No offense, but if this is the crux of the argument, then this whole thread seems kind of silly to me. Plenty of people succeed on 3 hours per night. There is nothing Blizzard can do to change the fact that the same group of people raiding 4 hours per night would likely make more progress than if they only raided 3. If you're talking cross guild comparisons, there is such a ridiculous amount of factors that play into it that it isn't worth discussing. Some guilds have outstanding players at tank positions, some have outstanding players at healer positions, some have them at DPS positions, some guild have all outstanding players, etc, etc, etc.

To me it seems like one of the major arguments is that these 4 hour guilds get through content faster, and are further ahead than 3 hours. I'd say that sounds right. There is no inherent quality per hour schedule that says spending 3 hours should leave you 3/4 behind a guild that spends 4. It's all about time management, and people who manage time well also do well in their given allotment. It's also a guild management issue when say, that 3rd hour isn't going to be as worthwhile (in terms of downing a boss) as that 4th hour. Likewise, that first hour isn't nearly as valuable as that 2nd hour when learning a boss. Nor is the 5th hour compared to the 6th (and there are these 5-6 hour a night guilds out there).

If a guild raids 3 hours a night, they need to be much, much better at time management to have a shot at keeping up with guilds who raid that extra hour (barring some significant discrepancy in skill/consistent players at key positions/etc). I don't know what kind of solution is wanted, but soft reset trash respawns seem to be what the 3 hour per nighters in this thread want, as it doesn't devalue their 3rd hour in comparison to a 4th hour. It could work, but it will still find guilds with 3 hours behind guilds with 4, and may be an even bigger benefit to 4 hour guilds (removing a devalued hour that the both of you share makes their 4th hour that you don't share of much more value than the gain you get on a 3rd hour).

Basically, if you reside in a guild that raids 3 hours, but that 3rd hour is almost always useless I'd say either try and formulate a way to make your hours mean more, or petition to cut the raid at 2 hours. I know we've gotten plenty done in our 3rd hour on weeknights, from downing Al'ar for the first time, to finishing out 4/6 SSC in one night (which would've been 5/6 without a few hiccups). At most, we end raids 30 minutes early, and everyone gets to relax a bit extra and PvP/farm/sleep/etc.

I think the point was that trash respawns at 2 hours each make 2 and 4 hours more efficient than 3. We've certainly cut a number of progression nights off at the "2 hour" mark on a new boss cause we were too tired to go for another set of downs.

And I don't think anyone in this thread would argue that. But what we are wondering is what the hell can you do to change it? So far the ideas have been getting rid of trash completely (which I think is ludicrous, read my earlier posts if you wonder why). Re-timing to match 3 hour folks doesn't make a lot of sense either.

I really like posts suggesting in-game administrative tools that could be implemented, like a dkp system, or a raid calendar. Anything that makes life easier for raid leaders, and makes forming raids a quicker process, I'm all for.

But as for changing the actual way raiding is done? I haven't seen any reasonable suggestions to do that thus far.

I was replying to Dominus. I think if you read his post and then mine it would be more clear. I think you guys are spinning your wheels at this point. When did this forum become a touchy-feely philosophy class? I don't think anyone cares that you haven't "seen any reasonable suggestions..." especially as quite a few good ones were in that initial post.

Removing the 2-hour trash respawns that are actually a raiding throwback is one sure-fired way to improve efficiency for a 3 hour raid. I know we weren't the only guild that cut more Kael'thas attempts short because we didn't want to wait for trash, reclear it, and then re-set up.

I feel like this entire thread is a defeatist topic. You really need in-game DKP systems? Tools for the raid leader? What happened to good leadership and management skills? Or perhaps delegation of tasks?

Aside from the suggestions in the original post - nothing short of an electric shock dog-collars that raiders must wear, with shock control available to the raid leader, will speed up your raid. What slows most raids down? Forming, and moving from point A to B, and people needing to be woken up during strat time. Beyond that, in control of blizzard: respawns of trash and tedious elements toward progression.
If you count the latter as "part-of-the-game" then you're stuck with the electric shock collars to speed things up. It is already assumed that loot delegation is handled - and that people are forming on time. If not, isn't that a corollary?

