f13.net

From another thread - taking derailing furthing into a new thread.

For players that never raided MC/ BWL/ Nax prior to expansion - is there any hope that they will see that content now?  It seems a waste of prior development effort to offer no incentive so that these instances have value.

I disagree with the view that now that folks are 70 - AQ40 or BWL should now be easy.  A lot of encounters will still require tremendous skill in coordination - which if you don't have it - no amount of DPS realistically can solve the problem (my suspicion - e.g. the Ebon Roc fight in BWL).  Folks can overpower UBRS with DPS - even MC - but AQ40 / BWL require actual strategy for many fights - that DPS cannot solve.

If my suspicion is true - there really will be no way for new gamers or new raiders to enjoy the old content - since any guild doing them for "fun" would still have to treat that content just as seriously as new raid content before they can do it successfully.  That is a big investment of time for loot rewards not comparable to expansion rewards - it's a shame there are no plans to address this.

I talked briefly about MC in regard  (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9211.0) to this a while ago.

if they take out attunements from MC maybe there is a chance for quick peek and see for casuals.
Right now when people talk about MC, I'll just tell them off with the attunement bullcrap that I'm not interested in doing. Easy cop-out excuse. It sounds less mean than 'fuck that shit' ;)

If they re-engineered it to be a 10 or 5 man and stuck in some nicer loot, people would be all over it.

All of the old raid content should be adjusted so it does not require attuning or keying - people who are not attuned/keyed are not going to go through 'end game grind' to get into now mid-game dungeons.

Few things should be reworked - loot and difficulty.

Loot:

Right now there is huge jump in loot at level 57-58, where you can get to tBC and any green found there is better than most purples. I think this should be addressed by moving 'old world' dungeon loot 5-10 levels down. For example T1 set would be perfect at level 45-50 if you could get it. T2 set would be good at around 55-60 but only if you could get it casually.

As to level 60 dungeons like Dire Maul, UBRS and such - rewards for doing them should be in-line with much-easier beginner tBC dungeons. Loot tables should be redone to make it worthwhile to do.

Difficulty:

Old raiding dungeons are not something you could casually do even if you could easily get into them and rewards are not appropriate to effort spent doing them. I think solution to that is to level-adjust content. Plaugelands should be re-tuned for level 45-55 (lower each monster by 5 levels) along with Strat&Scholo with all loot existing loot lowered in minimum-level reqs. This will provide more things to do at 'hell levels' (50-58).

MC/BWL/Nax should be made into 5 or 10 man casual runs that could be done with PUG and with loot that would carry you into tBC and not get replaced right away with first green quest reward.

Keep in mind people have to buy the expansion to get access to this.  If anything, the way it's designed now would seem to encourage people to upgrade and skip the content.


Why do I imagine that if Blizzard releases another level-cap-raising Expansion that these same arguments will be made for Lv. 70 content in Burning Crusade?

I think new expansion should be better integrated into old content, so majority of players do not experience 'trash all old loot and replace it with first green from FedEx quest' syndrome.

I also think every player should be able to casually see all content in the game, just not right away.

I'm talking here about what makes sense, and very few things in WoW make sense. It is popular despite what they do, not because what they do.

tBC was a gear reset since the gear gap between the casuals and the raiders was really, really, really bad. That, and 99% of the 5-man loot from the old world wasn't itemized worth shit.

Shit, even with the sizable level bump all level 70 epics got in quality, there are still blues that compete with the lower end of the epics. This was most definitely not the case pre-tBC.

As for old-world content...leave it I say. I'd love to fully complete BWL and see all the neat lore in Naxx that only the hardest core poopsockers got to see, but to be honest none of those fights are doable by casuals. Heroic versions of Strat/Scholo/Dire Maul would be cool for about 5 minutes until we realized how sick we were of running them before the expansion dropped. There is no way in hell you could get me into a Heroic BRD either.

I don't know.  A lot of people might want to re-visit MC/BWL/Naxx (I'd say retune them as 25-man content rather than 10), or perhaps nobody would care.  I guess it's one of those things where Blizzard would just have to put in the work and do it, before they can see how successful / wanted it really is.  And I don't know if they'll want to do that.  I don't know how much effort it takes to re-do the loot tables, probably quite a bit.

Personally, I'd go, if they revamped the loot, removed or shortened the attunements, and made it 25-man.

Blizzard could even try to implement some of CoH's code, whereby if a raid of L60's enter one of these instances, they get the regular crowd of NPC's, but if a raid of L70's enter it, they get 4x the number of trash mobs per spawn point, and buffed-up bosses or something.

Oh well.

They've already taken some of the old 40-man raid bosses and basically copied them for 5-man content; I don't see why they couldn't keep in that trend. The boss fights (and scripted sequences I guess) are really what make the raids fun other than the loot. Players can already see the instances in the numerous raid movies that exist.

Again, on ALL these ideas, why?  Blizzard isn't quick on the content updates as it is, why delay new stuff even more in favor of  old stuff?   Do you really want to see MC or Naxx so badly that you want to have a reason to visit it at 70, or would you rather they publish Zul'Araan or some other 5 or 10 man content?  I know which one I'd prefer.

There are several pieces of BWL and T3 that last through the end of Karazahn.  The big gap was between T2 and T3 in the old world. 

Pre-expansion there were blues that were better than purples, especially those from ZG.  The ZG blues were partially addressed when a patch changed their color from blue to purple.  Wonky itemization hasn't improved with the expansion, or changed overly much with the expansion.  There are epics that are worse than blues, and lvl 60 epics that are superior to lvl 70 epics.  The bump for tBC purple itemization was the 'other' option available for dealing with ZG blues, now Blizzard has attempted both obvious "buff the items" routes.

Bloodlord in ZG can nearly be two manned and trivially 4 manned.  We're still poking around there because the enchants available are relatively painless to acquire and not that bad.  MC and BWL still suffer attunement issues but Razorgore can be 6-manned, we've contemplated rolling MC/BWL for kicks on an off night with around 15 people.

The big problem with re-using that content (MC/BWL/AQ40/Nax) is that it was all geared to 40-people at once.  That means loads of trash or highly technical / gimmicky fights.  Take the suppression room, for instance, what if that was made hard for L70s in epic gear?  Would people have the patience anymore to spend 45 minutes moving through it to wipe?  What kind of raid experience is it when you've got a quarter of the designed load of players in the zone?  When the raid does a class check that requires half your current manpower to fulfil?  Guilds that had to team up for 40 man content are now teaming up for 25 man content in tBC.  Even if the zones were revamped many guilds cut all their 'weak' players when they realized they didn't need that many meat shields to run the end-game content anymore.

I do think the attunements no longer make sense, but I don't think the playerbase or blizzard would get much value from re-tuning the old world raids since the player guilds are no longer built to run (challenging) 40-man content.

They should just tune them down so that it can be accomplished via 5 man groups. That way if people want to go see them and do some sight-seeing, it doesn't require a whole lot of effort.

AQ40 and Naxx come to mind. I wonder what percentage of the player base has actually seen this content.

i would say that if you grabbed 2 groups of people who had done a full karazan clear (thats 20 people), they could pretty easily do everything in MC, BWL, AQ 40, and probably 90% of naxx without much difficulty.  In all honesty, the fights are no that hard, especially with the way 10 extra levels of HP, MP, and Spells/abilities/talents trivialize things.

