I think the minimal number of healers we have done Eredars with is 8, but that was due to a healer turnover that specific night. The ideal number is probably 9 healers, although 10 or 11 is doable if you have the roster to support it. Eredar twins feels like a non-ideal fight for CoH priests since Flame Sears that are going out both ticks for higher amounts, as well as target random people in the raid. The issue really as big with the encounters themselves, but rather with Heroism/Bloodlust contributing so much to the raid's DPS or HPS, depending on what you need the most at that moment. Another issue is that Shaman Totem's are good, yet they are limited by group only, which further promotes the idea of raid stacking using Shamans. With totems affecting the entire raid and Hero/BL affecting the entire raid, but having a 5 minute(?) exhaustion, it will be much, much less compelling to have the situation of "bring 4+ resto shaman or bust" mentality as Druids also gain Wild Growth, Paladins gain Beacon of Light, and Priests gain a smarter CoH.

The example you brought up with Felmyst is a valid point, but the same can be said about every encounter in the game: there are always ways to stack your raids favorably if you have the people to back it up. It also tolerates more mistakes than having a non-stacked raid. Back when we were learning pre-10%-nerf M'uru, we rarely made it into phase 2 with 2-3 Shamans in the raid, as soon as we add a fourth shaman in, after a month of attempt, we one shotted the boss. Does that mean people suddenly become better at playing? Not really, the extra Heroism just made up for the DPS of the dead people in phase 2. As pointed out above, it's really still the presence of group-bound totems and stackable Heroism/Bloodlusts that made shamans a favorable class to stack in ALL cases, even with non-CH friendly fights such as Kil'jaeden.

I think keeping well-geared healer in the raid is the same as keeping all the other good players in the guild. I know healers get frustrated because they are blamed for player deaths when a lot of the damage can be avoided. Also playing as a tank, I know that a lot of the time I can delay or even prevent my death as a tank, may it be popping a trinket or health-recovering consumables, but most of the time this is overlooked and tank death is seen as something that is exclusively the healer's fault. In addition, with the spell powers and dual spec changes in 3.0 and expansion, it should be MUCH more enticing to play a healer in raid since your healing gear can act as 80% of your dps gear (some stats are not optimal, but that's ok.) and able to spec whatever DPS spec you want to be to farm or to just have fun in general and avoid the cost, takes away another two major setbacks for a dedicated raid healing class.

One thing we have done. If there's a shortage, have someone else play the class. Usually when one of our core members is gone for a long time, it's either due to work or they no longer have the time to raid. But they will give out their account info.

So when our MT was unable to log on for 2 weeks due to the Hurricanes, we had one of our rogues play as him. When one of our main holy paladins took 3 weeks off, we sometimes had the prot paladin spec holy, or we had someone else play on his toon for certain boss fights.

On our first Felmyst, we didn't have enough shadow priests, so I was able to coax one of our shadow priests who quit WoW last year to come back on for one night to play another person's character.

Being flexible is very important. It helps the guild's morale because they know that just because Johnny the Enhancement Shaman isn't on, the boss will still die.

Hi, I'm a prot pally and I've tanked Kalecgoes I've also tried tanking Brutallus and if I had a Moroes trinket it probably would have worked, or if I had better luck with some other drops. Either way, this information doesn't diminish the point that you're making...its very silly IMO to design a single raid instance with radically different raid makeups for bosses. SSC and TK were nice about this in that you could typically bring 2 MTs and another couple of OT type classes, 7 healers and whatever damage dealers you wanted and you could succeed. Hyjal also had this, apart from shaman stacking Archimonde.

How can you not see this as a problem with the design?

And, see, when I read this, I immediately think, "are most of the complaints about raid stacking based on having bad players?"

Let me clarify.

Archimonde didn't require any shaman. Yes, having one in melee range was very, very valuable. And the vast majority of guilds had an enhance shaman at that point.

Sure, it was nice to have a resto shaman somewhere out there protecting a group. And the vast majority of guilds had one (or more).

And for a casual guild like ours we never had any more regular shamans than that. And despite have a collection of pretty mediocre players at all times, we never suffered from a "dearth" of shaman on Archimonde. In fact, the period days where he had extra shaman due to alts, people we were selling Tier 6 loot to, etc. we often had an extra wipe or two. I will note also that we got Archimonde down to a 1-4 pull fight fairly quickly once we returned to it after taking a long break from it after they nerfed the hill strategy and we focused on finishing BT.

The reason I bring this up is because sometimes despite the fact that there are legitimate complaints -- you couldn't realistically do Brutallus with more than 8 healers, many guilds used 7; while Kalecgos and the Twins requires 8-11 -- I just wonder how much of the general bitching and moaning is due to people not actually even trying to play well. I posted dozens of times in the Archimonde thread when most of the top guilds were months (a year?) past the fight trying to guide later guilds through it because it seemed like they believed all sorts of "facts" about it that weren't true. Like that you needed 5 shamans. Which you never did. You had ample warning about the fears and therefore plenty of time to get clear of the fires, load hots on the tank, etc.

