Tanks on Kalecgos just need to remember which group they went in with, as I have witnessed (fortunately, not experienced) plenty of wipes when tanks got ported (not the initial dragon main tank) and was confused about which group he is in.

There shouldn't really be a fifth group for Kalecgoes. First of all, you can easily fit people in four groups. Secondly, having too many groups causes people to take too many AB debuffs initially and can easily die.

Every people has to :
*put himself in good position
*be aware of portals
*be aware of the 10% marks
*be aware of the situation in his plan (few healers, etc...)

It's a bit dynamic : move, be aware, analyse, etc... That's definitely more than any fight in BT.

Beside that Kalecgos is a clever fight which points out sleepy/brainless raiders :
*people dying because of the predictable arcane blast
*people dying because of the predictable portal pop
*people accepting crez and instantly dying because of blast/portals
*people accepting crez just before inc portal and being tp
*people do not stop dps when needed/asked too and making enraged one of the mob
*people killing/banning the dragon too early
*people missing tp and not saying it
*...

Of course you can have a first kill or crap kills without that much suffering (specially since you regen lot of life/mana in demon phase), thing is depending of how things turn it can be 'easy' but it also can be a bit hard (and interesting).
But masterize this fight in any circonstancies need definitely some skills (or at least more than bringing lot of shamans). Someone missing a portal or a tank being tp can be handle for sure. This is a very clever fight if you care.

I think the times we've killed Kalecgos cleanly (no deaths, that is) can be counted on the fingers of just one hand. While that indicates it's a harder fight than anything in BT (for us, at least), it also suggests it's a very, VERY forgiving fight. All in all, not a bad first boss.

I think this probably wins the thread. You just cannot find 8/8 T6 players floating around if you need to recruit and are stuck on M'uru. The higher your DPS (ie, the more Sunwell gear you have) the easier M'uru became (provided your tanks were adequately geared and your healers had absurd amounts of haste).

All in all I think the biggest challenge of Sunwell was from a guild leadership perspective - managing your roster.

I'm sure it's been touched upon, but I feel one of the biggest cockblocks to Sunwell was the healer requirement for a number of fights. Our guild did all of BT/Hyjal with a max of seven healers, and often ran with six. This included supposedly healer heavy fights like Gurtogg and Council.

Then comes Sunwell and we beat our heads for 2 weeks trying Kalecgos with 7 healers. We later bumped it to 8, then to 9 till we got him down.

Then Brutallus we had to then ask our extra healers to sit, and Felmyst required them to come back. This constant revolving door took a toll on our numbers and whenever we didn't have enough healers on, we'd have to grudgingly go back to BT or call off the Sunwell raid when a healer had to go and no backup was online. It also didn't help that we didn't have too many reliable resto shaman. Since Sunwell came out, we recruited and burnt out more resto shaman than any other class/spec.

I'm hoping WotLK really doesn't go above that magic number of 7 healers per 25-man. When only 4 out of 30 specs can heal, it really puts a burden on any guild to get 8-10 competent healers night in and night out.

Also, I feel healing in Sunwell offered a much more difficult challenge than any other raid instance thus far. Healers had to deal with large spike damage on tanks, coupled w/ constant AoE damage, and a number of environmental effects that they HAD to be cognizant of, from portals to conflagrate to encapsulate. Healing in BT/Hyjal, I'd reckon was much easier, and for some guilds, the learning curve for healers in Sunwell could be too steep to overcome.

About two weeks ago, our raid group died. That means our server has now lost both the top end groups that have been going since MC was new. I've thought quite a lot about events since then. I'll try to list the various factors I feel are important.

- The gearing food chain. I'm thinking of the mechanism where the well geared players leak "upwards" here. Through vanilla WoW this wasn't an issue for the local top dog raid groups, there simply wasn't anywhere to go for the core players, apart from quitting (which did happen, of course). But with increasing availability of server transfers, the transfer game has gone global. I feel we have only seen the beginning of the impact of this change, especially now that PvE => PvP transfers are open as well. During TBC, especially during the SWP era, I've seen an increasing flow of our servers best geared and skilled players leak into the top 50 groups. Obviously, this has a negative impact on local groups.

