I did a quick search to try and find related topics but came up empty.

My question is that for a guild who has recently conquered BWL and has ~3 learning days available to it, what is a reasonable time frame for progressing up to Twin Emps or even C'thun? Six, eight, ten weeks required?

It's taken us 10 weeks to get from Skeram to Twin Emps. That's with 12 total raid hours a week and 4 to 8 of them being spent on BWL every week.

How long had you been farming BWL before stepping foot into AQ40?

Have you been preparing NR and/or do have the mats (Bloodvine, Living Essence) to mass craft NR gear?

It took my guild approximately 12-14 weeks from killing Skeram (first night in AQ40) to killing the Twin Emps. 3-4 of those weeks were spent farming NR, pre-craftable NR gear. We had killed Nef 4-5 times prior to this, but had just absorbed a goodly number of new members. This would be with spending around 6 hours a week on AQ40. (we're pretty casual)

With the 3-4 weeks of farming NR gear removed, assuming you guys do the necessary prep-work, and with more learning hours per week than what we had, I would say around 8-10 weeks would be a valid goal. Less time if you guys are rockstars and more if you all hit a road block with attendance, etc.

I'd say it varies wildly on how many consistant members you have amongst other factors. In a world where you had the exact same fourty people every raid (and had some BWL gear of course) I think you would see progression in AQ very quickly indeed. Unlike MC and BWL, a number of the fights seem to stress that nearly everyone knows what is going on and can react accordingly. They aren't supremely hard necessarily but they can be punishing on mistakes and several do require good healing and dps and not just a competant tank(s).

The NR 'block' is another facet of this too. Will you need to gear up 15 people or 30 that show up less regularily? Are world dragons ever available to you or is it all craftable/farm? Do you have a guildbank or enough time to farm for enough pots/consumables? Are your members motivated enough to get odd items for odd fights? Perhaps most importantly, will they freak out when they are learning new fights with very little in terms of rewards compared to BWL loot night?

If you really have three raid nights a week to throw at AQ though, I'd think you'll progress rapidly. Depending on your gear, you may well want to ensure that AQ20 and ZG are kept in the rotation though and even a foray into Naxx to learn Anub/Raz might pay off in the long term. I personally love AQ but it certainly is not to everyone's taste.

Our first Prophet Skeram kill:

04/29/06

Our first Huhuran kill:

07/30/06

So take heart that no matter how long it takes you, you'll probably be moving faster than us.

We killed Nef for the first time on 24th June. We started in AQ40 a few weeks later, and cleared through to Sartura in our first week in there. We eventually got Huhuran on the 22nd of July, and killed the twins for the first time on the 20th of September (dates might be a day or two off, i'm going by front page news posts on our website, and things are rarely posted immediately).

That was with mostly two nights a week spent on AQ40, iirc (was one night a week up until we hit Fankriss, i think, then two nights after that).

Our guild took about 10 weeks from Skeram -> Twins, We went for a couple easy Naxx kills alng the way though. We raid about 15-20 hours a week.

Took us 3 months (~12 weeks) to go from Skeram -> Twin Emps. We were in a bit of a bad period there though, raiding weren't that good. We spent 1 month on emperors and a bit over 1 month on Huhuran, that just wasn't good enough. So I'd say you should aim for 8 weeks with some good raiding.

imo, and many people will disagree with me, skip aq40 and move to naxx. its a more fun instance and is easier broken into raid chunk times. with the expansion looking more and more like hitting end of nov (alpha cap at 67 now and being raised to 70 this week, beta starting any day now) at this point do whats fun for your guild and don't overstress people. it would take an extraordinary group of people at this point to kill c'thun or get far into naxx if they are just starting aq40, before the expansion is out.

frankly if that just means running mc/bwl/aq20/zg and only occasionally venturing into aq40/naxx, so be it. it sounds good at first to go hardcore into aq40/naxx but as most people will tell you it can be very, very frustrating wiping hours on end and having only massive repair bills to show for it.

if you push too hardcore you will simply lose people, have to focus a lot on recruiting, etc. of course with no progression you will also lose people. every guild has to treat it differently, most importantly refocus every week and get an honest opinion of what people wanna do. after 2-3 weeks of wiping on sartura, huhuran, or anub'rekhan people may wanna shift gears and try something else.