Anyway, back to Sunwell.

I think something that really helped our guild during the downtime was not taking much of a break. (This downtime i am referring to would be before, during AND after Sunwell - like on nights that we didn't have a DPS warrior for M'uru)

I guarantee you 90% of my guild is so glad we didn't switch to 1-2 days per week of raiding during downtime. It would be sooooo boring doing that.

Most all of us enjoy raiding and we all level alts several weeks or a couple months in advance of downtime. The GM gives us a bunch of reminders to have an offspec or alt ready so that we can fill up the other days. Then during down time/non progression time, we raid 4-5 days a week still.

I really like it; it keeps people interested and on their toes; going back and learning it again via a different class or role is very refreshing.

On top of that, most all of the 'core' members, or those with the longest lifetime membership period; nearly all of them have several well geared alts or well geared offspecs so that if/when we are short a particular class; it's pretty much a nonissue.

i very much like the alt runs; i get a chance to do virtually new content in the form of a different role and learn something in the process, which is a large part of what i derive enjoyment from in this game. it's a reward for working so hard on the progression content, as i see it. Plus it makes me a much better player overall and gives me a more 'big picture' perspective because i'm not always looking at things from the point of view of a healer.

I will probably be trying to tank alt runs and learn more about my feral spec when the next downtime comes up. I can do all three but feral is my weakest link and the one i've spent the least amount of time raiding on.

the people who don't take advantage of this little alt run reward and make the most of it - i've noticed they always seem to fall by the wayside eventually. People in my guild from my experience tend to get really really lazy if they aren't raiding 4-5 days a week. (myself included)

It's funny how many people come to our guild and expect to only raid 2 days a week with sunwell clear and get completely indignant/selfrighteous/arrogant when we tell them about our alt runs. Even after the alt runs; most of us do Gruul/Magtheridon/Kara/ZA on offdays or after normal raid times. The rest of us all enjoy raiding - 2 days a week is just not enough for some of us.

Wowjutsu currently has 629 guilds as having killed M'uru. Those guilds would have to have had an average of 79 players each present for M'uru kills for 1% of the 5 million US/Euro players to have killed M'uru. So the real number is probably roughly 0.5% of players.

But that's dragging the thread dangerously close to casual/hardcore territory and that dead horse has been beaten until it's a faint smear on the ground.

I believe that the reason our guild survived was due to several factors:

[1] Light, efficient schedule
If we raided more than 12 hours a week, I'm fairly sure the guild would have stopped raided at some point during the pre-nerf M'uru learning period. Especially when you're on tightly tuned, raid-comp-stringent fights... it just sucks that much more to be doing it for 20+ hours a week. The fact that many elite guilds "ranked" above us have stopped raiding due to 20+ hr/week burnout is just another step in confirming my belief that raiding light is the way to go in the long run.

[2] Motivation from leadership
As soon as your motivational officer/raid leader/guild leader burns out, kiss your guild goodbye. I've found many guilds draw their focus and motivation from either a single person or a group of individuals (typically the officer core). So if you're "that guy" then it's super important to at least keep the energy and positive vibes cranked up - even if the 300th wipe on M'uru is getting you down.

[3] A steady stream of recruits
I don't think it's coincidental that when we shut off recruiting completely, play tends to get a tad lackadaisical. Make sure that the guild has new blood injected to it every so often. Keep standards high, but never stop recruiting (or at least being open to applicants).

[4] Social interaction outside of raiding
Members of our guild sponsor an alt raid for the server every Saturday night for people to relax and have fun. A few of us play online D&D 4th edition now that we've ramped back raiding a bit. Many of us played Warhammer together with other EJ Benefactors. It's crucial to remember that the guild is more than just raiding - it was probably best exemplified by this year's Blizzcon, where we had 12 of our 33 raiders make it down to Anaheim and hung out for a couple days. It's a lot easier to weather the shitty Sunwell periods when you're raiding with friends rather than competitors for that next piece of hot loot.

Anyhow... I personally think Sunwell was challenging, but it failed the "fun" test. With extremely stringent raid stacking requirements a thing of the past (for now), I'm again looking forward to continue raiding with the above guidelines =).

This is a ridiculous argument which is based off a logical fallacy. This would akin to me arguing the following.

If we raided less than 20 hours a week, I'm fairly sure the guild would have stopped raiding at some point during the pre-nerf M'uru learning period. Especially when you're on tightly tuned, raid-comp-stringent fights. . . it just sucks that much more to be doing it for less than 20 hours a week. The fact that many other guilds "ranked" below us have stopped raiding due to 12 hour raidweeks and lack of progress is just another step in confirming my belief that raiding heavy is the way to go in the long run.

