BC Raid Progression?

[Ironwood]

So with 100 gold in your pocket you can't slam every other level 19 in the battlegrounds? So the blue sword that drops off of Van Cleef isn't half again as good as an equivilant AH green?

You may not notice it as much since you level so fast but, yes, WoW is an EXTREMELY loot driven game. Remove loot from the equation and everyone of a given class is exactly the same. Loot's more than A defining characteristic of a character, it's THE defining characteristic. Christ, why do you think non-raiders are bitching right back at the raiders when it comes to loot?

Yes, but I disagree.  You see the point I'm trying to make here ?

[ShenMolo]

There is an additional motivation for gathering loot, one that goes back to my original post.

In Pre-BC WoW, Gear=Progression

If you want to see BWL, you MUST farm MC.
If you want to see AQ40, you MUST farm BWL.
If you want to see Naxx, you MUST farm BWL & ideally AQ40.

I can put up with months of MC because 1. I like my guildies and 2. I want to see BWL/AQ40/Naxx with them.

If in BC Gear does not = Progression, then all you are left with is epeen as a reason to do an instance over and over again. (I love my guildies, but there must be a progression element to our farming to make it truly fun).

If you don't give a shit about epeen, and there is no reason to farm an instance for months other than completing a set, which is no longer even needed for the next level of progression, why play the game long term?

If Blizzard is breaking the Progression Treadmill, even if it is in order to let everyone experience everything, are we not going to get bored?

Right now guilds across all the servers are reporting that raid motivation has plummeted. The epeen crowd is crying that there is no reason to get t3 because it will be sub-par with the expansion. The progression crowd is crying that there is no reason to push for  Naxx when it will be old news in a couple of months. The response that "t3 is worth the effort because it will make levelling up easier" is laughable.

What happens when we get to 70 and start raiding ALL the available instances. I almost WANT them to make Karazhan and the Black Temple impossible for blue-geared raiders, just so that we can have a goal to shoot for when we raid the other instances to farm gear.

[Xanthippe]

So when you get bored, do what non-raiders are urged to do at 60 when they find they have little to do.  Quit and go play something else.

As far as raiding motivation being low because BC is coming out along with a new lvl cap, there will always be an expansion on the horizon. 

If the game isn't fun to play, then find something to do that is fun.  What you describe is more keyed in to OCD than fun.  Surely there's other ways to have fun in this game than the MC->BWL->AQ40->Naxx progression.

If Blizzard were to stay on this gear = progression route, how would new people ever get geared up? It would be horrible trying to gear up alts or new people.

Looking back on my 2 years of playing WoW, I see it as having had fun, not wasted effort.  I wonder if anti-casual raiders would see it the same way.

[bhodi]

Blizzard will stay on the gear = progression route. It doesn't "ruin" the game, and there will always be guilds with differing advancement speeds. Taking a look at my server stastics, we have 4 guilds or alliances who have downed c'thun, 23 nefarion, and 46 ragnaros. The numbers are a bit misleading, because we do have 13 guilds who are playing around in naxx and have downed at least one boss. There are a good amount of people who are doing the high end instances already, and there would be more if not for the 40 man requirement.

The expansion will be UBRS difficulty again, and there will be another MC, another BWL, another AQ, and another Naxx. It's fine, becuase they tweak the harder instances to let more and more people get into them. They soften the difficulty and remove the deliberate cockblocksbugged encounters once all the super hardcore people have had their way with the instances. If Blizzard keeps to their schedule, it will be a steady progression; you'll be able to spend about 3 months doing a new instance, and then move onto the next one before the expansion comes out.

In the expansion, you will be able to gear up faster, both becuase you have less people to gear up and becuase the instances will be able to be completed faster. There will still be a gear stairway and a clear instance progression but it will be open to a lot more casual people.

Add to that the PvP gear which will enable you to bypass or sidestep some of the lower instances and I really don't see a problem.

[Paelos]

I don't see Blizzard breaking the progression at all with new raids. Frankly, I'm sort of wondering where that reasoning came from. After the expansion brings us T4 gear, you'd be foolish to think that T5 gear isn't coming eventually. You'd also have to conclude that you simply couldn't jump from T4 to T5 without getting the next set. The gear will always be progressive in a game like this.

The "if" in the comment about "If in BC gear != progression" is a huge one. I don't think the changes coming are that sweeping.

[Velorath]

The only thing I think you're missing to be on the "casual" side of the fence is that raids have to be large. That's the essence of the debate, does larger mean more challenging. In micromanging personalities it does, but in terms of the game it doesn't.

