Always possible

Well I grant you I talk retrospect. When we enter MC we didn't know what a gear check was. And we did wipe on trash and bosses. But in the end we did beat all the bosses leave Ragnaros not because we had the gear, but because we learned the execution and yes the gear we got from raiding up to that point naturally did help. But taking long to down a boss and it being a gear check are different things. Ragnaros is a FR gear check on 2 tanks. If you have the FR, and enough DPS to prevent a second son spawn, the fight is trivial.

Maybe I am, basically I just talk experience. Romulo first time we went there we had our tank in some 5-man gear and questing gear. Main reason for wipes: Romulo tank death.
We decide it's a tank gear check. We deck our tank in felsteel, get some gems and enchants together. We go back to Romulo and down him quickly with about the same crowd. Same stealing/dispelling/cleansing, same strategy and execution looked comparable.

For us it felt like a gear check...

I certainly don't want to exaggerate this. Read the R&D forum EU and you'd find other people making similar observations though.

Again I talk from our personal experience. We run double groups. Due to lockout one group is stuck with 5 healers and only 2 ranged DPS. We are stuck with only 2 healers but 5 ranged DPS. We comfortably have repeated 5min attempts on Curator and eventually down him when we pot up for DPS, main reason for wipe: OOM healers. Other group has to do a late sub for an extra mage (and park a pala) to make curator beatable.

Hence I consider it a DPS check. You need enough to comfortably down the astral flares. It's an implied healer longevity check too because if they run out it's done.

Well maybe it felt different for you guys. I don't know that. All I know is that we had no gearing push before entering MC and we never felt like wiping because we were undergeared. Rather we wiped because of inexperience or lack of execution.

In Kara we have boatloads of raiding experience and know how to execute and we have explicitly geared folks for encounters.

As a reroll the faction to be able to do the heroics for TK is non-trivial.

Consider most rerolls were so far behind thier guild that aside from a few pug runs in instances they mostly leveled solo. Doing that will get you about 2-6k into honored with the various factions when you have hit 70 and exhausted all your quests.

Atunement for Kharazan isn't too bad, though clearing shadowlabs in a pug was fairly painful and involved 2 trips out to repair. The keying for SS isn't too much worse, the only difficulty being you have to get revered with CE, that means 4-5 SV runs and maybe buying some armaments out of the AH if you soloed to 70.

The atunement for TK is much worse though. There are a lot of factions you have to get up and again if you are pugging the majority of the runs it sucks. Badly. I'm really not a fan of the way rep works in TBC.

So what are you going to do 6-7 months down the road when some key members leave? Recruit from another guild that has the class you need / player you want and is keyed already? Or will you put in effort to key someone who hasn't seen raiding past KZ?

Why do I feel there will be problems later on down the road? Especially on servers where recruitment pool is shallow, like horde side Malfurion.

This linear progression is fine if people stick around to the end.

Understandable then if that's your experience on those two fights but even granting you that they're a tank gear check/dps gear check, the point I'm trying to make is simply that it isnt a strenuous check even if it is one. For example, you say you used Felsteel on the tank for Romulo and that made the difference... that's craftable gear so isn't really something that's time intensive to get. But again it could just be we have different experiences

When did you first go into MC? I could be wrong but it sounds like you went into MC many, many months after the game was released (7+ months) and are comparing that experience to TBC 2 months in. The content in 'vanilla-WoW' got to the state you describe to after 2 years of additions and adjustments (and had it's share of painful times).

Sure if you had the raid coordination and gearing required to down Magmadar you were probably going to soon be at Domo but that's a huge part of why people hated MC in the first place (for being boring and trivial).

The original WoW was very unfriendly (at 60, near launch) to getting into 5-mans at all (unless you were a vital class) and extremely time-consuming on top of that (if you wanted to complete the quests, some instances took 4+ hours). 5-man instances were constantly raided for months in order to get a guild any reasonable amount of decent gear.

And many of the 'gear-checks' in original WoW were generally solved by repeated raiding of the instance you were working on (which would be on a raid timer).