- Gearing up / the last instance. I saw this in Naxxramas as well, but at the time it didn't really raise any headlines. The problem I'm thinking of is the negative cycle where as you loose a player, his replacement need to be geared up, pushing back progress further, loosing you more players etc etc. This was actually much worse during the Naxxramas era, back then it took months to gear a replacement for someone in full gear, as the drop rate of T2 set parts was a lot slower than the rate you can aquire T6 drops. But the problem is the same. Once you are forced to recruit, you are doomed to 2-3 weeks without SWP progress. This problem is most noticeable in the "last" instance of an expansion, that relies on gear from previous tiers of instances to a much higher degree than previous instances. Especially as Blizzard in their infinite wisdom likes to create a "nightmare" instance at the end of each expansion, requiring absolutely top quality gear.

- Deficient gear quality increase in SWP. This is a very specific problem related to the Sunwell Plateau in particular. For every previous instance I have seen, the gear you get from the instance will allow you to kill the farm content with ease once you have geared up a bit. Not so in the SWP. As far as I can tell, the critical factor is stamina. If you examine the effect of SWP gear, then yes, factors like DPS and HPS goes up, but you actually loose a bit of stamina as you slap on SWP gear. The net effect of this is that "farm" bosses in fact never become farm. Of course, with endless repetition the bosses eventually start dying. But I think most everyone has experienced how difficult even a 25th kill can be in the SWP. This is something unique in my experience.

- As has been touched on by many, the tuning of SWP to "harsh" means that it puts absurd requirements on group setups. If you check time spent on various activities during a SWP raid, you'll notice that as little as 20% of the time spent actually goes into boss fights, if even that. Endless of amounts of time is spent on swapping people between bosses, waiting for that one last person to check ready / log back on after a disconnect etc etc. With zero margins of "slack", you end up with absurd raid composition swaps and down time. Going from 11 healers on the Twins to 6 on M'uru is the most flagrant example. The same problem point obviously added a completely unprecedented pressure on raid group logistics. We had to keep silly amounts of specific classes on the books, or in the reverse, if you lost a key class / player, you simply couldn't do certain fights.

- Leaving SWP unchanged for 6 months. Yes, it's cool that top end groups get an instance tuned to their level of play. But to touch on a previous point. They recruit 8/8 T6 geared players and have no shortage of people to pick from if they loose someone. Once they were "done", the instance ought to have been re-tuned for the more ordinary groups. This wasn't done, and over time the raid group deaths escalated. This last minute 30% HP nerf feels like being spit in the face. We would have needed a nerfing in june / july, and not such a huge one.


So, why did raid groups die then? I'll summarize:
- SWP was left too highly tuned for too long.
- Gearing up didn't in fact make farming SWP bosses easier.
- The server transfers and gearing up for "not top 50 groups" left us in a downward spiral of: Loose core player to top end group => recruit & replace => forced to farm T6 => loose more core players.


My recommendations to Blizzard for the future:
- If you want to put in a playground for the top groups, make it an optional instance / boss (think: Viscidus). I'm pretty sure Blizzard has recognized the problem finally (it was evident during Naxxramas as well..) but you simply canot design your content with only the top X% (X << 10) in mind. It is the "middle class" that makes up the bulk of your game.
- Yes, let players transfer as they wish, but put in place more fixes to the gearing up issue. If the top groups advertise "we cba to farm BT & Hyjal, so you must have full T6 gear to apply" then you can bet the guilds loosing players don't enjoy being forced to farm old content either.
- Make sure that gear from an instance => easier farm kills. Wipe nights on your 22nd kill of a boss is poison for morale.

