I think there's more stress on raiding guilds these days, but the novelty of the encounters is still making many people eager or willing to raid.

The smaller sizes of raids have meant many more bumps than before causing more strife. This is coupled with the faultlines caused by uneven leveling paces in guilds.

But given the newness of the encounters, if not the mechanics there's still interest but less than before. You've got lots of 5-mans, plus heroic difficulty and tons of quests, and the Arena so theres lots to do besides raiding.

I foresee problems in the near future. There's been a regretable return to high trash content plus fast respawn rates. I see burnout happening with many raids unless Blizzard changes things. And also things are not dramatically different from before just more of it. I think you'll see many people grow bored of the new endgame in the next few months.
 

I'm an elitist prick, I admit it. I raided to get the imba gear to stand around in IF and let the nubs inspect me. I'm not kidding. I had the first Benediction/Blessed Qiraji staff/Atiesh Greatstaff on my server. I earned my DKP by being in on every first time kill and spent my points wisely. My guild was full of elitist pricks just like me. So what? We earned that shit. I apologize for rolling your shitty PUG group in AB.

Now with BC, the status quo is shot to hell and I was looking at marginal upgrades even though we were still showing the rest of the server how it was done.

So I quit.

Because

To sum it up, repairs and consumables + time spent + guild drama + FUCKING TRASH are not even close to equaling the rewards given.

We used to have 10 standbys on a 40 man raid even when we were wiping over and over on patchwerk. Now we have to beg and plead to get 25 on to try gruul.

It seems everytime there's a world first boss kill, the guild that does it puts forth a rant against the devs for letting them beta test the fight for em. wtf.

So, yeah, I'm gonna try to go casual again, I deleted my myspace, I quit using that email, I'm using a new IM name, and I gquit/gave away my gold/deleted my priest and rerolled a hunter on a new server.

And for now, it's fun again.
 

at the moment i actually see how "casual" my guild actually is and their dedication of doing stuff together. we have people left because we were asking for a "good" group in instances. Now we are finally trying to do Karazhan, but sadly most of us only have greens, so we cannot hack it yet. (boss 1 is a cookie, but the rest). Like a mate of me said, in MC you could slack when you were not MT. in karazahn you cannot slack because you are with too few.
this is good imho, but it makes me doubt if it's wise for me to stay in my guild (wow-wise that is :p )
 

First, it's still early in TBC. The people who are deep into raiding right now are the ones who rushed to the endgame. It's entire possible that the burnout is not a response to the raid scene, but a response to that crazy "push to 70".

Second, I'm not sure that the raid scene is dying. On my server, there are significantly more guilds listed on the raid progress sticky than before TBC. Even if all the old guilds were cut in half, I would say that there's at least the same amount of raiders, if not more.

They may be different raiders than the old guard, but the overall numbers seem to be healthy to me.

And the large wave of people who have not reached 70, who are still working on the regular 5-man dungeons has yet to come. A lot of people don't think about raiding until they are "finished" the other content.
 

Apologies for going off topic but am I the only gamer who does not like Puzzle Quest? Every gaming blog I read raves about it. The puzzle format leaves me cold. I want my battles to look and feel like life threatening combat. I want games to immerse me in an alternative reality not just to provide an interesting diversion.
 

I run a smaller raiding guild. We progress, but slower than most - casual player base :)

A lot of our players are suffering from extreme burnout. Of the 25 or so regular raiders we have, only 10 of those still regularly play, and it's fast dwindling as people chose different classes or simply leave the game.

The raiding game is too complex and too imbalanced - just plain hard - for the rewards given. The last two items I got from Karazhan were clear side grades, just coloured purple instead of blue.

Thinking of shelving my main (a Mage). Class balance is all to hell, it's hard work trying to just compete these days. Just not really having the fun I used to in the game, so for my part - yeah, the excitement's fast leaving raiding.

I play WoW, and I feel that Blizzard really need to do something to fix the game, because it's broken.
- Balance the classes. No hybrid should come close to the healing/tanking/damage capability of a pure class.
- Give people want they want. Rogues are getting a fisting right now because they signed up to be the metric for DPS, and they're not (indeed, it's hard to justify their slot in a raid these days). From a Mage perspective it's balls - they signed up to play a damage class and classes like Priest (healer?) are able to out-DPS them. WTF.
- Fix the assinine situation that is Karazhan. Split it into wings, or make it a smaller cooldown with more bypassable bosses, or increase the raid count and difficulty to 20, just *something*. Right now it's brutal, 10 doesn't go evenly into either 25 or 40 and that's torching our guild and others.

Really, the state of the game is shocking.
 

Pre-BC: 100 man guild, ~55 players raiding (AQ40 Huhuran best achievement). Strongly diminishing towards end Q4 2006.

