a given night (and we raid for less than most groups). Adding options like raid-wide versions of common buffs and a mass resurrection type spell would go a decent way to reducing this.
  
• Not spreading the instances out. I like the idea of shortr instances, but currently the 5 easiest BC bosses are spread out in 4 different dungeons. Taking breaks during an instance is a good idea, but these are enforced breaks, and often slow up valuable momentum.
  
• Trash. I still feel there's too much of it in a few places. It's necessary for pacing, but beyond a certain point it feels tedious and unnecessary, especially in situations like Aran/Illhoof or Ouro/Cthun. While there might be the same boss : trash ratio as elsewhere, it doesn't feel that way to the player. Walking into VR's room, seeing the boss, and knowing that you've got another 15+ minutes of clearing which is as likely to wipe you as the big robot in the corner isn't fun.

 

epiphenom

I'm not sure about that. I'd attribute the dearth of 3-hour-a-night guilds to the likelihood that anyone with a three-hour block to schedule to a contiguous task probably also has four and a half hours. My experience suggests to me that instead of an even distribution of availabilities (ranging presumably from "a few minutes" to "six or more hours") the majority of the player base tends to fall into large groupings, two of the larger ones being "four hours or more" and "under an hour". Three-hour-a-night guilds are looking for people in the category of "up to three hours available in one block but not four", which is a fairly narrow category.

 

Treibh

The T4 25-mans are very short and the T5 25-mans are possible in 3 hours. I know because we've done it, and we only raid 12 hours a week (3 hours x 4 days). We're far from alone - sure guilds that raid 20+ hours a week are more common, but there are many many guilds out there doing T5 or T6 content on 3 hour raid nights three or four times a week.

Blizzard is not forcing anyone in to 4 or 5 hour raid nights for 5 or 6 nights a week. There is nothing inherent in the design of the game that requires this time commitment. You're not going to miss out on anything by putting in less time - our guild will most likely be able to consume most if not all of the TBC raiding content before WotLK comes out. People who relax and realize that it's not a race and that they have nothing to prove (i.e. Nihilum killed everything months ago) can still raid the 25-man endgame with less time invested and at a correspondingly slower pace.

 

Whiteknight

Personally I'd value any positive changes that would reduce the time not actually playing the game - the prep time.

I've really like the trend in the new 25-man dungeons that places vendors inside the dungeon. BT in particular is well done. Even when you're working on Illidan, you can simply port half way, buy reagents, repair and then port up to the last room for the boss. This saves an immense amount of wasted time running back, running out of candles/repair bots/w/e.

Travel time to dungeons really costs too. The BT neck is a fantastic idea for reducing this time.
Travel time when dead is an important concept too - BT/Hyjal and TK all have graveyards really close to the dungeon. SSC not so well designed - lots of time is wasted running back in the cases where you wipe in non-recoverable situations.

If there's two things I could change about Hyjal, it would be to introduce a similar teleport-item-reward to port to CoT. And the ability to zone out of the dungeon without killing yourself. Not being able to zone out is an insane waste of time, for such a trivial thing. It makes swapping folk in and out a lot harder than it could be. An item to port you to CoT would solve this problem too.
Perhaps a little too 'out-there' but if your hearthstone was similar to your key-bag and you got a new destination for every raid dungeon you defeated, I'd be pretty happy.

I like the winged approach to dungeons for saving time. For example, Hyjal has portals into the 3 different camps - saves pointless running around.
I really liked Naxx's layout where you could choose which part of the dungeon to go to. You can save time by picking the wing which best suits your raid group makeup that day.


Some stuff could be done to make loot distribution easier, or more clear-cut. The hardest items to distribute are the ones that are desired by most people. Tier set tokens are usually needed by 1/3 of your raid per token. The Kael quest item is difficult to distribute. Making items more specific and expecting more to rot makes distribution faster, but goes counter to a lot of the progress we've seen in boss loot table itemization which counters waste. Still I think there's some middleground to be had - better attention to how raids are actually constructed and itemization that closer matches what people typically need - e.g. more +dmg/heal weapons, less MS weapons. If Bliz simply doubled the number of caster weapon drops, handing out weapons would be a lot less timeconsuming and more closely balanced considering the number of casters vs 2-hand melee in raids.


