Old Raid Content - no hope?

[cmlancas]

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.

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Vanifae]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[CassandraR]

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. :(

[Shavnir]

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'.

[SurfD]

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. :(

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.

[SurfD]

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.

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). 

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.

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[SurfD]

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.

[Vanifae]

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

[Paelos]

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.

[SurfD]

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.

[sinij]

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 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?

[Vanifae]

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 don't understand why even dungeons that take more than 2 hours to complete exist. Break it up into multiple dungeons...

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.

[Sogrinaugh]

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?

[Paelos]

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 don't understand why even dungeons that take more than 2 hours to complete exist. Break it up into multiple dungeons...

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.

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.

[Chimpy]

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.

[Selby]

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.

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[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.

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.

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).

[SurfD]

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)

[Chimpy]

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.

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.

[jpark]

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.

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.

[Vanifae]

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)

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.

[Paelos]

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.

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.

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

[Vanifae]

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.

[Merusk]

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

Our group #1 MT
our group #2 MT

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.

[Chenghiz]

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.

[Vanifae]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

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.

[jpark]

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.

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.

[Vanifae]

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.

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.

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.

[Jayce]

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.

[Chimpy]

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.