BC: 100 man guild, 22 players raiding, Karazhan only so far. Many people (myself included and I was raid leader pre-BC) lagging behind to get Karazhan attuned.

We will try Gruul (now post-nerf) end of April. No one is really eager to progress faster towards SSC etc., except 1-2 hardcore players in our guild.

My inner thoughts for the reasons:

1) For myself: I don't find the storyline behind BC compelling. Onyxia, MC, BWL, AQ brought their own, long-developed storyline. BC is simply boring. Blood Elves from outer space.

2) Itemization: Many (!) players are eager to get better items. Tier 1 - MC, Tier 2 - BWL worked like magic. No-one I know is really eager or happy to get Tier 4, Tier 5.

3) Attunement: Imho, BC is missing some "fun" raid instance like ZG / AQ20. They were loads of fun, possible to go there with a twink and no attunement needed. Karazhan (first raid instance) is way harder than MC at that time, promises less shiny loot (no one gets really excited about the Karazhan stuff) and takes ages to clear (trashmob respawn).
 

Our guild is one of the only who is stil in its old size, and we are growing daily as people see who and what we are: A group of players who casual Raid with a small core Elite Raid Group. We are all working class, have kids, family or other RL stuff to distract us from WoW. Afkkids is common for us and no one complains, even when we have to AFK 20 minutes as someone has to put their Kids to bed.

We noticed that Karazhan is a lot of work and the 10 man group with the reserve seem to stick together even during non raid hours. We have 3 Karazhan groups running. K1 for the elite (daily), K2 for the casual and K3 for the fun people who can't come online every day. That fits most guild members. Shame that the ID can't be shared even if progress is the same.

We miss 40 man raids big time. The fun we had on TS and in chat can't be replaced, not even with the 25's: they are very hard, there is simply no space for "fun" between the wipes.

The other reason are the bad balanced items. The KArazhan drops are pretty bad compared to Heroic blues, and heroics are so much easier and easier than most people believe. So why wipe in Karazhan but to get attuned to the new 25 man raids? There is no motivation.

T1 was so much better than ANYTHING you could find outside MC. T2 topped that again, same with T3.

Thats no longer true, in fact you get an epic item with merely 2 points better than your old blue, is it worth the increased repair bill and added gold you need to spend on a new enchant? Not really.

BC is badly balanced. The old WoW worked VERY well, the new BC WoW doesn't. I think the burnout will happen very quickly.

I also realized that Karazhan is becoming the new UBRS. Already there are random raids going on our server as the first 3 bosses are pretty easy once you learned how they work.

Maybe its a question of the difficutly to get attuned to the new 25 man instances.

My guild wishes a new 40 man raid with no or just basic attunement needed. We miss that ... a lot.
 

I quit WoW once its focus on "leet" raiding to the detriment of everything else these games should be about - so I was interested to read a thread on f13 last night which suggested the new expansion (and smaller raid sizes) actually made things harder for casual players/guilds. No idea if this is true, but I am curious to hear folks' experiences.

Certainly, the impression I'd got previously was that Blizzard was finally acknowledging a problem and doing something to help the casuals with the new 25-man limit. Is this not the case?
 

When I think of raiding, I think of grinding, and I hate grinding.

To me, raiding, battlegrounds, and factioning are all the same thing. Repititous content that is made to be re-played over, and over, and over again.

I understand - starting with Vox and Naggy - that it was crucial for some bone to be thrown to the hardcore guilds, but what started with Hate and Fear, and picked up speed in Kunark, has evolved into what I think of as a second job, and that really isn't what I'm looking for.

Though, I'll be damned if I can think of a workable alternative that will keep both casual and hardcore players happy.

Oh, and it sounds like you've got burnout. Nothing that a nice long WoW break won't take care of, I bet.
 

i consider myself as a content-ho ;)
gear is nice, but only to progress in the content.

but i admit, when i started wow my dream was eventually killing raggy and with ultimate reward the axe.
i have done that some months ago and that was the highlight of my wow-experience.
i would like to see mount hiyal, but the drive ain't there.

to refer sickboy "All I'm trying to do is help you understand that The Name of The Rose is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory."
 

I'm a casual raider, and still play for the fun of it. Must admit that I miss ZG and AQ runs - 20 mans were fun. Our guild is not yet into 25 man raids, most feel that we're not ready yet.

Most dissapointing in TBC is a linear prigression and long attunement lines for bigger raids. I know, you can't just go to The Eye and Serpent Lair with your random blues, but, for example, pre TBC we had a larger choice of raid instances - casual UBRS, ZG, AQ20, MC, BWL, AQ40, Naxx, Ony. And even if you can't go to Naxx straight away, raiding 2-4 instances per week isn't unheard of.

