Glayde

I know a number of other guilds are probably in the same situation.

Farming Illidan and a few choice drops in Black Temple and Hyjal, while de'ing all the rest. Even token armor is saturating off-specs for some classes.

Why not make raid attunements account based? Would that really be that horrible?
Or at the very least, implement single attunement items similar to the scrolls that Vashj and Kael dropped.

 

◊ Kyth

I never understood why a team that has some EQ folks in it never put in the 85% rule from day 1.

As long as X% (85?) of your raid is keyed the rest can be "gimped" in. Lets you get in "we need another mage for arch, hey you have an alt", trials (I hate having to key someone to T6 just to properly trial them), and, possibly most importantly, lets you group up your keyings all at once.

EQ did it without it being exploitable, surely Blizzard can figure out a way.

The folks still need keying, but you aren't ever having to do only 1-2 at once and as a raidleader you have a lot more flexibility.

 

berg

My guess is that the reason that nothing has been implemented is to prevent item selling. They designed (a lot of) profit into the T6 raiding game with Hearts of Darkness and the epic gems. If we could also sell the mountains of loot that we are all sharding I think guilds could probably make 25k-50k a week depending on the server. If(when) they remove BT/Hyjal requirements it will be when sunwell is released such that the gear is no longer a huge source of potential income for the guilds who already cashed in on the content.

 

tedv

But the demand for T6 loot hasn't decreased, and neither has the supply, so the price should be the similar between those two situations. Or to put it concretely, there is now a market for getting keyed for people who want to buy loot. Charge 3k to get keyed and then collect more money as you take them along for unwanted loot.

 

Rennard

Try to stay on topic, please. This thread could have some potential.

On topic: I think it's safe to say, once 2.4 (Sunwell) is live; BT/Hyjal will open ah-la SSC/TK in the not-so-distant future. "Account attunements"...if you're in a fairly progressive guild you basically have that option once you've reached farm on the particular instance. Personally, with the gaps in content we've seen since TBC, it could be construed blizzard has basically given the go-ahead on keying alts being as viable as creating alts.

On a personal note, I do agree with it being borderline retarded on the mechanic. I may have come off a bit flippant (like we're all in a guild that has everything on farm so just bring your alt on through). But as noted below, it's been talked about to death. Hell, how much of a cop-out was it when they just "lifted" the keying mechanic for SSC/TK, seriously? Instantly kill the Trials content so anyone can get in. I appreciate that they bridged the gap, as far as accessibility to content...but yea, not very inventive.

Edit:
Where is the "selling T6/loot" coming from, the topic is on attunements and keying?

 

Lymmel

It's been pretty much beaten to death as a topic already on these forums and pretty much elsewhere. Their unwillingness to do anything is puzzling and borderline stupid as this is obviously an unpopular, timesink-like mechanism, forcing people to do stuff they don't want to do, which is what wow strives to move away from. Yet Blizzard persists on this requirement for some reason, despite several guilds on each realm blowing up to it which really can't be that good for them. They are either exceptionally slow on this or simply know something most people don't about its use.

There's plenty of things they could do, scrolls on bosses, automatic attunements when x% of the raid is attuned, lifting them alltogether, buying them for gold/badges/whatever, setting an alternative and more personalised attunement path that doesn't involve dragging 24 people through it (like the old tk attunement quests) or just something. But as I said, it has been beaten to death to no avail.

We had to go do ssc this week about 3 months+ after killing Illidan because we can't find an attuned shaman in their wasteland pve servers. We also did tk every week until the week before we killed Illidan. Which is really the good scenario, because when we do find an attuned player it's usually from one of the guilds below us in progress who face a similar issue, only they have to add trying to progress in the mix too. Then the problem rolls over to them, they start having empty spots in raids, progress ceases and some of them blow up when we take too many of their core. Which we can't really help or we would blow up ourselves. Result is that said wasteland pve server becomes even more unattractive for a prospective realm transfer, so we 'poach' more and the circle continues, as more guilds blow up or stay forever in a semi-functional condition where they raid every second week and attempt a new boss every fourth.

