Clearing a pack of trash once can be a challenge and a good skill check. Clearing that same pack 8 times in a row isn't.

I'm not sure if I can respond with anything that hasn't already been said 10+ times in this 200 post thread. You seem to enjoy a stratification of raiding guilds based on the ability of their leaders to be tough taskmasters, and I disagree that that should be a leading factor in guild progress. I've had dozens of acquaintances give up on raiding because they get sick of (a) an unreasonable per-night time commitment, and (b) spending a huge amount of time just sitting around twiddling thumbs, and reasons for both of those have been discussed previously in this thread at length that do not necessarily involve slacking. Frankly, even if it does involve slacking, there's still no particularly good reason why raids full of people should be harshly penalized for one player.

And regardless of whether or not you think it's appropriate to punish raids for minor individual transgressions, Blizzard has a vested interest in keeping people enjoying and thus paying for the game. People enjoy the game when the challenges placed in front of them involve the core game mechanics, rather than imposing logistical overhead. You seem to have thoroughly confused the two concepts.

The success of a skilled casual guild getting to experience all that Blizzard has to offer is up to Blizzard's timetable. I don't mind what has been going on now (the nerfing) to get those with a less hardcore schedule to see as much content as those who've been powering through it.

Blizzard dropped the ball royally with Naxx, something they plan to fix in WotLK and are trying to prevent history from repeating itself this xpack. Last game there was not a reasonable enough time to complete naxx unless you had a wow first life second schedule. This time, so far, it seems like there will be.

While it's a noble goal, it would be a mistake for Blizzard to create a world such that EVERYONE gets to experience all the high end raid instances (based on current mechanics). Only if they created at "diet" version for less skilled players would this be possible. If they did that, then people would complain that it's not "epic feeling" when you finally get into Black Temple on the "hard"-mode.

I agree that the Pre-TBC releases of new content didn't match progression of the bulk of guilds. I too think that the nerfing of some instances was a great move on the part of Blizzard. How they are making content now works for the majority of players. There are harder and more challenging encounters at the start for the "elite" guilds and once they are through that content it is then tuned for the next wave. Following this however, you can never allow the top end people from staying stagnant for too long. As a result, they will always be end game content most people never see.


To Nezralix:
I fully agree that there are a few tweaks that would make raiding a bit nicer. Heck I have even made some suggestions early in this topic (eg: buffs not costing mana inside a raid when not in combat.. etc).
You stated
From what i can tell, almost every boss has a "You lose" button that any raid member can push. Someone doesn't stop dps on an aggro reset.... WIPE! Someone doesn't click their Mag cube.... WIPE! The reality is that as they lowereed the raid cap to 25 and players have gotten better, Blizzard has chosen to make EVERYONE focus when in a raid. In most cases, the chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. 24 great players will always suffer from that one person who isn't focused.

Isn't it a good thing nobody's asking for that, then.

Reality check: Currently in the US, ~270 guilds across 222 realms have killed Illidan. That's 1.2 guilds per realm. Adjusting for the 40 -> 25 change, that means that the equivalent of ~0.75 40-man guilds per realm have killed Illidan.

That's within spitting distance of the number of people that killed Kel'thuzad. So it's really not the case that the current endgame is any easier or more accessible than it used to be. Yes, there's time left before WoTLK, but I'm just not seeing any evidence of this supposed vast dumbing-down of the game.

No, what's happened is simply that the top end has accelerated away from the pack much more than ever before, fed largely by paid transfers and the smaller raid cap. Do not mistake that for global better accessibility! Your own perception is inevitably heavily skewed by your own surroundings.

The majority of raiders have not yet killed anything beyond Magtheridon/Lurker/Void Reaver. Whether you define that as "working" depends entirely on your desired goals. However, the facts are that pre-TBC, the bulk of the population was ~ 2 instances (1 Tier) behind the leading edge. Post-TBC, they are ~3-4 instances (2 Tiers) behind the leading edge. It's not an exact comparison, of course because the instances are slightly smaller and the Tier jumps also slightly smaller. But it's clear at least that there has been no mass dumbing-down of raiding: quite the reverse.

The problem is you will have a raider that has no interest in completing the instance on that night. All they want is something to do until 10 PM rolls around. At 10 PM, they are gonna logout, get a workout in and go to bed. They don't care how far the guild is in the dungeon or if they have completed it.

No I'm saying that not all players are going to want to do things faster in WoW so they can go work out (or whatever) sooner. They will just leave when their own personal schedule calls for it.

I'm pretty skeptical of your claim that people just don't give a shit whether the instance gets done or not, and just up and say "see ya, peace!" in the middle of boss fights and such.

Pretty much everyone who raids would prefer to stick it out to the end of instances, but some people do have overriding obligations or priorities, or even just an attention span that lasts less than four hours. I'm sure you may know some people who do the "hey guys, I gotta go" thing regularly, and may feel that those people are lazy jerks who take away from your game experience, but some of them may actually have real, tangible reasons for needing to leave the raid. And with raid hours extending as long as they do in the average case, it becomes exceedingly likely for this to happen for any given person with family, friends, and responsibilities. 4+ hours is simply not a negligible amount of time to be spending on a regular basis. At some point, typically after 2-3 hours, people become much more likely to have to leave for whatever reason, because huge blocks of free time just may not be feasible.

But then again, I admit that I don't really know what you're trying to get at, because this post and the one before it don't quite match up.

I didn't didn't say any of that. I didn't say all people are like this. I did not say people just up and leave in the middle of boss fights.

I hope I don't repeat something said already in the thread but there is really big ddifference in time investment when it comes to raids.