However, a caveat of electric shock collars: an angry raid leader like me would use them to kill all the mages in my guild because of their lack of ability to sheep.

Well, we didn't really need the lucky charm raid icons, but they worked out pretty nicely. There was no original raid UI. I'm sure Guild Banks will make distribution of certain consumables faster.

Why not add more tools to take some of the administrative overhead off the shoulders of the raid leader?

That is certainly true... the lucky charms are nice. But I wouldn't classify them much in the reducing time investment as much as the useful tools for raiding. We could add a lot of things there - in game blackboards, VOIP (...), a better raid UI... but for saving time?

If you asked me "What would save your guild the most time?"

My answer would be: An ability to click a single button and instantly summon the entire raid to my location (outside the zone entrance). Perhaps a guild hall where the guild members can hearth to, and have a portal to the raid leader. That would be nice. Meeting stones are nice but it still isn't as fast as I would personally like - Like EJ we are extremely efficient with our time. Trying to get zones down as fast as possible including prep requires a lot of efficiency. We've managed to cut the other tasks such as switch outs down to a minimal amount of time, and loot assignments and DKP. But I wouldn't say lucky charms saves us even a second of time.

We already use an internal mod that lets me log off emergency afk'ers, and forces people who are afk to /takesummon. However, those features probably wouldn't be allowed in the regular game features.

I can't see what else Blizzard can provide us (technology wise, not content-wise) to speed things up unless it allows reciprocal replacements of raiders out-of-combat (player A out, player B in in his place instantly). The rest I think is just management, which again was well summarized in the original post.

So yeah:
Electric shock collars
Instant player movement

I guess those technical achievements would help us out a bit. I really want the shock collars. Breaking sheeps, dying on Illidan, Illdari, or Shahraz should all basically give someone a shock. Man that would be fun.

I would only use it out of love.

While it wouldn't save us the most time, I'd love to have an group / raid-wide resurrection spell, combined with raid-wide versions of some class buffs. It would save time directly, and would reduce the window for people to go afk during a wipe. On a given night we'd get at least another attempt or two in if these changed happened.

I disagree about 3 hours being only slightly better than 2. We only raid 2 nights a week, and every minute is precious to us; the difference on nights where we've stayed for 3 versus those where we've only been in for 2 is significant.

I think this was one of the factors that got people hooked on raiding pre-TBC. I know when we were first learning BWL and AQ40, and clearing MC and Onyxia on every lock and green dragons when we could, we covered repair costs and pretty much all applicable PvE upgrades just from the content we were already doing.

Apart from all the various resistance gear, etc, which is why it was such a source of complaint at the time.

Graveyards at the zone-in point for the dungeon - every dungeon. If the trash is supposed to be the limiting factor on boss tries, why implement another one in the form of corpse running?

Our Vashj learning nights have been more limited by the length of the corpse run than any other factor. Last Saturday we managed to get in 17 attempts of varying effectiveness. Average time from combat end to next pull was 10 minutes, at least half of which was spent just getting back from the graveyard. That's 85 unnecessary minutes wasted - around a quarter of the raid. We do our best to cut down the dead time ressing and buffing, but there's always some people who die in an unressable place, and nothing we can do about the length of the corpse run itself.

I think one of the issues is really the size of the groups involved.

The more people you have, the more "expensive" the setup and teardown phases of the grouping process become. This means that all other things being equal, cost/benefit analysis will result in people deciding to group for longer periods of time.

So, the main thing I think they could do would be to reduce the "costs" of the setup and teardown of forming groups for a raid.

Imagine instances with an antechamber in which (1) buffing spells cost 0 mana, and (2) buff timers did not count down at all. Get folks in there and buff them as they show up, and don't even think about rebuffing until well after the first pull. I can't imagine that anyone would mind this. Buffing up at the start of a raid is not a fun activity, and it would be nice to reduce the overhead.

