The only problem with that philosophy is that you are negating the entire point of raiding. Sure, you need your buffer classes, but now multiple classes can fulfill that role which does fix a lot of the problems. You are WAY more likely to have at least 1 of 3 different classes that give similar buffs rather then 1 of 1 kind of classes that only give that buff. The likelihood of the former not going your way for 25-mans at least is slim to none.

All this is doing is giving the chance for the all classes to shine in a handful of different roles, and giving the chance for each individual, no matter the class, to prove their worth no matter how many of said class is in the raid (within reason of course, let's say 3 of each class).

The thing that really kills high-end/server first guilds, is the core members leaving.

Sunwell has such a low tolerance for bad play, that in most fights anybody can wipe the raid by not paying attention. Understand that most guilds outside the top 50 comprise of a handful of hardcore players that drive the progress of the guild. When these core members start to get frustrated with randoms wiping the raid time after time and completely out of their control, they eventually stop playing.

Attendance and composition are other issues that are out of the control of raid leaders, and are a difficult pill to swallow after putting so much effort into a guild.

Everyone has a limit to the amount of crap they can take. When you look around and see players simply not caring about the game, its disheartening.

It's fine for the randoms to come and go, but when you see fellow core members leaving, it really hurts.

We're the only horde raid on our server doing SWP. There was another, but they pushed too hard and their leadership burned out.

We're 4/6. My grievances with SWP are the linear layout and the composition requirements.

The layout hurts us because we only raid two days per week. We often find ourselves in the situation where Kalecgos/Brutallus/Felmyst are down with only 40 minutes or so left in the raid, and thus that time is wasted because it isn't worth it to clear to Twins, do subs, etc. at that point. This means a minimum of an hour wasted on the following raid day, if Twins go well. They often don't because we haven't had them down for long.

Composition requirements suck for us as well, but for different reasons. We actually have too many shamans which doesn't get said very often. There's no way that we can bring them all forward to Wrath. We've also got some players seeing a huge amount of bench time versus others because of the class that they play (ie. our protadin).

My old guild was on a PvE server and we found that the weakness of the recruitment pool really held us back in clearing Sunwell quickly. We raided most of late Sunwell with just two resto shamans because we just couldn't find anyone even remotely good enough to take to Felmyst and Twins, nevermind M'uru and KJ. As an officer, I was extremely picky about recruits at times, much to the annoyance of some my fellow leaders who saw throwing gear at any available body as a viable solution, and yet we still ended up with more than our fair share of idiots.

Across all classes we constantly found people using subpar specs and idiotic gemming, with WWS parses showing a clear lack of the understanding about the fundamentals of playing their class in a raid environment. We're talking double glaive rogues struggling to put out 2k DPS on Brutallus and constantly dropping SnD. Hunters who died prematurely every single KJ pull, that kind of thing. We recruited something like fifteen people between the end of June and the beginning of September, when I left, and I can count the number of players you could actually call 'good' on one hand.

While we weren't exactly bleeding edge (in the top 160 KJ kills), we were still the leading Alliance guild on the server and probably in the top fifteen EU Alliance PvE guilds and we still had horrible application after horrible application. I hate to think what things were like further down the food chain. We almost fell apart twice, the first time between Felmyst and Twins and the second time between Twins and M'uru but somehow managed to scrape things together and get a KJ kill in August.

Other guilds on the server weren't so lucky. The third ranked Alliance guild on the server couldn't down Brutallus and spent months farming BT and recruiting and losing players before finally managing to progress again. Two Horde guilds were held up on M'uru, even after the nerf. One stopped raiding for a month, went back to it at the end of summer and eventually got the kill, the other is, to the best of my knowledge, still working on it. Even the top guild on the server struggled horribly over the summer, owing in part to a lack of quality recruits.

Edit: needless to say this has been addressed now (I hope) by the opening of PvE to PvE transfers but had the change happened sooner, I'm not convinced it would have helped, given that the movement on my old server since transfers open seems to have been almost universally one way - off.

