Serious attrition problems since Thanksgiving? Typical? - Page 4

Malorum · 12/03/06, 2:53 PM

Originally Posted by XI-

Originally Posted by spronk

next week is certainly going to be interesting... anyone else betting that one or two naxx bosses will be bugged so that they are unkillable? perhaps one or two others will be killable by just 15 people to balance that out lol

i also think many of our healers have gotten very used to decursive/emmonitor and the changes will hit them like a brick.

I never understood why people are so worried about decursive/EM. I know at least when we raid most if not every group typically has 2 healers, and we could create groups that every one has a decurse. Now each group is virtually self sufficient.

Not to mention the whack-a-mole feature that is built into RDX 6 makes it even easier. I dont see it as THAT much of a problem.

Cmpnd · 12/03/06, 3:05 PM

Originally Posted by XI-

Originally Posted by spronk

next week is certainly going to be interesting... anyone else betting that one or two naxx bosses will be bugged so that they are unkillable? perhaps one or two others will be killable by just 15 people to balance that out lol

i also think many of our healers have gotten very used to decursive/emmonitor and the changes will hit them like a brick.

I never understood why people are so worried about decursive/EM. I know at least when we raid most if not every group typically has 2 healers, and we could create groups that every one has a decurse. Now each group is virtually self sufficient.

Just to give you an example:

You're on Sapphiron and each group has 1 Decurser. Four or five people in one group get hit by the curse, you're bound to see some people take damage, which leads to more health for Sapphiron and less mana for healers. If you encourage cross-decursing, people will sometimes be going for the same target, and one person is going to lose the race and end up wasting time. I don't think these bosses will be "unkillable", but definitely harder than they were before.

Ngita · 12/03/06, 4:05 PM

Slightly different time frame as have australian exams and Dst to deal with but still fairly typical, had 45 people turn up for our first pw kill a month ago. He died and a lot of us are on a high, next week 35, week after that 27. We dropped bwl and aq40 as we knew people had exams and others were talking about burnout, That was no help.

This week we gave up and dropped our main progression day which just leaves us with 3 days of 3 hours sessions of farm content. Mind you it was fun to go back to bwl yesterday, we cant kill Vael with 30( he died) , we cant do suppresion room with 1 mage(we did), a 4 hour clear meh but we got the best drops we have had for months.

We stopped recruiting mainly because we know we will have no place for them post tbc.

Warstehgnome · 12/03/06, 4:12 PM

Yeah I guess I'm going to "advise" my officers, guildleaders to check out this thread. As it has one good message, we shouldn't add a bunch of trash applicants just to get a few more bosses down in naxx. Since we're going to probably drop a lot of people because of the 25 man cap anyway, if not then field two raids(maybe 10man?). I was a good guild leader at one point and know its best to do the best for the guild.

Yeah btw Bekah, I disguise my "recruitment" thread in a simple thread named, "Naxx, WTF?" I doubt we'll get trolled as much as you guys though, since no one likes to troll me :*(

XI- · 12/03/06, 4:30 PM

Originally Posted by Cmpnd

Originally Posted by XI-

Originally Posted by spronk

next week is certainly going to be interesting... anyone else betting that one or two naxx bosses will be bugged so that they are unkillable? perhaps one or two others will be killable by just 15 people to balance that out lol

i also think many of our healers have gotten very used to decursive/emmonitor and the changes will hit them like a brick.

I never understood why people are so worried about decursive/EM. I know at least when we raid most if not every group typically has 2 healers, and we could create groups that every one has a decurse. Now each group is virtually self sufficient.

Just to give you an example:

You're on Sapphiron and each group has 1 Decurser. Four or five people in one group get hit by the curse, you're bound to see some people take damage, which leads to more health for Sapphiron and less mana for healers. If you encourage cross-decursing, people will sometimes be going for the same target, and one person is going to lose the race and end up wasting time. I don't think these bosses will be "unkillable", but definitely harder than they were before.

And you know what happens with decursive, it still goes after the same person and people get raped, because idiots are too stupid to do their little job. You know how many times I've taken multiple ticks on Saph because 3 people decursed the same people in the same order, and I wasn't high enough on the list. If they used their eyes and brains a little bit it wouldn't have happened.