But now every week it's Karazhan, Karazhan, Karazhan again, untill it'll be on farm status and we can go for the bigger stuff. Maybe then I'll see more diversity, but I keep wondering if all the effort is really worth it.
 

Could one of the more experienced raiders enlighten me? I have problems with the statements that "Karazhan loot isn't much of an improvement" and "you need to do Karazhan repeatedly before being ready for the next raid dungeon". If Karazhan loot isn't all that much better than high-end blue loot, then why can't you skip it and go directly to the next raid dungeon?
 

Our guild did a server transfer, and we lost a good number of great players because of it. Everyone says the benefit of transferring is queue times, but what's the best about it for me is that it's easier to farm for raiding.

That's one of the things I thought would have me burning out: raid farming. After the casualness of getting up to 70, I was not looking forward to that.

We currently have two Karazhan groups going. Ostensibly one is for east coast time and one is for west coast time, but they don't start a full three hours apart so people, in different weeks, do switch groups. (Sometimes one group doesn't run, due to RL affecting a raid leader.) After slamming through Kara at a faster progression with group 2, I joined group 1 in the hopes of getting to sleep earlier, and am now in the middle of spending an easy 60g (lowball estimate) in one evening just for attempts on Aran, which I've already helped get to farm status with the other group. THAT is frustrating.

The fact that I basically have to show up, because I'm a healer and the whole group needs me since no one can step in to take my place (they're all in the other group) -- THAT is frustrating.

Fun-wise... For me, group 2 was a lot of joking around. Group 1 veers more to serious, which is less fun for me. (Progression is not inversely equal to the amount of silly you fit into the raid. Fun does not keep you from one-shotting a boss.

I'm hovering on the edge of burn-out. I'm raiding because the high-adrenaline, high-involvement, cooperative play of a raid is one of the things I like best, in WoW. I don't raid for loot -- I'm getting a lot of it crafted, and some blues are almost as good as purples, and also some faction rewards can't be beat in Kara. (But everyone wants to go to Karazhan, so I go, too -- besides it's satisfying to clear it out fully, at least once.)

Before I burn out, however, I think the raid leaders will. They are often a tank or a healer, and so are in a high-stress position anyway, AND they have to deal with putting together a ten man from a tight list of players, where the whole group suffers if someone has an off night. They have both told me 10-mans are harder to put together than 40-mans. This isn't right for a dungeon that ramps you up to what should be the harder stuff.
 

Tobold, people say Kara loot isn't that much better because they're bitter and can't kill / master the boss fights. The loot is better then any "wolrd quest" rewards. The problem with Kara is that it is significantly harder then MC / BWL. IT SUPPOSED TO BE! I can't get over how people think that they can come into Kara with standard greens and just upgrade straight to Purples....does that not make sense to anyone else but me? You had better be doing honor to get Exalted rewards from each faction or get the crafted items. They didn't call the newly released gear T4 because they felt like it, it's T4 because it's the next stuff in line AFTER T3.
 

Tobold,

Karazhan loot isn't signficantly better than stuff available from the highest quests and especially heroic dungeons. There are some definite upgrades, but they are far far smaller than the jump from UBRS gear ----> MC gear was in WoW 1.0. People used to that kind of upgrade are dissapointed they aren't seeing it when they start raiding...the curve is just very very slow. (Blizz has also acknowledged some items are mis-itemized)

What Karazhan gives a guild right now is volume of loot. My guild clears all of Karazhan with 2 raid groups each week. That works out to around 21 epic drops (+boe epics) per clear, so 42 epic drops per week. We could probably gimp some of our groups, maybe kill 1 or 2 less bosses, and run 3 groups, getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 epics per week from it. No raid in WoW history has given that kind of return, and in many cases Karazhan is easier than heroics.

You could probably skip Karazhan and move right into 25 man raiding if you wanted to (except that for all but 3 25 man bosses you need to kill last boss of Karazhan for attunement), if you were willing to go all out with consumables. The base epic set right now is tier 4. Someone in tier 3 (blue set), consumabled to the max, has stats above someone in tier 5 gear. This is what you need to beat most 25 man bosses nowadays. I think alot of raiders are getting disillusioned by constantly having to farm consumables, since the gear curve, while upward, is much much slower than it was in WoW 1.0. The guilds that are making significant progress into 25 mans beyond the entry level ones are the ones that farm consumables till the cows come home, and get incredible gear upgrades by using them constantly. The need to do this is really making people in my guild not look forward to getting into the future 25 mans.