I'd like to expand on the second point even further. I've slowly become a great fan of the thought of "bind on raid guild" equipment. I looked at a speed kill of Brutallus by a top end group and they had no less than 5 glaive pairs lined up in that screen shot. I would bet my house they didn't farm those glaives themselves. I think there is very little, to no, point in making the game even easier for the best groups by robbing the labour of the middle and low end groups. From a global perspective, you don't want to increase the difference in quality between groups. It's much better if you can in fact narrow the gap. This is where the "bind on raid group" idea pops up. In motor sports, the drivers can frequently swap teams. But can you imagine anyone who wish to run or sponsor a team if the driver could walk off with his car or bike as well? And the gear on an individual player is actually not "his" as such. It took 24 other people who put in their time and effort to gear everyone up.

I fear that the strictly individual-centered approach to game design we have now will cause even further havoc to the group building efforts in WoW. If my best players can walk off with dozens of hours of collective effort spent by the group, eventually I'll just get tired of working for the common good, and take the easy option of transfering to better group myself. In the long run, and on a large scale, this is a completely untenable situation for the game.

For me personally, I'll never run another raid group. There are no good sides to the labour and the game design keeps messing you up if you try.

I don't think Nuveena is disputing the DPS increase. He's saying that there isn't a corresponding increase in Survivability, which makes farming easier.

Maybe its just with rogue gear, but my hp actually increased too. now it didn't increase by the same percentage as my DPS, but it didn't need to. I had enough HP to kill the bosses when we killed them the first time, I don't need any more for the fight. In addition - with the DPS boost - the fights became shorter and the healers could afford to uprank / burn mana faster granting vastly more survivability for everyone.

Yes, I have. There is a very clear correlation. When you enter new content, the "I quit" posts start piling up. People may claim they enjoy wipe nights, but in fact they don't. For sure, leaving for a "better" guild is not the norm, most just quit. But those who do leave for better guilds causes the most damage to you as they are your core players most often. I think the most common reasons for leaving are along the lines of "sorry, I got a job / girl friend / whatnot!" and "This isn't fun anymore". It's not the first time over either you know. I saw exactly the same behaviour when we ran into a wall in Naxxramas. And those scarred veterans who survived that experienced all quit when we went into T5 and they went "oh no, not THIS again". We even used to have a post with "damage done" for each instance where we tracked how many players we lost for each new instance. Funnily enough, you loose hardly anyone once the last boss has died and you enter farming mode.

Wiping on hard bosses is what causes the most stress on any group. Obviously this will expose existing cracks. And in a group of ~40 people there will be such cracks regardless of what you try. I'm sure you have encounterd people blaming the "bad players" for wipes one or a hundred times? That's the sort of thing that eventually can rip a group apart.

Now, if you belong to one of those very very rare guilds that hasn't lost more than a handful of players since 2004, then congratulations, well done! I've actually kept track of player turnover in roughly 10 guilds on our server. And our group was in the normal to lower bracket of that data. I don't think we did anything substantially wrong. What ended up killing us was when a fairly large fraction decided they didn't want to keep playing with "all those bad players" and went ahead and formed a 10 man WotLK guild.


And how much did your survivability increase? In my experience, quite a lot of Sunwell farm wipes start off with someone taking lethal damage inside a fairly small amount of time. Usually, total HP goes up as you gear up in a new instance and you get more slack eventually on the fights. Just think of how you can survive the most horrible misstakes in BT these days, and then compare how you can't afford any little misstake even on Kalecgos and you get the picture. In the Sunwell it was mainly just DPS & HPS that went up. Sure, that decreases the total fight time, but did nothing to prevent the "random raid deaths" problem that easily snowballs in such tightly tuned fights. But of course, as a rogue you would pay most attention to the DPS stats and not so much to 'irrelevant' things as total health

Well, if you went with 9 healers (which I find slightly improbable, but heck, why not) then you most likely super charged on shamans for healing, which is raid stacking in itself. You end up with 10-11 if you can't rely so heavily on chain heals to solve the healing problem for you. I think the "common wisdom" in the player community is that the Sunwell forced an unheard of amount of raid stacking, I'm hardly alone to draw that conclusion.