Honestly I think most of the issues have already been addressed in WotLK by the raid buff overhaul and new abilities. From guilds that are needlessly strict to fights that just plain require it, raid composition hell is over. M'uru was overtuned, but that too was exacerbated by the class stacking requirements.

The prospect of an approaching expansion certainly doesn't help raid commitment for those who are losing hope, but I think we will see a lot more folks raiding straight through 'til the weekend before WotLK launches than we did even a month before TBC.

I don't know about Hunter gear, but for other classes this is definitely not the case. Most Heroic gear is comparable to Sunwell gear, if not slightly superior. 10 man gear is markedly superior (140+ DPS 1h weapons vs ~110). Also, if you entirely skip out on 10 mans and heroics you will miss out on some excellent badge items at the very least that have no replacements (eg., Mirror of Truth is likely the best Rogue trinket currently available in the game). There are a lot of very clear upgrades in Naxx 10.

Additionally, it's not like running Naxx 25 will take a significant amount of time investment. The instance is tuned very easily. Most serious (eg., SWP clearing guilds) will have it cleared out in the first week of starting their raids. What are you going to do with all your free time if not run Heroics (at the very least to get rep for enchants)?

As for the topic of this thread, my guild survived SWP (though I was not an active raider through all of TBC and only came back a few months ago). The guild survived by maintaining our efficiency model, having excellent recruiting/raid leading, and having dedicated players who want to see the content cleared. Not that they haven't had a lot of turnover since BT, but turnover is unavoidable when there are long streches of no content.

I think the essence of this thread is the fact that for almost any game, there -needs- to be content that caters to a broad player base. Sunwell fleshed out the high end of the requirement beautifully in that regard. The two most guild-killing factors would be the stacking requirements, and sub-par players causing the driving force to burn out.

Hopefully with Blizzard's proclaimed design paradigm for WotLK ("Bring the players you like to play with, not X because he has Y buff") both of these will be somewhat minimized - You won't have to bring shit shadow priest X just so that he can mass dispel on Felmyst, or more likely eat 3 combat rezzes an attempt. Gear consolidation will also help getting key gear upgrades faster (and to some extent, ease offspec swapping to handle minor healer/tank/dps stacking requirements)

Otherwise, no one likes to be told they're not up to snuff - and that's basically what SWP did to the morale of a lot of guilds. This sounds a little elitist, but it's true... something that's tuned to the enjoyment top echelon of players WILL give other groups varying amounts of trouble. That's something that Blizzard will never be able to avoid. Perhaps 10-man Arthas will give the "driving force core" of dying guilds enough motivation to reform and push on, though... we'll see.

SWP being hard wasn't a mistake. What was a mistake was the jump in difficulty from the content prior to SWP.

The WotLK class redesign will help ease the need to field very specific raids certainly, but I'm pretty certain they still want to maintain some sense of needing to adjust raid composition slightly from fight to fight. You definitely won't see something like SWP, and there will be a lot more interchangeability, but you will still see some loose requirements from time to time. For instance, on Razuvious in Naxx 25 you have to bring 2 priests. It doesn't matter if your priests are all terrible, no one else can MC so you must bring them.

You can already do this in SWP - some guilds have been doing it from the very start. You can happily take an alt prot Paladin in ZA/badge gear to Felmyst and get by just fine. Even with M'uru, the worst fight in terms of tank requirements, you can get a holy Paladin to tank spawns with no appreciable impact on the raid. Likewise, there's nothing requiring you to take four mainspec resto Shamans to Twins. Respecced Enhance or Elemental will get you by just fine. It won't be optimal but I'm sure many, many guilds got their first kills by doing this.

This issue of raid composition is an extremely interesting one and one of the things I enjoyed most about raid leading in Sunwell was trying to work out how we could use what we had to get the desired results through respecs. You didn't need a ridiculously large roster, you just needed competent players with good offspec gear and a guild bank happy to cover respec costs. There came a point where you had to ask why you'd been throwing offspec gear at people for the last six months and actually get them to use it.

