jozga

Although this may not sound like a particularly important point, as a guild that moved to SWP with very little BT farming (~5 Illidan kills before Kalecgos) we found that many of our classes had no offspec gear worth a damn, especially shaman, warriors and hunters - on the Protector token. We did have bad luck with that token but it has resulted in canceled M'uru raids due to no resto shaman being able to spec enhance for a one off, for example.

I completely agree that it should be all about what class you play, not what spec, and I would hope they do this in future raids, but I also hope they balance out tokens so that guilds are confident that they can field a player in a different spec to their usual one without them being a liability.

I also think that SWP can cause a groan every Wednesday when you remember how much trash you have to clear before you can get started, this can cause a sub-par raid, meaning it takes longer to get to your current progression boss. I know we are capable of clearing to M'uru every Wednesday, but I know we won't when people remember how much they dislike the start of Sunwell and take the night off. I have to admit I am also sick of Bloodelves, almost as bad as Naga.

This said, we have not suffered too much in SWP, due largely to recruiting heavily cross-server and having a huge amount of shaman and priests to fall back on. I can, however, easily imagine M'uru becoming a pain if it wasn't about to be nerfed to hell.

 

◊ pewsey

This is quite true.

In our guild, the people who were most capable of respeccing - were unable to. For whatever reason, most of the adaptable, non-firestanders were our pure DPS classes (rogues, warriors, mages, warlocks) while our healer core at the time was our weakest point.

We stalled a lot as we tried to recruit - that didn't work so well, so we took a leaf from Fusion and instituted a co-main policy which alleviated our concerns (my rogue respecced to a resto shaman) but it was too little, too late and it seems we'll miss the KJ boat sadly.

However, we've learnt a lot as guild officers about how to manage our guild roster - especially for guilds that have difficulty in recruiting for various reasons (PvE Alliance Oceanic TZ - sigh)

To me it was definitely the changing number of healers (in particular) that handcuffed our ability to progress as rapidly through Sunwell, and we did have plenty of our classes respec to heal as required - nobody complained about it - including having our main feral OT respec tree for Twins.

We live, we learn.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
Nemesis: "Pewsey is single-handedly turning around every guy in the BB that didn't want to have kids."
Viator: Because I had a baby so I'm better than non-breeders.

 

kaib

Strange, I have done 0 rep grind, each heroic once on beta and 2 full 10 men nax clears and 2 halfways that were stopped by instance server dieing. Now my gear for lvl 70 is 3 or 4 items off perfect, I'd guess. Let's see:
Headpice, t6 due to set bonus
neck, replaced
shoulder, swp
chest, replaced
bracer, t6 due to set bonus
gloves, replaced
belt, t6 set bonus
legs, replaced
boots, t6 set bonus
ring 1, replaced
ring 2, replaced
trinket 1, skull
trinket 2, replaced
weapon, replaced
off hand, replaced
wand, replaced

Now for the minimal effort I put in, that's a lot of lvl 80 gear, isn't it? The only reason that doing 25 men WotlK raiding with SWP gear on beta works is that 25 men stuff is just WAY too easy right now. Don't expect 25 men nax to go live like that, it's easier then 10 men nax right now. I would be very surprised if that will ship like that. It has a tier higher loot, if I was a dev, I'd expect people to run 10 men nax at least 2 or 3 times and tune fights expecting at least some 10 men/heroic epic gear.

And now to get back on topic:
It's been like that pre TBC and it will be like this with the last big instance in WotlK, given it's not a walk in the park. The people that really want to raid to see stuff and push new content are done with SWP. Obviously about every single casual guild has a few guys that strive for that as well, but don't mind doing it slower, playing with friends etc. That's a minority of those guilds though. Otherwise they would have killed Illidan 1-2 months ago. Now the pre-expansion depression sets in and detonates a lot of those guilds as a decent % of the players just does not see a reason to spend that much time any more.
After all a lot of people do this for gear, again, I am certain that all guilds that have 20+ people that raid purely to explore new content have finished SWP in August or earlier.

