Tobold, I'm thinking back over your last 10 posts or so on raiding, and I don't think you've ever mentioned one thing you actually like about it.

Consider this an intervention:
Play. an. alt.

At this point in raiding, you're just poking yourself with a sharp stick and complaining about it. It's a game, dude - why raid when you don't enjoy it and you don't have to?

Love the blog, btw, great job. But it's time for some tough love!

Sammy
 

Congrats on bringing down Majordomo :)
 

Love / hate relationship I buy, the closet raider I don't. Thing is that in order from liking most to liking least, 5-man groups come first, raids in the middle, and soloing last. I can only stand soloing when I can do new quests that I have never done before. Unfortunately I have now played this game so long, and on so many characters, that I've done nearly every quest in the game, except a few high end quests. Certainly I've done every quest below level 40 at least twice. So making an alt isn't a good option.

I raid because my guild raids and there is no hassle in participating. I sign up in advance, be there on time, get invited, raid, done. Getting a 5-man group is a lot more complicated, and half of the time you end up with a pickup group which disbands after one hour.

Up to now I could live with raiding, because of the "firsts". In the last two weeks I had my first kill of Geddon, Shazzrah, Sulfuron, Golemagg, and Majordomo. Plus my first look at Ragnaros. Next weekend I'm not home, so my next raids will be in two weeks. But there is a definitive risk of raiding becoming too repetitive then. I'm considering taking a break from WoW until the expansion, but it's not decided yet.
 

Never said that, Brian. 20 times Scholomance is exactly as boring and repetitive as 20 times Molten Core. The problem is nobody is even proposing to do Scholomance 20 times. But raids are always scheduled for 5 to 7 nights a week. My current guild has 7 raids per week, to just two places, Molten Core and Zul Gurub.

Where is the guild that goes to a different place every night? Molten Core, Zul Gurub, AQ20, Scholomance, Stratholme, Dire Maul, LBRS, UBRS, and so on.
 

Where is the guild that goes to a different place every night? Molten Core, Zul Gurub, AQ20, Scholomance, Stratholme, Dire Maul, LBRS, UBRS, and so on.

This is something i will rant about in an upcoming entry. No matter which guild type you play in, as a normal gamer (e.g. non 24/7 player) you will always consume the same number of zones, the game never widens the players choice of paths. This combined with the instance timers, and the way the stuff is itemized you will always play 2 zones a week literally. You can only choose them to be Scholo/Strat or BWL/AQ. I am impressed, that the burnout rate is so low yet, when you hit lvl 60, it is "groundhog day" for most of the time.
 

My guild is all about forward progress with end game content. At one time we had a schedule like Sunday -MC
Monday - No scheduled Raid
Tuesday - BWL
Wednesday - AQ40
Thursday - AQ40
Friday - AQ40
Sat - No scheduled raid

This has been my guild's formula for along time. spend 3 nights a week clearing/wiping the toughest instance we can get to. and farm status MC and bwl since we can clear each of those places in one night.

Just recently however, the guild leader said we will no longer be scheduling MC raids...
This is supposed to mean that most likely there will be:
2 nights of no raiding
3nights of wiping it up in naxxramus
1night of bwl
1night of aq40

alot of the newer/newbier ppl still want to do MC but it will be going the way of the dinasour since our last bwl 5 people completed their 8/8 tier 2 set.
And from the sounds of it Tier 1 isn't even gonna get you past the door in Naxx. :-X

To be honest when our "real life friend guild" merged with our current guild way back when... I was loathe of the end game and the character i was playing at the time so i made a bunch of alts on a bunch of diff servers.

All guilds have hurdles to clear before moving on, but hey all face challenges. They all also bow to the mighty formula of Time dedicated to the guild = Phat loots/rewards for your toons.
 

Ultimately raiding can get mighty repetitive. The real trick is finding a group of people you don't mind spending that time with anyway, so at least if you're wiping to the latest encounter, or even farming whatever it is that you've killed for the 20th time, you can still have a group of people to BS with as you do it and be happy for when they pick up their loot. If you're just in it for the sights and the loot, then that's going to be a quick path to burnout in a hurry.

That said, kudos on making it to Rag, he's an impressive sight, and still one of the more interesting boss fights in the game.
 

Anyway, back to my main point. I wasn't specifically referring to you Tobold when I mentioned people not calling the smaller instances boring or repetitive. I mean, you just don't hear it. That's the main knock on end game raiding (and in regards to MC I'd tend to agree at this point) from a lot of people. I just wonder how many of those same people are complaining about how people running Dead Strath for the 15th time have no life and how boring the instance is.

But that's the point, people aren't doing Dead Strat several times in a row, it would be boring and repetitive. The kind of player who still visits Stratholme a) is not visiting dungeons 5-7 times a week, b) is not going always with the same people, and in consequence c) can organize his pickup groups to visit a different place every time. I already tried to explain that when talking about how difficult it is to get the same group doing Strat Undead several times until making it in 45 minutes. The people who do Strat aren't that organized, and the people who are that organized don't do Strat.

Raid guilds don't work like pickup groups, they like to "concentrate" on one or two places. First you only have the choice of ZG and MC, because you can't possibly beat the higher dungeons, and by the time you can go to BWL and AQ40, the guild doesn't want to do MC and ZG any more.
 

Raid guilds don't work like pickup groups, they like to "concentrate" on one or two places.

Well there is nothing else possible than to focus, for those kind of guilds. The lifespan of a fresh (raid) zone became unbelievable short, if you do not use it at the right time, it may be dead in the water soon. I am interested to see, how Naxx will be itemized, cause its items will determine if AQ will see instant death as a raid zone or not, sure they will pull out some artificial AQish prequisite thingie for Naxx (e.g. kill Cthun to be able to engage Lichking) wich will just show how bad their progression is laid out right now. As it looks right now, AQ will be a huge candystore for sidegrade (PvP) items.