I mean, anyone who has done all of the 5 man content currently out there, and most of the 5 mans on heroic mode at least once, has probably encountered nearly every single raid mechanic you are going to encounter in any of the old 40 man stuff.

All it would take is a 10 or 15 minute readup session on the general behaviour patterns of each boss in a 40 man, and you could probably wafflestomp most of them quite handily.

And once again, dont forget how CRAZILY trivial 40 man stuff gets when you gain 10 levels and are running around in decend 5 man blues / karazan stuff.

I agree it's a waste of development, though they did get a good 6mos-1.5yrs out of it. I imagine they'll redesign/vamp them at some point as the total Warcraft storyline moves forward. By the time people trivialize Black Temple, Garr or Ony should have long fled.

I think it's in part becasue of Blizzard's glacial content-producing pace - after all, the art assets for all the deserted old raid content are complete, so it's just a matter of retuning the mobs and loot rather than having to go through the entire design process including mapping, layout, art, world building, etc. So in theory, the new-old content should be something they can get up to relevent faster than developing all-new stuff.

Retune C'Thun to level 70ish, make him accessible to a group of 40 people sans all the crap before him. That is my only "old content" suggestion. Even if the loot was sorta meh, that fight is seriously the most fun I ever had in WoW. Plus, everyone needs a chance to get a henatacle :-D

i would re-run AQ 40 in a heartbeat if i was guaranteed a Hentacle.

We're only one expansion in.  It was a HUGE jump in power, but so was EQ's first expansion, and we didn't immediately see people doing the Planes of Fear, Hate, and Sky with small groups.  Difference of course being that in EQ's first expansion, old gear was not entirely obsoleted - it was certainly made to look poor in comparison, but not completely useless.  That's where I feel WoW made a mistake, the old gear was made too useless.  Hopefully future expansions will keep the jump in gear power a little less extreme so that it's still worthwhile for people to do old dungeons, even if just for fun/alts/twinks.

One of the things that kept me playing EQ for years - and still brings me back on occasion - is the thought of going back with small groups and killing old bosses.  Most recently, last year I had good fun doing Vex Thal with 3 people.  If the next couple expansions do it well and have it set up so that old gear is still somewhat useful, at least for alts and such, it will be fun to go back and do it.  But just like in EQ, it would get boring if there was nothing to gain, beyond the first couple times.  Eventually going and soloing Trakanon got old, cause nothing he dropped was useful even for my alts.  Killing Kunark Dragons became more of a routine than a fun thing to do, and so on.  This wasn't a bad thing in EQ - by the time it got dull to do it, it was years and years after Kunark - but in WoW, if future expansions provide a similarly huge power jump, it won't be fun even 2-3 expansions from now.

That above all else is one thing EQ did relatively well.  They raised the bar in a manner that kept older things somewhat fun and useful to do for years after release, making a huge amount of older content still viable to call content.  In WoW, most of the level 60 dungeons can hardly be called content anymore, because it is entirely worthless to do them.  They're there, but there's no point whatsoever in doing them.

Because, like it's been said, it shouldn't take them too long to just re-tune some NPC's and re-do some loot tables.  Maybe a month?  Two?  They did re-tune loot as a patch...

And there are probably a lot of people who haven't seen this content.  It was only accessible to the ubers, remember?  I haven't seen half of BWL, and all of Naxx and AQ40.  There are a lot of casuals in the game, and they probably haven't seen all of this stuff.

Plus, it would be a side-grade (is that a word?); those hell-bent on reaching 70 ASAP and hitting the Black Temple can do so, whereas the casuals looking for a diversion can go check out the old stuff but not be required to find 39 other people, and get keyed, in order to do so.

why is getting keyed such a problem?

other then naxx, which is a reputation based grind, it would take a level 70 character about 10 min to get keyed for MC (easily soloable if you take the jump in the lava shortcut), a group of 70's about 30 min to get keyed for BWL (10 70's could SLAUGHTER ubrs) and there is no attunement for AQ 40.

Well, i suppose BWL could be a problem if no one has done the UBRS key questline.

You see, all new stuff is designed for catasses consumption, regular players won't ever see it. Redoing old raid dungeons will be for casuals. I don't understand why WoW devs insist on creating content 80% of player base won't ever see.

Endless quest chains, rare turn-ins and rep grinds . Most importantly it requires other people to be keyed, so you not just need to find other people, you need to find other people that are keyed making it a problem to PUG. People will simply skip it in favor of Ramparts or other tBC dungeons that does not require keying.

I'm also think that old dungeons should be made doable at around level 60, by casuals. Making old world reward actually useful in process of leveling to 70.

I dont know where you are getting that, its completely the opposite.  Old raid content, specially naxx and aq was designed with catasses in mind, the new raid content is extremely casual in comparision.

More trash is definitely not a good idea.  :)

He was referring to the MC/ BWL keying.  MC attune is easy to solo at 70, so long as you know the path.  It's easy for stealthers and hunters at 60 even.  At worst you'd need to duo it if you're a heal-spec, because you might not be able to kill the few elites you need to.   BWL I can see having a bit of a problem, because you have to do an UBRS run and who the hell wants to do that at 70, even forgoing the fact you need to find someone who still has the UBRS key.


If you don't see it, it's because you don't want to join or help start a guild that wants to see it, really.   Even 10-man stuff will still have that barrier to entry, because folks just don't like taking non-guildies when saved instances are involved.  The notion being that you (rightly) can't count on PUGs to be there the next day, or in a few days, or whenever the next run of that saved instance is.

If you want to do away with saved-instances, well then that's a completly different base game.  This one's about loot aquisition, and multiple ways of doing so.

Tons of players see the entry-level raid content, so sinij is not entirely accurate. The late-game stuff like Black Temple or Naxx won't be seen by any but the hardcore. I think what he's suggesting (and I agree) is that they take that content and retune it for smaller groups of people at level 70 so that those who never saw it can do so.

Isn't the MC attunement "quest" to click a stone 2/3 of the way through a level 55 dungeon?  And the BWL quest to click a stone at the end of a level 60 dungeon?  Sure there are collective action issues, but I don't think the attunements are the issue.

Back in beta, I was always a proponent of "normal/nightmare/hell mode" dungeons (raid and otherwise).  The heroic mechanic pretty much accomplishes this, and hopefully it can be scaled upwards (and in raid dungeons as well) so that Blizz can mitigate this issue on the future.  I wish they had built in a way to upgrade the original dungeons, but they didn't, and God knows how long it would take them to retrofit them for upgrades.

The old raid instances have the additional problem that they were designed around 40 people and now the game has abandoned 40-person content, which adds a much bigger rebalancing wrinkle.  I don't know that the analogy to EQ1 raids holds, because those were almost all straightforward tank-and-spank encounters which you can easily handle with gear and levels.  You can just outgear more complicated fights, but it takes a lot longer.

My hope is that WoW2/WoW1.5/World of Diablo/Vanguard II (lol) will (a) have one or two group sizes for content and keep them stable from the get-go and (b) a built-in capacity for difficulty scaling in every dungeon from the get-go.  I wish they could retrofit WOW like this, but if they could do so I imagine they would have. 