Guilds who were used to doing this pre-SWP and who had players capable of playing in multiple roles found the zone easier, those who didn't struggled. I think it was Gurgthock who said that in Sunwell you play a class, not a spec or something to that effect. This, for me, pretty much sums up what Sunwell raiding was about and I'm sure many of us have experienced a Paladin or something respeccing for each fight in the zone in one night. It really encouraged guilds to get the most out of their players and made people with decent gear across multiple specs who knew how to play very valuable assets indeed.

This is turning into a gripe-fest. We all know the various reasons why SWP kills guilds (Mine is 4/5, and can't recruit).

So now the next step is to prevent this in WotLK. And no, chalon, that does not mean swapping people in and out boss to boss. That's annoying and in no way a challenge on the actual players. Class balance in this new system is going to be the pin holding this all together. If that falls apart, we're back to stringent raid comps and screwed.

Interactive, challenging bosses are not damage races or healing stacks, they involve STRATEGY and THINKING. Maybe a certain phase of the fight has burst or needs ton of damage, but that's it.

See kalecgos, illidan, nefarion, felmyst, cthun, 4H. For failures, see all of MC, Brut, M'uru...

The D&T rerolls did very well, they scored the 2nd or 3rd KJ kill on Blackrock. (Nurfed got the first one)

Whilst my guild is still raiding, there was a long struggle during Felmyst/Twins progression due to lack of Shamen. (They'd all been scooped up by the more-progressed guilds) This was around the same time WotLK hit Alpha; which planted the timebomb in peoples' minds that it was only a matter of time until all the gear they were working to obtain would become redundant. Whilst this is the ongoing nature of any MMO, the release of an expansion marks a point within the gearing cycle whereby they have an opportunity to temporarily bypass the stepping stone dynamic, which is what classifies the current content as "truly" redundant from a loot perspective. To clarify; everyone knew they were going to replace their T4 shoulders when they first looted them. But that doesn't mean you are compelled to stop raiding; as you know they'll act as a pre-requisite to obtaining Tier 5 shoulders. And Tier 6 shoulders, and so on. With Tier 7 shoulders on the horizon, and no current pre-requisite, then the current content becomes entirely redundant.

I no longer raid with my guild (can't attend due to work commitments), I was there for our first M'uru attempt. Since then, they've been going strong, making reasonable progress on M'uru each week. There's no doubt in my mind that they will kill M'uru in the next reset (the -30% health nerf, combined with new talents will push them over the line) - however i've sat back and watched alot of the top guilds fall apart over the last few months. I think my guild is one of three or four Alliance guilds still raiding on Blackrock. Many of them collapsed, disbanded and/or gave up raiding until WotLK. I think attendance was the main reason. My guild hasn't had to cancel any raids yet, but there were some guilds 2 months ago cancelling their raids because they couldn't fill it.

One point of note, though... is that the limited amount of time has driven the hardcore raiders into a frenzy. There's been mass exodus all over the place, and pretty much every recruit we've recieved has applied with the same goals: "I want to see KJ dead before Wrath." If another guild shows promise of doing it sooner, they'll immediately jump ship (or even server) to swipe the opportunity.

Hey Chalon long time no see... been since AQ40 PTR!

Khassie, I have no idea what you're basing your posts on but it seems like you're very confused about how wrath is going to be. Sunwell Epics are 154 to 164 and heroic and 10 man epics are 200-213. Are you honestly saying you aren't going to be upgrading gear with this? It is silly to think that any guild would pass up on 10/heroic content to do 25 only especially since the 25 man content can be done in 1-2 nights max. Doing so will slow down your guild's progress considerably.

As to what caused my guild major issues in sunwell was just the difficulty and raid stacking. Any slowdown we hit in SWP was directly related to not having enough of X class. We started (and finished) sunwell with *2* shaman in the guild so you can probably see why we had issues.

Couple the class stacking with the sheer difficulty people in my guild began to burn out at a pretty quick pace because farming nights we'd still wipe on things, sometimes over and over because people wouldn't really want to be there.

