You might consider, oh I don't know, not raiding 5 days a week when Sunwell comes out if it's such a big concern for you. With the staggered release of the final bosses and the first three being fully explored and documented you'll be lucky to get a full 5 day week of raiding before Sunwell is on farm anyway. Then you'll find yourself in the exact same boat 6 months from now when wotlk still isn't out.

That is exactly why we handle a strict rule of "inactive for 21+ days = kick", unless they have a very good and specific reason for it and keep us up to date on the progress.
We've had the issue in the past. People go inactive, we go short on players, we recruit new players, old players come back active, and suddenly we have too many players... Once we saw that some even were doing it on purpose to avoid tough bosses like Vashj and Kael, we drew a line and kicked all players out that went inactive for over 21 days without a very specific reason.

Rather than derail further I'll just say go read the prot warrior thread in class mechanics.

Well luckily the two issues above partly cancel each other out: Members not willing to go to 5 day raids vs. Old people coming back. So the effect should be somewhat diminished. Our guild had a relative active stab at the bear runs to fill offdays, and keep more people in the raiding rhythm, and the general profitability of raiding in 2.4 is also a stimilus. We only hit the 2 day 25man schedule 3 or 4 weeks ago (hovering on 3 days since christmas) , but I can imagine for those who've been doing it since early fall, it's going to be quite the adjustment. Then again, those are also the guilds for who the 5+ day raiding week will be really short. Sunwell isn't that big an instance after all, only 6 bosses, not that much trash, and you have to wait after boss 3, boss 4, boss 5 on gates if you are fast. Assuming the first 3 bosses go live as they were last on PTR, the top 100-200 guilds will probably hit farm on them within 2-3 weeks. Of course, there's no clue as how long the gate opening will take.

Have to agree, the trends will hopefully cancel each other out. And as much as the coming back sounds crappy the fact that you said some of the returning may be better raiders can only be a good thing overall, if they can be stomached. I'd rather have a guy I've played with for a long time and know can handle his own, even if I hate his behaviour on the subject of farming, for most of Sunwell.

As for getting bored
Yes, probably all bosses before a gate will be on farm before next one opens and within a months of the last gate opening so will KJ but there's still some drive to get geared up for a while and after those few months hopefully exp beta will be around the corner.
In any case there's still ... my goal to pass a 2nd (or more) char through at least BT . With 2.4 badge gear and getting 3 chests on 9 alt + 1 main runs in ZA all the time (while DEing most loot) most active alts will be at something of a start of T6 level gear + knowledge + reasonable experience with the classes would make them easilly useable.

I tried searching this thread and others concerning the changes to CC break effects. In relationship to Shaman is the Magma totem still breaking CC? I would expect it would as it can hit every target in its range on pulses, though for some reason it won't tag them.

The change only affects abilities that have a specific target and then hit other targets within range. Or in other words, no, Magma Totem is not affected.

I think this is incorrect. I've been starting up wow without the launcher and it has started up twice for me.

The change appears to be only on mechanics where an effect affects a fixed number of nearby targets. Magma totem isn't target limited, so it would affect everything. On the other hand, Thunderclap is capped at 4 targets, so I believe in 2.4 it selects up to 4 non-CCed targets.

Nope. It's not just "things that affect a fixed number of targets", it's "things that start with the target that you currently have targeted, and then jump to a fixed number of additional targets".

Thunderclap doesn't work that way -- if you are tanking six bad guys and do a Thunderclap, it might not hit the one you're targeting. It's not a "chained" ability, it's a "half-assed AoE" ability.

Cleave and Chain Lightning and Avenger's Shield do start with your targeted enemy and then jump to additional targets after that, so they do get the CC skipping logic.

Wouldn't 2x [Shiv of Exsanguination] be superior to that polearm anyway? I was under the impression that 2x [Dagger of Bad Mojo] was currently the best hunter statstick combo.