Did EQ1 have the concept of a raid group, or did you just organize your guild into a lot of 5-man groups together?

I also have the impression that EQ1 had some raids that required more than 40.  Is that right?

EQ did not have raid groups until, iirc, the Planes of Power expansion.  So you just had regular groups (6-people per group in EQ) before that.  Though I think you could make private chat channels to facilitate raid coordination before that (I think the chat channel system came with Luclin (an earlier expansion) but I may well be wrong about that).

Anyway, yes there were some encounters geared for more than 40.  I think the PoP raid group interface allowed 72 people, but people would sometimes bring more than that (there wan't any real in-game effect of being in the raid vs outside it, at least at first).  Because there were no instances there was no limit on how many people you could bring to a raid other than coordination and lag you would occasionally see some pretty obscene zergs (back then, I think a lot of the raid stuff is instanced now - come to think of it there were some instanced encounters at the end of PoP).

I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that instancing and raid groups made raiding in general a lot less primitive.  You physically can't just zerg an encounter with 100 people, communication is more facilitated, and the instanced nature makes things like varying difficulty levels possible.

Given that, the comparison to EQ1 raiding seems even less tenable.

I want to say that chat channels came-in before Luclin, but then I recalled being in Ssra while another raid was going on.  First group in gets to claim /yell for their heal rotations... so yeah chat channels came later.

Complete Heal was also a big part of why encounters were just tank n spank.  Percentage Heals are teh debil.

PoP was designed for 72 people minimum  Something about the way the Rathe Council encounter worked required a certain number of people on each mob.. and that worked-out to 72 people.  The subsequent "oh hay, now you only need 35" of the GoD/ OOW was also another reason many ubers quit.  Which made iit funny watching WoW do the same thing 3 years later, and not having it backfire on them like it did EQ.  (Lack of choices helped there, though.)

Then again, I also recall being ecstatic about 40-man raids and SOME folks (Gallo!) saying it was crap and just meant that everyone had to be more on their toes, so you're actually NARROWING the amount of people who would raid, because scrubs would be bumped and unable to raid.  This argument was repeated again as they released the 25-mans and once more about a year ago when we found-out kara was a 10-man.   Tee Hee.

I didn't think it would be crap, just that it wouldn't be the panacea a lot of casuals and time-starved powergamers thought it would be.  You could take out North Temple of Veeshan with 40 obsessed catasses watching TV half the time, 60 generic powergamers watching TV half the time or 90 total fuckups watching TV half the time.  Or whatever combo you can come up with.  Black Temple?  You bring 40 people who get 100% Freebird on Guitar Hero 2 Expert while passing their guitars back and forth in a painstakingly choreographed bee dance or you don't zone in.

There were a lot of raid spots for dead weight slackers with very inconsistent schedules but a nice personality (like me!) in EQ.  Now, it's harder to mooch  :cry:

You obviously never got keyed for Ony on the Horde side.  14 steps of hell.  Multiple LBRS\UBRS runs, world dragon hunts, etc.  The most painful keying I've ever had to do.  MC\BWL were a cakewalk compared to that.

Level 70 druid, level 70 mage, level 65 shaman, All horde, all keyed for Ony.  I know the pain.

You and El Gallo baffle me on this point.  I sympathize - but it seems like a no solution complaint.

We complained about the massive raids in EQ that very few guilds - or players could even organize.  A massive display of politicking and sheer online game presence - to pull those raids off.

Now we complain about small raid sizes in WoW - since it is very difficult for casual players to attend (UBRS might work - but certainly Kara no).

I'm in a very casual guild and we're doing pretty well in Kara.  We need to gear up more arcane resistence for The Curator though.  We just reached him and figure a solid month more and we'll have him.

Can casual guilds do Kara fast to farm status?  No, but it can be done and can be fun.

Don't do this - my team did the same thing.  Unless your team is packing very uber DPS (at which point you would not be in Kara) - go with NO arcane resist gear and keep that DPS as high as possible - make sure those flares die within 10 seconds.

My team assembled arcane resist gear - useful for trash clearing just before Curator - but otherwise - we actually do the entire Curator fight without it.  You lose too much dps/healing/mana regen putting on arcane resist.  Bottom line - if you can kill those flares fast enough - and your team is spread out - it is not really an issue.

Gah.  Cannot delete.

I have no complaints about the smaller raid size.  I very much prefer it, in fact.  10-25 man raids let you keep a guild fairly small while still letting folks play classes they want to, rather than they HAVE to for 5-man groups.  I was one of the folks cheering for the smaller raid sizes.

I do, however, have a problem when things hit the 5-man level and you have a ton of different classes (or classes/ specs as WoW does).  Someone is always going to be odd man out and get left in the dust, unable to both play a spec they want to AND see the content they're paying for/ get lootz.   Weather that's because of a hardcoded inability to bring a well-defined role or a metagame one, it'll be a problem because there is no true 'balance.'   However, that's another topic entirely.

Casuals will get through Kara - particularly if they wise-up and guild together. They'll even get through SSC, Gruul and - I'll wager - BT.  They'll just take a lot longer to do so due to time and how big your 'casual' guild needs to be to have a good pool of players to build raids from.   If gearing-up weren't such a cockblock process, I'd bet you'd see a ton more 'casuals' in BT right now than Hardcore folks.  They aren't any less skilled as a group,  just more time-starved.   But then, we might differ on the definition of 'casual' as well.  Your casual might be my 'part time player.'  I see casual as 10-15 hours a week, tops.

Yeah, the 'casual raiding' thing can be done. My guild co-raids Kara with another guild twice a week (though this week we finally managed to clear the entire place in a 5 hour run) and it took about 2 months for us to learn the place. We're looking forward to ZA, too, especially since Tigole said it'll be a shorter instance.

Re Curator: As a warlock, I'm the "hateful bolt soaker" on Curator, and I wear a grand total of three AR pieces [arcane evasion cloak, some blue boe bracers of arcane protection and the violet eye trinket]. Nobody else wears arcane resist and being affliction, I don't have the master demonologist talent either. We find that with enough ranged damage, the sparks go down quickly enough to not pose a problem.


-- Z.

Sorry I borked your delete.  :-P

What jpark said.  Resistance gear does nothing for you, and is -in fact- a red herring.  My group has our arcane resistances at 200+ and we wiped horribly time and again, until someone noticed "oh hell we're not even getting him down half as far as he was before."   Get your DPS up as high as possible, use pots consumables and gear out your weapon-dependant folks with the best you can get.   We keep the tank and one other on Curator until Evocation, everyone (and i do mean everyone) else is on the adds.  AS SOON as Evo happens you dump EVERYTHING into him.  If there's a wisp still up you have ONE designated person whose job it is to finish it off (Usually a melee since running from the adds to the curator takes most of the Evo timer anyway).

The hardest part for my group has typically been keeping the mana users on the actual adds.  They seem to like to slack to save mana/ pots/ whatever for Evocation.  Not having played a mana-dpser in a raid I don't know how valid this is, or if it's just an uninformed ranged DPS/ healer player's view.