Some people just want to raid progression content more heavily than others. My guild raids about 16 hours during progression, but if we cut off an entire night, I know it would upset a significant portion of our roster. Likewise, people who join guilds like Vodka, Premonition, Nihilum, etc, guilds who put in 40+ hour raidweeks during progression, those people most often join those guilds because they want to be putting that much time into progression - it's not like someone joins the guild, discovers they're expected to be available for 10 hours a night, and is shocked by it.

Summary: raiding less is not necessarily better. Every guild has a 'sweet spot' for raid hours which varies depending on your roster.

I don't see it as a problem with design, but rather a challenge for guilds leadership to manage. Had we had the correct (or desired) number of Shadow Priests or Shaman then I wouldn't have had to do that - but we didn't so we managed it and got by.

Its an eternal problem ... Blizzard cannot cater to the hardcore crowd with encounter design without playing the same min/max game top end raiders do.

If you designed Eredar Twins to require massive amounts of raid healing - but designed it such that you didn't need to stack Resto Shaman ... then the top guilds would still just stack Resto Shaman and the encounter suddely becomes trivial for them.

Sunwell required your guild to min/max everything ... from professions (loldrums) to specs to classes to raid balance.

It is hard for me to not be biased, because I have killed KJ and would be considered as one of these min/max type people - thus I loved Sunwell and I PERSONALLY would be happy to have another instance like that in Wrath.

Edit: I'll quickly admit that I'm connecting "Raiding Less" as "Raiding Efficiently" - they're not necessarily causal, but I'd argue that it's correlated.

By raiding more, guilds can easily fall into the "head->wall" trap that really causes the feeling of waste, leading to burnout. This is clear on M'uru, where guilds wiped hundreds of times and it was probably easy to just do attempt after attempt late into the night, etc. etc.

Obviously guilds all have their sweet spot, but I'd bet quite a bit that most guilds could cut a night off their raiding schedule, advance 90% as quickly and maintain a much healthier roster. The marginal gain of that 5th hour, or that 6th night shrinks is pretty low.

Just nitpicking here, but for gladiator rank, the teams 'just for points' much like Kara/Gruul raiders are counted

Anyway, to keep things on-topic: my guild was 3/6 when we stopped raiding, the thing that probably killed us the most is people getting frustrated with eachother as mistakes by 1 person can cause yet another wipe on "farm" content. Wiping on Kalec is not fun when you want to work on Twins progress, and even though missing a portal shouldn't happen, I'm pretty sure everyone can remember "one of those nights" where everything just doesn't work out, when tanks get unlucky on brutallus and that massdispell gets resisted yet again at felmyst. Stuff like this never was a problem in previous content, and can be buffered by gear once you're really past it, but for us it got people emo and raiding attendance dropped for some members, leading to less raids/progress, and ultimately the end of raiding for TBC.

After patch 3.0.2, I think a lot more guilds will be trying to raid SWP again, and fewer guilds will die.

We usually kill Brut around 5'30. Last night we killed him in 3'00 with one of our healers dead from the beginning (DC).

Felmyst still went down with half of the raid dead during first air phase.

I don't remember Twins, but I think we had 2 minutes left til enrage.

For guilds stuck on a certain boss, it's almost free loots. As someone in guild noted last night, it's basically a 25-man Karazhan now.

I think Sunwell is over-nerfed (I never thought I'd say that). It's definitely not a challenge, but it now represents a lot of loot people can take to WotLK with them.

Wow you're lucky. The servers were stable in time for your raid? Lightning's Blade wasn't up until 11:30pm EST



Idk, maybe the average caliber of player that I am used to seeing is somewhat lower, but my guild ran into a problem where we would repeatedly run out of time in our raiding week. We raided 4 nights a week for 4 hours. We got into Sunwell pretty late into the game, we started in July, and as a result we were still farming BT for new applicants who needed to get geared out.

A typical week would look like - Tuesday: Clear Black Temple as far Mother or Illidari Council. Wednesday: Finish Black Temple, wipe a few times on Illidan. Clear to kalecgos. Wipe for an hour. Start trying brutallus. Wipe until the raids almost over then kill him. This leaves two nights leftover for new boss attempts. Maybe we would take the whole next day trying Felmyst and then I'm left with only one night of the week to do Eredar Twins.

The first three bosses in Sunwell just didn't seem like easily repeatable encounters. It was hard every single week. There also felt like some element of re-learning went into every single week. It used to frustrate me so much when I would hear about other guilds on my server happily clearing to M'uru in 3 hours. I honestly did not know what I was doing wrong - and as the guild leader and raid leader - I felt that it was in some way or another my fault.

