Well yes, obviously that was meant in the context of the content being obselete in 4 weeks anyway. I agree with you on the difficulty nerfs (including the progressive ones that we've seen throughout TBC tbh).
Sunwell was hard, as it should have been. The problem was it was harder than class balance was ready for. Mages losing spots to warlocks, bloodlust stacking, hunters out-DPSing rogues/mages, prot paladins suddenly being required, holy paladins falling behind, and so on, all these problems came to the forefront because Sunwell was hard enough to force raid stacking.
These aren't new issues. It's not like a prot paladin didn't tank Hyjal trash better than any three other tanks, or like warlocks didn't AoE it better than mages. We just didn't care, because it was Hyjal trash. T6 wasn't hard enough to really test class balance. If BT/Hyjal had been more tightly tuned these problems might have been caught and fixed a year ago.
Hard content is always going to destroy some guilds, especially at the end of an expansion when people are burning out. That's inevitable and there's no way to "fix" it without dumbing down the game. What Blizzard can fix is getting their class balance right before they drop in a dungeon like Sunwell, so guilds that never needed to stack raids before aren't scrambling to do it during progression.
"What the poet laments holds for the mathematician. That he writes his works with the blood of his heart."
– Ludwig Boltzmann
I think each guild had its own blend of struggles but below is a list of some of the broader problems:
1) The start of school
2) Relative difficulty vs. reward - Sunwell is brutal by design, which is both awesome and a problem when there are now many ways to get amazing gear (pvp, badge, no keys for BT/Hyjal). A number of people didn't want the stress of it.
3) Raid comp swings - 10 Healers/3 tanks for Kal, 6 healers/2 tanks for Brut, 25 priests for Fel (joke), 11 healers/3 tanks for Twins, 6 healers/4 tanks for M'uru. It's either a lot of sitting or respeccing for people.
4) Expense - Haste & Destruction Pots are required in mass quantities. The price of herbs on servers with multiple SWP raid guilds also rose with demand. Additionally, ilvl150 gear is not gear to repair ~ 5g a wipe. With dailies its not hard to get money, but its still money not spent on alts.
5) Wrath - As soon as it was announced a number of people lost interest in current stuff.
6) Raid Comp (or the shaman employment patch) - SWP favors shaman unfortunately. Shaman is one of the least played classes producing hardship for a lot of guilds. This is particularly true alliance side where the totemic way is much less traveled.
Does that help?
Just reading over this post and Brut doesnt require 6 tanks. You need only 2. One for each end of his body at NE and NW corners. Basically allowing all ranged casters seperated behind the tanks to take the damage mitigated and have the melee dps at either side of him at all times. Kal requires at least 3 tanks, 4-5 would be nice though. We did it with 5 and it took us three tries, but after that, we got him down in the first night of walking into SWP.
Just reading over this post and Brut doesnt require 6 tanks. You need only 2. One for each end of his body at NE and NW corners. Basically allowing all ranged casters seperated behind the tanks to take the damage mitigated and have the melee dps at either side of him at all times. Kal requires at least 3 tanks, 4-5 would be nice though. We did it with 5 and it took us three tries, but after that, we got him down in the first night of walking into SWP.
He wrote 2 Tanks, 6 Healers
And for
Originally Posted by Caladiera
2) Relative difficulty vs. reward - Sunwell is brutal by design, which is both awesome and a problem when there are now many ways to get amazing gear (pvp, badge, no keys for BT/Hyjal). A number of people didn't want the stress of it.
This also made part of Sunwell easier to access, as several pieces of gear could be replaced by badge loot or pvp items (phyiscal damage ring, weapons for unlucky guilds etc.)
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.
I don't think this would have been nearly as popular pre-BC. As far as I could tell, most guilds in Naxx that hadn't cleared it yet were quite stuck wherever they were at. Anyone who stuck around through horrible attendance issues was chased off by unusable cross-faction loot while all the healers had to deal with broken UIs and instant gibs in PvP. This time around, healers are still frustrated by downranking nerfs but every other issue is gone and the raiding nerf encourages people who haven't wandered off yet to keep going until WotLK. Back then, 2.0 was a deathblow that nerfs to encounters wouldn't have solved.
Sunwell was hard, as it should have been. The problem was it was harder than class balance was ready for. Mages losing spots to warlocks, bloodlust stacking, hunters out-DPSing rogues/mages, prot paladins suddenly being required, holy paladins falling behind, and so on, all these problems came to the forefront because Sunwell was hard enough to force raid stacking.
These aren't new issues. It's not like a prot paladin didn't tank Hyjal trash better than any three other tanks, or like warlocks didn't AoE it better than mages. We just didn't care, because it was Hyjal trash. T6 wasn't hard enough to really test class balance. If BT/Hyjal had been more tightly tuned these problems might have been caught and fixed a year ago.
Hard content is always going to destroy some guilds, especially at the end of an expansion when people are burning out. That's inevitable and there's no way to "fix" it without dumbing down the game. What Blizzard can fix is getting their class balance right before they drop in a dungeon like Sunwell, so guilds that never needed to stack raids before aren't scrambling to do it during progression.
I think this is an excellent post and adresses something very important. Difficult content will bring out class balance issues to the forefront, because when you balance it, you have to balance it around an optimal raid.
The optimal raid will have all the good classes, and none of the 'bad' classes, thus guilds that made it through BT with a mish-mash of suboptimal healers / dps will end up struggling through Sunwell until they can update their roster.