Illidari marks are a fantastic idea for saving time. I hate the amount of time we waste farming gold for repairs. Dropping consumable tokens in dungeons is a fantastic trend and I think bliz should really push the idea further. I'd like to see them add things like herb nodes in Hyjal, Sporefish/Crawdad fishing nodes in SSC, etc. I'd like to see the death penalty reduced to 5% durability loss or removed entirely. 100g in repairs for a single wipe night is a lot of time spent farming to recover those losses. In the same vein, taking durability loss on your shield for blocking or your weapon for hitting should probably be toned down. Our prot pally keeps 2 shields for Hyjal mainly because his shield literally breaks from full durability half way through the dungeon if we don't wipe.

Perma-dead trash is also a nice touch. I know bliz really likes their respawning trash as a pacing tool, but if some of it stayed dead like the post emps trash in AQ40 that'd be a fairly big time (and morale) saver when learning the dungeon.



My comments aren't focused on the length of time people raid, because I do think that's a function of players' schedules. However I do think a lot could be done to increase the enjoyment of the raid game by reducing, toning-down or eliminating those elements that detract from the actual play time in the dungeon.

 

songster

The issue is the 2 hr trash respawn timer coupled with the length of trash clears. Say the trash clear takes 30 minutes or so to the first boss. You then have two hours to work on it (assuming you have wipe recovery in place), making a 2h30 raid in total. When the trash respawns, it'll take another 30 minutes to clear, putting you up to 3hrs. You then get uninterrupted boss-time for another couple of hours. So, raids of ~2h30 or 5h "work". A 3hr30 raid means you get to do double the trash clearing and get almost no more practice on the boss - which is why they just don't happen.

Now, this only really applies to the first boss of the night - as soon as you can move past one boss and onto a second within the same evening, the timer shifts, because some trash doesn't respawn. However, for the all-important progression nights, you're always going to be zoning in, clearing trash, then going straight up against a new boss until the respawn gets you.

So the choice is really between a 2h30 raid or a 5h raid. For a lot of raiders, 2h30 actually isn't long enough. 5h is pushing it for me personally - my concentration's shot by the end of it. Some more creative options on trash respawn would be very welcome.

Example:

1) Naxx model. Trash doesn't respawn until a soft reset.

2) Stuff Stays Dead. No respawns until the hard reset.

3) Boss pull counters. Blizzard hasn't tried this, but I don't see any reason in principle why they couldn't set it up to allow you 10 (or 20, or...) pulls on any given boss before the trash respawns. That would mean it is worth clearing the trash at the end of a raid, since it'll allow 10 clear pulls of the boss on your next raid night.


Most complex, but also most tunable (and also most immersive, I guess) would be staggered respawns. That is, some trash respawns after a given time, but the rest stays dead until a soft reset, or even a hard reset. You could have roaming singletons on a 1hr timer, one or two packs on a 2hr timer, one tougher pack which respawns at the soft reset and a "miniboss" pack with guaranteed BoE / vortexes which respawns at the hard reset.

 

Kink

Well, the entire first post is basically stating that guilds commit to 4hrs minimum a night. As the second post states you will get a lot of my guild does... type replies.

So let me say... my guild raids 3 hours a night. We can now clear every instance, except BT which we are still working on, in a single night. SSC, TK, MH all are clearable in 3 hours. We have no required attendance % either on the members.

I feel we have been this successful thanks to the effort put forward by our officers and GM. If people start to slack off raiding a bit, we just recruit people to fill in the holes. Also even though we only raid 3 hours a night, everyone brings their "A" game.

And as people have said, the 2 hour trash clear was a problem for us, but only on one fight: Kael'thas. Vashj had no trash, and it took us a week. Archimonde took 2 full raid days, RoS also 2 raid days. So it is definately possible for a guild to raid less and progress but it is just less commonly accepted.