-Orestus, 70 Druid, Mug'Thol
Shadow Syndicate (3-4 Nights a week raiding, Gruul dead)
 

Tobold, people say Kara loot isn't that much better because they're bitter and can't kill / master the boss fights. The loot is better then any "wolrd quest" rewards

Bitter? No. My Priest wears loot from Quests and Heroic dungeons and so far the increase I get from Kara items aren't that great. They usually switch stats/abilities of items, thats all. Ie. less Mana Reg more stats or vice versa. Our K! group is in front of Nightbane, K2 is just wasting Curator. Progress is there but the loot isn't.

Example: my main healer weapon is the revered MAce from Shatar, +300 heal. Show me a better one. If you list one with 330 it will have less stats or no mana reg on it. See what I mean? Same with Damage gear. You can get the dagger from the Honor Hold faction with +150 Spell damage, which is the epic drop in Karazhan. Same thing, less work.

It seems if you add stats and abilities of items (itemvalue, there is a wiki abotu it somewhere) the value is identical and only raises 10% per instance. Thats not really a progress there. Compare that to UBS-MC-BWL-Naxx progress.

One hting I must defend however is where we stand. MC was very hard when most of us had UBS gear only. When we had T1 MC was easy and BWL a challenge. More T2 came into the raid and BWL at some point became a 3.5 hour affair. Naxx was significantly harder (which was designed on purpose).

In BC we are at the MC stage. We run round in the dungeon/heroic gear and go KArazhan. As soon as we have Karazhan gear and some higher ini gear I bet Karazhan is as easy as MC was in T2. Its just a matter of time.

Btw, our random Karazhan groups on our server have some success here and there, at leastuntil they stand in front of the Curator.
 

Could one of the more experienced raiders enlighten me? I have problems with the statements that "Karazhan loot isn't much of an improvement" and "you need to do Karazhan repeatedly before being ready for the next raid dungeon". If Karazhan loot isn't all that much better than high-end blue loot, then why can't you skip it and go directly to the next raid dungeon?

Tobold,
If every member of your raid team ran heroics all the time and sought out the exalted reputation items and spent the time and gold for the crafted epics, you would have a raid team in better than Karazhan loot, for the most part.

However, that is very, very unlikly and as the posted above said, you simply can not get the same volume of upgrades for people. Right now we are taking our 'new to 70' guildmates into Karazhan and turning their Steamvaults gear into epics in 2-3 weeks. We are still DEing about half the loot thoug, which is what leads to the burnout.

Another big issue about smaller raids is what happened to us last nigth on Nightbane. One person disconnects and doesnt return. Wait 15 minutes while we replace them with an appropriate person who isn't already locked to Kara. Then someone AFKs and we stand around again. In 40 man raids you could have 15 people braindead or being played by their 3 year old cousin and still be successful. Now if one of your members decides to take the dog for a walk, the whole raid is screwed.

Its easy to get frustrated and burn out, when stuff like that happens, but in general, I am really enthused by Gruul and Serpentshrine. I think the raid sceen is going to get much more exciting as time goes on, but Karazhan is definatly a test of willpower no succumb to the torture for such marginal gear improvements.

I still find myself rolling on epic 'upgrades' to my Dungeon 3 drops and then just tossing them in the bank because they are really sidegrades or downgrades. I only save them out of hopes that Blizzard figures out they screwed up itemization royally.
 

I didn't even bother signing up for our Karazhan raids next week.

A 25-man raid group should have about 30-32 consistent raiders with 3 tanks. To get there, you need to be able to field 3 simultaneous Karazhan runs. These 3 runs each require 2 tanks, for a total of 6 tanks. When we graduate to the 25-man content, what do we do with the extra 3 warriors/druids? They can't really respec to dps/healing, the gear they've collected is for tanking.

So, to be fair to everyone, we have tried to avoid recruiting more tanks. On a good night, we get 4 online, which means 2 Karazhan runs, and about 10-12 people left out in the cold. On most nights, we get 2-3 tanks online, which means 20+ people who have to PuG even a 5-man due to the lack of tanking in-guild.

I believe I am going to send the Blizzard content designers a calculator, as they seem to have abandoned even the most basic of mathematical skills.
 

Well I've basically given up on Blizzard. At every turn they show how much they are catering to the significantly lower population. Hardcore, raiders, whatever you call them. I took a few looks at the attuning diagrams and then just threw up my arms in the air and gave up. Grinding and keying forever, lots of tough group and instance quests just to set foot in instances where it's more of the same.

I guess I could have kept playing had there been some sort of equalizer in PvP, but there it's just more of the same as in the rest of the game. With so many tiers of equipment upgrades we "casuals" don't stand much of a chance against someone that barely sleeps just to be able to grind for better equipment, be it PvP or PvE loot.