Cmpnd · 12/03/06, 4:41 PM

Originally Posted by XI-

Originally Posted by Cmpnd

Originally Posted by XI-

I never understood why people are so worried about decursive/EM. I know at least when we raid most if not every group typically has 2 healers, and we could create groups that every one has a decurse. Now each group is virtually self sufficient.

Just to give you an example:

You're on Sapphiron and each group has 1 Decurser. Four or five people in one group get hit by the curse, you're bound to see some people take damage, which leads to more health for Sapphiron and less mana for healers. If you encourage cross-decursing, people will sometimes be going for the same target, and one person is going to lose the race and end up wasting time. I don't think these bosses will be "unkillable", but definitely harder than they were before.

And you know what happens with decursive, it still goes after the same person and people get raped, because idiots are too stupid to do their little job. You know how many times I've taken multiple ticks on Saph because 3 people decursed the same people in the same order, and I wasn't high enough on the list. If they used their eyes and brains a little bit it wouldn't have happened.

However, if you just spam your decursive hotkey then it will immediately move to the next person and not decurse the person that does not have the curse (you get the "Nothing to dispel" error). The difference is a normal human is going to have to move his mouse and then click on someone else's name in order to decurse; however, simple priority lists for each mage/druid should help out the problem. It shouldn't be a huge deal, just more organization/paying attention will be needed.

Bekah · 12/03/06, 5:38 PM

Yeah tagging a zerg just to get warm bodies in the seats is a dangerous proposition, it's currently one of the more debated things in guild atm. Do we just tag our way back up to 60 people and call a halt to Naxx progression (because to do that we'd have to take T1 folks- and they're not going to cut it for Thaddius etc) but keep raiding heavily- even if we're just raiding BWL? Or do we tag just the folks who would normally make it through (a much smaller number) and trust raiding to survive until the expansion.

ATM we're pushing the most promising apps (decent gear, no major personality problems, naxx acceptable damage/healing) through faster than normal, and trying to keep the undergeared folks hanging on until we can get them on an AQ40 run to see if they've got brains and are just undergeared. No zerg for us, although we are shortening the trial process out of necessity and starting to consider some folks in slightly worse gear than we'd normally consider.

All kinda depends on what's still possible come Tuesday- we may be stuck with a few naxx bosses that aren't killable if rumors are true (who knows at this point) at which point it won't matter if they can provide Thaddius level dps, and we'll just be looking for the best personality/smarts fits to head into the expansion with. ^.^

♦ Praetorian · 12/03/06, 5:55 PM

Originally Posted by falkon2

Originally Posted by Praetorian

I wouldn't quite use the past tense. We want to kill him within the next two days.

Ah, okay... I misinterpreted the phrase 'this reset'; didn't mean to imply anything. Best of luck!

Shameless plug: http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...255591#p255591

Jaete · 12/03/06, 5:58 PM

Originally Posted by XI-

And you know what happens with decursive, it still goes after the same person and people get raped, because idiots are too stupid to do their little job. You know how many times I've taken multiple ticks on Saph because 3 people decursed the same people in the same order, and I wasn't high enough on the list. If they used their eyes and brains a little bit it wouldn't have happened.

So you're saying people are too stupid to use decursive's priority list feature? How is this decursive's fault? (And which people are you referring to anyway - probably the ones in your guild?)

You do realize that a human literally cannot decurse as fast as decursive, once you have the priorities etc set up, right? Cause it looks like you're just trolling. :p

On any other fight it won't matter as much, but Sapphiron... well, at least we'll have Noth to practice on. :)

...on topic - what's thanksgiving? ;) But the patch on wednesday, that's gonna suck either a nontrivial amount or a lot. I'm cautiously optimistic tho.

• malthrin · 12/03/06, 6:21 PM

Congratulations EJ!

XI- · 12/03/06, 7:15 PM

Originally Posted by Jaete

Originally Posted by XI-

And you know what happens with decursive, it still goes after the same person and people get raped, because idiots are too stupid to do their little job. You know how many times I've taken multiple ticks on Saph because 3 people decursed the same people in the same order, and I wasn't high enough on the list. If they used their eyes and brains a little bit it wouldn't have happened.

So you're saying people are too stupid to use decursive's priority list feature? How is this decursive's fault? (And which people are you referring to anyway - probably the ones in your guild?)