And while I agree with you on the fact that you're stating - Yes, raid stacking happened, No, my hp didn't go up - I disagree with the conclusions you're drawing from that.

My guild also 'died' (although we did a Sunwell raid with 10 of our non-raiders in greens, blues and kara gear in it the other day - wicked fun, you've never heard such girlish screams of delight from grown men as we did at the KJ animation) and experienced the same issues you seem to have. However, rather than blaming the raid instance, I've come to the conclusion that if I'd managed the guild and peoples expectations better, then they could have ben avoided. Hence my post above

It's worth noting though, that Kazzak is pretty much as full a server as you're going to get in the Euro realm pool. Well-geared and decent playing individuals don't transfer away from Kazzak, they transfer to Kazzak - didn't Last Resort, for instance, return via PCT after leaving via a free migration because there was no one to recruit and very few willing to transfer to the free target realm? You don't really have a typical recruiting pool, neither in size nor - by now - composition. A lot of the management issues encountered on smaller servers as a result of talent/gear-transfer-drain just doesn't happen at, if you'll pardon the rough analogy, at the bottom of said drain.

We left Boulderfist simply because the server was too dead, especially after Forte died. The majority of the guild ended up voting to go back to Kazzak since we still had ties to people there. We had no problems per say getting recruits while on Boulderfist, although a lot more applications started coming in once we moved back to Kazzak. In general far into an expansion the prospect of finding good recruits on the same realm is slim compared to PCT; we do however have high hopes for benefiting from the Kazzak community in WotLK. If only the queues would go away.

Nuveena, I can hear your words as I've been in a position almost identical to yours. However, I chose to stop leading "bad players" that I didn't even like raiding with, once my IRL friends quit. Now, speaking of "Sunwell problem", there is a major decision to be made by Blizzard between two ways of fixing it - 1. make Sunwell easier; 2. make BT harder; and I believe that the latter is better for the game.

If Blizzard chooses the first way - "everyone will beat the game" - then good players will finish all content very quickly and stop playing. It already happened in top guilds during BT lull. If this becomes the norm, it will raise the question for good guilds - why bother playing 1 month of say 4, then cancel subscription for 3 months waiting until Blizz releases next tier, come back to clear it in 1 month and stop playing again? I'd rather find a bettter game where I could play and have fun all the time instead of 1/4.

If Blizzard decides "last tier is nightmare" is the way to go, then your situation won't happen. Imagine if they did a proper T4 25man instead of Kara + 2 overtuned single bosses, then released T5 in April 2007, then T6 tuned significantly harder in September, and Sunwell exactly as they did. If they released and tuned raid instances properly, your raid group would've still been working on last T6 bosses in March-April 2008, and you'd had more realistic goals of sticking together, having fun and killing 1-3 bosses in Sunwell instead of trying to clear all SWP and destroying yourself because that content was not indended for your raid group.


P.S.
For top guilds, situation is diametrically opposite - people disappear when everything is on farm and there's nothing to beat. Different consumer segments, different goals and different problems. I believe that solution is in better segmentation of content, not in dumbing everything down.

I don't think Blizzard are only facing two options here. I think they have a third option, which is in fact the one they have chosen which is to make instances in general be easier, but then provide additional harder goals for the raiders who want them. Timed runs, Sarthurion style encounters, achievements based incentives to run with lesser players, or zero deaths, etc, etc.

This way all decent guilds can see all the content, but there are still additional challenges there that only the best guilds can complete. Blizzard have admitted that Sunwell was 'too hard' and I think we will see them balance the desires of 'average' raiders with 'high level' raiders by using additional rewards or challenges overlaid onto easier content in this manner.