At the moment I've got about two months of subscription time left. After that I think I will not renew, because right now I'm hardly playing WoW at all anyway. Should I renew I guess I'll just try to level an alt or get ganked in one of the bg's a few times by people with deep purple loot.

Nah, bring on something better where max level actually means some sort of equalizer.
 

If Karazhan loot isn't all that much better than high-end blue loot, then why can't you skip it and go directly to the next raid dungeon?

I haven't seen anyone point this out, so...

After hitting 70, the raid dungeons available to you are Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon, and Karazhan. In order to get into Serpentshrine you need to have cleared Gruul and Karazhan. The Eye requires killing Magtheridon. Hyjal requires Serpentshrine and The Eye. Raid gear might be comparable to heroic and quest gear, but you need to clear these for the draconian attunement chains for the next raid dungeon.

Personally, I raid to see the content. Leading the raids gives much more satisfaction than being another cog in the machine that was MC or BWL... but yes, it is tiring. If we stay in Karazhan for too long, I will almost definitely get burned out and switch over to LOTRO for some time. But still, Karazhan is far and above the coolest-designed dungeon I've seen, and I'm glad I've been able to experience it, regardless of the ridiculous respawn rate.
 

My raiding days are numbered.

And from what I've read about Serpentshrine Cavern, others will be too.

People beg to get attuned and into Karazhan - then they see the trash and stop showing up.

If SSC is AQ40 trash on crack (even hardcore guilds are complaining) there is no way I can see "casual" hardcore guilds like the one I'm in doing it.
 

I'm one of the leaders in what is probably classed as a casual guild. We play for fun and understand people have real lives so the game comes second.

I personally played WoW since day 1 and was a big raider in a different guild pre-TBC. We cleared ZG/AQ20/MC/Ony but as you will know the effort required in a hardcore raiding guild is immense. Eventually I left and helped start up a far more casual guild.

We are only 55 people in total and have no high level druids or shamans. Right now we have 28 lvl 70's with another 18 above 60. Around 20 of us are attuned for Karazhan.

Many of the guild have little or even no experience at raiding. We did manage to clear ZG and some of AQ20 before TBC came out.

This week we made our first attempt at Karazhan. We found it to be very hard but we got the first boss down which was a huge achievement for us. We've also put in decent attempts at some of the others.

Many of us are still in greens with a few blues and so I think the Karazhan drops are going to be well received by us.

Overall there's a growing enthusiasm for raiding in our guild.

I can appreciate that the current end game is very different from the old one. Players that saw most of the old end game seem to be the ones suffering the most with the changes in TBC.
 

Pre-BC, I was in a guild who was working on Razorgore attempts. I left that guild a few days after I hit 70, and joined a smaller, newer guild made of Naxx raiders from large guilds pre-BC. There are about 30-35 of us in the guild. While my old guild(of more than 100 people) is stuck on Moroes in Karazhan, we've just downed Maulgar and are working on Gruul's, and in this guild I actually spend *LESS* time raiding than I would have in my old guild, as we clear all of Kara in one night instead of dragging it out into multiple nights of attempts.

I for one am enjoying the boss fights of BC, if not the annoying trash. Kara and Gruul's are a helluva lot more fun than MC/ZG/AQ ever was (the extent of my raid experience pre-BC)
 

One thing which I know would switch perspectives of a lot of people: how many people of the western world playing WoW has seen the "old" high end Instances inside? Ie. like Strath, entered them, not even cleared them. Just peeked into the gate.

The number is so low that all the high end stuff we talk about here becomes to unimportant to the success of WoW that its scary.
 

Karazhan raid id is a killer for me, with the one week reset. Ten people means that depending on who is online, I might not get to play with my close friends on the first night in - which means I'm locked out for a week.

Maybe when we're back to 25 mans, it'll warm up a little but right now it just isn't *there* for me. I'd rather run 5 mans.

Also, the class balance needed for Karazhan, at least at the stage we're at, is painful and frustrating.
 

Anonymous hat gesagt...
Pre-BC, I was in a guild who was working on Razorgore attempts. I left that guild a few days after I hit 70, and joined a smaller, newer guild made of Naxx raiders from large guilds pre-BC. There are about 30-35 of us in the guild. While my old guild(of more than 100 people) is stuck on Moroes in Karazhan, we've just downed Maulgar and are working on Gruul's, and in this guild I actually spend *LESS* time raiding than I would have in my old guild, as we clear all of Kara in one night instead of dragging it out into multiple nights of attempts.

I for one am enjoying the boss fights of BC, if not the annoying trash. Kara and Gruul's are a helluva lot more fun than MC/ZG/AQ ever was (the extent of my raid experience pre-BC)


Why does the queen think the whole world smells of soap?