Horde side of our server went through the same thing only a lot faster as it was less populated. Top guild slowly ate through all smaller guilds, then when it had nothing to feast on it exploded, because when your recruitment pool is somewhat small and you need to run ssc/tk weekly because you need to fill the gaps at that very moment, but not all apps are submitted the same week you are ending up doing a bit more ssc/tk than your members can handle. Then several splinter guilds popped who are now merging, because they are stuck at the gatekeeping bosses and they face attrition. It would be irrelevant if it was my server's story or if it was a problem attributed to pve servers or low pop servers, but it is not, a huge part of it is the problems that pop up when you try to do progress as well as attuning new players. It can totally struggle progress and if there's a guild above you, or heaven forbid a guild like ours that has finished and can take you through all the content, you are really tempted.

In short, attunements amplify an already present dynamic of the big fish eating the small fish, and then the big fish players getting bored because they have to run attunements too when they run out of small fish. The end result is not fun to anyone. But well, this hasn't even been slightly acknowledged as far as I know, as some apparently deep lore reasons or worries about newbie guilds killing naj'entus/akama appear to be far more important issues in blizzard's eyes.

They are not any good for the guilds who haven't killed Kael/Vashj either honestly. What's the point of having to go through severely harder bosses to then do a series of disproportionally easier ones? If guilds can kill naj or kaz before kael, then by all means they should. If the loot is better, that is Blizzard's problem in tuning and itemising, not the player's problem who would rather follow a sensible scaling in difficulity on his path to progress. Do they really prefer having a ton of 5/6 3/4 guilds who never go through to t6 and eventually blow up? Is that really good from a business perspective or from a having lively servers pov?

Sorry if it's come off as a rant, the truth though is that this situation is terribly frustrating and something needs to be finally done about it.

 

berg

I think you have a skewed view of the problem. The guilds that get hurt by the process are the ones with high turnover. They lose progression weeks when they have to go backwards to attune new recruits. Flagging an account as attuned just helps gear out alts in guilds that have beaten the content to death, it does not help the guilds that are genuinely hurt by the attunement process.

As far as selling items I feel that it is a genuine consideration as to why the attunements have not been lifted(yet.)

 

Metrosexuelf

Actually this topic has been discussed ad nauseum in numerous other threads about raid pacing, problems with recruiting, etc. and is fairly superflous.

 

Rennard

Actually, I'm on the same page with you. Not sure why I was compelled to really post a response, but I think the topic could actually stay away from raid pacing. Getting into the instance is a far cry from getting through the instance.

I really don't want to split hairs, I've been a long time lurker and the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure why I through in my 1.5 cents into the thread.

 

XI-

The reason the bosses are easier is because there is a keying process. Typically more difficult bosses were followed by easier bosses in order not to have things be completely discouraging. Does it really make a difference if you need a key to zone in or if the first boss of BT was Bloodboil, and the first boss of Hyjal was Azgalor.

 

◊ Praetorian

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It may not be ideal for the top guilds out there who always want a challenge, but for many guilds, the fact that after weeks of Kael wipes you suddenly have this surge of loot and progress really does buoy spirits and get people excited and motivated about the new content. Compare that to having Razorgore/Vael at the start of BWL and how many guilds simply never got past that roadblock. Really it's not a clear-cut choice.

 

tevid

You summed it up perfectly. We spent a few weeks on Kael and suddenly with that out of the way we had a progression surge that carried on all the way to Illidan. While not the perfect solution it is quite nice to be able to gear your raid up easily through farming the (loot) pinatas.

 

XI-

That was my point Gurg, it's stupid to argue that people should get to go farm the easier bosses, and skip the keying process, because the bosses are easier BECAUSE of the keying process. I also think the people complaining about backflagging people should just man up. Most of the people complaining have cut their raid schedules from 5-6+ days a week down to 2 days max. Quite frankly if you can't spend the 1 extra day per month to key your apps I don't know how you figure to get through progression again.

