No. I *like* repeating fights - even farm fights - just for the satisfaction of killing something. A month with nothing to do but bang your heads on the current progression boss would break many groups. I'm still at the stage where the Vashj fight is a heck of a lot of fun when it goes right.

I'd say about 10 kills per boss is optimum. Means everyone gets a chance to be in on a kill, means you get to do it several times and try and beat your previous best. OK, after you've taken X boss down 10 times, it gets old. I like the idea that a boss could drop a fragment of their soul (or some such) per kill. Once you have enough, you can combine them and get an item that lets you skip the fight if you want to.

I agree with you Constantius : running instances you mastered a while ago, for a very specific piece of gear is time-consuming, not that much fun, and basically requires solidarity in your guild (9/24 people play 2 hours hoping that the 10th/25th one will get his loot).

The "reset-at-will" thing sounds a litttle bit extreme however.
And would most likely lead to the worst T5 traffic ever, in my opinion.

I was more thinking of something in the line of :
Each BoP loot from a specific boss can be turned in to T4/T5/T6 vendors, for a token ("turn in a Choker of Animalistic Fury for a Lurker-token").
Any piece of gear that's part of a boss' loot table can be obtained for 5 tokens of this specific boss ("turn in 5 Lurker-tokens to get a Mallet of the Tides").
Items Blizzard deliberately made rare, because of their high quality, could be more expensive (I'd consider fair a DST to be worth 7 Gruul-tokens, for example. It doesn't really matter whether it's 5 or 7 : you just know that after X kills, you'll get your thing).

With 3 loots on most bosses, it takes at most 2 instance runs for one raider to obtain his long sought after piece of gear, providing nobody else in the raid needed anything on this specific boss (which seems to be a fair condition).

I do not think it would be beneficial to "temp" guilds into hardcore raid farming by introducing "reset at will" options. No, I believe people should farm less if anything; and I also believe raid IDs are good and should not be bypassed. A 1 month reset timer for raid instances while having bosses drop quadruple loot to make up for it is still optimal in my opinion - clear your farmed content in less then 1 week and then spend the rest of your time progressing. For guilds which finished everything, a 1 month reset timer ensures they stay in shape without getting bored to death doing the same content to many times.

This would need the raids to be balanced to this as well, or have the option to reset it after a week.

If guilds are saved to an instance for an entire month, you'll end up with pretty bored guild members due to a lack of things to do.
Quarduple loot for the same effort doesn't seem like a good idea in my opinion.

A little deviation from having to "attempt" and wipe on the same boss for 3 weeks straight without any gold or loot from other bosses in between will get very annoying pretty fast.
Sure it helps the guilds who can't be as active as others, but i fear you'd end up with population issues for your raids pretty fast.

And there are players who'd only show up for that first week of "loot fiesta", after which they won't raid for 3 weeks.

A lot of frustration in this thread seems to be aimed at trash.
I wholeheartedly agree that the trash timers could use a change.

Something like, doubling the repop timers? 2x the boss attempts, .5x the "/guildgroan"
If you're skilled enough to get the trash down and up to the boss, chances are you don't need to take another 10 min clearing trash after you've wiped x amount of times.
Nothing kills a good run of attempts like stopping to clear trash again. Everyone gets psyched up for killing the boss, trash pops, and everyone groans.

It's rather anticlimactic.

Well, Imbar, that's what everyone has been telling to Blizzard since MC, but they seem to really love trash somehow...
I'll never understand how the people who gave us a trash-free BWL could ends up creating the absurd trash-fest of pre-2.1 BC, which was stunningly ridiculous from the text description alone...

A heroic badge system for raids would be better so if you kill archimonde 5-10 times you are guaranteed to get that item from his loot list you always wanted , but never dropped. Lets say that everyone wants one, maybe two items from a boss, then after 10+ kills they are guaranteed to get it. Yes its the raid version of the world of welfare we currently know from 10 mans and heroics, but I just despice the system in which RNG can be so frustrating. We all know the stories of Billy who went to every raid to get item X and that one time he couldnt due to being in the hospital, it dropped. Every guild has a Billy, or several ones.

Only thing being able to clear an instance multiple times a week is burning content faster ( You can do MH 12 times in 4 weeks which is probably enough to drop 80% of the loot waned and then never return again ) and rep if there is any to gain.

My name must be Billy.

Anyways, I understand why the resets work the way they do, because if 5% of the playerbase is in BT and Blizz feels the need to announce an expansion, I couldn't imagine what they'd do if 50%+ of the players were in BT. The code-developing team would have a heart attack. I code, and I'd feel the same way in that same situation.