  However, if I can spam flash/ greater heals for the length of the fight thanks to my uber mp/5 and 5sec dancing skillz, I've got to imagine a ranged DPSer who keeps an eye on more than JUST crit/ damage can do the same.  (Which.. is a problem for most of the mana DPS'ers I've known.  They eshew to-hit, penetration and mp/5 for anything that'll up their burst dps because they like big numbers.  It was funny in MC days listening to the locks bitch about how they kept getting resisted, but they refused to pick up even the affliction penetration talent.  It's like the tanks who complain they can't hold aggro, but refuse to stack on any to-hit/ weaponskill gear. >.< )

Ok, passed along the info on Curator.  Thanks for the tips!

We have also been co-raiding with another guild to get the class match ups correct and swapping people out as necessary.  It really hasn't been a big deal and actually works for me as I can usually only be in the raid for the first 1-2 hours anyway.  Finding a replacement is no big thing anymore.

With 40 person raids...not so easy.

Minor point - to my knowledge, penetration is a PvP stat only.. no effect in PvE.  Spellhit, however, is being discovered to be uber for your overall DPM, and the stat you need most until you hit the cap.

Ah, thx.  Wasn't sure how pen played into the game now, but I knew to-hit has been important for years... and is largely ignored.

One musing I have is if the raid leader could set the "reset" time on the raid instance.  For example he could choose to set the reset on Kara at 3 weeks, 10 days or 1 month - if that is how often his team of casuals can raid to clear such content.

One thing that I have noticed from a short perusal of sites of guilds I know from when I played is that the lower raid cap actually makes gearing up a ton easier. It took nearly 5 months for everyone who wanted your generic early tier 3 pieces to get them in Naxx even more to get hat/legs/chest, now a guild can be totally done with a zone except for rare single item drops in less than 4. Add in the 5 and 10 man loot that is raid quality and you have a much easier time getting a group of people together. The gear gap for Naxx was a nightmare to deal with as someone in anything below mostly Tier2 did not have the stamina to survive, much less enough mana/AP to heal or DPS through the fights.

Any way to make the game less catasstastic is a good thing. But I still can't bring myself to play again, mainly because I would end up having to grind to 70 and then find some way to sneak into Kara loot just to get caught up with the bare minimum. Plus, learning how all the changes to hunters affect gear and gameplay seems like too much work right now heh.

actually, spell penetration IS useful in PvE, just not quite as useful as spell hit in the general run of things.

Spell hit affects your general ability to actually HIT (Ie, not get complete resists) mobs of a particular level.  This is especially important in high level instances and raids, where bosses / mobs are often 2 or 3 levels higher then you.  So yes, a high amount of spell hit is useful in upping your dps, since complete resists do 0 dps.

Spell Penetration is useful in PvE in the rare occasions where you are fighting mobs with high resistance to your primary damage school (but not flat out immune).  For example, nearly everything in Molten Core is resistant to Fire (Fire elementals and Geddon / Rag were the only immune mobs).  As a fire mage, i could actually get pretty damn close to top of the damage meters in MC with a good stack of Penetration gear when we were doing non Immune stuff.  other, non penetration fire types, were WAY behind me on the same meters, simply due to constantly being partially resisted.

They haven't made a raid mob for a long while that has had more resist than CoS / CoE will nullify.  Completely useless at this point in pve.

Why so long, Karazhan isn't even all that long.  My current guild does up to Curator in one night of about 3 and a half hours of playing.

Maybe if you want to fight bosses deeper in despite the fact that you're killing the other bosses slowly?

If it takes you longer then a week to clear kara, there are problems that simply extending the reset timer on the zone will not fix.

Well I mean gear is a holdup in a lot of places. We kill everything up to the Prince in 2 days, and we dragged our sorry asses around for months. We still haven't killed the Prince or Nightbane yet, but we're EXTREMELY casual about the place. If you can't hack that, I'm curious why you don't just skip it and run heroics instead.

3 1/2 hours....

Did you miss the casual part?  It isn't because our casual guild takes too long on bosses, it is because we are a casual guild.  We only get windows of 1-2 hours of enough willing participants.  Is so hard to understand that getting 10 people together for that extended of a period is not easy for people that don't have large amounts of time to burn on a game in one sitting?

Why would allowing the instance to reset after a *longer* period hurt?  I like the idea.

My guess would be that Blizzard wouldn't want to give that kind of control to the playerbase. It would probably be difficult to implement and flesh out all the saved instances every week instead of the number just going back to zero on regular dates.

Oh, I didn't know if it was doable.  I just liked the idea.  :-D

Subject to player-abuse.

That is probably Blizzard's main concern.  Although Zul'Aman will have a faster timer then Karazhan and be harder, yet short with better loot and no attunements... that should be good.  Oh and still 10-man.

Player abuse of what?  Of not getting the equivalent amount of loot in the same time? Think that one through and you'll see it's a flawed argument through and through.

I think it is the whole "we can't figure out how to fix our raid ID system to work properly and keep timer exploiters out so we will make resets global" kind of player abuse argument blizz made pre-AQ patch.

Think of this.  You join a pug.  You go thru Kara.  A few pulls go bad, a few loot whores and drama queens ruin things, you leave. The group leader, out of spite, logs on once a day to extend the timer and you can't go to Kara with your guild for weeks (whatever the max time would be).

I thought the idea was the timer was preset at the beginning of the raid, not refreshed whenever someone zoned in to the place.  Yes, that would suck, but be griefing not really 'abusing the system.'

The Raid ID stuff I got the feeling they just didn't want to recode the system so they did some hand-waving and everyone accepted it.  Even the set-schedule resets can be stolen the same way as the old system, and have in a few cases.

I kinda agree with what you said here, it reeks of 'We know what you want, but we can't redo the whole crap all over again'. There really is no harm with player controlled instance timers, I might actually get to see more instead of re-doing the same part and then reset cause we can't get enough experienced people to do a chunk before the reset take place.

That's why I just took a long break, I'm burned out from learning Kara like this, because casual guilds like mine have trouble getting the right mix in, as well as people with the right 'experience' in the instance. Then when someone new who just dinged 70 and keyed asked to come along, we had to repeat the process again from Attumen, 'Where do I stand?' 'What does he do?' 'Lol, Horses fear? Omg'  :|

I don’t see it as a flawed argument, I am not sure if player controlled resets would be a good idea, I mean I guess if you want to set the reset at a month then I can see that being good for fairly slow guilds.  But I always believed that a faster reset is better in getting more people gear, even if you can’t complete the whole thing you should eventually get enough gear to make the instance go faster.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate more than an hour or two then there are Heroic runs that can be done which are plenty fun and require a smaller commitment.   My own guild is fairly casual and we do pretty well with many brand new 70’s who have never been in Karazhan, and yet we got to Prince on our first week and we raid three times a week, for a large chunk of time I suppose, 3 -4 hours but really I don’t see that as extreme.

I am not sure if we can see eye to eye here it seems we have very different philosophies of play here, I would absolutely hate a long reset timer, its counterproductive to my own play style.  I just don’t see Karazhan as all that difficult, but then again this is my experience.  I really think if you are having issues making progress your guild may need to spend more time doing heroic runs, especially for your DPS; raid encounters go so much easier when your raid DPS improves.