Moving forward into Wrath you can at least exclude most stacking issues but the difficulty curve is still problematic. I'm not an advocate of "easy" content but content that is farming friendly once you've beaten it is really high up on my list of priorities. I guess I just wish we could stroll into SWP with 3 people afk and 3 people watching the MLB play-offs and not wipe to Brutallus or Felmyst... My whole reasoning here is just that after 6-7 months in a zone not very many people really *want* to be there so it should be as painless as possible. The gear gives you somewhat of the ability to slack off or suck but not nearly enough IMO.

Raid stacking hit us hard. We've always run with 25~26 people. We were a very paladin heavy guild too (5 on a raid usually) so when SWP rolled around and said, "haha, paladins? what the hell are you thinking? PALADINS?!?" we hit a road block for awhile and we've been reeling ever since. Of our 5 shaman now, only 1 was with us in black temple and even he was on military leave through most of it and just came back in the past few months. Everytime another guild posted about how fun/well balanced Brutallis was and then had a group photo that included 5 shaman I wanted to murder someone.

We're doing well now, though we've taken the week off so people can enjoy doing other things prior to 3.01 hitting such as play some warhammer or in my case, catch up on about 8 months worth of console games that M'uru stole from my life.

Few things, and... some of them might sound a little arrogant.

"On the shoulders of giants..."
It was too long between BT and SWP. This gap cost a lot of guilds key raiders - they just got bored of the weekly BT/Hyjal farm. So they replaced them but the people that were brought in weren't really tested. They had 6 hours / week raiding schedule on farm bosses. You couldn't tell if they had the same fire within them as the people they'd replaced. Maybe they talked the talk, but when Sunwell came and you're pushing 5+ days with longer raid hours and your RL is demanding 110%, they can't walk the walk.

"Dude, I got a life".
Some of those that stayed through BT farming stayed... because it was farming. They didn't quit because WOW was now "manageable" for them ~ 6 hours per week. So when that guild returned to pushing 5+ days/week...they got a delightful comment similar to the caption. And loyalty. So many of these people exploited their guild's loyalty. How many times have you found yourself passing on an application and regretting it weeks later because you were too loyal to the person they were going to replace? People who think that now they've got their feet under the table, they don't need to show the same level of reliability you'd expect from anyone applying to your guild.

"Keeping up with the Joneses."
A lot of guilds eventually cleared BT and these guilds got used to perceiving themselves as able to match the "elite". So when they got left behind by the guilds that cleared pre-nerf SSC/TK/BT months before them, they didn't deal with it constructively. They expected success to come to them. In fact, they couldn't deal with it constructively because they'd never had to motivate a raid through challenging content. A lot of these guilds ripped themselves apart by demonising each other - each wipe was someone elses fault.

"ZOMG we're undergeared."
There was a perception that Brutallus was weighted at the level of a guild that had farmed Illidan for months. And maybe it was - but 2.4's 3 tier items per boss and ilvl 141+ badge items went a long way towards repairing this. So a lot of guilds attributed their failure to gear levels, rather than lack of practice.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer"
This wasn't true for my guild, but we're pretty unpopular - I'm told a lot of guilds suddenly experienced increased applications from players in 4/6 guilds as soon as they'd killed M'uru. Why? The applications said they wanted "to see KJ before the expansion comes".

"LFM 5 Shamans"
8 healers at Kalecgos. 6 or 7 healers at Brutallus. 8 healers at Felmyst (just to be safe), 10 healers at Twins, 6 healers at M'uru. 7 healers at KJ. But it's not just shamans, it's tanks, it's warlocks, it's shadowpriests. You can't use the same 25 throughout the instance. But I love that stuff - it's part of the raiding metagame because it's what separates a well run guild from the crowd. Another hurdle to overcome. When people were cancelling M'uru raids because an enhancement shaman's cat caught the flu or your 3rd shadowpriest was at one of those ever popular evening funerals, you could either look at it as being a sad statement on the TBC party buff requirements, or as a failure to provide backup, and backup for the backup. Some guilds couldn't recruit or handle the roster requirements.

And that's all for now. Toodle pip.