For us, our healing core has tipically been our extremly strong holy paladin crew. When we set foot in Sunwell, Kalec himself was brutal. Eventually, we managed to kill everything except KJ before 3.0, but I lost count of how many horrible resto shamans we had to recruit just to struggle through the zone, and we gave up on raiding about a month before 3.0 simply because every resto shaman we recruiteded ended up being horrendously unreliable and I realized I didn't want to recruit more mouthbreathers simply because they had a chain heal button and heroism.
Had paladins been as good as shamans, we probably could have cleared the zone easily - but most guilds have to work with what they have, not with what they need.
I dont think blaming Sunwell for guilds dying is right. Remember people this is exactly what we, the raiders wanted. No other instance forced me either as a raid member or as part of leadership to think about what me or the raid is doing so much and i thank Blizzard for it even if i ended up quiting and not seeing the end of it.
As mentioned before what killed guilds that spent all these months farming "end game," -that was never end game in terms of difficuilty in the first place- leveling alts, doing arenas and battlegrouns or just plain idling in Ironforge, many people go and the ones replacing them can't be tested, by them selfs or the guild, in situations where they need to perfom at the level each guild requires them to.
Guilds were never before forced to have 30k RDPS setups, they were rarely forced to move out of the fire, their healers weren't forced to gem haste to put out the required hps (not just in terms of numbers but speed), raiders were rarely forced to put that amount of focus that you needed to have to keep Muru phase 1 under control reliably in each attempt to get to learn p2 and kill it.
The frustration of not having everyone at the same level is what causes the finger pointing, drama, core people leaving and in some cases the guild disband.
It doesn't have much to do with class restrictions or imbalance, you can't make tightly tuned content without forcing tightly composed raids. That is not even why they are remaking the whole buff system that was probably the most intresting part about raiding, they loved the buff system just as we (I) did. But they just need to balance things arround both 10mans and 25 mans now. To me thats not a solution to the whole guild killing thing but im getting off topic here.
In the end, most were not prepared for Sunwell and thats the only fault on Blizzards part in my opinion.
A quote that I wanted to throw in that applied to me and my own guild:
"Progression is a marathon, not a sprint."
I was the GM, and I can say that that basically sums up why we failed. We started in January and were averaging at 1.09 new boss kills per week starting with Gruul and going up to (and including) Brutallus. We hit a wall of summer, people leaving on vacation and recruitment getting hard, and we didn't have the morale to continue. We were sprinting through the content but had no stamina for the long-run.
We were simply fucking exhausted, especially the leadership. Sunwell was simply brutal.
A quote that I wanted to throw in that applied to me and my own guild:
"Progression is a marathon, not a sprint."
I was the GM, and I can say that that basically sums up why we failed. We started in January and were averaging at 1.09 new boss kills per week starting with Gruul and going up to (and including) Brutallus. We hit a wall of summer, people leaving on vacation and recruitment getting hard, and we didn't have the morale to continue. We were sprinting through the content but had no stamina for the long-run.
We were simply fucking exhausted, especially the leadership. Sunwell was simply brutal.
Our guild met its demise through general exhaustion as well, but I think the difference that isn't always stressed in the posts above is that the stress point wasn't just Sunwell, it was the other environmental factors that intervened at the same time.
Certainly, precision, expectations and tuning in Sunwell were far higher than in other raid instances, but progress into Sunwell also hit many guilds in the summer, when attendance tends to lag, and on the brink of an expansion, when interest in raiding often lags.
Combine lesser attendance with a harder raid instance and you can't really fill the raid in the same way. We were frequently taking people on raids who sat bench before, but it was all we had. Raid fillers don't work well in Sunwell and a lack of success on raids makes it a lot easier to get exhausted in a hurry.
For those of us who benefited from the progressive nerfs to Vashj and Kael, the changes to Sunwell came late. For us they came after the guild had already melted down...
I think it's too early to say. We just haven't gotten to that content yet. Everything that follows beyond this point is just my random brain dumping and not our official stance:
-- Raiding is easy at the moment. Even Naxx will be pretty easy. Part of that is because we thought Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon were too steep a jump in difficulty from the heroics. Part of that is because most of the Naxx encounters are well-understood.
-- You will not be able to AE tank and AE burn down every encounter in Lich King like we're all doing now in Hyjal and Sunwell.
-- Very few players experienced Sunwell pre-nerf.
-- On the other hand, those that did were generally very complimentary of the encounters. Despite the difficulty, people had fun.
-- No matter how difficult we make content, very hardcore groups will probably still finish it quickly. In other words, we can't make "insanely difficult" the barrier that keeps a boss alive for months.
-- It's probably okay if some content is only seen by a few players. It just amps up the epic quotient of those fights. Everyone knew who Ragnaros was, even if they hadn't been able to beat him.
-- Obviously the preceeding is a very slippery slope and it's easy to make content too difficult or too easy.
-- Part of the reason Sunwell was difficult was it mandated raid stacking. The buff / debuff system has changed so much that we don't anticipate that happening again the same way.
-- We really like optional objectives that let skilled groups really test their mettle (and then show off about it). I'm talking about things like the 45-min Baron run, ZA bear run, and Chamber of the Aspects with all drakes up. Does this mean Arthas will be doable by many groups but the uber mode to beat him will be 10x as hard and offer better loot? We're just not there yet.
10/29/08, 1:19 PM
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