First, there is a group of "organizers". Those are people willing to form and lead the guild, find the right people, deal with issues in guild, organize forums, voice com and other activities out of the game, then, at the very end search for strategies, organize raids themselves, lead people and such.

Time investment for those people is huge - they basically got to love that more then actual raiding to be able to keep it going. Of course, it can't be done by 1-2 persons, so we get to second group - official or non-official officers.

There are players that are more active then others. They actively seek how to improve their performance, out of raids their get all the reputation, badge, PvP and heroic gear and got very high attendance in raids. This group, as much as organizers is critical for new guild/raid group to "start moving". Because of their better preparation and usually high "morale" they don't give up easily when facing new encounters. In general, players in this group spend a lot of time ingame and quite often they spend quite a lot of time on WoW-related activities out of game (reading forums, watching videos and so on).

Last group is "the rest". This group is not neccessary unskilled (although it might be), but one thing that makes it different from group group II is amount of time dedicated to raiding. Those players might be ex-group II members that got burned out after a while, but again, it's not the only reason. Getting 25 (more with reserves) people staying together every 2-3 evenings every week is not a schedule everyone can sustain - but at the same time it doesn't mean that those people won't try raiding if they have a chance.

Now, the question - if we want to reduce time investment, which group we prioritize? Do we want to make leadership and organization easier (because it's definetly the group with highest time investment), do we want to help "dedicated group" (because they form the pool of potential leaders, are backbone of raiding and we don't want to lose those players) or do we want to help "the rest" (because they are the most common and the easiest group to give up raids when facing time investment)?

It's not really easy choice considering that first 2 groups are needed for raids to actually start and progress, while the last group is what keeps them going when players of group 2 get tired.

I want a game which caters exactly to my personal preferences. Every player out there wants the same.

Blizzard wants to create a game that appeals to a wide variety of players, giving each what they want. This can be challenging when people want things at cross purposes, but if you hire the best and the brightest, creative solutions can often be found.

Raid instances can't be tuned so that the hardcore guilds finish just as new content and expantions get released, because most people won't get to experience most raid content. Nor can it be tuned so that every guild out there can run right through them, because the majority of people will clear everything the first month, then bore to death waiting for the next expansion.

My contention is that an optimal solution is one where raid difficult changes over time. Instances start out very hard. Hardcore guilds enjoy the challenge, and fight their way through every boss.

Then, later on, the raid tuning gets relaxed. Easier trash. Slower respawns. Fewer attunements. More middle tier guilds now start progressing. They have fun. Hardcore guilds complain about the nerf, but it's OK, they've already moved on to a harder instance, and secretly they love crowing about how they killed Boss XYZ "pre-nerf".

In the last stage, things get nerfed even more. Even bottom tier guilds now have a chance to play around in the early and mid raid instances they didn't have a chance at seeing before. Hardcore guilds have now finished the current instances, and are a little bored waiting around. Maybe they PvP, maybe they farm bosses, I dunno. Middle-tier guilds now complete the end-game, just in time for the next expansion.

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I, too, find trash respawns rather annoying, in general. My guild is good enough not to worry about them most of the time, but at least once every few weeks we call the raid early some night because we don't have the time to reclear trash before people need to start leaving.

Trash spawn as a pacing mechanism is really only useful to slow down the hardcore guilds and keep them from finishing all the content too quickly. It's not "needed" for any other reason. Mid and lower tier guilds are never going to run out of new stuff to do before the next expansion anyway. I don't mind having it be prickly for the first few months of a new instance's release. But I appreciate it when instances get nerfed, so that me and my guild have a chance to see the content before it becomes outdated. I am still bummed that I never saw Ouru, C'Thun, or about 5 or 6 Naxx bosses.

I think BWL really did trash right. Multiple different types of reasonably challenging trash that stayed dead. I really don't think any other model improves on this.

Blizzard has said the want to take the tedium out of playing MMOs, is there anyone that likes respawning trash?

That'd be penalizing various guilds on various servers just because of their raiding schedule. Heck, on Oceanic servers, Honor update occurs right at prime-time for raids.

I think the different trash respawn methods are fine... What needs to be done is to get the amount just right, like it was in Naxxramas and BWL (AQ40... not so much >_>)

My ideal trash respawn methodology would be to have some packs stay dead till the instance ID resets, and others respawn on a 2h timer. That means reclears don't take as long as the initial clear for the week - it's a gentle nudge that maybe a raid force isn't well-prepared enough for a boss just yet, but not a crippling factor should the raid still decide to give it another 2 hours of attempts

My understanding was that BWL and Naxx trash didn't respawn.

Some did (in Naxx), and was a very well-balanced pacing mechanic. See: Faerlina. Or even Heigan trash, though I get the impression his gauntlet run was put in place so that people couldn't 15man him.

What about if trash respawns could be prevented/eliminated by an external mechanic, such as a turn-in type of quest?

For example, on a given night your guild has 3 hours to play. At 2 hours 30 minutes elapsed, your guild has just killed a few bosses and cleared to a new boss and makes 3 unsuccessful attempts at 10 minutes each. After the 3rd attempt the raid leader calls the raid and everyone is grumpy since the boss wasn't killed and next raid they'll have to reclear the painful trash.

What about this idea:

1. Before boss, but after his or her trash there is an item that can be picked up. This item starts a quest. Obviously some mechanic would have to be in place to avoid stealth farming, perhaps it drops off the last trash mob instead. Everyone in the raid can pick it up but it can only be turned in once per reset, per boss.
2. The quest requires some sort of drop from mobs in a heroic instance(s).
3. If the quest is complete, the person who completes it can turn it in and despawn most (not all) of the trash in front of that specific boss.

This way a guild team could get together and complete the quest before the next raid and save time on the trash they already killed the previous night.