 

• Whiteknight

I think XI was suggesting that in the absence of keying/attunements, you'd be forced into a more linear difficulty progression as you progress through dungeons. I.e. the value of the gimme-bosses is removed because people will just clear all of those first and then stall on all of the gatekeeper bosses at the same time. You can see this phenomenon today with folk clearing Lurker and VR and then stalling.

Bliz has stated that the reason for attunements is to foster a sense of achievement. It's a big deal to get attuned/keyed for BT and once you're done it really is a big sense of achievement.
Personally I think the attunements are just fine as they are. The SSC/TK attunements were fine too.

It's backflagging that's the issue. Once you've accomplished the milestone, you shouldn't be forced to keep re-accomplishing it every time you need a new recruit. That part is the dumb one.
Potential solutions have been discussed at length, but the 85% keyed solution definitely seems to be the cleanest. In addition to a scroll of attunement dropping somewhere from middle to the end of the dungeon would be just fine in my book.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with you.

 

Galred

What I'd like to see is an "attunement" scroll that can be used to make a portal to Vashj/Kael. I think what burns out T6 raiders is the hours spent clearing trash and killing bosses that no one cares about just to get to the final boss; whereas the endboss fights are at least more interesting and useful.

Naturally, some guilds would 'buy' a scroll + raidmember from a more progressed guild and then try to kill Kael/Vashj in Kara gear... but more power to them if they can manage it.

 

Lymmel

Old argument, but same was true for early naxx for guilds who hadn't killed C'thun. I know on my old server noone ever killed c'thun alliance side but we had 2 guilds at 4HM and 5 more somewhere between PW and Gothik. And the first Twins kill happened after PW was killed as well. Noone really complained much about it or was affected by it. Ofcourse even Anub was harder than the early hyjal bosses, but I am pretty sure 40 man c'thun coordination was a bit harder task that kael 25 man too. Not only did they not kill him, but they didn't even come close. I remember practically all guilds on him were almost crushed while attempting him and had to go to naxx instead just so they could do something less demoralising. It wasn't even a choice for some. Why leave some guilds banging their heads against Kael now, when they can farm Kaz to oblivion without any consequences for anyone?

In the end I don't particularly mind so much if there is an initial attunements for guilds, I can understand the reasoning around it at the time it was first applied, but I don't believe it's essential either anymore or that it really enhances gameplay in any way. The situation that would arise is similar to what has happened with t5 now. A lot of guilds tend to leave both kael and vashj for the end of their t5 progress now, which wasn't true when we did it because the tk attunement was a lot more time consuming. Guilds then typically went through pretty much all ssc first before setting foot in tk (apart from VR). But if guilds going through it now choose to take a path that will lead them to a row of cockblocks, that's a problem of their own planning, the choice should be there. If they never did kael and got Illidan, does it really matter? All they missed is a cool fight.

That is true too. The issue is not that it's 1 more day, the issue is that it's unwanted tedium. You could man up and farm 30 dreamfoil/7 mountain silversage/1 black lotus for a flask in the pre consumables nerf too, but it was only a tedium and it was rightfully nerfed. It offers nothing to the gameplay experience, adds frustration and heaven forbid you get the occasional wipe, you got to be prepared to hear about it as the raid leader all night after. But I guess that varies per raid group. Also, it's pretty irregular. It can happen once a month or you might need to do it two or three weeks on a row. I think we have never skipped Kael for more than 2 weeks, as there's just no pool of people with that vial to recruit from on pve servers. At that frquency, it gets rapidly annoying.

 

◊ Kyth

Say what?

I challenge you to find guilds who are early/mid BT (i.e. still raiding their full schedule) who aren't very frustrated when they have to:

- stop progression/gear-farming to key 1-2 apps to replace someone -- and if people don't conveniently leave all at once, you end up with a lot of backflagging
- stop progression/gear-farming to key applicants before they even have a clue how good they are
- stop progression/gear-farming for a night because they don't have enough mages for archimonde and can't bring in so-and-so's alt


It's ridiculous to paint this as only a problem for the guilds who have killed Illidan and say they're the only complainers. Maybe you don't read posts from people with other guild tags, or maybe they don't post.