I have to agree with Vanifae here.  1 week is a perfectly acceptable reset timer on damn near everything.  I hate to say this, but it IS possible that your play style may be simply TOO casual.  I can sympathise with the problem of being unable to get 10 people together at the same time for long enough to make meaningful progress through a raid instance, but lets face it, it even with only 2 hours every other day for a week, you still should be able to make progress through kara, and extending the raid reset timer to 2 weeks probably wont help.

I mean, first off, it isnt THAT hard to learn most of karazan, the only really difficult fights are Curator (which is pretty much your cockblock gear check fight), Prince ( fight relies too much on random luck) and Illhoof (which is can be brutally hard or rediculously easy depending on your raid makeup).   Every other fight is pretty straitforward.

And as to running noobs through kara to fill out your groups, it really isnt that hard either.  Provided you use a voice chat app for ease of explanation, and that at least 6 or 7 of your raiders are NOT noobs, you shouldn't really have problems.  Hell, since my guild stopped running kara / ssc / tk and moved on to Hyjal and BT (and because i'm effectively locked out of both due to not having been present for a kael kill) I now pug kara.  Even in pugs, it takes us 2 or 3 days to clear the whole place, at maybe 3 hours a session.  We have a core of people for much of the pug (2 wars, pally, shaman, me (either mage or feral druid) and 1 or 2 others, but each pug usually always has someone who is new to half the place, or only been once.

You assume too much.  My group's working on Gruul at the moment. We'd be much farther but we only raid 2 nights a week because, well, none of us are kids so doing it during the week isn't going to happen.

I do, however, empathize with folks who are paying for content they're never going to get to see.  A long instance respawn -set there at that guild's discretion!-  hurts nobody, as those who want loot quicker can set it to the minimum.  Your arguments are akin to saying that my PS2 should delete my saves after a month since, y'know, I apparently don't care enough to spend the 4-5 hours to complete the game.  The underlying sentiment seems to be "It's not fair that these casual folks would get a month of attempts on a boss without putting up with the prior bullshit."   However, in that same month you'd have gotten in 4 runs to their as-yet-incomplete single run.  Seems plenty fair to me.

This isn't a difficulty issue, it's a time issue on behalf of the folks who can't get in there regularly.  That "oh it only takes 2 or 3 days 3 hours a day" is even being tossed around means you don't get it.

Vanifae, you're arguing "well that doesn't work for me."  Again, the proposal isn't "Fuck the hardcore everyone gets a month timer!"   It's "Hey how about a variable timer set at the guild's discretion, with a minimum reset of a week?"   If the timer the guild uses doesn't work for you, you've obviously found yourself in the wrong crowd.  Just like raid schedules.


-- PS:  The "it's not THAT hard to learn Kara" stuff amuses me.  I was saying the same thing months ago and folks were telling me I was a fool, and nobody would ever PUG Kara the way UBRS was.  Ha ha.

Well like I said I probably don’t get it, we have different gaming philosophies.  But your argument about the PS2 is overly simplistic and reeks of some circular logic.  Honestly it does not affect me if your guild takes a month to do Karazhan, but I am in no way saying because you can’t put in the time you should be punished.

It sucks that some folks may not see all the content in the game, hell I never got to see much of any of the content beyond the Twin Emperors before the Burning Crusade launched.  I don’t expect to see Illidan for a long time if ever, so no I am not a hardcore player or in a hardcore guild.  I could be but I prefer to game with my friends.

Now as far as the “casual” folks go, I am not even going to indulge that term it’s nebulous and your version of casual differs from my form of casual.  If your guild is doing Gruul, then your guild is hardly “casual”, you may not put in much time during the week but if you are fielding 25 people for Gruul then I don’t consider your guild to be casual.  You may not have progressed far but being able to form 25 people means you can probably field two Karazhan groups, what happens if one group decides they want to go faster than a month?  One part of the guild is locked in for a month the other for say two weeks? 

I am not sure on your guild, I won’t pretend to know but I think 1 week is a good compromise and it may not fit every guild but to liken it to a single player game is a false argument.  The system isn’t perfect but it’s better than it was, I will say that much. 

So let one grp go faster and the other slower. It's not a machine we're dealing with, we're humans.
It doesn't matter how fast these guilds are going at, it's not about the damn loot. You seem to think people only raid for the loot all the time. Unfair? In what way? We're gimping ourselves on the loot from the early bosses just for the sake of seeing the WHOLE content. What is so unfair about this? OMG it's UNFAIR, they get to see the whole content in a month, while we took a week? wtf? If you don't like how the guild runs one instance very slowly, then find another. Problem solved. Imba?
 I don't think so. It lets people 'LEARN HOW TO BEAT INSTANCE' at their own pace that does not affect anyone else except their own guild.

Guild A try to complete KZ in a month.
Other guild cleared in a week. Hit top tier PVP in Guild Wars Ranking at the same time.
Next month
Guild A is more experienced and now completes KZ in 2 weeks.
Other guilds got into Warhammer Beta, hit max level and still clears KZ in a week.
Next month
Guild A more or less completes it in less than 2 weeks, barring wipes and insufficient attendance on those busy RL days.
Other guilds Played LOTR, Hit 50, And still goes back to clear KZ in a week. Half quit to play Ultima Online to azzrape.

Just set earliest reset at 1 week, so nobody can go faster than 1 week. While letting whoever wants to learn KZ as long as they want. Probably a month limit would be suffiicient. What? It imbalances your PVP cause casuals now have uber gear? I don't even think anyone would be made unhappy from this change. Those who are unhappy with the slow guilds usually stick it out or leave.

I'll just get this out of the way. I think Karazhan is a shitty shitty instance, and I think it was horribly stupid to make people work a week-long instance in 10-man groups just to get to the point where you could complete 25-man content. It's a design flaw on Blizzard's part. Analyzing timers is pointless because Blizzard doesn't want to hold onto your raid date for a month. They want to reset the servers every week and clear off any excess. Karazhan is flawed and badly planned. They are trying to correct this in the future with Zul'Aman, which is probably the next 10 man instance. NOTHING should have 10+ bosses in it, and that much trash. I hate the place.

I think Kara was intended to be a two-day clear from the get-go with all the 'save points' (day 1 attumen-moroes-maiden-opera-(nightbane)-curator, day 2 aran-illhoof-netherspite-chess-prince-(nightbane)). Even though we farm it now, a complete run STILL takes 5 hours. It reminds me of Molten Core in that aspect and I don't think that's a good thing... :P

re 'casual' raiding: Everyone has their own definition. I think if you raid three times a week, you're not casual... our guild alliance struggles to get 10 people together for ONE day a week due to various RL commitments, and we typically end up picking up 1-3 'new' people (undergeared alts or guildies that typically don't raid) for each run. Since the full clear takes ~5 hours, I'd hardly call that a casual time commitment...

Yet, to put it into perspective, a full BRD quest run took 6-7 (!) hours and the typical ubrs or scholo pug (again, full run) took 3-4 at 60. At least Blizzard learned something when designing 5-man dungeons, if nothing else.


-- Z.

I've never claimed to be a casual player of WoW.  I'm not hardcore, but I'm definitely not casual.  I'm thinking outside of myself here, because the current system works just fine for me.  I enjoy raiding for raiding's sake, and I feel more people would as well if game designers would stop making it such a time commitment/ lifestyle.  Shock. Awe.