Obviously SWP has issues with raid stacking etc, but hey, if you really want to, you can fix that. SK gaming geared up alts in BT to fix raid setups. I did most of muru and all KJ progress on a friends shaman that had 0 SWP drops. We took an alliance-rerolled dps warrior 2 weeks after he hit 70 to our 5th or 6th KJ kill. Gearing up between badges and BT/Hyjal runs is so fast these days, it's not like Nax where you could only recruit people that at least farmed BWL for weeks.
In the end it comes down to guilds having enough people that care about not-so rewarding but time intensive encounters. WoW is a game after all, not everyone has the time or wants to spend the time to wipe on muru or KJ 40-80 hours or whatever.

I kinda believe that Blizzard is to blame for that though. I would have bet money on muru/KJ taking some serious nurfs in august or at least september. The gear they drop is worthless anyway. Once I hit 80, I will shard my precious sunflare and replace it with savage gladiators spellblade (a blue honor weapon). I loved SWP. After BT it was really refreshing to actually wipe on fights again. But I really don't see why the nurfs that are coming with 3.0 did not come earlier. Guilds already stopped raiding and will stop raiding 4 weeks before expansion. The bosses should have made avaible for a lot more guilds mid August/early September.
They even stated that they do not want to repeat Naxxramas, yet the two best encounters in SWP were exactly what 4h+ were in Naxx.

They should have reduced HP on the elves at muru another 10%, sentinels 20%, void spawns 20% and decrease entropius AoE. Then Nurf reflecti HP, actually fix the firebloom/dart crap right after darkness and make the dps race on KJ a lot less forgiving. There would have been a brief outcry of guilds that farmed that stuff. But that would slow down soon with them now being able to farm those enocunters without actually bringing serious raid setups and without random wipes.
The only guys that could have really complained would have been those that actually were close to finishing it in hard mode, but then I am sure they don't mind actually getting done and farming it much, much easier.

Difficult content is great. There's no reason for it to stay that though.

Also, I am sure there were 1 to 3 threads like this shortly before TBC and there will be the same discussion at the end of WotlK. Countdown to this getting locked is ticking.

 

◊ Regen

That is a problem that can be solved very fast through BT(Hyjal)/Badges

jozga: It appears you too hit a possible gearing problem. Again largely solvable in a short amount of time.

As for trash in Sunwell, you seriously have to be kidding me? Half the reason I enjoy sunwell is the LACK of trash. ~12 pulls before Kalecgos, ~1 pull before Brut, 0 before Felmyst, Gauntlet + 3 2-packs before Twins, 6 pulls before M'uru, 2 mobs before KJ. There is very little trash in this instance compared to BT, Hyjal, SSC, TK, AQ, MC.

The only stacking somewhat necessary is for Twins, and if you want to count 3 priests on felmyst.

 

Vagabond

Please note, this is mainly an Artifact of Blizzard managing WoW as if it was a single player game, and expansions as sequels rather than content additions/continuations.

Going back to EQ, For every "Cobalt bracer off trash in Kunark beats PoH/F (whatever) gear" moment, there was also plenty more that weren't. Expansions were content drops, not instant "Reset" bombs.

If you think of the content from the first mob to the final boss as a line from 0 to 1, Expansions were, mostly, .75 <-> 2. Blizzard runs them along 1.01 <-> 2 lines.

 

P51mus

Maybe that's a function of class availability?

Going down to 5 mans, tanks/healers practically get groups tossed at them. And going up to raiding, groups still often need to wait on healers/tanks. Dps has more competition, so they HAVE to be better. And pure dps classes even more so. There's no I'll respec and get into the group for a different role option.

 

Linnet

I don't think dps has more competition than tanks for raiding.

Druid: Peace

 

Gozul

Here'es my point of view.

Brief summary of my guild : Killed Illidan in Feb, tight roster, mid-level standard progression in SWP ( Felmyst down 06/06 ). And then, as soon as summer starts ( Euro Football Championship, Graduations, holidays ), we lost a lot of players (back to irl, conan etc ... ). We were down to 1 resto shaman, 2 paladins, 2 priest (including sp ) ...We knew at this moment that our guild could explode during summer.

What did we do ?

Gear re-rolls during BT/Hyjal runs ( just like SK-Gaming did )
We didn't have good apps before, we couldn't wait for them. Instead, we had 3-4 of our core raider ( i.e skilled players ) get their paladins/shaman/priest reroll geared.