Heck... imagine if paladin blessings could be available in soulwell/lightwell/doughnutwell form instead of class-targeted blessings. Set up a bank of blessings, and your feral druids can click on the "mightwell" while your resto druids click on the "wisdomwell". Anything to reduce the organizational overhead of the buff-up process would be dandy.

Another thought I've had is, imagine if instead of a buff having a duration, it stays up for an entire raid instance but lowers your mana regeneration rate very slightly (so that it averages out to be the same). I mean, rebuffing during a raid is also not a fun activity. Many players streamline it away with mods anyway. Why not build something like that in, so as long as someone is in your party/raid, you don't have to consciously rebuff them unless they're the target of a dispel?

Now... another way to do this might be to force people to break up an instance. Imagine one where the first three bosses were clearable in 2.5 hours, and killing the third boss causes the fourth boss to spawn... 24 hours later. (Maybe the fourth boss is an undead version of the third?) Blizzard certainly could do something like that, but I don't think it would be popular among some folks. It's probably a bad idea, but I'll throw it out there because it's on-topic and might work.
Wow, yeah, if we had this I might still be actively raiding right now.

I will not ever raid for more than three hours at a stretch. I'd prefer two if I could get it, but can handle three. And, I'd prefer no more than once a week, but can handle two, if I take periodic breaks from it. And... when I'm in there, I prefer not to rush (makes the activity un-fun for me). But I'd have liked to finish Karazhan. If I could spread the instance out over three or maybe even six weeks, I certainly would!

I mean, killing Prince after weeks of trying is better than not killing him at all, but for me, not killing him at all is better than rushing through the stuff too fast (it burns me out), and rushing through too fast is better than spending too much of my time and energy raiding (it burns me out even more).

What about another mechanism besides trash to accomplish the same goal?

Know the door to Gruul that closes when the fight starts? What if it didn't open until 15 minutes after it closed, ever? And if once it closed for the fifth time on a given night, it wouldn't open again for 6 hours no matter what? But in neither case does trash respawn.

Ugh no thanks Douglas. We don't want a repitition of the way Vael or Rag used to be. If your guild is there trying to get attempts in on the boss, it does no one anygood for Blizzard to force you to stop playing when you're making progress.

That's exactly what trash respawns do. The parameters and details differ, but it's exactly what trash respawns do.

But you can do something productive and kill the trash respawns, because they have a chance to drop epic loot, vortexes/hearts and marks of the illidari. So you get something from doing them. You will never get anything from being forced by game mechanics to call a raid because your chance to kill him for the night is over.

My guild raids 3-4 hours a day 4 days a week. We are working on Vashj phase 3 at the moment (well...getting into phase 3 cleanly). I have the following ideas to throw out there.

Trash timer – I think the 2 hour timer should be used less often and the kill once per reset should be spread around. Let the trash respawn be a pacing mechanism for things like The hunter in kara, clear to hydros, and lurker for example but set it to 6 hours or never for fights like Kael. I have not seen it yet but I’m sure MH could use a reduced wave mechanic after the first boss wipe or something but that might be going too far with how the trash maintenance is setting up the boss fight. I would just suggest that 2 hours everywhere should not be the norm. 2 hrs to A’lar (ok) but VR trash and Solarian doesn’t need to respawn, for example. In general, I would put the 2 hr respawns at the beginning of instances and the 6 hr/never at the back of it.

Prep Time – Summoning the raid force, AoE Rez, and longer buff durations are all in the mix I guess but many of the real time sinks here are player created.

Simple DKP system – It would be nice to have a basic DKP system in game. Using mods and other things to track DKP and upload snap shots and all the admin really adds up (well…adds up on me at least. Not many others deal with it). It would really be cool if players just had a DKP tab on their raid panel verses having to reference the website.