You do realize that a human literally cannot decurse as fast as decursive, once you have the priorities etc set up, right? Cause it looks like you're just trolling. :p

On any other fight it won't matter as much, but Sapphiron... well, at least we'll have Noth to practice on. :)

...on topic - what's thanksgiving? ;) But the patch on wednesday, that's gonna suck either a nontrivial amount or a lot. I'm cautiously optimistic tho.

If everyone has their decurse priority set the same, and they spam the key at the same time, guess what? It tries to decurse the same people. Now if we cut down to hey decurse your own group, then you won't have as many overlapping decurses, only on those people who's groups are clean and are trying to assist, if they decurse the same people in other groups, you have the same functionality as decursive.

Jaete · 12/03/06, 7:50 PM

Originally Posted by XI-

If everyone has their decurse priority set the same, and they spam the key at the same time, guess what? It tries to decurse the same people.

Like I said, if people don't set their decursive priorities properly, things will go wrong. I still don't quite see your point.

Originally Posted by XI-

Now if we cut down to hey decurse your own group, then you won't have as many overlapping decurses, only on those people who's groups are clean and are trying to assist, if they decurse the same people in other groups, you have the same functionality as decursive.

Decursive is obviously much quicker about deciding who to decurse than a human _can_ be; so you will have time to cycle through more targets with decursive than without. So the functionality won't be the same.

With decursive you can also set priorities optimally, of course - but even if you don't, it won't matter since with decursive it's easy to check 4-5 targets automatically before the curse ticks.

But I'm not quite sure what you're arguing; surely you can't be arguing that humans are as fast as computers? Or are you saying that just because it is possible to suck even when using decursive, it won't matter that everyone is guaranteed to suck without it? :)

♦ Praetorian · 12/03/06, 8:00 PM

The advantage of decursive is that you can just sit and spam your cleanse key when you know a curse is going to go off, and your first decurse will happen practically before your UI even shows that someone is cursed. It's not that the target selection algorithms are so amazing or that picking whom to decurse is hard. It isn't. It's that on Sapphiron you really want to have 10 decurses go off before the debuff ticks even once. Even the most skilled human player still has a reaction time of even tenths of a second in which he has to observe which player has been cursed, and then target that player to decurse via click or hotkey. By the time he gets his second decurse off, it's already ticked on someone.

A player can't know whom to decurse until his UI tells him who has been cursed. With Decursive, you just start spamming when curse is due, and you can get two people before it ticks quite reliably.

Z-Factor · 12/03/06, 8:06 PM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

Originally Posted by falkon2

Darn, how close were you guys to KT? If that's public information.

I wouldn't quite use the past tense. We want to kill him within the next two days. We haven't wiped prior to phase 3 in ages, but we never make it to phase 3 in adequate shape to finish the job. If we kill him, great. If not, oh well.

I read that this morning and felt you were tempting fate Gurg *winks*

Well, as an Englishman my guild's not suffering so much from Thanksgiving Syndrome, but what i like to call Holiday Free-fall. December is perhaps the worst month with the exception of July for guild progress and activity, for all the reasons mentioned above by various people. I'm in the fortunate position where i've put the giuld on cooldown until January, a decision i took with the officers as soon as the TBC delay was anounced, and it is something that has benefited our staple 15 greatly. Of course this leaves us trying to recruit 25 odd people before TBC hits, or at least before mid-feb when the level 70 raiding will kick off for the majority. Looking at the Guild Recruitment forum, there are a lot of "TBC H guild new PvP server 'Slayers" posts, but very few new guilds popping up on established realms, which is what Serious Business is. Trying to convince people to transfer existing characters is hard, and despite the notoriaty Magtheridon has it's incredibly hard to see how much a person knows about their class at level 30 in Gnomeregan (the flipside to my mage being in transfer limbo). Not a problem i'm hugely concerned with from the 'will we be able to raid confidently and comfortably' thoughts common-place at the moment, but as the clock draws closer to live, i can see a lot of draenei recruitment going on. But then there's always the carrion appeal, picking up drop-outs from existing giulds down-sizing.

But at the end of the day come the 10th of January you'll be seeing a lot of activity on every server as people get ready for the 16th.