TBC blows all that away (even in it's early state) by making 5 mans easily accessible, relevant and rewarding - providing all the gear you need to completely clear the next logical step (Karazhan). Molten Core was far worse than that if you were aiming to finish it.

You may not mean it, but the message I'm getting loud and clear is "come back in six months". The first six months of raiding in vanilla WoW were painful till Blizzard retuned things and put in Dire Maul / ZG.

Maybe it's true. Maybe Blizzard didn't learn a damn thing. Maybe I should just quit the game till July. Maybe.

No, it's "not come back in 6 months" it's "gear up in 5 mans to pass the gear check in Kara" Oh, and while you're gearing up in 5 mans, you're getting the rep necessary to be revered with all your factions.

I remember our first week in Kara. R&J had their way with us. Why? We hadn't run enough 5 mans. As I recall, we didn't keep going back every night to R&J and failing, we said "hey, lets take some time out, run 5 mans, and get people better gear." We focused on that and R&J wasn't as big a problem then. This is NOTHING like vanilla wow with poor itemization in 5 mans. The 5 man gear is excellant, in fact that's why there's such a problem later on, because the raid stuff is a small upgrade.

I'd never have to mow again if my lawn was as emo as that post is. The original release had next to no "real" tank gear by today's standards, no +dmg or +heal, itemization was a complete joke across the board, drop placement was completely out of whack with risk, there were no fancy UI mods like Bigwigs or CT to the extent you couldn't see outside your own group. The under-budget problems that we're seeing now are a complete joke in comparison.

Today, there is one glaring problem (consumables) that is preventing the vast majority of guilds that want to raid from raiding. The people who are flasking/potting and executing are winning, which shows that the encounters are not necessarily poorly tuned but were tuned with a level of consumable use that is higher than it ought to be. As has been pointed out this is the direction you want to be on gateway mobs that are required for keying lest you let a glut of people through with no real challenge. The only real issue is that people are chomping at the bit for fight balance fixes when the real problem is deeper. It's not going to take six months to fix that. It will probably take one patch to rectify the major problems, maybe two to get things ironed out. Blizzard has simply chosen to do it in a major content patch instead of a minor patch, and people want bandaids instead of a cast.

Not only is that not what I'm saying - but it's a gross exageration of how it should ever be construed.

We're 2 months and 0 content patches into the expansion and it's already huge leaps better solo, group & raid-wise then it was 9 months into vanilla WoW. It's just not quite all there yet.

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My major complaint with Blizzard at this stage is itemization related. Not from the point of view that items are badly itemized and/or that raid bosses drop items with too low iLevel overall - I think they will fix that reasonably soon.

I just find it mind-boggling that they are still releasing items that are under/over budget and clearly errors. That's the type of thing that they can have a computer script quickly check and fix in almost no development time.

That's all true, but Blizzard doesn't get the luxury of having people compare WoW 2.0 to WoW 1.0. They get the drama that stems from people -- including many raiders -- compare the somewhat dinged and underdone WoW 2.0 to the well-tuned, complete, and very polished endgame that was WoW 1.11 (or 1.12 depending on your PvP tastes.) The current TBC endgame DOES still feel somewhat like a mid-life beta test compared with the finished state of WoW 1.11, even though it obviously trounces the release state of WoW 1.0, as you said. But most people don't even know about those times, or remember them. They remember the fall of 2006 and TBC doesn't stack up as "polished" in comparison, even if it has make some major improvements.

On the other hand, they don't have nine months to get it right this time. If there's the possibility of another expansion coming around not much more than a year after the previous one, then people may just cease to be interested in raid progression if it takes too long to really sharpen it up to where the average person wants to participate.

Then again, people in my guild harped on me when I said I wanted to take a break from raiding for a few days before TBC was released.