In-game Raid Availability – This one came up because we are recruiting now and I found myself trying to remember everyone’s RL impacts to their raid availability. I get tells, in-game mail, and second hand reminders in /o. It would really rock if people could have a tab in-game to set their Mon-Sun raid availability relative to server time so a RL could get hypothetical raid rosters by day. I think this as a planning tool would help a ton more than people /telling me “I have to take my son to the doctor on Thursday. I might not be here or might be 2 hours late.” I think pressing the “Monday raid check” button and getting a report of # of raiders, who they are, and what classes they represent would help us understand if a raid needs “help” days in advance without a ton of administration.

I like the idea of free rebuff areas, not unlike what's already there in Arenas. Maybe a few per zone, or just one at the start. Only works when out of combat, to prevent crazy exploits.

I don't think this can work. People really work quite hard to get every advantage while in combat, and a penalty to in-combat performance for the benefit of out-of-combat time savings won't be accepted well, I don't think.

I think forcing people to come back later would be monumentally unpopular. The way I've envisioned it, they want to break the basic unit of raiding down into a point where it can be finished in a "fast clear", i.e. by experienced and relatively well-geared players, in 1.5-2 hours. Which includes loot stratification, i.e. one unit has a cross-section of loot types, not one prerequisite unit with boots/gloves/bracers that needs to be done to move on to the second unit with the good stuff. That's probably the biggest reason that prevents people from attacking raid content in smaller blocks right now; they're going to have to spend the same amount of time per week in an instance to get a shot at the stuff they really want, and all of that stuff is going to come from the end of an instance. They're limiting themselves to two farm status instance clears at most, on a four day raid schedule, because each instance is going to take at least two visits if they're only able to dedicate two hours to it. This is just not realistic for progression.

Not that it wouldn't be interesting to have a zone that you clear, and come back later to find that it's significantly changed after "reinforcements" have arrived and set up defenses to counter further attacks.

This is something I support as well. It really doesn't make terribly much sense not to allow this, although the logistics for how they'd do this are not immediately obvious. Essentially they'd have to ask players after each reset time whether they really want to stick with an existing instance, because you certainly don't want players joining a raid and finding themselves unwillingly locked into it for a month because the raid leader doesn't reset it. They'd probably need a way to designate one or two players with authority to reset the instance.

But if they come up with a workable solution, then it would provide a lot more flexibility to the time-restricted guilds out there. And really, resetting every Tuesday doesn't make a lot of sense. Just totally arbitrary.

On another note, one of the things that's always taken the biggest chunks out of my raids was getting replacement players to the instance. The "town portal" idea mentioned earlier seems like a really good way to let people summon themselves back to the beginning of the instance to get a summon out (along with moving the summoning stone inside the instance to prevent clashing with raid groups outside). I'm sure everyone has their funny stories where they had to get the whole guild out of the instance to fight off another guild for a half hour, but that doesn't add a whole lot to raiding or the game in general.

One other mechanic that isn't really working at all is wipe prevention. Ankhs and soulstones just tend to not be doing anything for raiding right now, because they invariably end up just initiating combat with the boss when used. Being able to set the resurrection point to some nearby marker in the zone would be one potential solution. As it stands, there are big penalties for being farther into a raid instance, because it means your raid is just going to have to spend that much longer running back (with AQ40 being the most hilarious example). Again, some players might find it charming to have to do this, but many don't, and I think it's a pretty unnecessary burden.

In a sense, these sorts of changes are making the game "easier", but they're making it easier to participate in, not easier to beat the encounters within.

Completely off topic, but Quigon's internal mod make me raise my eyebrows in deep suspicion, (Yeah, I'm sure versions of it are widely in use, but nobody really talks about them!) because that sends up a red flag in my brain!

Its similar to the kind of feeling I'd get in EQ when I'd see SS's with part of the right side of the screen cropped/drawn over. Pay no attention to the box called Jesus that can perform miracles! (I know its not the same thing)

Honestly, I feel this would be nice. We had to call attempts on Leo last night 'cause his trash respawned. Had it not, we would have totally gotten him last night.

It doesn't remove the trash entirely, but it keeps it from being a hinderance. The only problem is that this is one of Blizzard's primary pacing mechanics, and they'd probably implement something else to slow progress (though I couldn't even begin to imagine what it would be) if they take out 2hr trash respawns.

