Our raiding has been an absolute disaster - we're not a high-end guild, we were farming BWL and working on AQ40. But last weekend our AQ40 raid couldn't even beat Skeram, and our BWL raid wiped a bunch on Vael and then gave up. Seemed to be a mixture of people trying to play with broken UIs, people trying to play with unfamiliar talent builds, people trying to deal with game mechanic changes, I dunno.

But on the bright side, our rolling AB group is almost undefeated, and a nice string of 2000-0 victories cheered up everyone involved. Several people have collected GM weapons already, and many more are well on their way. So morale is good there.

I'm not really expecting any serious raiding from now until TBC. Think it'll just be PvP'ing and waiting.

Yes. Rexxar has been plagued with this problem since the first announcements of patch 2.0.1 in mid November.

Since the first releases and burning crusade implied all current content would be obsolete come January 2006 all three front tier guilds have either folded or ceased raiding. Not even Blackwing lair has been attempted.

I think the high warlord weapons were an excellent reset button, but the cost is a but too steep. Raiders watching their gear be outdated over the span of 3 days, or the gear they had while waiting for loot council / dkp to upgrade into Tier 3 have ceased logging in, or do nothing but PVP for GM gear.

I'm not sure if this was intentional by Blizzard. It would seem that the Raid developer knew exactly what he was breaking when the community for two years relied upon a set of crucial mods to beat the given encounters.

Silver lining is that there are a few guilds who have continued raiding. The problem is that like the Ark, you can only take on X of each class. There seems to be too many who still want to see KT dead, yet not enough PVE or PVP guilds which are willing to step up and see the Lich dead.

My only hope (as I've echoed over on the Fires of Heaven forums), is that blizzard sets a firm policy on what and what a mod can not do for you. In doing so, I would also hope that they do not randomly choose to 'reset' all third party community work. If this becomes a common issue with each new expansion (unless they are all on two year time cycles), I think raiding in WoW is done. Or at least, the margin to rebuild a UI and relearn each new set of legal 'assistants', will drive alot of raiders out of the game.

Well after 2.0.1 release our guild hasn't raided seriously once, in fact around 15-20 people left the guild today due to lack of raiding. Now of course the majority of us are PVP'ing at the moment, so we're not all focused on PVE, but at the moment on the European realms, we go through a hell of a lot of lag spikes and server downtime 2-3 times a day, mainly at raid time :/

We haven't been raiding much at all. I personally did want to kill Nef before the expansion, but I'm not losing any sleep over this new development (if anything, the guilt about not logging on is gone, gone, gone.) We lost a couple of people who were eager for more raiding. Ironically enough, they haven't found much more raid-solid guilds, from what I know. It's kind of dumb to abandon a guild where you have friends for transient low-level (BWL) epics that you'll replace in a month, at this point.

It also helps that our GM is very good at writing analytical inspirational posts. ;) I think it helps make people feel like we're still solid, and we have a future ahead of us in TBC.

To the OP in particular: Never say die. I've been in a situation where "everyone" was abandoning the guild, and the one thing I learned is if you have a solid core that will stay come hell and high water, then Bob's your uncle. Right now is the best time to weed out the undependables anyway. Recruit people who will be equally committed as those who weathered the storm, and you'll be better in the expansion than you were before it.

(Most idiomatic expressions in one post? >_>)

Our morale actually seems to be slowly climbing upwards again. I think most of us have accepted that we probably won't see KT, and are okay with just pushing on as far as we can go.

This week of raiding went exceptionally smoothly outside of mod difficulties, all but one of our farm bosses are down- and the boss we just got for the first time last week we planted with a partial raid this week. We're right back looking at Loatheb after we plant Heigan tonight- people are super excited about PvPing to polish out gearing gaps and there's pretty much always a pvp group going (rare for us). Most of our beta folks are even playing Live full time again- it's bringing back some of the heart of the guild. Attendance is okay, several of our apps are promising.... All in all we're coming out the other side of the patch with that semi dazed feeling that we expected it to be the end of the world and not only is everything okay- we're actually kicking ass...

The patch was awesome! =D

I'll toss a "ditto" in here. We, at our apex, were working on Twin Emps, killing Razuvious, and farming BWL weekly. This weekend, Saturday raid was called due to lack of healers and no warlocks. We actually picked up 3 very solid locks Sunday afternoon from another similar-tier guild that was dissolving :(, and had a full raid, with our new locks, ready to go at AQ40, a bit late since the server queues were running 500-600 deep in primetime. We pulled and middle of pre-Skeram trash a 15:00 server shutdown was called. We cleared to Skeram, got one artifact, 4-5 bug mounts, and a half-assed attempt at Skeram to show the new recruits our positioning, server rebooted. About 30min later we had everyone back in and on-line, started buffing and, yes, another 15:00 server shutdown. Raid leader called it at this point since we didn't want to work thru massive server stability problems. We're going to try to form the usual raid schedule this week (clear BWL, as much AQ40 as time remains, possibly Naxx if the right mix class shows up), but I suspect it will be interesting, our Nef strategy is no longer viable, and I'm unsure how many people have figured out decursing strategy without the old addons. Remember that a lot of people learned how to do things over many many weeks "the old way" and a complete transition will be jarring for them.