We ran Onyxia weekly regardless, so we had ample cloaks and replacements got them from our storage. No problem there at all. Very easy logistics for us. FR gear is only critical for tanks otherwise a few pieces here or there helped. But we did run MC for almost a year and had plenty of core mats to get a tank in FR shape when needed, again no delay or excessive effort. The mats came in at a very comfortable rate. New tanks ran with us but didn't MT, so you could gear them on the side. I don't know about you but we always had farm content and progression content. Say we were in AQ40, then BWL was farm, and of course you'd gear your folks up there. With older folks already geared new hirees would actually deck very quickly as virtually all class loot would default to them unless it was that one piece missing for a veteran.

We were alliance but I feel your pain about horde onyxia. :P

But I grant you this, we started raiding August 2005. Lots of people did. So that's our expectation. If you think people shouldn't have the expectations from the content they saw when they started raiding, but when the game came out then that just doesn't reflect the game experience of a lot (probably the vast majority) of raiders.

Alright, Romulo is a tank gear and/or a tank pot check As said we did beat them comfortably once the tank wore felsteel. Hence he was origintally woefully undergeared. Not sure if we disagree at all here. Doesn't look like it.

It's just a mis-use of the term 'gear-check'. Coming into a fight undergeared, replacing 3 items and then winning is not at all what people were talking (and complaining about) when they originally got to Patchwerk.

Alright we use the word differently. I use the word gear check whenever what makes or breaks a fight depends on improvement on gear once the execution is understood.

If people imply a certain sufficiency scale like it has to be comparable to the AC levels needed for patch in 60 gear, alright Romulo isn't a gear check. I still somehow feel I use the word sensibly, because it describes what we have to improve to go on. Maybe "mild" gear check would be permissible

Elsia, please don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds to me as though you want to play content at a gear level you choose and/or want the gear to be available in a method you find convenient. But, as we all know, that's just arbitrary. I very much like the fact that I can gear up for Karazhan in my own time with a group of buddies I have spread across the different raiding guilds of my server. To make it where you didn't get gear from them but went directly from green quest gear to raiding would be to me a great loss.

I think the problem here is that the original dungeon sets did very little to gear you up for MC. The stuff that really helped out was either strange off-set items or added in with DM. The difference between the folks who had 8/8 Tier0 and the ones who started out being geared in Dire Maul was enormous. Let's not even imagine the people that geared up in ZG. People who killed Hakkar and then zoned in to MC could totally own the place due to gear superiority and strategic superiority.

Blizzard decided that it was not good fun to have excessively long instances that drop terrible class sets (stats only, no equip bonuses) and one or two great off-set items (Strat, Scholo, BRS, and the awful pre-buff BRD), then try to bridge the gap by putting in a dungeon that drops reasonable amounts of FR and dps/mitigation gear (DM), finally having a 20-man raid instance to try to fill in the gaping design space in between Dungeon1 and Tier1. Instead we get FANTASTIC level 70 dungeons. They are short, give excellent gear (with all the right bonuses stats and sockets), have factions that are easy to rep up and get useful rewards for doing so. People who love 5-mans even get a quasi-endgame experience in the heroics - along with epic loot and lucrative crafting mats.

Wanting to skip these because you prefer doing 25-man raiding just seems unfathomable to me. There are very few who have no upgrades left in the 5-mans somewhere. You realize you can just go get them without waiting for a lockout timer to expire? You'd actually prefer the coremats approach from MC and the ridiculous loot streaks?

Hmm Slight derail but I will bite, main tanking paladins are being forced out beyond kz by min/maxing guilds, they dont make good offftanks and to even get that far they have to spec heavily into that role and diminish their other abilities, Blizzard themselves have admitted that tanking for paladins is not quite where they want it.
Holy Paladin feel the lack of tools available if they try to main/solo heal and yet if they spec that heavily into that facet of their role they are denied from other options.
Ret Paladins face a severe lack of itemisation beyond greens, their is little room for them in heroic or 10 man content and that role of warm body who turned up to zg/mc/bwl and provided cleansing/buffs/auras with efficent healing through blessing of light and/or downranking to the tanks has almost completely disapeared.

Of our 4 raiding Paladins who acheived 70 only 2 are still playing as paladins, and I did a informal survey of top guilds on my server via armory a week ago and they all appear to be short on raiding paladins and in some cases have more 70 shamans than 70 Paladins.