Hell I think in some ways 5 man groups can be a lot more challenging than 25 or 40 man groups.  With only 5 different classes in a group you don't have nearly the variety of tools and strategies available to use that the 25 man group (with presumably all the classes represented) does.

[Modern Angel]

So with 100 gold in your pocket you can't slam every other level 19 in the battlegrounds? So the blue sword that drops off of Van Cleef isn't half again as good as an equivilant AH green?

You may not notice it as much since you level so fast but, yes, WoW is an EXTREMELY loot driven game. Remove loot from the equation and everyone of a given class is exactly the same. Loot's more than A defining characteristic of a character, it's THE defining characteristic. Christ, why do you think non-raiders are bitching right back at the raiders when it comes to loot?

Yes, but I disagree.  You see the point I'm trying to make here ?

Not exactly. You're disagreeing with Blizz's design decision or opting to insist that gear is only a huge factor at 60? Because one is a matter of opinion on game design and the other is moon man think.

[Ironwood]

My point is that you and I are playing different games.

[lamaros]

Babble babble.

Raiding is not hard though. It just requires more time and organisation.

If you can remember back far enough, if you played at release, people once considered Strath and UBRS hard.

Because they were trying them in the proper progression. Now of course they're boringly easy because people are trying them with gear that is too good for them. The itemization hath made them hard, not the fact they're 5 mans.

Raids are hard because of itemization too - and because all the new 'challenges' Blizzard has come up in design they have decided to put into new Raids rather than new 5 and 10 mans.

This does not have to be the case.

Forcing people to have T3 to do things is stupid for one reason:

I FUCKING HATE GROUPING WITH 39 OTHER PEOPLE AND WILL NEVER DO IT.

It is boring boring shit with little individual skill and flair and I feel little acomplishment from doing it.

I enjoy playing with 4 competent mature and fun people and overcomming challenges by thinking on our feet and working well together. I get lost in a crowd and feel less connected with the world. I also get pissed off because I'm better than other people and don't like to see me putting in all my hard work only for some other bastard to fuck it all up. Especialy if it take HOURS and HOURS of mind numbing boringness.

I dont have any problem with what you HXC raiders have said about loot being hard to get. I just dont want it all to be in 40mans because they SUCK BALLS.

[Calantus]

Pointform rebuttal, cut because this could easily turn into a thread full of large quotes otherwise

1) Ah but I'm not arguing the same points as what you're trying to prove. The reason is I disassociate from raiding and even from what other people are doing. I'll get that in another point.

2) Here you are agreeing with me, but then you disagree with a premise you ascribe to me without me actually believing in it. That may or may not be miscommunication so I'll address it. I don't feel that the highest rewards have to be exclusionary. I believe they have to have a consitant risk/time vs reward ratio though. I don't care where the bar is set, or how many activities it covers, so long as no matter how you got X item it was consistant with another way you could have gotten it. The problem with the low low % drop uber item idea is that it's not fair on the people going that route. It's just going to suck having done strat 200 times and never even seeing your tier 2 piece drop. Some people get that already but they are in the minority.

3) The only ways to do that are to either give the smaller instances gear later (which would still be the same problem), or with very very low drop chances which to me would be a sucky system to participate. Of all my characters none of them has ever had their blue set headpiece because I've done a number of scholos and just decided not to bother after it didn't drop for a time. It just wasn't worth it to me. My dwarf priest wore a mauradon drop on his head until he got trans and I only got that after we were in AQ40.

4) This point again feeds into the idea that risk v reward has to be an us v them system. Basically even in a singleplayer game I'll engage in the most worthwhile activity if there's a choice. I honestly can't think of an example right now, but the idea is basically simple in that if I have 2 things to do and one either pays out better, or pays the same but is easier then that's the one I'm going to do. It's got nothing to do with what another person might do. If I'm raiding and it's not giving better rewards than 5mans (assuming current difficulties) I'm going to feel cheated, regardless of what everyone else is doing. If the whole world is raiding I'd still feel I'm being cheated by raiding instead of doing 5mans.