Another option could be to have cool effects on all 3 tiers of armor, but have the effects get better with each tier. As an example, t5 hunter 2piece is 15% pet healing. t4 could be 10%, and t6 could be 20%. You probably would want to make the similar set bonuses not stack, but this way you could have unique bonuses, without people feeling attatched to them.

Unfortunately, that could just make classes with stupid set bonuses have them more. I know rogues wouldn't exactly be thrilled if instead of the quite good t4 and t6 2pieces, those sets had scaled versions of the extra damage on eviscerate/envenom from t5.

Obviously, this'd be relieved if they picked good bonuses to have scale, but I'm sure it's unlikely they'd get it right across all nine classes.

Well, I wasn't saying that they should just take t5 bonuses and scale them up and down, but Pick good bonuses that scale up for each tier.

Yet another option still, is to have T6 also count as a piece of T4 and T5 for set bonuses (and D3?). This would require dramatically scaling down the 4-piece bonuses (which are generally throughput-related) on the later tiers, but would allow for players to keep the neat "utility" 2-piece bonuses that they come across, such as the Hunter/Warlock 2/5 T5, without sacrificing dps by delaying upgrades to the next tier.

The framework for this already exists, as seen in the gladiator set bonuses.

The Gladiator sets are a different animal entirely. The answer here is really not some overly complicated tier-muddying scheme, but just to have more comprehensive and intelligent bonuses on sets for the content you're doing.

By the way, "boni" isn't a word and has the opposite effect of you trying to look clever there.

Maybe, but the post you are quoting was referring specifically to Ret paladin weapons, not hunters.

My point isn't that they'd take T5 specifically; my point was that, in the event they choose a crappy bonus (and given 2 set bonuses across 9 classes and how many total specs, they will more than once) you're stuck with it for more than just one tier of gear.

Two thoughts here:

1. Yes, Blizz has come up with some lousy set bonuses. However, they don't ALL suck, and if it was cut down to 2 per class I think they could make good ones. Part of the problem may be that the devs have to come up with four pairs of set bonuses (D3/T4/T5/T6) and some of them just aren't very good, or very applicable.

2. A complication which I'd like to see, which would retain some of the flavor of different set bonuses, is having all TierX/Tier X+1/Tier X+2 items counting as a "set" but have the option of changing set bonuses based on gemming. So imagine if your T4 hunter set by default is "Demon Stalker" (T4) set bonuses, could be gemmed to "Rift Stalker" (T5)set bonuses, or drop in epic gems with a different combination and now it's "Gronn Stalker" (T6) set bonuses.

This would still have the complication of the multiple pairs of set bonuses, and I have no idea how to communicate these options in the UI. On the plus side, players can use whichever Tier pieces they like, and all Tier pieces count towards the set bonuses which the player chooses. So if there's a real turkey in the mix everyone will gem around it.

Actually, I believe that has the opposite effect. By having 8 piece sets with the best bonus being the 4-piece, it becomes possible to have the 4-piece bonus from two sets, meaning Blizzard will have to be more careful about overly-powerful set bonuses. It wasn't possible to have two different 4-piece bonuses prior to 2.4.

It's odd though that for some classes/specs they manage to hit the nail right on the head when it comes to set bonuses, yet when it comes to other classes/specs they manage to completely screw up, making the set bonus absolutely worthless and nothing more then "nice to have".

Makes you wonder why they seem to get it wrong for so often for certain classes/specs (for example I haven't seen a single setbonus on T4 -> T6 on the dps plate gear for a warrior that would be seen as anything other then a nice little extra but nothing to be amazed about).

At least for the warlock 4t6 it's easy, they totally screwed the meaning of warlock for destruction without quite realizing it at the time the sets were made. So they made a set bonus for something that they thought was 35% SB dmg for affli to around 60-70% SB bonus for destro. Turned out spamming just the one button with quartz and latency accounted for is better and this way the set bonus became quite possibly one of the best of the dps ones.