My advice is to check cross server if you want to raid but do not want to commit 4 hours a night to it.

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

 

Jayde

Our guild raids 4 nights a week and has for around 2 years, we typically do 7:30pm-11pm on weeknights, and 4pm-9pm with a 30 minute break on Sundays. We occasionally go later on weeknights to 11:30-11:45 if we're working on something specific or close to a kill.

On average, we're raiding around 15 hours a week or so, give or take. We don't have a strict attendence policy but generally presume people will raid at least 3 of the 4 nights per week typically. (Let's say 11 hours.)

Even though we had a late start on things, we managed to get into middle-Naxx pre-TBC, and at the moment we're 5 bosses into Hyjal/BT after killing Kael a couple weeks ago.

So, at least from my perspective, the raid scene currently does support some pretty resonable progression curves from a more "casual" schedule--at least casual when compared to the highest end of things.

From my experience, I suppose I do agree with the "4 hour" mark being typically what is needed to make a productive raid work. We generally use 3 1/2, but expect people to be ready quite quickly. We also occasionally push to the 4-4 1/2 hour mark when it's needed, as it sometimes is. However, stuff like Gruul and Magtheridon aren't nearly so bad, and you can make some progress on bosses with less time.

I would say that in the current 25-mans, you're probably going to want at least 3 hours though--that being, time to clear trash and time to work on the boss until the trash reset.

Personally, I hate trash respawn...then again, I know that if they removed them they would probably make the trash a lot more hellish than it is now. So, I'm not sure which I prefer. I know guilds who have stuff on farm much prefer the current method--as weenie trash they won't ever have to deal with respawns for is preferable to uber trash they will have to clear just as often--although I would guess that the BWL method of handling trash is better for guilds trying to learn bosses they are struggling with.

Also, as others have noted, the further you progress the more time you have to free up to work on further content. Sure, it's easy to spent a short period of time on Lurker...but pressing forward to Morogrim? Then Karathress? Vashj? Each time you progress in a single instance, you increase the amount of time it takes to clear up to your present position. I'm not sure there is a good way around this, as allowing too much flexibility with raid resets would really make it trivial for some guilds to progress. However, let it be noted that this goes away as you learn how to farm, so it's a bit of a up-and-down hump you have to get over--start with minimal time investment, push towards the middle to get some of the further in bosses down, reduce down to minimal time investment as you get things on "farm." As the post above me states, SSC/TK are clearable in < 3 hours once you have them down.

As an example for this, we hopped into Black Temple on the last raid night of the week after killing Kag'rogal in Hyjal. We killed Naj'entus with a bit of work, then killed Supremus quite easily. After that, it was very very late and we really didn't have time to do anything else. However, with "flexible" resets, we could have hopped over to Shade of Akama on Wed. instead of starting over with our clear pattern...and probably have an additional 2 days in BT starting at Akama+. Would that be nice? Sure. Would it mean we cleared BT faster? Absolutely. Is this what Blizzard wants? I doubt it. Resets are a way to control progression as much as they are to control loot distribution.

 

Golias

I agree however that the basic requirements for satisfactory raiding are quite hard to meet and do not favor competitive raiding. I'll define "satisfactory raiding" as the feeling of playing in a generally competent team, with reasonable expectations of experiencing all the end-game content.

Vontre posted on BB forums that guilds being able to put as many hours they want on a raid does not allow for a competitive metric:

I know there are exceptions to this scenario, but it is generally accurate. The fact is, while you can be on a guild that raids much less and still see the end-game content, you will never experience things while their buzz and freshness is at their peak. And you/your guild can be just as competent.

We can for instance compare raiding to a competitive sport, even if not high competition. While doing athletics in my youth I used to practice around 5 times a week, 2 or 3 hours a day. So this would be 15 hours a week, maybe add 5 more with official competitions. I feel this is already a good comparison basis for competitive raiding. My current guild raids 6 times a week for 4 hours. With preparation time this is around 30 hours dedicated for raiding a week. It is double the time I spent on a competitive sport, to be part of the 500 best guilds in the world. I'm sure some guilds have killed Illidian raiding 4 or even 3 times a week, but those are a small minority.