By doing this, we cleared BT/Hyjal and SWP 3/6 during July and August, every week. We knew we couldn't have 10-11 healers for ET. We waited the end of holidays, and then made huge progress with this new flexibility ( we're now in front of KJ, hoping to kill him before 3.0).

TLDR : Gearing rerolls helps with raid-stacking instances or huge loss of players. This is something we will try to implement in our guild for WOTLK : A concept we call "Double Main Character".
Gearing rerolls ( or "double main characters" ) will be a lot easier in wotlk. Remeber there will be a large spectrum of gear available through badge / heroic / 10 man dungeons.
This is the only solution we found when you're stuck on a server with no good apps, no cross server apps, and a raid stacking instance in front of you.

Here's my main warlock : The World of Warcraft Armory
Here's my shaman alt : The World of Warcraft Armory

No e-peen intended.

 

Duilliath

It would seem Blizzard has solved a few issues of this already. As mentioned above "you play the class" - well, with the item change, Healers and their caster counterparts will work already. Not perfectly, but good enough for the change from 8 to 5 healers or vice versa.
Similarly, raid wide buffs and changes to heroism reduce the "Must Have Five Shamans..."-syndrome.

However... you would still need your three priests for Felmyst. And that might be a problem, if they focus too much on 'single class' abilities. I think Shamans got remove curse for that exact reason. It's why there's Mind Control Cubes in Nax10. One can see they did learn from their mistakes and can only hope they won't be prone to falling in the same trap due to "Cool Boss Feature" tm.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

• Falk

That's a really interesting concept and probably something fresh to keep people getting a little bored with their roles continually interested with the game. The only problem (that you guys overcame) is that you need the whole guild into the same mindset to make it work, i.e. the extra time investment into getting the alt/altmains the gear they need, which is pretty hard when pretty much the general 'easy way out thing to do' would be to jump ship to another guild. Good luck with getting KJ this reset!

 

ZeroWashu

It isn't retarded. It is simply a response to what people perceive in the expansion either through direct experience or looking at items on wowhead.

Basically, if their current gear will carry them nicely to the new end game then why bother. If it is "good enough" they will take a pass. I am not saying its a good mentality but I see the logic when it comes to pushing for the last four to six weeks for what might give you a few % shift in ability.

BTW, I expect quite a few people who post here will be replacing gear within the month simply because they will be at the end game by then with their main, if not with an alt as well.

 

• Falk

A month? Try a week. lv200 epic loot is almost head and shoulders better even without gems and enchants in practically every slot for practically every spec. The loot that'll actually last longest would be belt/bracer/boot/random slot for 2/4pc T6 bonuses. A lot of classes have 2pc bonuses that are pretty damn hard to displace, considering the stat upgrade for belt and bracers is minimal compared to ther others.

 

shanice

While this topic comes up with every new end-tier instance, I still want to add my thoughts on topic. Sunwell Plateau was a relief from farming BT/MH, very well designed and a lot of fun to clear in an active raiding guild. The "SWP|M'uru destroyed our guild train" didn't hit us at all, tho we lost quite a few very valuable players and friends on the way.

From my pov, the effect of guild disbanding, loosing active raiders or what not isn't special to Sunwell, rather top tier raiding progression. There are some repetative factors tho that push it forth. Holidays, non-dropping loot, to name a few. This will remain the same in WotLK, like it has been in TBC and earlier WOW. Just the time gaps between the affect catching a guild are getting smaller and smaller ...

__ don't argue with an idiot. he will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience __

 

Arelae

It's quite easy to explain : Wrath beta keys & Warhammer Launch.

The same thing happened when TBC beta keys were floating around, Naxx interest for most guilds just died on the spot when half the healers and a few tanks got invites and went awol. Along with it, is the feeling of 'why go through all this trouble when it will be outdated in a month'. Now I know some will say 'But ilvl 150 epics will last till 80' That's true, but they will still be outdated by quest blues and heroic drops at 80, a stark contrast in difficulty to acquire gear of that prowess. That stigma isn't lost on people, and is a big reason that interest in doing the top end raiding grind is lost when an expansion is on the verge of release.

The other affect is Warhammer Online. While this will not damage wow populations long term (the game is extremely shallow overall, the RvR concept is flawed and will end up as boring as the pve), it has drawn the interest away for the 1-2 month period that people will take to try something new. Again, as soon as Wrath launches, the wow populations will swell once more and no one will care about WAR except the people who think farming honor in bg's is fun (which are not WoW's target audience at all).