But lets not forget the months between BT and the release of sunwell when everyone was complaining about how easy and boring BT/MH were and they needed a hard instance. If blizzard did anything wrong it could be they didn't progressively nerf the instance after the top guilds cleared it. To their credit a lot of badge T5/T6 quality badge gear was introduced with the sunwell patch so it may have simply being an itemization issue.

I actually see merit to the approach Blizzard has somewhat taken with Sunwell and the 3.0 patch. Keep the top tier content hard and fairly exclusive. When the next tier is ready for release (of course in this case its not a new tier of content but rather a new xpac), release it and then maybe 3-4 weeks later, nerf the previous tier for the rest of the masses.

Well, the 3.0 nerfs were something different altogether but I agree that the approach that was (eventually) taken in TBC worked well. Make the hardest content very difficult, and then make it easier once it's been beaten by a bunch of the guilds who really want to compete for the top X kill in the world.

Upgraded badge gear was a very natural way to make this happen, along with incremental nerfs of the content itself. From the sound of it we may have a different situation with WotLK badges though -- one of the stated reasons for multiple badge tiers was that folks were getting T6 gear from T4 challenges. Personally I'm hoping that this means we'll see Epic 5-mans...

I think WOTLK is definately a factor for dying guilds, and stagnant progress will affect morale.
Personally, the close release of WoTLK has motivated me and my guild more than ever to finish all SWPcontent. We have a mindset that the loot is just loot, and it's an enabler to do move forward in content.

We down'd KJ last night for the first time with 24/25 in the raid. Our first full night of tries

Coming from Horde side of the very same server I can only add that keeping last top guild alive through the transition was quite a task - about 4 months ago 2 top guilds (existing since MC days) merged to conquer SWP by stacking the pool of talented players (one of them was losing people fast at the Brut, second just had management changed and was high on morale after very fast BT progress). Getting to Mu'ru and wiping on him took its toll, then of course 3.02 came and SWP was cleared in the week right after the patch (slight delays because of ER post-patch stability and lag issues).

Right now new guild seems to be holding and getting ready for WotLK, but it was achieved by quite insane patience of the leaders - there is practically no supply of players ready (both gear-wise and "don't stand in fire"-wise) for the place, so long reserve bench helped. WotLK future looks relatively bright if Naxx reports from beta hold true, as it will allow us to continue even with less then stellar performace.

Nevertheless, if things start to get really hard (SWP hard), I'll start to worry - certain servers are getting less and less viable option for 25 ppl raiding because of the lower number of players feeling its worth the effort. There is core of players that is ready for such things (and for new achievements related), but there is rarely new guys being able to supply "the core". Sometimes old veteran that have left is coming back, which is great boon, but more often then not, you are forced to progress with raid taking 2-3 players that fit only because there is no one better around.

Not going to lie SWP is practically 25-man Karazhan at the moment. Shortening the raid week down to 1 hour for some, and making the content widely available for the rest. Half-wish this was done with Naxx a few weeks before TBC went live.

Its a great opportunity for any guild with a raiding core and a number of casual players too, as it allows you to bring the casuals along to see the content before its outlevelled and for them to experience the fights as they were intended to be (or thereabouts). I know i've harped on about this in other threads, but from the point of view of a guild that 'stopped raiding' about 3-4 weeks ago, it's ideal.

We raided it last week and the one before with ~40% casual/non-raiders in the raid, and did fantastically well, clearing it all the first week but unfortunately not killing KJ the second (due to raid makeup and my refusal to swap out people who wanted to see it more than anything else). Everyone's excited about being able to see the content, and looking forward now to raiding in WotLK. We've had more re-activations in the guild than ever before, and its great to see loads of old faces in the guild again. From a marketing point of view, this change to raid encounters is nothing short of genius.

Genius as long as it remains something that only happens ~4 weeks before an expansion is coming out. Staight difficulty nerfs are generally a terrible idea unless the content has been out for an excessive amount of time (6 months).