Duo, thanks for clarifying. Exactly the point I'm trying to make. The point is we, a group of 40 odd people want to play together... emphasis on the last word.

Alright. Yes I want the game to be somewhat convenient. And I know it's arbitrary. MC->Naxx was convenient enough for me. But isn't really my point.

Also I do not advocate skipping Karazhan at all. I advocate lowering the linear progression between content and lowering the attunement time-sink.

I want to see all content and have no intention to skip anything. But I want to lower roadblocks that prevent my from playing with my buddies just as you like to play with yours.

I can imagine, I didn't mind the extra difficulty in MC due to some DM blues and rest greens. We did ZG in parallel to learning MC and I'd guess for the most part I was wearing MC gear, though my first ever epic was the bloodstained hauberk from ZG.

I totally agree with you.

See I think you miss what I'm trying to say completely. I do not intend to skip anything and I know my buddies won't want to skip anything.

But I do not want the "who wants SH heroics", "sorry I'm not revered yet". Which just means we cannot play together easily. If someone has to take a RL break and misses an attunement rush I don't want the pain to rush them through separately.

All this, mind you, has paradoxically, nothing to do with wanting to skip content. It has everything to do with wanting to play together. Or in other words wanting to play together trumps playing content in the order that linear progression dictates.

For example, we need a healer and plan to go SH heroics. Healer is not revered with HH, yuck. We have a dps shortage in Karazhan but our spare DPS hasn't managed the attunement chain yet. Yuck. And that is just now. The longer you go into a linear progression the more stretched you are in requirements that separate you. There is more content ahead but we, as a group can't sensibly move into it unless everybody has fulfilled the formal attunement requirements.

We have fluctuating signups. In the past this was occasionally a problem but we had flexibility. Now if a member who was slow or absent to RL cannot fill signup wholes because to enter SSC we first have to pull him through all the attunements (kara + gruul first). Hence where 1-2 people could have formerly patched signup holes, now we are structurely prevented from getting that person in. And I say "great" as raid leader who try to make things happen for the group.

This has nothing to do with not wanting to gear up. This has everything to do with having the option to at least try an encounter even if one member is undergeared.

In Vanilla we had the option to enter MC or BWL or AQ or Naxx undergeared because there was no forced MC->BWL->AQ->Naxx for all member. We could play together even if someone had to take a break for a month or two.

I can't hide that it's frustrating that it seems so hard to convey what the problems are with the current system on the logistics of running a raid with fluctuation signups (33% minimum attendance) and people at widely different levels of time commitment to the game.

As said, to me that's much bigger of an issue than the difficulty of gruul, or consumable farming. There is no structural lockout to more hardcore people farming more and more casual ones helping as they can.

Pretty sure the raid game is intact and undergoing constant treatment, you all just want to have things served to you on a silver platter instead of having to work for them.

Did you even read what we wrote? How does "wanting to raid together" imply "give me silver platter treatement"? It doesn't. We did raid together in AQ40 without any attunement, that doesn't mean that the trash or any boss just fell over as we came because they realised "oh, semi-casual group marching in, look killable".

Lowering attunement requirements or removing linear progression has nothing to do with downing any boss or even trash at all. You still have to down it to call it killed.

Geez, where do those generalizing sweeping statement come from that don't even address the points raised and put demeaning intend on other folks, hmm?

Seeing as how this is my relaxation from work, you're goddamn right I don't want to turn around and work some more. There is no reason that a significant chunk of preparation time spent simply on consumables (much less the actual current time involved) than time spent raiding should be involved for every single person in the raid in order to have a realistic shot at winning. Blizzard didn't, doesn't, and never will design this game for the type of player that raids with DnT if they have any desire to be profitable.

Sorry I don't want to put up with heaping piles of bullshit just to have some fun. "Work", ha I do that all day so I can have fun playing a game later.

I'm pretty sure the majority of the people could care less about the current inaccessible raid game other than the fact that they won't see it or have fun doing it till blizzard patches their mistakes.