Scholo 3-4 hours? Whoa. We did it in 90mins tops. UBRS took us about 2 hours and I never really did BRD because it was pointless. The drops were mostly crap because you would replace them in a few levels.

I mean a FULL scholo run. Killing every boss and running out for quest turnins.. in a pug, guild runs were significantly faster. This was before they nerfed it, too. :p
Full Sunken Temple and Maraudon clears [not just princess runs] were up there, too.


-- Z.

rk47 I wasn't talking about two separate I am talking about one guild large enough to run two Karazhan groups.  But honestly it would not affect anything, but hthe way the instance is designed, you would only slow down how long you complete it.  Most guilds just can;t finish Karazhan in dungeon blues.  You extend your timer you only extend how long you wipe on specific gateway bosses like Shade of Aran, Curator, and the Prince.  But I don't think it hurts anyone to allow a guild leader/raid leader to set the timer, but I do think in the long run you only build up more frustration.

Raiding even "casual" raiding probably demands a few hours of commitment, beyond what the instances demand already unless you are doing Gruul or Magtheridon.

Zul'Aman will be shorter then Karazhan a little more difficult, starting at about the Prince/Nightbane level, with better rewards on a faster reset timer of only three days.  Plus there will be no attunement quest.

The main point was, harder is fine. Working on new bosses is fine. Being punished constantly by annoyingly long bouts with trash respawns and HUGELY long instances where the carrot at the end is 6 pointless bosses away, not fine. Karazhan is the new MC, and it's just as annoying when you've run it a bunch. Hopefully they won't repeat those trash mob and design mistakes with Zul'Aman. They didn't repeat them in BWL.

I have really never understood the appeal of grouping in general. Especially in raids. Bringing 24 other people along makes the whole thing seem cheap and amusement park like. 25 people to face one other person? Makes it seem like my character is just some scrub, where as she should be able to stand up in a one on one duel with any raid boss. :(

I donno, that was the case with the old world raids (except Naxx) but in the newer raids its very rarely a 'roller coaster'.

That, in all honesty, is a WHOLE other can of worms.  How do you explain to your average Warcraft Player that NO, while their character IS more powerfull then the typical Orc grunt, Human Mage, or NightElf Huntress as seen in WC3, they are NOT intended to go toe to toe 1 on 1 with Thrall, Arthas or Illidan and expect to survive more then 10 seconds alone.

Out of curiosity, who is forcing you to kill all 10 bosses to get to Prince?  Assuming all you want is Prince loot (meaning you now know Kara fairly well), the ONLY bosses you need to kill are the Opera Event (to open the back door), Curator, Aran and Prince.  The Random Basement Boss, Attuman, Moroes, Maiden, Nightbane, Illhoof, Netherspite, and Chess Event are all totally optional if all you are really interested in is "the best loot" off Prince.  Hell, even Aran is argueably optional if your group can reasonably expect to kill Prince with 1 shot (or 2 or 3 if you are carefull with your wipe recovery soulstones / reincarnations). 


Karazhan is nothing like Molten Core, since MC required you to kill every boss to douse the runes, just to get the "good loot" off of Rag, where as i pointed out above, you could reasonably skip OVER TWO THIRDS of the bosses in kara if all you want is prince junk.

You need to kill Moroes to get to opera (otherwise the backstage door will be locked)... but yeah, you can skip most of the other bosses. Skipping Aran is just way too silly/risky though, unless you outgear the instance enough that Prince won't be a problem.


-- Z.

Back Stage door? Which door is that? granted i have never been to Opera without killing Moroes, but i cant recall seeing any door between the entry door and the door to exit the opera stage, so I always assumed you could just clear trash strait to the Opera Announcer dude and start the fight.

And as i said, skipping Aran is only risky if you would be expecting to wipe on prince often enough that beating the respawns from aran's trash would be an issue, since the only thing aran saves you is the run back from the back door, through his trash area (curator trash would stay dead).  If you can reasonably expect to 1 or 2 shot prince, skipping aran wouldnt be an issue.

I agree only a few of the bosses in Karazhan are actually must do bosses.

You are right. Nobody forces you to kill all the bosses. You can skip most of them IF you have the place on farm, but not all the groups have that luxury. Most groups want to kill Attunemen to have the repair guy available when you are facing a tough boss. You have to kill Moroes to get to the Opera. You have to do the Opera to get to Curator. You have to kill Curator to get to the next levels. Not killing Aran is only an option for people who have the place on total farm, and simply want to fun'n'gun to Prince/Nightbane loot, otherwise the trash will ruin your day. But that's all tied up in something that wasn't really my main point.

It's too fucking long. Even if you're simply farming with all the optional crap out of the way, the trash is STILL too fucking long to get bottom to top. I also find most of the drop rates on certain items completely frustrating, but that may be simple bad luck. Hell, there is no reason for the library to exist in the fashion it does, period. There is no reason for the balance of trash leading to a boss to suddenly change in the very heart of an instance. That is the definition of a design flaw by Blizzard. It creates undue pressure on learning the next boss, and simply telling people to "Suck it up and learn to down Aran" doesn't really address the issue of why it blows. Aran shouldn't be the teleport point of the instance, and the legions of mechanical walking guardians shouldn't be tied to him. Both of those things should be tied to the Curator. The Curator protects the library, and it only makes sense to have the trash stop respawning there when you kill him. That would cut down on about half of my frustration with the place.

Remember ZG? A 20-man instance with a lot of optional stuff involved in it. However, a solid group who spent some good time in there could work over that place in 3 hours, all the way to last boss. I would doubt if anybody could do the same kind of job in Karazhan, other than the ridiculously overgeared.

zg had 4 optional bosses, 2 of which dropped the best loot in the instance next to Hakkar himself.  Very few groups actually skipped Jindo or Bloodlord simply cause the loot was good enough.  And the other 2 bosses were usually skipped because their loot sucked ASS, unless you were a mage who wanted to poly book, or were gunning for your trinket that took 2 months or more to get.

I don't understand why even dungeons that take more than 2 hours to complete exist. Break it up into multiple dungeons...  Also why trash even exists? At lower levels its to provide exp, but at max level? Can't we just get access to 'bossfight-only' mode after clearing trash once?

Some people enjoy the long dungeons, I do as long as they flow well and are not stupid like BRD.

BWL was not bad for pacing.

Why all the BRD hate?  Since they buffed the loot to decent levels the place is awesome, and it has so many quests, tons of replay value.  I also think the design of the place is just cool, dark iron city, the bar, the ties with molten core and ragnaros.  Honestly since DM all instances have a sort of sameness to them, to many people like neatly partitioned, bite-sized instances for goodies like brd to be designed again.  I also liked the fact that to a large degree brd was designed in a non-linear fasion.

PS:  Is your name a spinoff of "Danifae" from War of the Spider Queen?

BWL was great for pacing because of trash principles. The first boss involved no trash at all. The second required killing 6 goblins that you could easily let run away if you didn't mind. Then, 2 groups, the dreaded suppression area, 3rd boss, 1 group, 4th boss, 8-9 groups (I can't remember exactly), 5th boss, 6th boss, 1 group, 7th boss, Final Boss.