5) That's the point I think, that I can argue against the general ideas put forth for "casuals" to get equal items to raiding as it stands without being an elitist. Lately I've gotten a bit tired of raiding, I've been doing more work lately and am unable to raid as often as I used to. Right now I'm in a position where I can't even take loot unless everyone else passes. Some days I don't log in when I can because the last thing I want to do is lock myself onto the computer for another few hours at the end of a long day. I now skip MC fully, regardless, because the DKP is just not worth the pain for me. I'm pretty damn close to the "casual" definition right now I'd say. But I still say that as the game is currently raiding has to pay out better than any other activity (besides maybe honor grinding, although those are a weird thing because very very few of the people crazy enough to hit 14 are crazy enough to do it again so the system really has to change and it is).

Like I said I'm fine with raiding being lowered as it is in principle (only annoyed because its late arrival means a big shakeup in the status quo which is always a hassle), I'd be fine with no raiding game, and I'd be fine with other activities boosted to a point where the risk/time v reward ratio was sufficient to give out as good items as raiding (and am stoked about the arenas being just that). I just disagree with the idea that lesser activities should pay out the same as harder activities in general principle. And that's not elitist thinking to my mind, if everyone was doing the hardest thing and thus everyone was getting the same rewards then I'd have no problem with it. I agree with the idea that raiding being both exclusionary and the only path is bad, but still disagree that the solution is simply making things available to lesser activities. So I take offence when people say that disagreeing with "casuals" getting epics means you are being elitist because to my mind they don't have to go hand in hand.

Raiding is not hard though. It just requires more time and organisation.

If you can remember back far enough, if you played at release, people once considered Strath and UBRS hard.

Because they were trying them in the proper progression. Now of course they're boringly easy because people are trying them with gear that is too good for them. The itemization hath made them hard, not the fact they're 5 mans.

Raids are hard because of itemization too - and because all the new 'challenges' Blizzard has come up in design they have decided to put into new Raids rather than new 5 and 10 mans.

Raiding is hard, and precisely because of requiring more time and organisation. If there is a solo activity I can probably ace it, no problem. I've never ran into something in WoW that I couldn't solo if it was possible with what I had. The last singleplayer cockblock I've ran into was the final fight in God of War under God mode (the one before that was the final tower calibration in FFX-2, argh), I just can't keep the people alive in that sequence. If it's duoable it's just as easy because I think my brother is more skilled than me, and the co-ordination is easy because we've been playing together since we were children. Beyond that it gets a little harder with each person added until it gets pretty hard with 40 people.

I suppose that it helps that I've always been an officer so I get to see first hand the hassles of raiding and that my responsibilities in a raid go beyond whatever straightforward shit my character is doing. But on the whole it is harder, even if you are just a grunt with an easy task the actual downing of the boss is hard to you because there are factors beyond your control. Just like some singleplayer activities can become hard due to randomness, if the base activity is fairly easy but you have a common but random chance to fail the task is pretty hard. That's not what I'd call a fun difficulty, but it does make it harder. Then there's also the fact that from the perspective of getting the loot it is definitely hard. When you get an item chances are you had to beat out a bunch of other people, or had to wait in line for quite a while, etc.

Also the 5mans are easier now because they've been nerfed and people learnt the encounters and how to play their characters/WoW in general.

[bhodi]

Wall of Words crits you for 90,000. You are dead.

[Calantus]

Yeah I slowly made it while doing other things so I wasn't aware of how big it was getting until I previewed. I even cut out a paragraph before submitting but cutting more would be too much work I think. :P

[lamaros]

Raiding is hard, and precisely because of requiring more time and organisation. If there is a solo activity I can probably ace it, no problem. I've never ran into something in WoW that I couldn't solo if it was possible with what I had. The last singleplayer cockblock I've ran into was the final fight in God of War under God mode (the one before that was the final tower calibration in FFX-2, argh), I just can't keep the people alive in that sequence. If it's duoable it's just as easy because I think my brother is more skilled than me, and the co-ordination is easy because we've been playing together since we were children. Beyond that it gets a little harder with each person added until it gets pretty hard with 40 people.

I suppose that it helps that I've always been an officer so I get to see first hand the hassles of raiding and that my responsibilities in a raid go beyond whatever straightforward shit my character is doing. But on the whole it is harder, even if you are just a grunt with an easy task the actual downing of the boss is hard to you because there are factors beyond your control. Just like some singleplayer activities can become hard due to randomness, if the base activity is fairly easy but you have a common but random chance to fail the task is pretty hard. That's not what I'd call a fun difficulty, but it does make it harder. Then there's also the fact that from the perspective of getting the loot it is definitely hard. When you get an item chances are you had to beat out a bunch of other people, or had to wait in line for quite a while, etc.