These are also the guilds that aren't able to just do SSC/TK in a single night, who don't raid as many days so giving up a week of progression is a bigger deal.

This is the guilds that *now* are getting into T6 content. Raid 6 days and it's a lot easier to deal with a bit of backflagging. Raid 3-4, it's a different world.


85% (or something) rule and you wouldn't have to stop *each* time you wanted to key someone, you could do it in batches. You also dodge the "easy selling of attunements" if blizzard wants to dodge that (via scrolls.) And it lets them keep the keying in for pacing if they wish.

That's why it mystifies me, since it seems to satisfy Blizzard's criteria while easing the player coordination burden.

 

zeidrich

I think the purpose of the keying was originally intended less of a progression stopper, and more of an insurance that all of their content gets utilized. This is moreso the case due to the fact that in the original inception of the expansion, the gear progression from raid zones was very flat.

IE: You do karazhan->gruul->SSC->Mag->TK-> because you have to. Not because the gearing process forces you to. This emphasizes the fact that most encounters are really skill checks far more than gear checks. You can do all encounters, minus the resist encounters, with poor gear and great execution.

Therefore, I think blizzard could consider the possibility of account flagging. They ensure their customer has experienced all of that content so it doesn't hurt to let them do it with another character.

I think it would be less likely that they would allow just anyone to walk into BT, whether it was because the raid met some flagging requirement, or even through an attunement item.

From Blizzard's point of view, I think they want as many people to experience as much content as possible. Allowing a player into BT without them stepping foot inside SSC/TK means they will likely never step foot inside those instances. While requiring the keying means that if you really need that player into your BT raid he will at least be killing Kael/Vashj/Al'ar and doing the Akama questline.

Again, the same idea of allowing as many people to see as much content as possible would mean sunwell should have no attunement. It is close enough to the expansion that those people who aren't yet in BT may not ever get to kill Illidan. To create a zone that you would need to say, kill Illidan and Archimonde to enter, would mean a vast number of players wouldn't be able to see it.

But, you say, what about Black Temple? Why don't they remove attunements from that? Realistically, you could kill Naj'entus in PvP gear. Nothing else is a serious gear check. If they left off BT attunements, a lot of people would likely forego SSC and TK completely. At least they would skip Kael and Vashj, which are still some of my favorite encounters.

The fact that there are only 6 bosses, and only 3 available on instance's release means that there just wont be enough content in sunwell to stop a progressing guild in it's tracks, even if they can zone into it on release. My guess is the first 2 bosses will be difficult, but killable by players in pre-kael guilds. The third boss will be very difficult for those players. And the final three bosses will be tuned expecting t6 quality gear.


The reason is, Blizzard has succeeded when most of their more serious raiders (Those who raid on some schedule, not just casually or occasionally kill maulgar) have seen the best of Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT/Sunwell. My guess is the first couple of bosses in sunwell will help those guilds still stuck around Kael'thas to finally break through it. It will give those people who have downed Illidan something to do. But it will not remove the sort of linear progression from raid dungeons.


So in short, I don't think Blizzard will enable a keying system that will allow more players to get better items while seeing less content. I believe sunwell will be designed to allow more people to see more content ie: seeing Kael'thas in 5 man zone, assisting gearing up pre-BT to ease entry into BT, more bosses for post-BT guilds.

So Alt-Flagging I think they could consider. Bringing unflagged players, I think they would be less likely to.

 

Hate Monkey

The problem with backflagging as it is now is not actually Kael'Thas or Lady Vashj, it's the fact that in 1 week a raid can start and clear TK up to Kael'Thas and be stuck there for months. Al'ar is the hardest boss in TK when you compare to the gear levels needed to beat a boss. If TK bosses were a bit harder, people would be more geared when getting to Kael'Thas so that you actually had the right dps on your raid for the phases, no one would ever complain about this.

 

Metrosexuelf