Old Raid Content - no hope?

[jpark]

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.

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).

[Dren]

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.

[jpark]

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.

[jpark]

Gah.  Cannot delete.

[Merusk]

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.

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 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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

Sorry I borked your delete. 

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. >.< )

[Dren]

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.

[Jayce]

(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. 

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.

[Merusk]

(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. 

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.

[jpark]

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.

[Chimpy]

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.

[SurfD]

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.

[Shavnir]

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.

[Vanifae]

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.

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.

[Chenghiz]

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

[SurfD]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Dren]

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.

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.

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Dren]

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

[Vanifae]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Chimpy]

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.

[Jayce]

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.

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).

[Merusk]

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.

[rk47]

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' 

[Vanifae]

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 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.

[SurfD]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Vanifae]

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.

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. 

[rk47]

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.

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Merusk]

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'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.