 

Dralmoo

I think it's easy to explain, Sunwell is "too hard" for most guilds. Generally, it seems to me that people who were successful early on in Sunwell enjoyed the challenge. But even for people I know in guilds that clear SWP in 3-4 hours, it's never "fun" - meaning, I think, it's still a challenge even on farm, people still have to play at 100% or you will wipe. For some percentage of hardcore players, that's exactly what they love about sunwell, but for a lot of other equally skilled players, it seems like they'd like to relax a little on their farm content.

And that's the guilds who HAVE cleared SWP. For everyone else, failure is not fun for most people, especially if it doesn't seem like there is any progress being made. SWP is hard enough that progress is much, much slower than what people are used to from the rest of BC. Kael was a block for many weeks for a lot of guilds, but at least you were progressing through the phases, and you could say "we used to barely get through p2, now we have all weapons down with 10 seconds left".

If you look at the difference between 1.0 Naxx and SWP, the obvious one is the number of bosses Naxx had and it's non-linear nature. I think if SWP had more total bosses, some easier - not Grobbulus easy, but easier - guild morale would be a lot better, people would feel like they were getting somewhere and killing the 'reward' boss every week would make it feel like less of a grind.

 

Uglesh

My 2 pennies on this topic...

Well I don't know that this is specific to Sunwell.... in fact Vashj and Kael probably claimed far more victims. It has been mentioned by a few people here, but what i see TIME AND AGAIN is that the "leaders" get tired/bored/burned out and everything crumbles around them.
This game in many ways also can mirror RL activity. We all know the people in RL who are the "ring leaders" of their social group. This could be from school, work or otherwise.... but I'm sure everyone has examples they can think of. These are the people who everyone calls on a Friday to see what's going on. I would equate many guild "leaders" as this type of person. In a guild you have 25-30+ people who rely on the direction of a small core (maybe 4-5)... the rest of the people (while they may be skilled individually) don't have the want/ability to organize and lead. As a result, the vast bulk of this "meta-game" everyone refers to is disproportionally place on the small number of leaders. The smaller your core.... the more intense the pressure. Having to constantly recruit, plan, schedule and evaluate a raid is often more time consuming then raiding itself.

I'm not sure how you get away from this, but clearly Sunwell was designed to be a crucible for the elite guilds... sadly for anyone even slightly below that top edge it will prove to be too hard to overcome.

Overall, changes to buff/debuffs and reducing stacking issues will have a good effect on leaders... as will the creation of more 10 man content. The real challenge I forsee for 2nd-3rd teir guild leaders will be trying get your guild members out of 10 mans and into the 25's.

 

Mideci

You needed 9 healers for Kalecgos. Surely all of you used 9 healers at some point regularly in BT (Bloodboil, Council, for example). You needed 10 Illidan kills and Archimonde kills to have the gear for Brutallus. By the time guilds that weren't bored sitting around for months waiting for Sunwell would've gotten to M'uru, it was nerfed. Look, my lame guild basically stopped raiding. And people made some of the excuses listed in this thread. It's just that they all ring very, very hollow.

This thread should properly have been titled "Expansions -- Destroyer of Guilds" and then probably closed. The same exact things happened before TBC shipped. Lazy people. Burned out people. Sense of the futility of gear upgrades. People who play for purples. People who want it easy. Etc. etc. Those people will love Wrath. Sort of.

 

• Bazazu

Speaking as the leader of one of the top guilds, I agree completely. I'm fairly certain I and my #2 in charge (Trouble) took the longest mental vacation ever, the day that KJ died. We went from full out 100% attention / over drive - to "bare minimum to keep the guild running".

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed SWP immensely, but I am glad that I've had a month or two to recover. I think I've just reached a point over the past few weeks of being ready to hit the expansion at full force.


Of course, now I get to deal with the headache of our roster for WOTLK. Oh Joy...