Might surprise you, being an officer as you are, but being organised around by some guy and then making sure you don't stuff up doing some simple task is not really that fun.

Fun for you maybe, as you might enjoy the orginisational aspect (and I do too, but not the rest), but you are but one person among many.

Raiding is not inherrently harder. Co-ordination among 40 people is of course going to be harder than among 5, but otherwise there is no real difference.

This is the important bit:

It is easier to get a higher level of co-ordination among 5 people than among 40. You will probably never have a 40 man group in WoW that could be as co-ordinated as a 5 man one. Thus, if you have something that requires AWESOME coordination among 5 people it can be just as "hard" as something that requires "good" coordination among 40.

I hate raiding. In nearly all other areas I agree with you. I want better loot if I'm acomplishing things that are harder than what the average guy is doing. I just don't want them to be in raids.

[bhodi]

I finally beat the end boss on god mode in GoW. It was really fucking hard and took me about 3 hours. You cheese the images by doing the triangle triangle square smash  on either side, then rage, then do a hades+lightning+hades+lightning, and hugging wife while they stand back up.. then hopefully you got enough to rage again, and you just cheese stomp them again for as long as you can, and then do it a second time... It took me almost two hours trying over and over again and I finally got it, I had 3 guys left but they were the sword guys and were easily dispached with that cheese combo. It took me another hour to kill him with the sword, I never did get the hang of when to block, when to dodge backwards.. I eventually just brute forced it by getting lucky enough times to force him into the crossed swords push, and beating him down enough times to kill him.

Oh, and then, once I won, I decided to hit start to see how many orbs I got before walking into the portal to olympus. Wasn't that nice. The game locks up, in case you were wondering. It's a known bug. I had to do redo it all over again for the save. Only took me 1.5 hrs that time.

[Calantus]

Might surprise you, being an officer as you are, but being organised around by some guy and then making sure you don't stuff up doing some simple task is not really that fun.

It doesn't surprise me, but then I never said it was fun difficulty. ;)



Re: God of War >> Nice to know, I still have the save from before the fight so I might go back and try it. I actually never use the triangle triangle square combo, I mostly used square square square+hold it combo which wasn't very good for that fight and I never had time to heal them enough. I tried other stuff of course but didn't think of any combo starting with triangle. :P

[bhodi]

you know what, I think it was square square triangle. whatever the one that just does two quick jabs and the slam on the ground. you just want to slam them as fast as you can to keep them off their feet. The other combo while it does more damage it takes too long. The square square triangle doesn't do all that much but it completely disables them. You can go left side right side left side right side and if you do it right they won't make any headway on you. I liked to stand just to the left of her slightly up on the platform, that gives you enough reach to hit the right side guys, and the left side guys won't hit her when they do their little charge forward move after you.

[Trouble]

Right now I'm a hardcore raider and a raid leader, but I could take it or leave it. There are moments in 40 man raids when everyone is working together in a delicate ballet and the sheer breadth and coordination required give it a certain awe-inspiring air, but those moments are too far and few in between for me to really cling to it very much. Far too much time must be spent doing things that aren't all that fun but more of a time sink, like trash and uninspired boss fights. But the few gems get me going now and then.

That said, I AM here to be more progressed than most other people. I'm an achiever, I want to be scaling the mountainside, I want to going above and beyond what most people are, simply by virtue that it is beyond the norm. It doesn't matter all that much to me what the specifics are, whether it be 40 man raiding or extremely hard 5 and 10 mans. Hell, I spent a couple years playing ATITD doing the same thing and that's a COMPLETELY different type of game.

[Velorath]

One of the things I think CoH does right is scaling up the difficulty for missions and taskforces depending on how many people are in the group.  I think it strikes a good balance of fun and challenge when you let the players choose the size of the group (up to a limit which should probably be higher than what CoH had) and try to balance it for whatever mission they're about to take on.  People shouldn't have to do 40-man groups because it's more tedious and thus worth a better reward.  You should do a 40 man group if you've got 40 friends online in your guild at the moment and all want to do something together, but other than that I don't see a reason to try to push people into a playstlye that most people don't seem to find fun. 

Really I don't even see the need for Blizzard to make some instances 5-man groups only, or 10-man groups only.  Let me throw together a 7-man group if I've got that many friends I want to group with that night and scale the instance difficulty up accordingly.  Really, my biggest problem with BC so far is that it didn't go far enough fixing the problem.  A 25-man raid is only slightly more appealing to me than a 40-man.  I imagine both would force me to listen to some guy barking orders on Vent for hours on end.