Small wonder you are enjoying your time more... a collection of leet players that are up to the task, concentrate and had better gear to begin with. You, sir, are comparing apples and beans. The challenge for a raid leader of a 100 man casual gamer guild is far higher than for a guild where you can dictate the # of classes, skillsets and equipment priorities.
 

Teut if you read further in my post you'd have read: "You had better be doing honor to get Exalted rewards from each faction or get the crafted items. They didn't call the newly released gear T4 because they felt like it, it's T4 because it's the next stuff in line AFTER T3."

So when you say you have the Exalted Sha'tar 1H Mace you fell right into that statement.

Again, go into Kara with quest reward greenies (unless you have them for an ABSOLUTE SPECIFIC REASON), be prepared to have your teeth knocked out. Spend the time to gear up a little or have it already on hand T2 (some depending on your spec) or T3, then you have a fighting chance assuming you can play your class and your raid is capable of CC and OT of 5 man pulls.

The biggest problem is people complain about how hard it is when they go in there unprepared. THAT is the real problem.
 

I honestly don't understand the current common sentiment on the forums and blogs about Karazhan being too hard for an entry-level raid. Blizzard designed the new smaller raids in response to the casuals complaining they did not have time to organize 40 people to raid, and instead wanted smaller, faster raids that people could accomplish not through numbers but through personal skill. Well now that's happened, why all the complaining? The incremental gear upgrades are also a direct response to the complaining that the endgame was raid-or-die, that you just couldn't compete with raiders due to the large gear discrepancy pre-BC...Again, Blizzard has fixed that by making raid gear only slight upgrades. I guess you just can't please them all.
 

I play two level 70 characters (prot tank, mage) a total of about 20-30 hours/week. If/when I ever see the inside of Karazhan it'll be months from now. MC attunement was easy, but Karazhan... forget it... maybe I'll get there eventually I guess.

Whatever purples I get are going to be faction or pvp rewards, at least I can get those without attunement.
 

Old world, my guild cleared to C'Thun (would have gotten him down, too, if all of the word from the beta test hadn't killed the desire of many) and also cleared over 1/2 of Naxx. I quit the game before the expansion, and when I came back I committed to taking things slowly and casually.

I'm still in contact with lots of friends in raid guilds. I've gotten 3 invitations (as a rogue) from raid guilds looking for warm bodies. To me, this is hilarious. Back when I first started raiding, it was some cutthroat business as a rogue trying to get a spot anywhere. I'm not getting invitations now because I know people, I'm getting invitations because people know I've raided and am not currently in a raid guild. They'd send an invite to anybody in the same situation.

One of the guilds has had a standing post on our realm forums for 2 months trying to find members. They've finished Kara. They've defeated (with the help of another guild since they couldn't field 25 people) Gruul. They're all really nice people and are basically begging people to join for free epics.

I can't tell you the reason things are different, but they are. Myself, Karazhan sounds interesting to me. Nothing else that I've seen/read about really piques my interest. I have little doubt that I'll get opportunities to see Karazhan at some point in the future, so why be in a hurry? I still have plenty of stuff to get done first.
 

I honestly don't understand the current common sentiment on the forums and blogs about Karazhan being too hard for an entry-level raid. Blizzard designed the new smaller raids in response to the casuals complaining they did not have time to organize 40 people to raid, and instead wanted smaller, faster raids that people could accomplish not through numbers but through personal skill. Well now that's happened, why all the complaining? The incremental gear upgrades are also a direct response to the complaining that the endgame was raid-or-die, that you just couldn't compete with raiders due to the large gear discrepancy pre-BC...Again, Blizzard has fixed that by making raid gear only slight upgrades. I guess you just can't please them all.

Hardcore raiders are complaining about the loot. Hardcore raiders are complaining about Kharazhan being a 10 man.

The problem is Kharazhan is a bottleneck for truly hardcore raid guilds and it's requirements (keying) are onerous to the smaller family guilds. It's poor implemented all around. The complaints about this are coming from both sides.

Blizzard should have ditched the retarding keying requirements and saved it for the truly hardcore 25 mans. There should be a few Aq20/ZG ish 10 mans in the game that are fun, give decent loot and aren't required for anything. These could have been the stepping stone into the bigger raids.

Back on topic, I don't raid anymore because I hated the mentality it got me into. I was raiding 5-6 times a week, always trying to get my DKP up and be there when somthing I wanted dropped. It was detrimental to my life. I spent two summers indoors because of raiding taking over my life. I won't raid in any game ever again.

Now TBC comes out and Blizzard has a keying system which is so confused you need a graph to keep everything straight. Their challenging instances are tuned to force everyone into a min/max role and there is little space for me to play my shaman unless I go resto. PvP is imbalanced. The whole thing is a mess.
 