While I do like some of your ideas, this one struck me as self-defeating. I think it requires less time and organization for a paladin to wait until everyone is in place and then pass out appropriate buffs (i.e. the current method). I believe that the common practice is: One paladin does kings, another does salve, and then the remaining paladins give out the class/spec appropriate blessings. This doesn't seem like it takes very much organization. With the blessingwell idea you now need to make sure that everyone in your group has all the blessings they need, something that is easier said than done (example: There's almost always a Nature Protection Cauldron standing before we clear the RoS gauntlet even after we ask everyone to get their potion.).

I'd like to make a distinction as I think some arguments are being confused:
Many suggestions here will make raiding more accessible and less tedious.

If the idea is to reduce the overall time investment in the raid game, then cutting away farming time and traveling time is a given, as it reduces the time spent *outside* of raids, but specifically *for* raiding.

The situation with trash respawns, buff times, corpse running and similar things, however, is somewhat different, as even without trash respawns, buffing and rezzing most guilds will probably not spend less time raiding progression content. I find it more likely they will raid exactly the same time but use that time more efficiently. Only once they run out of content they will have to spend less time farming.

Both options might not lower the huge block time investment (~4 hours), which is deemed necessary for the actual raid.

The latter might just lead to faster overall progression, meaning the content will last for a shorter amount of time. Don't get me wrong I'm all for making raid content more fun (not "easier", just less tedious), but I'm sure Blizzard wants their content to last as long as possible.

This is where the idea of "rested XP for raiding" came from. Blizzard would have to specifically reward scheduling shorter raids somehow to make them more efficient than longer raids. Right now it's the exact opposite of rested XP while leveling, as larger chunks of time spent in a raidzone are typically more efficient than shorter chunks of time.
As long as Blizzard can't overcome that the "actual raiding time" might not be reduced significiantly for anyone but the guilds, who have run out of content. I think this is quite hard to solve assuming you don't want to punish guilds for raiding too long. Give bonus epics for calling it a night early? I don't think so. You could do something along the lines of "pick how many hours you want to raid today" and the lower the time you chose the more/better the bosses drop, but after the amount of hours picked is over the instance would close for 20 hours.
Seems a bit complicated, though. And might have too much of an impact on farming the instance.
Edit: Maybe give some kind of buff, similar to the old world buffs for raids who choose to raid only 2-3 hours and make it scale the shorter you want to raid. Like +5% to all stats maximum for raiding not more than 2 hours and +2.5% for not exceeding 3 hours. Numbers are pulled out of my ass for illustration purposes.

I know what, you could implement some strong buff potions that only last two hours, or something. Make the cost quite high, so people won't want to use too many of them per evening. And make them persist through death so it's an actual time limit rather than a penalty for dying.

Revolutionary!

One primary complaint here seems to be trash and trash timers. While I fall firmly in the "it's fine learn to play" camp on most of these things, the pacing of raid instances is so uniform and boring these days that it's hard not to look back on the golden days of yore. To wit, the solution:

Make every raid instance similar to BWL. Let's briefly recap the "internal structure" of BWL.

• Zone in. Immediately fight the first boss. No trash to clear.
• After second boss is a single silly pack of goblins (who drop Elementium! :ooh: :aah
• Then you fight one of the hardest bosses in the zone, who is also a gear/preparation check.
• Two more trash packs. These never respawn.
• Gauntlet of easy trash that nevertheless requires raid-wide coordination to get through to attempt the boss.
• Total of 6(?) lab packs spread throughout two floors of the instance. These never repop.
• Fight the first of the drakes somewhere during the lab packs.
• Triple Wyrmguard pull. More difficult than a couple of the bosses in the instance. There are two of these "trash packs" which also never respawn.
• Fight the other two drakes.
• Kill the other Wyrmguard pull, fight Chromaggus.
• Fight Nefarian.

Eight bosses. Eleven or so trash packs and one gauntlet, none of which -- save the suppression room -- ever respawned once killed.

Is it any wonder that BWL was fun?