All in all BWL had ~60 something trash mobs in 13 groups and a suppression area, and 8 bosses. Karazhan has 16+ groups with well over 100 mobs that are connected to JUST MOROES. This is the absurdity of the situation involved in Karazhan. The numbers go up from there. 14 mobs before you get to the Opera event. 10 groups of mobs before you even get out of the opera area. 10 ghosts before the Curator area. 2 Mechanical Guardians and 7 groups of Arcane mobs before the Curator pull. Then, you finally get to have your 3rd boss fight. It goes really really downhill from there on the way from the Curator to Aran.

Are you seeing the difference here? This is the problem in a nutshell. BWL for a next generation instance after you'd mastered MC, with little trash, and it was still very challenging and fun. Karazhan was supposed to be a lead-in to 25 man raiding, and it's nothing but a beat-the-clock-dps-and-trash-fest. Can you honestly say you enjoy the trash in Karazhan? That the trash there is well designed and adds a needed purpose to the instance? Or is it rather something that simply wastes inordinate amounts of time each time you are trying to grind your way through the place? Do you find yourself groaning when you get past the Curator and realize how far it is until you get to Aran every single week? Most people I've talked to do.

AQ was the worst for trash.

Good, manageable if you had someone with more brains than a drunken snail pulling, if monotonous trash up to the 4th required boss, which was a super shitty resist check fight but not that difficult in the long run. Then 5 trash mobs that were each harder than any of the previous bosses in the zone, followed by the fifth bosses which were muchly difficult. When on farm, that whole mess took about 75 minutes or so.

Then, to get to the next boss, the worst trash packs in the history of WoW, that lasted for as long as it took to get through the first 5 bosses and all the trash in between them, and were able to insta-rape the entire group faster than you could say "oh shit".

All of that shit was even more painful because the loot/cash royally sucked to that point, and it was all a cockblock that no one wanted to bother with to get to C'Thun. Which is really sad, because C'Thun was by far the most fun boss fight in the game for a lot of people.

This post just sums up the reason I quit raiding.  Wasting my time sitting around for hours to kill tons of trash mobs that you HAD to beat quickly before the respawn timers kicked in and royally boned the entire group all the while hoping that the healers would do their job properly, the tanks would do theirs, and that some rogue\mage\hunter\lock wouldn't get bored and fuck up by accidentally pulling aggro and wiping the whole raid party.

C'thun was fucking great. It really seems like they designed AQ and someone went "Oh shit, when we load up the tester raid with full tier 2 and consumables they can burn through this instance in under 2 hours! We need to add some crap to make it longer.. make them work for it.. make them want it.

C'thun made it all worth it... The best fight in the game, by far, that I have ever seen. Whoever designed it should get a medal, and whoever put it 4 hours into a complete sidegrade tier 2.5 keep-the-raiders-occupied dungeon should be hung from the roof.

Of course, AQ and then Naxx burned me out on raiding, and I didn't even get halfway through the expansion before I quit WoW. I'm not surprised that for all of their 'casual friendly' promises, the end game is more of the same.

Same here - but of course it did not start that way.  Initially we spent the whole 3 hours learning Moreoes.  After a few weeks - it went to farm status and then we spent most of our time wiping on Curator.  Now we spend most of our time wiping on Aran.

We would make more attempts on Aran - but with our limited raid time - we are killing the other bosses along the way too.  It would really suite our play style to have set the instance at a longer cycle time - so we could spend more time attempting our current boss (e.g. new content, not on farm status).

I dont know, maybe i have been spoiled from being a raider (not a top tier raider but a raider none the less) in one of the best horde guilds out there.  Heck, the first time i got into Kara was when a bunch of people in guild were already getting bored of clearing the place every week.  Really, when i look at the place, the only fights that seem difficult to me (having now both guild run and pugged the place) are curator, prince and illhoof.  Everything else in the place just seems almost down right easy.

Out of Curiosity Vanifae, what kind of group makeup do you usually run on Aran?.  In my experience, the fight is pretty easy if you have 3 good consistant interupts (rogues or warriors)

By making the cap lower, they feel it IS more casual friendly. Simply because you can more easily find people of your same level of casualness.

Though I doubt that is actually the case, but it does seem to make it easier for guilds to dump the retard loot sponges every guild had to bring along simply to fill out the 40 person roster with the ideal raid makeup.

Of course, anything is more casual friendly than Naxx. Even getting to the easy bosses in there was nigh impossible for any casual guild.

For any instance - if you join a team that is already made the kill - it willl appear easy.  When we cleared BWL and put it on farm status no doubt it looked easy to our new recruits.  All the real fun is learning the instance for the first time - before it reaches farm status for anyone in your guild.

I run in a relatively odd group makeup, I am in a small guild now, rebuilding when my guild of nearly two years imploded two months ago.  I am the main tank, I run a Protection spec Paladin, my off tank is usually a Protection spec Warrior, we have a feral druid, two restoration shaman, one enhancement shaman, a hunter, a holy priest, and a warlock.

We pretty much just power through Aran with ridiculous melee DPS.  It isn’t as high as it could be, but that is how we one shot him last night.  We cleared everything except Nightbane last night, in our second week of Karazhan, half veterans half brand new people.

We are usually lucky to have maybe 10-13 online at any time during raids so we just make it work.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with jpark here. You never really played Karazhan if you just joined up with a team that had everything down already, nor any instance for that matter. It's impossible to judge an instance correctly when your entire impressions are based on blowing through it with a geared group. Karazhan has many pitfalls for the player learning it from square one, and that's where most of the problems lie (in respawns while learning bosses, long distances to run through the place to get back to fights without a teleport, horribly stacked up trash costing an 50/50 blue/purple group more and more time in the place than it should, etc.)

We just finally killed the Prince yesterday, and that was a culmination of about 10 weeks of effort. From start to finish I feel that's pretty slow-to-average for a regular 2-3 day a week group in there. Still, I think the whole reason it happened was suffering over and over on Aran for weeks of setbacks until they nerfed him. We simply couldn't get the dps in our group any drops due to our luck. Hell, we've still only had 1 set of Mage, Lock, Hunter gloves drop off the Curator in 10 tries. It just became very frustrating that the instance had the teleport tied to what I wouldn't even call the "Halfway" point in the instance. I wager in 10 weeks we've spent about 2-3 hours just running around in there getting back to boss fights after attempts

Shade of Aran is the hardest fight by my measure, and also the most different kind of fight you will encounter in there.  Pretty much more DPS and your runs go faster, best way to do that is to supplement your gear with Heroic loot and Badges.  Prince is a joke, but the Infernals can fuck you over, Netherspite is a joke if your group can learn to stand in front of beams, and Nightbane is basically healer endurance.

Nightbane also sucks if you have an under-equipped tank, despite having good, well-equipped healers.

Our group #1 MT (http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alleria&n=Ginkan)
our group #2 MT (http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alleria&n=Darksnow)

Gink is wearing his DPS gear cuz he's grinding, but when I check him out on raid-days he's got 520+ defense and 14k hps.  Dark only has the one set of gear, so slap a shield on him and that's his tanking set.

Needless to say, group #2 hasn't killed Nightbane yet.