They went down 3x. Once was a server reset right before Felmyst was about to go down, so we had to wipe the raid so the loot wouldn't disappear.


Trust me, everything up to Kil'jaden is half-assable now. If you had problems on Felmyst or Twins you won't have problems this week.

If anything, I think the new problem SWP will present is boredom. Nothing is challenging, and I heard several people complain that it feels just like BT now.

What you should have been doing in that setup is cutting down your BT clear times to one night. Getting that done in one go helps a huge amount as the next raid everyone turns up focused and fresh for the hideous kalegos trash. Push through there, with everyone flasked etc in 30 minutes, and everyone's still focused and on form for Kale and Brut who should both go down pretty swiftly.

At this point you're already almost a full raid ahead of where you were previously. Congratz, you've just gained a day for progression. Getting farm content done FAST is key to pushing progression.

Now my guild has stopped raiding until WotLK (mainly due to me as guild leader needing a break after 2 years and no one stepping up), but we're probably going to have a go at SW:P with the new changes. Tbh it sounds like a bit of a laugh, and should be quite good fun. i'm very much in favor of the current situ for guilds like ours

I think that what they were really saying there was "M'uru was too hard." and not Sunwell itself without directly saying it.

This is a good nitpick, because it only further proves my point: 0.5% Galdiators for all arena players is equal to 0.5% M'uru killers for all raiders - Blizzard did it well. Also, just like 17% of Sunwell guilds are M'uru killers, if you only count PvPers that play for competition and not for easy purpz, you'll probably get similar percentage of Gladiators among those players. It also explains comments like "1850 rating is easy, any scrub can get it" - just like any scrub guild can clear half of T6 if they actually gather a raid and try.

For background my guild worked about 20 hours on pre-nerf muru before 4 core healers quit the game. We merged with another guild that had recently killed Illidan and trained them up in Sunwell for around 8 weeks before we were back at M'uru when the guild officers rerolled alliance.

My problem with M'uru was its complete and utter tediousness. P1 reminded me so so much of Vashj P2 yet in terms of fun they were night and day. As for luck based, any bad avoidance or miss/resists could wipe you.

I also agree with some on the fact many people may not have liked it because it was all down to personal skill (though with less venom). It took me maybe an hour to work out the nuances and problems of picking up each wave of adds as they marched through the shield whilst working with a mage to ensure no broken polys. After this the next 19 hours of wipes were things totally and completely out of my control and down to another player messing up. Whats more annoying was it wasn't even Bob the priest or whatever each time, mistakes were pretty evenly spread. But the tuning was so tight it felt like we were waiting for the stars to align on that one try where no one fucked up and then he'd go down. It felt like after 2 hours of tries EVERYONE knew the fight inside out and what they were doing, it was just riding out the storm till no one fucked up and no bad luck streaks occured (which I'd argue do occur here, any sort of shit avoidance streak is usually a tank gib). We even felt we were close to killing him just waiting for a better P2 setup than we'd been getting but by that time people were burned out and fed up of him.

Its a shame because I do like complicated boss fights with lots of stuff going on, refrring back to my Vashj comment earlier this boss was a fucking joy to partake in. I killed her in a guild before I went hardcore raiding again so the skill wasn't great (the usual, 10 or so excellent core + casuals). But the 10-15 hours it took to down her were some of my fondest times in TBC and I think shes my faveourite boss in the expansion. I heard good things about post nerf muru that it was really fun but I sadly never got to experience it.

Our guild recently reformed agian for WotLK but I'm looking forward to going back to the super weak M'uru in the next couple of weeks and venting some pent up frustration on his stupid wind chime face

Was Sunwell really that hard?
I m RL of a pure Funguild atm and we had Kalcegos to 2% on 3rd week of raiding SW with about 9 ours per week of raiding.
We got many players who barly can get more then 50% of class potential out.
After the 2% try one of our healers asked a so stupid question clearly showing that she had 0 clue of how the encounter works and of the Boss abilities.

I somehow cant believe that guilds with focused Raiders really got such heavy problems downing such a Boss.

I think the main thing keeping the raid and guild motivated was a constant preogress on the Boss, about 10% less he had every evening.

Maybe being totaly stuck or even sliping back in progress was a big problem for many other guilds (I know 1 from our server for which it was), totaly kills motivation i guess. Maybe like being stuck in Arenas as Pala or whatever due to op Druids and Rogues. U get tired of too many fails.

Kalegos is essentially free loot for clearing the trash to him. Most guilds get him in their first couple of nights.

Muru/KJ and to a lesser extent Brutallus were the hard fights.

This. The hardest thing about Kalecgos was maintaining the portal rotation for the duration of the fight, and having enough people in the shadow realm to finish off Sathrovarr when they enraged. The shorter the fight is, the less chance there is for people fucking up portals.