[caladein]

Also the 5mans are easier now because they've been nerfed and people learnt the encounters and how to play their characters/WoW in general.

I'm not so sure really. I find the margin for error outside of key people (i.e. main tank, primary healers, primary crowd controllers) is much smaller in 5-man instances the in raids. This is especially true I've found during the Dungeon Set 2 line, which are the hardest of the non-raid encounters.

Sure, you can't have all your DPS fall asleep or you'll get mowed down, but somehow, people's brains seem to turn off (my own too sometimes, even as an officer) in a raid and you don't automatically fail like you might in a 5/10-man instance. So I don't feel that 5-man is any easier on the grunt level, but I agree with you that the chance for catastrophic screw-up goes up with the more people you're dealing with. Just as it's important to remember that your margin of error isn't nearly as razor-sharp for the majority of the raid in comparison to a 5/10-man.

[Zetor]

A minor tangent, but I've done the tier0.5 questline twice (with guild, mains+alts) without epics, and it's REALLY friggin' hard. Especially the 45min run if you don't have a proper class mix, and Valthalak. In fact, I'd say Valthalak is harder than most ZG and MC bosses.

The tier0.5 questline also has the best 'boss encounter' in the game, the arena in BRD. Man, they need to add more of that stuff.


-- Z.

[Ironwood]

I totally agree.  I really feel that me, and those in my guild that helped, really EARNED my Full Heroism set.

[Phred]

Killin' stuff over and over again was never limited to 40-man raids.

I think the changes are largely great.  Accessibility and pacing has always been problematic for people who couldn't raid for whatever reason, and this expansion does a lot for them.  My main concern now is quite simply content longevity.  Removing 15 people removes a ton of variables.  Organization will be easier, there will be fewer factors (people) at play; things will generally get done faster.

We all know how glacial Blizzard's content cycle is.  If their speed is unchanged come expansion, there will be a heavy onus on their new PvP systems and the hard difficulty setting to keep people distracted once they finish everything else, I think.

EDIT: To answer your question, the main issue is giving attention to one "playstyle" without compromising the other, and vice versa.  As I see it!

Having seen the low 60 instances now, I can say that people are going to get really tired of them even on hard. They are very small. Like 3 boss small. Fine if you're time starved but even then after a few runs you're going to know every mob's spawn spot by heart. With such tiny instances people will burn out way faster than they did on strath/scholo/ubrs imo.

[lamaros]

Killin' stuff over and over again was never limited to 40-man raids.

I think the changes are largely great.  Accessibility and pacing has always been problematic for people who couldn't raid for whatever reason, and this expansion does a lot for them.  My main concern now is quite simply content longevity.  Removing 15 people removes a ton of variables.  Organization will be easier, there will be fewer factors (people) at play; things will generally get done faster.

We all know how glacial Blizzard's content cycle is.  If their speed is unchanged come expansion, there will be a heavy onus on their new PvP systems and the hard difficulty setting to keep people distracted once they finish everything else, I think.

EDIT: To answer your question, the main issue is giving attention to one "playstyle" without compromising the other, and vice versa.  As I see it!

Having seen the low 60 instances now, I can say that people are going to get really tired of them even on hard. They are very small. Like 3 boss small. Fine if you're time starved but even then after a few runs you're going to know every mob's spawn spot by heart. With such tiny instances people will burn out way faster than they did on strath/scholo/ubrs imo.

Aye, but the 'hard' mode on leveling instances is probably not considered anything more than a bonus, and not the main instance focus at level cap.

[Xanthippe]

Having seen the low 60 instances now, I can say that people are going to get really tired of them even on hard. They are very small. Like 3 boss small. Fine if you're time starved but even then after a few runs you're going to know every mob's spawn spot by heart. With such tiny instances people will burn out way faster than they did on strath/scholo/ubrs imo.

What does this mean, people will get tired of them "even on hard."  Do people get to pick the difficulty of instances now?

[Merusk]

What does this mean, people will get tired of them "even on hard."  Do people get to pick the difficulty of instances now?

Yes, but only if you're L70.  You can run the previous Burning Crusade instances on "Hard" mode.  Nobody knows if this increases spawns/ respawn/ whatever or just ups the level of the mobs. 


IGN has a good write-up explaining a lot of the changes from a hands-on view, and showing a lot of the early quest rewards.  There's a quest reward cloak that'll easily replace the one Rogues/ Hunters get off of Ragnaros.  Made me giggle.