Aran isn't too terrible once you down him.  It's all pretty much DPS.  Keep interrupting him so his mana stays up and you don't get poly'd at the elemental spawns and learn not to move during Flame Wreath and you'er golden.   We keep a resto druid in tree form if he looks like he's going to poly, and he then does the healing if a blizzard or some other snafu happens.

Prince, once you learn things a bit, absolutely is a joke.   More often than not you can simply reposition if an infernal pops in your raid on your healing or melee group. But goddamn those times when the infernals space themselves evenly so you're trapped and just have to eat a death.

Honestly boss difficulty largely depends on your group makeup. On trash, at least the trash is fairly interesting to fight, but I agree there is too much, especially between Curator and Aran.

I agree there, there is too much trash in that section.

This is the key thing for me on why I don't raid.  I don't have the time to beat my head against a wall with 20 other people night after night "learning" a boss, and after seeing the frustration and drama over guild chat, it doesn't appear that everyone's having fun.

I can lose AV all night and have more fun than that.

That's really too bad.  In our Kara group - half the guys were real life friends - so it helped.  I really look forward to more 10 man content for that reason - small like Kara - but difficult.

I love it, small group content is fun, but some of the larger fights are just fantastic.  It's stress, but the fun stress of trying to do something difficult, knowing you can do it, but there is uncertainty... kind of like the first time I fought Zeromus in FF2.  It isn't for everyone, but then again my guild experience has always been fun first, drama later.

I find that the drama really comes when the instance is on farm.  If it's on farm and you wipe, it's not as expected as if you wipe while learning the fight.

Also, the loot whores don't show up until there is easy loot; then, the real drama begins.  The only drama to learning an instance is that certain people stop showing up until the encounter is in the can, because they just want loot, not a challenge.

Drama is really guild specific. My horde guild was drama-town more in the learning time than in the farming time, mainly because of the personalities and cliques in the guild.

My Alliance guild was more specific old-axe to grind small group drama than anything else. Most of that was leftover angst between the 4 rank 14s we had that had come to hate each other during their pvp grinds and had later ended up joining the same guild to raid. Just about everyone who ground out the ranks to 14 in my experience  had some major sanity issues anyway.

We just had class drama -- this was all pre-TBC, but the warlocks bitched that the hunter stings were pushing their DoTs off, the hunters bitched that the fucking mages were dragging AoEing mobs over their FD'd forms during a wipe or that no one would dispell or cure them when they pulled (that was a biggie -- we got tired real quick of dying on a pull because we had enough DoTs dropped on us to kill a horse before the tank grabbed aggro), the priests bitched that no one ever pulled ads off them , the raid leader bitched that people started firing before the attack call....

Nonetheless, we actually had fun. Quite a bit of it, but then we were learning MC less than 3 months before TBC came out. Hard-core we were not. (Although our class leads were generally raiding AQ and BWL with another guild)

We never really had much drama in any of my raids, but that's mostly because I wouldn't let anybody get away with being a social misfit for very long. People could bitch all they wanted on their own time in tells, but if anybody caused shit during raids about someone's play or attitude in public channels, they got removed. I made it very clear that many of them were my friends, but you are not special and unique snowflakes who can't be replaced if you decided to act like a loot-whoring whiny douchebag.

Really, most drama I've seen is the direct result of very poor leadership either within the guild, or on the raid-leading level, or both.

Oh, that was never in TS/vent. That was in the class channels, and the class leads filtered it up selectively to the raid leader. So what you HEARD over TS was "Hunters, could you please not apply stings after we're onto the second row of debuffs?" and "If it's a wipe, just sit down and die please" or "Priests, we need a PW:S on the Hunters, and pallies, please cleanse your hunters as they tank takes aggro. We're going to need their DPS". (The last was some pull in MC -- we kept wiping on it because we'd lose four or five Hunters right off the bat. Didn't have enough DPS to burn down all the bosses' buddies before the healers ran dry. Once they started shielding us and removing the DoTs, the fight went smoothly).

What was amusing to me was that most of the sniping was between the 'locks and hunters, and as my wife played a 'lock I was sitting right there laughing about the shit both sides were saying. Even funnier was the constant "And I don't mean XXXXX!" when they remembered about the spouse. :)

Yes, 100% dead on.   If you're going to take a leadership position, don't bitch when forced to make decisions and/or complain that you don't want to tell playerxyz to shut-up because then they'll get mad at you.  Or how about 'well you two just work it out between you and let me know what you decide.' 

 It's part of the job, welcome to management, bitchcake.  You want to sit back and do nothing, then put someone else in the lead.

Not that I have any experience.  :-D

Sulfuron Harbinger it sounds like. The SW:P that the adds have would hit for about 500-600 a tick. Try doing that on horde where the only class that could remove the debuff was a priest. I died so many times on that damn boss back in the day.

Warlocks with Felhounds were my personal gods on some of those fights :P

My experience was raid-spot drama, and the occasional loot issues (because we used a DKP system but the raid leader decided which classes could participate on any given item when the item wasn't class-specific).  What happened most often was I'd try to smooth things out or make a decision and have them abide by it, but the dissatisfied party always appealed my decision by whispering the guild leader, which pissed him off to no end because that's why he had class leads, so he wouldn't have to deal with the crap himself.  Oh well, after a while they learned that going to the top might have worse results than my decision.

I had the same situation going on.  They knew better than to bitch to me about specific healers because the other half in the same room was one of them.  Of course, all of our healers HATED raiding with the guild because the guild leader put a guy who BOUGHT his characters and had never actually played intelligently in charge of the healing classes - who always gave stupid and contradictory directions, or no direction at all and then bitched at the rest when they didn't know what to do and asked.  This is the moron who would go into bear form in the middle of a fight and then complain when we wiped because no one was healing (douchebag, you ARE the healer).  Can't heal, can't win.  And when you only have 4-5 healers in a 40 man, you need to have some VERY good coordination on what to do (not to mention being a mage I was just expecting to die alot if I fucked up so I didn't).  I told him he was a retard and to quit buying characters and actually make one, but that didn't make me popular with the rest of the guild leadership.  When he got banned for botting was one of the happiest days of WoWing.

That was the one -- we wiped there for three weeks straight (and then occasionally thereafter, as the pallies forgot to cleanse us). Once the priests shielded us and the pallies cleansed as as we ran by, the fight was easy.

MC made me learn the importance of "Choosing the right shot for the job". On Sulferon, I just wanted enough aggro to get his attention -- arcane shot (even a down-ranked one) was enough. Later on, for another pull, I needed to use Arcane - Distracting - Arcane to make sure I really got it's attention (one of those big hell dog thingies had a taste for our primary healers -- you had to generate a lot of threat quickly or it'd just run down the healers).

I actually enjoyed the MC raids -- full of trash and crappy, but fun -- our raiding group didn't take the whole thing very seriously, we held collections to pay for our main tank's repair costs, and generally were there for fun. :)

Goon Squad drama is like watching a nuke go off in the distance - don't get involved and it's pretty fun to watch.

Eve forum is thata way-> (http://tinyurl.com/2g9mqh)

It's predictable now.

I really want to find a zombie rickroll with close-ups of feet.

I meant wowgoons drama. It stays pretty internal though.

Except when they disband us, splinter and we laugh because only maybe 3 of them knew their head from their ass. :v:

Well yeah but even then most of M'G didn't know what the fuck. :P