 

Rasputin

I'm not sure I agree that Sunwell was a "crucible for the elite guilds", unless your meaning of elite guilds is different than my own. I wouldn't call my own guild elite, and we had to slam our faces through recruiting issues, tank desertion, shamanstacking etc. We didn't get it done nearly as quickly as the guilds that I would term elite, but we managed to get KJ down about a month ago, and with the 3.0 announcements I'm very glad we did it before that nerftruck hit. It's certainly not an easy instance towards the end, but I think the other issues brought up in this thread about player retention through BT farming, recruiting, and class availability/respeccing are more important than the hardcore raiding level of your guild. Perhaps they go hand in hand, but as I said, I don't consider us to be an elite guild, and we managed to work through them. We had occasional resto/enhancement shamans respec resto, I(ret paladin) respecced prot for felmyst and m'uru(side tanking not spawns, oddly enough) and we never used paladins buffing from out of group or spirit priests etc.

So, while Sunwell is certainly difficult to learn and get through, I think condemning it as some sort of overtuned test that only the very best guilds and players have any shot at beating is perhaps overkill.

 

• Falk

Semantics... take a look at the percentage of guilds that have KJ down. :P

 

ildon

The thing is, it was an explicit design goal of WotLK to allow a guild, if they choose, to skip all 10 man raiding and progress entirely through 25 mans, and vice versa. Naxx 25 is intended to be the Molten Core of WotLK (something widely regarded as missing from TBC). It's a zone where you can take a lot of people casually, not try very hard or be very good or go all out with consumables, and still kill some bosses and eventually clear it.

I wouldn't expect most serious raiders to be challenged until the middle to end of Ulduar, or maybe even the 3.2 raid zone.

Sorry for veering off topic.

 

Arelae

They're not lame excuses, it's how the game is. Realize that most of the player base doesn't get off on raiding 100% for four hours strait. As such they don't design 100% of the game as SWP, since those 'lazy' people would leave and you'd be left with what EQ1 was when WoW shipped, a ghost town full of diehards that only have themselves to brag to.

 

berg

The are many valid points here about raid stacking and etc.

Personally I feel the original M'uru was tuned in a bad way and it doubtlessly killed many guilds. The initial M'uru with high hp adds was more or less tuned for 25 people with most of the upgrades available to them in sunwell. This requirement seems fine at face value but if you mix in any guild turnover or guilds with larger rosters of 40+ people swapping in and out all of the sudden guilds that should be ready for M'uru could not field a raid capable of keeping up in phase 1.

We were able to get him a few weeks before the hit point nerf on the adds and I am pretty confident that it was the most wipes we ever had on a single raid boss to get there. Killing him was nice in that it was finally over but it was not a satisfying kill. We all knew the fight at that point, it was the gear that finally made it possible.

 

Rasputin

Yes, I agree that it's difficult. My point was that the number of guilds who have killed KJ is due more to turnover, burnout and boredom stretching back to the BT farming months than any inherent elite qualities of the guilds. Those who managed to maintain raiding through roster changes and burnout and etc are the ones who had a decent shot at killing KJ. Those who didn't, due to untimely quits or low server populations or what have you are the ones who were put at a larger disadvantage and then eventually broke up. I do not think the encounters themselves are tuned to such an extreme level that only the most hardcore and elite raiding guilds have a shot at it. Those guilds did get it down and quickly, both because they ARE that good and that guilds of that level have no issue with recruitment and can deal with turnover and have less attrition.

 

Volsh

Some of the reasons our guild survived the summer and finished off the game, we've had a couple of borderline cases where things seemed grim, but everything ended on a good note and we killed KJ before the 3.0 patch.

- Stepping up to the plate and telling all mediocre/bad players in our guild they were not going to raid in Sunwell any longer due to their skill. We got through Felmyst with shit players in the raid, after that it was obvious they needed to go or the guild would get stuck and eventually fall apart.

- Never ending recruitment. It supported the natural turnover rate, and gradually raised the average skill level of the raid, I attempted for every new recruit to be a bit better and more commited than the one they were replacing.

- Changing our 5day raiding schedule to 4days, freeing up Thursdays for people drastically increased attendance and the overall raid atmosphere.

- Enforcing every hybrid class in the raid to gather sunwell quality gear for all of their specs, as well as know how to play every spec. All of our paladins are required to have prot gear capable of tanking on M'uru/KJ in addition to their main spec, as well as the shamans often go resto for twins during sunwell. I pay up to 500g in respec fees to people every sunwell clear, but I think it's well worth it.