If you're alliance these are the easiest pulls in the instance >_< not sure how horde do them tho

Painfully.
I gotta disagree with you there, the majority of Naxx encounters won't be possible with "we just killed Nef" gear. The DPS upgrades from Skeram-Fankriss can make an impressive difference in anything you're doing in Naxx.

At this point, I will say that I don't think it's worth guild time/money to get NR for Huhuran/Viscidus unless you have the stuff and nothing better to do with it. Huhu-Emps takes quite a bit of time/effort to learn to handle the encounters compared to Anub/Instructor.

How are you pulling them?

We generally have 3 tanks and their healers 30 yards in front of the raid, pet pull, then pull one nullifier into the raid, one off to the side, and the warder back up the tunnel so that we get massive seperation. I can't see how I'd do it differently as horde, so you must be doing something we aren't, or I'm missing something.

The way we're doing it only takes 3 competent tanks. Nobody dies and there's no real downtime.

You could probably Do Skeram/Trio(Or Skip Trio)/Sartura/Fankriss in 1 week of raiding. There are tons of videoes, and written strategies are out now. Fankriss will probably take a week itself (schedule a raid, and tell people to take the 4-5hours to go farm NR). Then after you have 16-18 NR available, go for it.

Huhuran should take a week max with proper preparation. Twin Emps could take you a while though.
But in total you could very realitically do Skeram-Twin Emperors in 1 month.

NR for Fankriss? I'm guessing you mean Huhu :)

As long as your frontliners have got a decent combo of maraudon/bramblewood gear and your healers coordinate, Huhu shouldn't hold you up for too long. If anything the Defenders will give you more problems than all of the content beforehand.

As for nullifier packs, they're completely trivial once you split them. Quadruple Mindslayer packs, on the other hand, are the single most irritating fight in the entire instance.

Yep, nullifiers we do with pallys and melee up front, everyone else at the back. Pallys burn their mana down to under 1000 so they dont get burnt and just spam low rank heals, the nullifiers hit for sod all anyhow. Once the pull is split its very very simple.
[edit] To clarify, we just have both nullifiers together up with the melee/pallys. That way the nullifiers are dying about the same time as the rest of the raid kills the warder.

Have to agree on the 4 mindslayer packs, we had one reset with about 5 lots of those, was debating jumping from my window by the end of it.

Nullifiers as Horde:

Offtank the Warder with a Warrior + two healers. Pull one Nullifier through the raid and way down towards emps, offtank it here with a Warrior and two Druids. (They can alternate healing and stay in catform without being drained). The rest of the raid zergs/drains the first nullifier right below where you pull it from, it's not hard to kill it before it nullifies. Then you move to about ~50 yards of the second Nullifier in the back. Wait there, feed it mana and let it nullify the three people down there. Then the entire raid heads on down and drains/zergs that too. The warder left standing is trivial.

Odd, that's how we do it as Alliance.

AQ:

21 Feb (skerem down on first day) to 24 April (Twin Emps) to 17 June (C'Thun)
So just over 8 weeks to Emps, 14 weeks to C'Thun.

We had about 3 learning days available to us at the time, although we'd had 2 months of farming Nef before the gates opened.

I'd guess 8-12 weeks to Emps, 12-16 weeks to C'thun.

Is the pulling the nullifiers a safety net incase they explode or is there some other reason? We tend to rely on a semi patented zerg style kill and just pull the defender out of range and drain the first nullifier whilst nuking it.The drainers then switch draining at 30%ish to the second one which we then nuke b4 running to the mt whos playing with the defender around a corner.

Mildly off topic but does anyone know how the defenders abilities are decided etc? As randomly the other night we had one that Feared, Rooted, Sandblasted (87% miss rate) and Silence all in swift succesion and ive not seen this before. Whilst more irritating than hard as i havent seen them do this before i was wondering if this was regular and ive jsut not noticed or if its a rare combo.

Skeram killed 03-18-2006 (our server was about dead last to open the gates) to the twins dead 04-24-2006. We didn't get C'thun until july though, mainly because of the usual summer commings and goings, vacations, etc. We'd been killing nef since December of 2005.

We started naxx right when it came out (6-28?), and have been on Thaddius since killing Gluth on September 4th.

This was generally done while raiding 4 ish nights a week, as the server allowed. Before hardware upgrades Fridays and Saturdays were just about unplayable until 10 PM or later.