So I'd argue 15 to 20 hours, including raid preparations, would be a good goal for raiding time expectations. How could this be done?

* Some people mentioned repairs/reagents on instances, bosses less spread, etc etc. This is a non drastic way to go at it, and blizzard is on it. The downside is that it is the slowest kind of change. The way to improve is simply have instances provide the items you need to farm for raids. Mobs dropping herbs or pots, maybe daiy (weekly?) quests inside raids could be the way to go.

* Longer reset timers. More time during a reset would allow a break for those that have cleared the content, and less farming for the others. Would 2 weeks be reasonable for 25 men content?

* Limit the time you can spend in an instance. For instance, the moment you get saved you get a 20 or 15 hour counter. You can choose how many hours a session you want to spend, but you cannot exceed that time on that ID. This would stimulate competitive raiding, as all would have the same preparation time. This is a very radical idea, and its side effects would need to be considered/debated.

* Reward faster learning of bosses. Like X boss killed in less than Y resets give an extra piece of loot, or gives special items.

All in all, the final goal would be that end guilds are mature groups of people that want to raid seriously but have time limitations. It's to ensure the actual best players have the chance to raid. I think the more experienced a raider is, the more he wishes for a great guild that raids less. Going back to quoting Vontre, this is the situation we should avoid:

 

Nezralix

I have to thoroughly disagree with this statement. Starting at 9:00 and going to midnight is much different from starting at 7:30. One gives you enough time after getting off of work to take care of any responsibilities you might have, and the other doesn't. At least in my experience.

I just think you'd find a lot more people interested in raiding if it were normal to complete a single unit of raiding in under three hours, and having more units to work through.

 

Uglesh

Without going into too much detail, whats being argued is covered at length in previous threads about "harcore vs casual".

I know what the OP is saying as the guilds I have been in have largely had the same issues. But as someone pointed out, these aren't so much "content" issues as they are player created.

Ask yourself
- do we start on-time (or even early)
- has everyone spent some time researching the new content (or does the leader have to hand walk everyone for each Mob)
- are all your raiders bringing full consumables
- do all your Buffer's know their assignments and never have to be asked for something
- are your wipes 15+ minutes because people go AFK waiting for a rez
**Edit**
I would bet that if you added these up, the "average" casual guild wastes 25% of their potential time. Take SSC as an example (2 hr trash repops). I was recently helping a guild learn Lurker and I think this is EXACTLY what happens to most casual guilds. First, raid was 30 minutes late starting. We had cleared trash to Lurker in about 35 min. Guild leader started explaining fight. First attempt was at 50 min. Quick wipe. Regroup and explain. Next attempt 1 hr 10 min. (See whats happening?) Another couple attempts and someone has connection issues. At 1 hr 40min we have to look for another healer. New healer comes in just for long enough for us to explain the fight and get ONE more attempt. In total, 2.5 hrs and only 5 attempts on the Boss.

Raiding can very easily be fit into smaller times, but you need to find 25 people who feel the same way... THATS THE PROBLEM!! This board seems to contain an incredible number of people who "get it", but its very unrepresentative of the WoW population as a whole.

*** Edit ***

If you think back to Pre-BC, the 40 man raids were nice because we have more class flexibility and the instances didn't require 40 people to be present. As a result, more casual guilds we able to have people flow in and out of the raid while still moving forward. This was a huge help in my guild as our player base spanned 12 hrs of time zones.
25 mans on the other hand require all 25 to be present and attentive in addition to a specific mix of classes.

 

Mbobo

I like the way the situation is currently. I like long raids, I enjoy watching the evolution of play as the time goes along, regardless if the raid is a progression raid or farm content. However, nothing beats the staying late to kill the boss, and finally downing it 3 hours after you'd normally have ended raids on a Monday night (hello Nef, C'Thun, Loatheb, 4H).

That said, the efforts to reduce the wasted time is appreciated. Repair/reagent vendors is good (even though they price gouge like a mofo until you're exalted), as are things like the BT neck.