(Random side note, I hearthed back to IF at this point, then realized I had some Cenarion Hold quests to turn in from acculumated effort during the day. I took the boat from Menethil over to Duskwallow and found that Kalimdor had essentially crashed. There were no NPCs, no flight masters, no mobs, nothing but the boat. I contemplating riding to Silithus anyway and thought better of it. Grab the boat back, and it crashes on the way out, dumping us in the water just off Alcaz Island. I almost fatigue-died there but made it to the coast and got to take a nice tour of Alcaz with no mobs on it. A bit later got a 15:00 notice and Kalimdor apparently rebooted, the flight masters and such re-appeared.

Is this kind of instability common on other servers? We seem to be having a lot of it post 2.0...)

We're seeing a lot of PvP, mostly premade AB also, until very late at night. A few people racked up their first GM weapon yesterday after some monster BG effort Fri-Sun. I'm figuring I will push for a GM Swiftblade now since it's a nice DPS upgrade, plus a solid tanking/aggro weapon, and will come faster than I will see Iblis or Crul'Shorukh given my current DKP state. I'm about 20-25% of the way there and only did an evening/evening-and-a-half's worth of premade AB.

If I was someone who actually did the GM/HWL grind right about now I'd be a little annoyed, the new system seems to be heavily devaluing their accomplishments.

We had tried a lot to push naxxramas before the patch and signs of burning out from a lot of people were seen. So we decided to just skip pve entirely until tbc (we wouldn't have the attendance anyway) and focus on pvp. Works well so far, everyone seems happy and a lot of people who had vanished made a reappearance, some of them playing even more than before.

I was thinking the same thing, but then a guildie who PvPs (I don't) pointed out a different view of it. The people who got GM/HWL got to be the elite few for quite a while. Now other people are getting the gear, but they didn't have it when it meant something significant. Now the gear is nice, but not amazing, considering the gear that will be available in a month or two once TBC is up and running.

As for guild issues in general, the guild I'm in is still clearing BWL and working halfheartedly on Naxx/AQ40. However, a lot of people are taking time off from raiding to enjoy PvP for a while. The result is that we'll end up with a few cancelled raids, but I think the guild will do fine.

On the other hand, I'm glad we keep raiding so we don't repeat the mistakes of other guilds on our server. One guild announced in October that they were 'cutting away the chaff' to prepare for a November TBC release. After the release was delayed, they tried to get their 40 man groups back together, but couldn't get a decent sized raid group. It seems telling almost 40% of your guild that you're abandoning them makes them less likely to want to raid with you...

People who did the GM/HWL grind stopped being special about 6 months ago when BWL cash runs came into vogue. When someone can buy an Ashkandi for 500g or something from a random guild, your HWL 2h doesn't look quite so special anymore.

To put things into perspective, the Rank12 armor is level 71. That's Majordomo loot. The Rank13 armor is level 74. That's Vael loot. The Rank14 weapons are level 79. That's a bit above Chromaggus/Huhuran.

The weapons are still nice, certainly, but it's misguided to imagine that the rest really is some great prize or has been at any point in recent times.

The HWL/GM player title is, oddly enough, the real lasting mark of distinction. A year or two from now there won't be so many of those, to say the least, and no one will remember this crappy gear.

We as a guild are stuck on Gothik before 4h and sapph, KT. We will not kill goth before the expansion. After the expansion hits I am pretty sure our guild will continue to do 25 man content but just barely. Keep in mind that it will be late Feb, early March before people start to hit 70 (in large numbers). We have lost so many people to burnout, quitting, a pvp break, people deciding that redoing all their UI mods is too much work, people bailing to the one other horde guild who is actually doing naxx right now (who just recently caught up to us) and an overall lack of healers due to the same issues and poor recruiting practices plus a total ongoing lack of druids.

Not to mention the fact that there is no loot carrot dangling in front of us because of the expansion and some pretty damn good weapons to be had for not much work PLUS the exams and holiday break hitting all at once means that we went from sitting 10 - 15 people on Naxx free loot nights to not being able to muster 30 people online to raid. Also, we lost some of our best geared tanks - 7/9s Dread, etc - to the same issues.

With the current state of WoW endgame - this critical loss of even one segment of the holy trinity means that our guild, atm and for the foreseeable future is totally and completely fucked. Keep in mind that while this has been "on the horizon" for a while now, this actually happened in the span of about 2 weeks. I don't even log on much right now - I have RL things to do and since I am already rank 13 on 5 characters (I multibox) - I have no real desire to pvp more for a few weapons that I will wind up replacing soon enough as it is.

I just hope that everybody rears their head again for the expansion because from my perspective we are bleeding people right now. That or Blizzard just doesn't care about those of us who are high end raiders - after all we are not the largest market for their product and we consume content and require a lot of their time. So who knows. As it stands right now though, WoW is dying a quick death mainly because the gear is going to be replaced so quickly.

I would also like to extend a big screw you to Blizzard for making HWL/GM weapons so much easier to get. It went from taking literally 1,600 games of WSG (winning most of them) over 4 weeks - doing 12 hour days 5-6 days a week to something in the area of 40 games of AB? Those 1,600 games was what it took to go from Rank 13, Warlord, to Rank 14. That was one rank. Now it is two days of pvping? Not that the system is much more sane (it is) but having worked so damn hard to get R13...... then come expansion everybody suddenly pops up with R14 weps.... just doesn't seem right. On the one hand I do applaud the MUCH more reasonable period of time it is going to take to get R14 weps but seriously.... why the hell was it so damn hard to get them before?

I logged in today to hear that my raid group has disbanded until BC and there will be a post on the forums...

..still in shock.