I would blame common Sunwell raiding schedules for the burnout among guilds who did not kill Kil'jaeden. From what I've seen the majority of 4/6 and 5/6 guilds still attempt to raid 4+ evenings every week. Sunwell was released in March, and Kil'jaeden's gate opened in late May. Thats about seven months of attempting to raid hardcore progression hours. Burnout is inevitable when you ask your guild for that kind of time commitment. Sure, 6/6 guilds raid similar if not more hours initially. However, once they got their KJ kill, Sunwell soon became a one night clear. One to two raid nights is infinitely easier to maintain than the schedules of most guilds still progressing in Sunwell.

I suspect for guilds who did not manage during the ~5 months KJ has been released to score a kill, they would see improved guild performance if they switched to a schedule that emphasized quality over quantity (meaning less hours).

I don't really see a way to achieve the result you seem to be looking for - tough to score a first kill, ridiculously easy to farm thereafter, without nerfing the hell out of the zone at some arbitrary point in time, which is never going to work since all guilds progress at different rates and everyone wants a chance to beat encounters in their original (or near original) forms. Doing it now is fine, with an expansion in five weeks. Doing it two months ago would not have been.

Farming Sunwell is a pleasure compared to farming BT or Hyjal. Obviously we haven't been doing it as long so boredom hasn't set in to quite the same level but it's nice to have content that still feels somewhat challenging and that requires people not to mess up even months on. Trash is minimal, apart from the initial run to Kalecgos and it's a fast instance to clear. There's no reason why you shouldn't be done in a night and with everyone playing well you can clear in 3 to 4 hours without too much trouble. Even knowing the fights inside out, it's a far more enjoyable zone to clear than facerolling through BT ever was. It's really not too much to have to ask a raid to focus for a few hours every week to loot the very best items the game currently has to offer.

I'm not so sure that this is a shortcoming of the instance but rather one of your players... I know that in my old guild we faced the same thing. As soon as KJ died a large number of our raiders expected easy mode and we promptly spent the next week making stupid mistakes and wiping on farm bosses. Previously we'd been one and two-shotting these bosses, now Felmyst was taking an hour or more due to complete idiocy. I'm pretty sure the instance didn't change so it can only have been something with us

A thousand times this. This may have not happened in guilds that are still around, they are the lucky ones, but I can personally attest to this decimating my BT clearing guild pre-2.4. A 7-8 month break (10-15 hrs/week) for 'hardcore' raiders who were used to 4 or 5 night raid weeks led to massive boredom and general quitting. Most guilds rely on core people in critical roles, and if you lose a few of them, it leads to massive jumping-of-ship. Although a number of the other reasons listed here are correct, this one is overlooked since its been a good 9 monthes since the patch.

There is one item that annoyed me about BT. After a very short period of time, only the last 3 bosses provided any real value, and after a medium period of time, only Illidan had any useful items.

BT really needed a "sneaky back door to Mother" that could be purchased/rep-levelled/whatevered.

We solved this by buying partially cleared BT instances, but having access to later bosses after a period of time seems to be a far better outcome in reducing the amount of boredom from farming.

Even something like "Akama recognises you from previous attempts, do you want to clear the instance of all trash?"

Wasn't it Gurg who mentioned at some point "You bring classes to raids and not specs". For lack of a more profound word that's pretty deep, also goes hand in hand with the more common "Its who you bring, not what class they play". Neither of these become quite clear in TBC until Sunwell. Everyone who has completed or partially completed sunwell should be able to take a step back and say "Damn, it's true".

Raid stacking was not out of control given Gurg's quote. There is no reason enhance/elemental shaman couldn't go resto for felmyst/ET, no reason your holy/ret pally can't go prot for felmyst, M'uru, KJ or ret-->holy for that matter, as well as balance --> resto. Respecing is a minor inconvenience sure but you have portals/summons at your disposal - take a quick bio/beverage break - Not to mention respecing should net you time vs. the alternative.

