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[slog]

Way to much trash in Kara.

I'd be fine with fewer, but they are easy pulls.  We always have a tank and offtank in the group.  Each tank grabs a group and leapfrog.  DPS and Healing can keep up with it and we whip through it all very quickly.  We can hit Moroes in probably 20 minutes.  We are probably at opera in about 30 more minutes.  Nightbane is summoned 10 minutes later.  Then we go take on Curator in about 30 more minutes.  Aran is 20-25 minutes after that.  Go back and do Illhoof in 2 minutes.  Netherspite is 15 minutes away.  Chess another 10 minutes.  Prince another 20 minutes.  Then go back and clean up Attumen and Maiden.  Each of those is probably 20 minutes.

3.5 hours, 11 bosses, 22 badges each, tons of purple lewtz.  Of course, you just can't screw up anything!

I think it's more that as a healer, trash healing is incredibly boring.  To make it more interesting, I drink whiskey on the rocks during kara raids and type random drunk comments in /raid, but even that gets old

[Merusk]

Netherspite is 15 minutes away.  Chess another 10 minutes.  Prince another 20 minutes. 

 What.. are you tired at this point or are you including time to kill bosses?  Getting to NS after Illhoof in 15 mins makes sense.  There's all those fucking 5-ghost pulls in the way and then the room of ethereal thieves.  But after that Chess is only 2 ethereal caster kills away from NS and Prince after that is just 4 of those duo blood beast pulls.

I think it's more that as a healer, trash healing is incredibly boring.  To make it more interesting, I drink whiskey on the rocks during kara raids and type random drunk comments in /raid, but even that gets old

This is what killed healing for me back in MC/ BWL days.  The ONLY good solution was pulling way too much shit, but then either the tanks couldn't keep aggro on it all or the DPS wasn't focused and pulled aggro on mobs that tanks were only supposed to be aggroing enough to keep off of healers.

[Paelos]

I quit doing Kara because everyone in my regular group wanted me to tank it because I have no alts, and they would bring in their worthless DPS alts into the raid. I geared up with one set of toons already, but I wasn't really ready to gear up a second set. Also, I don't understand the obsession to gear an alt in raiding gear. You already saw the content once. Now you are just kicking yourself in the nuts again for gear that will be useless in 6 months or less.

[Merusk]

The purple, man, they call!

I geared up my Pally alt because my guild needed a heroic tank (since the tanks were raid geared and didn't want to blow time in heroics) and a pally tank because we didn't have one for SSC at the time.   

Other folks do it because they figure it'll give them some kind of edge. Edge at what I'm not sure of.  Farming dailies?  Getting spots in heroics on their alts?  Leveling up to 80 come the x-pac?

I suspect most do it because they're bored and have hit a wall where they can't progress any farther with their 'main' toon.  They want to do SOMETHING, but since there's no raid that day working to gear-out the main isn't going to happen.  Sooo, let's gear out the alt!

[Rasix]

Being in a casual guild with delusions of grandeur, Kara is never a slam dunk unless you're in one of the overly geared, off the books runs.  The exceptionally l33t don't even run it with the guild. 

Having no real stable schedule, the runs I'm on are inundated with the undergeared tanks (stam stack, you stupid fucks), dps, and healers.  Some runs I outheal both healers combined.  Some you can't even expect to keep an offtank up on a trash pull.  There's always lots of real amateur hour shit, like tanks failing to get second on the aggro list where it's important, people going AFK without telling anyone, ninja pulling bosses (my favorite is when locks do this placing imps), pulling aggro on trash, healers landing big heals before a tank hits a mob, etc etc etc.  It's absolutely amazing how many people haven't mastered the "do not stand in the fire" boss mechanic.  The overal lack of concetration and attention to what's happening situationally is maddening.

Due to a string of unlucky runs, there's  still quite a bit of upgrades I can get from there.  My last few runs the amount of offpsec to healing gear is probably 3 -1, which doesn't help (my future WOLK leveling set is happy). 

I don't know why I really bother though.  Only reason I suppose is that they have me fill in a lot for SSC when healers start bailing later in the evening. I can heal heroics fine and most ZA groups want some sort of commitment written in your own blood. My main motivation nowadays is helping two RL friends that just bought TBC and need the occasional healer for group quests.

So.. tl;dr: Yah, Kara is always a bit long for me.

Even more off topic: Anyone notice a general decline in the amount of people running instances at all?

[slog]

Even more off topic: Anyone notice a general decline in the amount of people running instances at all?

Yes.  I'm starting to get multiple tells a night with people literally begging me to run Kara and various heroics.  Must be a shortage of healers.