I used to raid. I quit the game last October-November. Came back about a month before TBC. Played for a while after TBC (no raiding), until about a month ago. Got my Warlock to 69 and my Paladin to 64. Now I've stopped all WoW and I'm into Titan Quest Immortal Throne. Not sure if that helps you with trends but that's my story thus far.
 

I played when WoW first came out, open beta and release, and I used to raid. I quit the game a few months after the guild I was in downed Onyxia and was almost at Ragnaros. I came back for BC, played around for 6 months, got to 70 again on a priest, and hated the nerfs, hated the raiding, hated being outhealed by hybrids, hated not being able to PvP heal with the same spec as the hybrid healers could. Then I quit, and never looked back.

Oh and Titan Quest is pretty fun, and I haven't gotten the expansion for it yet.
 

Question: Is the enthusiasm for raiding flagging?

Answer: Yes (for obvious reasons stated above)

Outlook: The Black Temple and beyond will most likely revive the old raid scene leaving the current mess behind if Blizzard can get the loot issue fixed up.
 

I was going to chime in with something here... then I realized it was about 2:30 and time for me to go home and play LotRO
 

1) Attunements.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Instance_attunement_(Burning_Crusade)

2) The loot from KZ is a downgrade from what I currently have, at least for a Hunter, and I'm still mostly in blue quest gear and T2. There are only three items from KZ I'd want.
It's partly the slower increase in item levels, but the itemization team made some questionable stat choices for a few classes. T3 doesn't have as much AP, but it has more balanced stats overall, even considering socketing. If I was going for PvP right now, I'd rather be in 5 T3 than 5 T4. T4/T5 isn't much of an upgrade over D3, and is a downgrade in a few cases (shoulders). T4/T5 are sidegrades to each other for Hunters. T5 has a little more crit and one better set bonus. That's it. Is it worth hours and hours of work? Personally, I'd say no.

3) The slower gear upgrades mean that if you have to farm consumables for a boss, you'll continue having to farm them for a long, long time. Back in MC and BWL, I was willing to farm for Fire Protection Pots because I knew that the raid would earn enough FR gear in a month or two and could stop using FR pots. In BC, I suspect we'd be farming pots for Gruul and Magtheridon until we're already farming pots for SSC. The encounters you need consumables for may change, but I don't see a time when we'll stop needed them altogether.

4) Expectations. I was expecting raids that were tuned and designed as well as Naxx or Ossirian, but were as short, fun, and casual-friendly as BWL, ZG, or AQ20. Blizzard has shown in the past that they can make awesome boss fights and casual friendly instances. I was hoping they could do both at once.
But the new content is as well tuned and designed as AQ40...with all the casual-friendly trash clears and hours spent traveling back and forth of AQ40. I didn't like AQ40.
 

The guild my rogue is in has been helping people get attuned to Kara for about 2 weeks or so and from what I have heard, many of the members are happy with the way things are progressing. Our guild formed post BC so we started with different goals vs an already established 40 man raid guild who had to adapt to raid changes.
 

I have been to Karazhan, and while it was fun for the first few times, the fun factor was quickly lost to raid balance, bickering over the 10 spots and especially how painfully underpowered some classes are compared to others.

At the top of the wanted list: holy paladins, shadow priests, mages, warlocks, prot warriors, druids.

At the bottom of the wanted list: enhancement shamans, holy priests, retribution paladins, rogues, fury warriors.

You can quickly see how ugly everything has become for healing priests and melee classes, which were popular and well-loved playstyles that are now completely fucked over.
 

What has made “endgame” tiring for me is not merely the structure that Blizzard put on it, but more the attitude of many people WoW gaming community in general when they hit end game now. I wrote an article about if for WoW Chronicles recently. The addition of five man instances seemed at first that it would address the casual gamer and make the end game more accessible, but the reverse seems to have happened.

The fewer people you have in a raid, the more essential each person's role in that raid becomes. This is the first time I have heard both general and guild chat filled with "looking for tank and healer". It used to be on my paladin that I was always relegated to the back row of any group or raid with the role of healer and buff bot. This is the first time I have not only had people ask me to tank with my paladin, but literally beg me to tank with my paladin.

I thought the inclusion of heroic level instances was a great idea. Until the first time that I joined a group going to Steam Vaults, only to be told that they would rather disband the group and not run the instance if they couldn't run it in heroic mode. But the reason I wanted to run the instance in the first place was to get to revered reputation with the proper faction to get the key to run the instance in heroic mode. The five man instances have actually had a reverse affect for many guilds. There are no longer any large instances that large groups of people can go to. There are no longer any instances that even just TEN people can go to without excruciatingly long quest chains to get "keyed."