Trash still irks me.

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I thought this news was applicable to this particular discussion.

link

This is what we have been doing. We no longer do SSC or TK, despite having only killed kael three times and vashj five. People still need loot from these bosses in theory, but we'd rather do progression content than keep rerunning the old stuff.

We raid three nights a week, from 7.30 to 11.30 (hardcapped at 11.30 - we always stop at this time, even if only 2 pulls away from the next boss).

This focus has helped us a lot - by committing to less time (many members, including myself, raided for 5+ hours- 5 times a week in the MC/BWL days) we are progressing quickly. By concentrating all raiding time for a week into 3 shorter days, we are outpacing a lot of established raiding guilds.

We formed the guild three months ago (wiping repeatedly on HKM) and are now deep into hyjal. We were the third horde guild on the server to down Kael (slow server) and I honestly believe the focus that only raiding for a few hours a week helped us immensely here - many 4-5 night a week guilds were stuck on him for a long time.

In my mind, raiding 3 nights is optimal - it forces people to really pay attention and strive to keep things moving. The less time we have available, the faster we all summon/buff/recover from wipes/whatever.

I saw this and was rather surprised. It would be a tremendous change, in spite of how many people seem to cherish the mini-game of getting people summoned to an instance!

I feel the got this right in most of ZA as well. Patrols feel like actual patrols rather than mobs wandering aimlessly. The grouping of mobs makes some sense and, overall, you feel there's a reason for there to be heavily armored troops standing in your way- the end boss (and hell, each avatar boss) knows you're there and is taunting you the whole time.

One of my biggest immersion breaks is slaughtering your way through hundreds of trash mobs, some right in front of their face, and then the boss seems surprised you're there. I'd like to see less trash- but smarter trash. It can take just as long- as long as it's somewhat immersing. Scouts running for help and summoning adds, smart path patrols that you can either fight or skip- but if you skip you have to do the next section of trash either quickly or precisely (a smaller area to work in etc), gauntlets of changing mob types (Honestly the eagle gauntlet is the only gauntlet I've ever enjoyed the second/third time through.). Even something like trash positions and patrols changing as you kill different mini bosses. (Maybe an easier patrol and set up initially for 5 bosses and then as you kill each one- the trash reforms into more difficult set ups for the remaining. So you could choose to do the AoE groups earlier if you're light on AoE and the crazy spike damage trash later because your tanks are exceptionally geared- or reverse.

Trash could be lighter if it were smarter- giving better experienced groups a much faster time through it while still giving that initial learning curve that Blizzard seems to favor.

This will add convenience and reduce outdoor PVP on PVP realms even more. Though the latter would have been interesting to discuss in the now closed transfer thread.

I agree, this is one of the things that kills MMOs for me too.

"Oh, looks like they just slaughtered B-squadron, what should we do?"
"Well, we might as well just stand around and stare at the ground until they come to kill us too"

Trash should be structured not as inanimate stuff you have to wade through to get to the next boss, but as its own mini-encounters. If they completely got rid of rooms full of static trash and replaced each major "trash clear" with its own little mini encounter or wave event, it would make the game orders of magnitude more fun.

I like Hyjal in this respect. Going with the example presented earlier:
"Oh, looks like they just slaughtered B-squadron, what should we do?"
"Well, let's send more powerful foes in greater multitudes until they crack under pressure. If that fails, sic Winterchill on them."

Wave encounters are just plain exciting. I think Blizz did a nice job with Hyjal. There should be more raid instances that aren't "kill trash, kill boss A, kill trash, kill boss B, rinse, repeat". Having npc allies and timed waves of mobs makes the raid encounter much more dynamic.

I'd agree whole heartedly with you, except for the "we wiped, now lets start all over from the first wave" aspect of the fight. Especially since Hyjal has been on farm status for my guild for about 2 months. While the trash is an integral part of the actual instance, it doesn't have to be a mind numbing wave after wave concept. I'd say that this could be accomplished with a simpler construct of 4 waves, that were longer, overlapped (some of the first wave wasn't killed before the next comes in), and were a bit more diversed (like the later waves in the fights, Azgalor's trash comes to mind). Portions of the fun of the fights in hyjal are how the NPCs react to the fights also. How many get involved, do you include the boss, or do you drag him around the whole camp?

I'd also suggest more of a caverns of time: dark portal approach, where you really don't know which side the mobs were coming in from. If you are defending a base camp, and you actually have mobs putting up ladders on the walls, and climbing over the fences to get in, instead of just a mindless walking through the front door, it may provide more anxiety and anticipation, as well as requiring more spot reports (coordination) from your own players. It could even be scripted (like it is in Hyjal) that the base gets over run, and part of the raid's job is to defeat the boss before it does get overrun (soft cap to dps race).