[Dren]

Yes, my run down included bosses.  Yes, those are complete swags with no guarantee at accuracy.  Overall it does take us a bit over 3 hours when we are really clicking and our A-group is doing it.

Yes, healing does become boring on the trash, but when you have two tanks chain pulling it isn't so much.  We always have two tanks and two healers.  2 of the DPS need to have decent CC.  The rest can just bomb away.  With this combo we have no problems.  Somebody dies during the chain pulls?  No big deal, just res during a lull and keep going. 

Yes, I have 3 alts that are now fully Karazhan and partially Mags/Gruul geared.  Two are healers.  One is a lock.  I run alts through more from basic boredom, but I also enjoy having a variety of characters to offer to the guild during runs.  We are running Karazhan 3 times a week now.  That means lots and lots of alts because we don't have enough people to field a 25-man run ourselves.  Not even close.  We probably have 15 regulars that each have 2 or more alts.  Sprinkle in maybe 5 more that have single characters that can go to Kara.

Yes, nobody is doing normal instances, not even heroics.  It has been driving me nuts lately. 

[Merusk]

Nobody was doing normal instances at least as far back as 3 months ago.   It was Heroic or nothing.   I imagine the drop off of Heroics has to do with "hey I've got all the badge gear I need." Folks should have gotten their upgrades by now, andt here's not going to be any new gear coming out prior to the x-pac. No reason to stockpile badges when we're not 100% certain there will be BoJ gear in the x-pac,  (They might be called something else? Maybe? Just speculation here.) and if there IS BoJ you'll have plenty of warning to stockpile again.

[Fordel]

It's just pre-expansion blues, or whatever you want to call it. Everyone has done all this crap 500 times over already, want new shiny now, please and thank you.

[lamaros]

Kara has too much trash, especialy in certain places. The fact it can be done quickly doesn't change this. I did runs in April last year where it only took 1.5-2hours for the whole thing (no beast or netherspite) but for all that does for message board posturing it doesn't change the fact that there was(is?) too much trash. I havn't been in there for over a year so it may have changed, but the curator-aran trash was too significant especially on the low timer it was on originally. Going from Opera to curator was also a bit annoying if you didn't skip out and go in the back way (any people didn't like to because they wanted to ninja loot--read: drop raid and loot--the fucking benefactors).

You don't judge trash once you've mastered the instance and are over-geared, you judge it from learning attempts when at the entery gear level. Kara was by no means the clusterfucks of original SSC and TK, but the trash was still tuned too high in parts.

Asking why would you gear an alt up is kinda like asking why would you level an alt up isn't it? People enjoy it. Going back and running Kara again with 9 friends on poorly geared alts would probably be a lot more fun for me than many others things I could do in WoW for me.

As for running instances. Well, more people are doing them now than they were before TBC dropped. All I can think of running bck then was a couple of 45min Baron runs for the sake of it and farming orbs in Strath live. My server atm has quite a few heroics going on however. I'm leveling my Pally and I'm often in LFG and people are always looking for people for heroics and ZA. Maybe not as many as before, but still a few.

And I'm able to get an instance run of whatever dungeon I'm at on my pally most times I make the attempt too. Have to wait around 30mins questing while you get that last person at times, but they're still there.

[Merusk]

IIRC april last year was before they removed a lot of the trash.  There's  still a decent amount but it's about 1/2 what it was when Kara was new.  Yes, there was WAYYY too much trash then.

I still think there's too many pulls between Curator and Aran, but at least it's gone from "OMGWTFMAN" to "fuck this is irritating"

[Dren]

Ran Kara last night and was able to use my Lock.  I had fun again, but really only because I was testing out my POWAH!  I died several times because I kept testing that agro line just a tad too closely.

I'll agree with "too much trash between Curator and Aran."  I guess they wanted to have that big area with all the quest NPCs, but they didn't have to fill it with trash too.

I remembered a huge pet peeve too.  Those worms that are immune to magic.  If that isn't an obvious road bump to slow you down, I don't know what is.  They do very little damage, but it takes FOREVER to kill them because we are typically heavy on magic DPS for obvious reasons.  I got some much needed skill points on my sword though...

I guess they could take out more trash, but it begs the question:  How much is too much and how little is too little?  Do we measure this in time or is it the quantity?

[Fordel]

Curator to Aran is my guilds natural stopping point. We'll do everything up to Curator/Nightbane, then call it a night, and finish it off the next day from Aran to Everything else.


It's just not worth it for us to try and squeeze Kara into one sitting. 2 hours at a time is about as much as we'll stand for.