There are always those people in every guild who are able to make the big rush to 70, get "keyed up" for Karazahn and start making the regular 10 man runs there.

But what happens with the rest of the guild?

What happens to those players who actually took time to enjoy the content? Those who didn't push to make it to 70 as fast as humanly possible? What about those players whose characters don't fall into the "healer, tank, DPS" categories? Many of them get left behind. I hear a lot of people talk about being left out while guildmates in key classes run five man instances and Karazahn. It has caused bad feelings and people who are left out, while others get included in an inner circle.
 

Soooo...out of curiosity...how many people are actually "having fun" here?
 

For me it's a combination of things - burnout, didn't exactly love it before and OMG figuring out TBCattunements is like a science project now.

I've joined two guilds since TBC both of which have imploded. I'm sure Blizzard thought about the raid changes - I don't think they pulled a number out of their ass, as much as I'd love to acuse them of it. But I guess they couldn't foresee how un-even leveling would combine with raid size changes and people wanting one of the new races, would all perculate into mass drama for many, many guilds.

Now when you factor in that some players are barely hanging on to their enthusiasm for WOW and that stupidly intricate attunement scheme in TBC, it justa causes a complete watershed affect for some people and they have decided to say, "Uncle" on raiding.

And TBC kicking the old dungeons to the curb didn't help either, as it demotivated a LOT of raiding groups. In the end, people who really love raiding will find their way to each other and continue on as before.
 

You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps, obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled and quest rewards which are out of synch with the amount of time and effort required to complete them.

From here...

:)
 

Soooo...out of curiosity...how many people are actually "having fun" here?

I have. As the only holy paladin in one of two karazhan groups my guild is rolling, i always have a saved spot and i have almost no competition for loots.

That said i do see major problems the way WoW is turning to. I did not expect a second UBRS, where you can enter with 10 randoms and leave with shiny epics. To design difficult raid content for just 10 players, you need to force specialisation, if not 10 focused (e.g. correct specced) players finish the whole instance in a week, just like they did in UBRS.

So i do like content to push players into their main niche. If you want all classes to be viable in 10man raid environment, you need to cut it down to 4 classes or throw out the pvp. Then you can have retribution paladins with rogue dps, wich would be viable in karazhan.

I have no idea what is going on with Blizzard right now, cause now everyone can see major problems within this expansion, problems for any player type, hardcore struggle just as much as casuals.

The expectations for patch 2.1 to fix all that crap are unachievable.

They will adress many problems, but also many will remain. They will fix the loot and probably some class issues, but i doubt that with patch 2.1 karazhan will turn into UBRS II. I do like to see 10man bosses with the complexity above anything in MC/BWL, it really is fun for me.
 

No raiding for me, why? Because I have a life, I can't spend an hour or more sitting at wow just to wipe or be called a noob just because I favor the Frost spec for my mage instead of the instant-gratification fire mage.
 

Frost spec is nice for ice block, and don't listen to idiots that want to tell you how2play.

Oh and I got Titan Quest Immortal Throne and it is AWESOME! I stayed up all night playing it. Haven't had this much fun in a long time!
 

Anyone noticed less competition for loots as hybrid classes actually get a choice in what spec they want to run? and there are no longer 4 other people same class/spec as you to compete with?

I know kara seem hard now, it will be nub sauce soon enough. I think the complexity of the encounters might raise the bar a little. I also think the difficulty of the five mans has increased ten fold... that last guy in Alcatraz is a bitch. Its probably because im still wearing some greens though.

The point is everything is easy when your over geared. Most of the players here probably had 2 go 2 BWL or higher to find a challenge. Now they are finding them at everystep, which is to be expected with the amount of new content.

BTW frost spec is far superior to fire... anyone who says different is noob
 

First, many of you are incorrectly referring to "Tier 3". Tier 3 was and will, continue to be, Naxx gear. The instance blues you refer to are "Dungeon Set 3" or "D3".

As for raiding, Blizz blew it on this. Instead of offering an option for everyone (can you say "current karazhan ' heroic and an 'easier' version for casuals"?) they decided to bend over the big guilds and force them into smaller guilds. People are watching friends leave for other guilds because of numbers, etc. Blizz forgot the #1 reason we play: we like the people we run with. Force us to run with fewer and we're not gonna be as happy...
 

Example: my main healer weapon is the revered MAce from Shatar, +300 heal. Show me a better one. If you list one with 330 it will have less stats or no mana reg on it. See what I mean?

http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=28522

drops of maiden i would say thats a nice improvement over your shatar rep mace.

Seems alot of haters here maybe just cos your guilds are all a bit sucky and everyone hates things they are not as good at, its just normal human behavior tho so dont worry too much.