Everything (bullshit RNG, server lag, etc. aside) comes down to individual skill, which in turn translates into a team effort. Can mediocre players be carried straight through Sunwell? Absolutely, its just that much more time consuming, and taxing on the rest of the guild depending on the how severe the problem is. Sunwell in all its greatness can be considered a "Destroyer of Guilds" only because the average invididual skill threshold is higher than the majority of the guilds who cleared BT. If your raid can't raise the occasion via improvement, invested time, and finally recruitment to fill natural turnover your guild dies for the time being.

The major difference between Sunwell and BT/Hyjal (and similarly Naxx <---> AQ) is the reliance on your entire raid, Just take a look at all fights real quick.

Rage: Requires very few skilled healers / skilled dps
Anetheron: Requires very few skilled healers and brainless dps (Maybe one semi-lucid hunter to MD)
Kaz: Requires very few skilled healers and casters that know how to spread out OR look at their mana bar
Az: Requires a very skilled healers / Tank that can taunt / Melee dps that can move out of fire is just a bonus
Archimonde: Requires some degree of raid-wide awareness, although alot can be healed through, 1 decent decurser
Naj: A few good healers and a few non-brain dead people to pick up spike/use spike
Supremus: Requires .....?
Akama: ?
Teron: Requires a couple of healers, a dispeler, and whoever gets RNG'd to be able to tab-click spell/repeat
Bloodboil: Requires decent healers all around and 15 people who know how to move when told.
RoS: Requires 2 classes with an interupt ability
Mother: Requires Shadow resist on the majority of your raid
Council: Requires 2 hours of your time, and ~5-10 minutes each following week
Illidan: Requires 2 half-decent tanks with Fire resist, and a moderate amount of raid awareness/self-control

Kalecgos: Requires raidwide awareness, decent tank, dps and over-all raidwide communication
Brutallus: Requires decent healers, acceptable dps, moderate raid awareness, and 2 half-decent well geared tanks
Felmyst: Requires 3 priests, 1 person who understands breath patterns, and above-average raid awareness
ET: Requires good healers, above-average raidwide awareness, possibly a bit of strat tweaking to fit your guild
M'uru: Depending on how you do it - may require above-average to exceptional tanks, its been nerfed but I'd say in its original form exceptional dps, and exceptional raid awareness
KJ: Exceptional DPS, Exceptional Focus/Raid awareness, Exceptional Healing, Exceptional Communication. KJ truly requires a raid full of above average players --- How fast everyone learns/reaches that level strictly determines when you kill this boss.

I'm going to assume at this point I don't need to list AQ/Naxx fights to show you the pattern and whats really going on here.

Honestly if you are on the level of excellence and truly want to raid I'm positive you could find a spot somewhere in a guild where everyone is nearly as good as you or better and work your way up, it's really your choice, your money, and most importantly your time.

TL;DR: Two ways a guild dies:

#1 Shitty server where recruitment can not keep up with the natural turnover rate (or total turnover rate) (RL, Lost interest because of excessive time, and other oddities)
#2 Something causes your turnover rate to exceed natural levels and if recruitment can't keep up with the total turnover rate the result is the same

Ask yourself if its Blizzard's fault or really just mediocre gameplay from x number of individuals.

I see you're packing a [Golden Bow of Quel'Thalas] - you wouldn't swap that for a Zombie Sweeper Shotgun? That's a rep grind blue that has 20dps more than your Sunwell bow.

I'm aware, just for all intents and purposes they're both dead on alliance and dead on Korgath. Blackrock isn't particularly "skilled" persay just incredibly populated as far as its sustainability compared to Korgath.

Edit: Of course burnout was the ultimate cause of DnT's departure, considering they weren't even at M'uru yet and did relatively well when they did reach it on Blackrock.

I don't think anyone has ever challenged this statement, but if you don't have the people that play the class that can respec, you're handcuffed. I know the responses to this, crappy server, more proactive recruitment, you didn't learn from BT, etc etc, and I'm not using the raid stacking requirement as an excuse, but you can't deny that the raid comps for learning were fairly strict. Our mages, locks (when we had them), hunters, and rogues were awesome at their class, but their role couldn't be changed by respeccing.