[Phred]

I got that cloak. The only reason it replaces the cloak of shrouded mists for hunters is because of the nerf to agi.

[Merusk]

It's not a nerf, it's a fix.

Really, Aimed Shot was broken, broken, broken, B-R-O-K-E-N.  As was "ALL AGI OR NOTHING!" for equipment.  I'm much happier with the direction they're going now than previously.  Should let hunter DPS scale a lot better, too.

[Phred]

I disagree that aimed shot was broken. It was the ranged attack power calculation that was broken, making weapons that should have been upgrades worse than older weaker weapons because of the way ranged attack power added to the damage. It's still semi-broken imo, because too much damage comes from attack power rather than the weapon.

[Chenghiz]

No, aimed shot was broken - or rather, the contraints it places upon a hunter's dps optimisation in raids.

[Fabricated]

Also the 5mans are easier now because they've been nerfed and people learnt the encounters and how to play their characters/WoW in general.

I'm not so sure really. I find the margin for error outside of key people (i.e. main tank, primary healers, primary crowd controllers) is much smaller in 5-man instances the in raids. This is especially true I've found during the Dungeon Set 2 line, which are the hardest of the non-raid encounters.

Sure, you can't have all your DPS fall asleep or you'll get mowed down, but somehow, people's brains seem to turn off (my own too sometimes, even as an officer) in a raid and you don't automatically fail like you might in a 5/10-man instance. So I don't feel that 5-man is any easier on the grunt level, but I agree with you that the chance for catastrophic screw-up goes up with the more people you're dealing with. Just as it's important to remember that your margin of error isn't nearly as razor-sharp for the majority of the raid in comparison to a 5/10-man.

I say the 5/10 man instances are easier than they used to be just because the quality of gear people have going into them is a lot better. With people knowing where the cool quests are (who would know where to look for the Exile's Sunken Temple quest for example?), the glut of BoE blues on the AH, the improvement of loot across a lot of patches, all the crafting recipies, etc. etc.

I imagine UBRS would be some tough shit if you went in with a party swinging 80%+ greens. Ditto on Strat/Scholo. No +Def gear or 5000+HP unbuffed on warriors tends to make them die spontaneously through repeat crits.

In terms of encounters I say they're just as hard. Sure, the Baroness disappears and her victims get their HP back when they get released, but you're not steamrolling her with 10 people now. The Baron will still kick the shit of an unprepared group, and that series of battles when you enter the slaughterhouse is a chore without AoE and clueful groupmates. Scholo never seemed hard at all to me, but I imagine the butcher is a bit of a surprise to first-time runners since he hits hard, fast, and runs quite fast.

[Ironwood]

I'm still convinced they beefed the butcher at one point.  Ironwood never had any bother with him, but every time Silnakh took a group there, it was chaos.

[Dren]

Even with decent gear and full knowledge of what to expect, our guild wipes on 5-mans at least once everytime we go in.  Yes, we've done it without a wipe a few times, but that's very rare and only because we have the ultimate mix of classes and everyone is really on the ball.

I find the times we go in without the exact right mix and we do come close to wiping is more fun anyway.  Some of my best experiences have been with weird groups like 2 paladins and 3 druids.  Can you say hybrid crazy?  There is no pushing the same 3 buttons over and over there.  You're constantly switching roles depending on what's going on.  Fun.

Actually, the best experience I've had so far was when I took my rogue with 4 druids to LBRS for a stealth run.  While it was very quick to get to the bosses we wanted, it was extremely challenging to take them down with a mix like that.  We barely pulled it out and didn't have a wipe only due to everyone really knowing their class and staying alert.  I had to use every power and talent rogues have to pull through.

[Ironwood]

If you go with 5 Rogues, it's stunlock-tastic.

And there's always at least two of you backstabbing.

[Dren]

If you go with 5 Rogues, it's stunlock-tastic.

And there's always at least two of you backstabbing.

That works until you go up against bosses that can't be stunned. 

That's where the healing comes in from the druids.  My job at that point is to kick like I've never kicked before, and backstab.  Once we got the hang of this, we could down bosses fairly well.  Some of the animations indicating the boss is casting something particularly wicked are pretty subtle so it's hard to know when to kick, but dirt naps make you learn quick.

[Ironwood]

Hmmm, which ones in LBRS can't be stunned ?  I haven't done a stealth run in ages.

Besides, Feint, bandage works if you're chaining five of you.  Mostly.