Well, the problem with that model is they can't make the bosses very challenging or else people would cry bloody murder that you must spend 20-30 minutes in between attempts re-clearing trash.

I really don't think you did "read everyone's gripes", because if you did, then you'd recognize that there was more depth to the topic than "I don't like trash". The topic of trash respawns being on a two-hour timer (as opposed to a one-hour timer or a four-hour timer) does not amount to "I don't like trash". Nor will "playing better/smarter" let you avoid the issue except in the case that you play well enough to avoid the timer, which is a foolishly oversimplified view of things, because practically every issue in the raid game is trivialized if you're just going into a raid zone and one-shotting all the encounters by "playing better/smarter", with perfect players who never need to leave the raid early or even go afk for a moment.

I'm glad you're happy with it, I really am, but to claim that these factors are player-controlled is misguided at best. There's very little that transpires within the core game mechanics of WoW that's truly player-controlled, i.e. not influenced to a very substantial degree by the design decisions imposed on players by the game's designers. Virtually all of them have the potential to be overcome in the game as it stands, that's plainly obvious in the fact that many raids are successful in top-end content every day. Given that WoW is the most popular MMO on the market and in MMO history, it comes as no surprise that many players are going to be driven to be successful in the face of whatever constraints are placed on them (consider entire raids warping to C'thun to avoid AQ40 trash, or lengthy swimming routes to avoid SSC trash, or even the ridiculous lengths raids went through to buff to the teeth to be successful in early TBC raids).

In spite of whatever pain players are willing to endure, it remains Blizzard's responsibility to gradually reduce the average level pain endured by all players looking to enter the raid game. This includes determining what level of custodial overhead is reasonable to expect out of players and eliminating anything beyond that. The problem of summoning players to instances is one such example of a problem that does actually have a painful player-controlled solution, which Blizzard evidently seeks to remove the need for. That players have been able to work around it completely ignores the fact that the common workaround amounts to complete rubbish in terms of player enjoyment.

The game must challenge your ability to tackle its content, not challenge your patience.

Perhaps then, a "save point" type of solution? Say, 6 waves + 1 boss, save after every 2 waves.
Ex. clear waves 1,2,3, then raid wipes. Raid releases, runs, talks to friendly npc, wave 3 spawns and starts coming.

That type of approach isn't particularly realistic, but, this is a video game.

Isn't that pretty much what we have already, with trash that comes in linked packs? About the only difference I can see is that you want the individual packs/waves to be larger, and perhaps involve some dynamic spawning - i.e. you get X number of adds from behind once Y members of the original pack are down, etc.

Right, that was what I was getting at.
A touch of randomization would liven up what we have already. Like Psilux said, it could function in a style like BM does.
The waves come from a different direction, or in slightly altered numbers, or with a different group setup (eg. Group A is heavy on casters, but Group B has more melee types, etc).

The only problem I see with standard waves is that the raid eventually knows what to expect.
With random packs, the raid would need to work together to call which directoin they're coming from, in what numbers, etc.

Something else I thought of: randomizing patrol routes? or something along the lines of ZA's lifelike pats?

Now call me crazy (or maybe i'm just oversimplifying) but is trash REALLY causing people to be unsucessful in raiding?? REALLY?? The amount of trash between bosses is minimal and shouldn't take even the newest of guilds any more then 45 min to clear before they get to the boss. This should still allow for numerous attempts on that boss. How people use that time is THEIR decision. If you need 20 min to set up because people haven't done their research... that's a YOU problem. If your guild doesn't know when to call a "wipe" and burns 5 more minutes per attempt... that's a YOU problem. If your guild chooses to skip a boss and has to double trash clear... guess what.... YOU problem.

So are we now advocating that we should completely take away ANY player based decision just to dumb it down further? How is buffing, explaining boss fights, shuffling group configurations, afk players... etc not player controlled anyways? You mentioned "perfect players who never need to leave the raid early or go AFK"... I guess i hold my raiders to a different standard, but generally speaking people shouldn't come to a raid if they can't commit the time the raid is going to take (or they need to inform officers as early as possible). Anyone who does this is wasting 24 other people's time for their own greed.

When people are racing content they will do crazy things. The guilds that did this are not even remotely close to average.

Finally something we can agree on!! I would just like to add that I want a CHALLENGE. Not some diet version of a game because they are lowering their standards to the lowest common denominator