Take a look at the keying requirements for serpentshire, tempest, and hyjal on wowwiki. It is going to be extremely time consuming to get new players through some of these.

/bump

For our Illustrious Leader of Doom!

/agree
As much as I love the new Expansion... it has ruined allot of aspects about the fun of WoW.

The leader of the Horde raiding guild I was part of just quit playing due to the stupid changes happening to this once fantastic game. Big friendly/mature/family guilds are getting destroyed because of all these changes. When you see players who have been playing this game since it's beginning leaving you know something is seriously wrong in the direction Blizz has taken.

Here's a quote from the raid leader who left: (this was posted on the guilds forums)
(btw he is a druid and have removed references to the guild name/realm)

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Q u o t e:
Because of the druid nerfs in addition to the general guild level of unhappiness I have decided to take a break from WOW for a while. Not sure how long but we will see. Not really having the fun I want to have in my "recreation" time.

Not leaving the guild, still respect and enjoy _____ just don't appreciate the changes Blizzard have made.

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Q u o t e:
This is 99% about the druid nerf which makes tanking Karazhan impossible. (the only threat we have left is a bleed effect which is of course useless in Karazhan).

I don't care that they nerfed bear DPS. No need but that is OK. But the pinhead morons left at Blizzard (most everyone who developed the game left when the corporate parent pocketed all the cash from WOW and did not invest in the game) can't design a game to save their lives. In 18 months of beta testing they did nothing to druids except a last minute completly untested nerf to threat. Only DPS was left to generate threat. Now they have removed that too. Again with zero testing and zero rationale. If the nerf had been to lower health, lower armor, and lower DPS and up threat I would have taken it but this is just stupid. My contempt really has no bounds. They upped rage which was needed for warriors but is pointless for the MT in heroic instances or raids becuase we in effect have infinite rage.

The comment about the guild was basically:

If we had been in a nice supportive place that was happy people were making progress I might have just given in and become a healbot.

As I noted - I like ________ I think overall the people are first rate. I hope you guyes do great and I will see you around sometime. How long depends on just how high my disgust at Blizzard stays. Right now very high.

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I also hope these nerfs I read about priests currently being tested on the PTR's don't happen cause that's going to be yet another stupid move by Blizz.

Wake up BLIZZ!!! Stop destroying your game! We love this game!! So please stop this path you have taken!

I agree with your sentiments on the attunements and consumables. Time and again, I've tried to get that one person I need in a raid, only to find they're still on the Arcatraz part of the key or something stupid. I can't imagine what this is going to be like for the actual hard attunements. ("Yeah, I still need Gruul." "Oh, FUN.")

I also really dislike the "World of Consumablecraft" - I'm going to have to level up an alt with herbalism/alchemy just to support the DPS elixirs and flasks I need to beat certain encounters, even in Karazhan. Reading the forums from the frontline progression guilds, it's only going to get worse. Honetly, I'd be happy with an arena-like approach of not having any consumables for raiding. It makes the encounters easier to tune for Blizzard and saves me money. :-P

The same things are occurring in our casual-but-successful raiding guild. People are dropping out of the game like flies (especially anyone with a heal spell--we're down to three priests, big shock there), our tank-druids are quitting or getting ready to. And even though we're down to a much smaller 'core' group of raiders now (100% due to BC attrition), we still have too many people to really do anything together as a guild. The thrill of the 40-man night is gone as we divide up into 5-mans for keying and rep, and 10-mans for the lucky people who get the night's Kara slots. There is no real raiding occurring, and that team-effort feeling is gone.

I thought the change to raiding would be good--would weed out the less interested people, etc, make things tighter and more fun. Instead the expansion is breaking the guild--chasing away healers and viable offtanks (which means lots of people unable to get even 5-man runs in), complex keying and attunement which causes people to get very stressed if they feel they're being 'left behind'; meanwhile the people who have already done the keying processes multiple times are already getting burned out, with nothing to look forward to except winning the occasional lottery for a Kara slot. And as mentioned, the Kara loot so far is a joke. Void crystals, anyone?

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Q u o t e:
/agree
As much as I love the new Expansion... it has ruined allot of aspects about the fun of WoW.

The leader of the Horde raiding guild I was part of just quit playing due to the stupid changes happening to this once fantastic game. Big friendly/mature/family guilds are getting destroyed because of all these changes. When you see players who have been playing this game since it's beginning leaving you know something is seriously wrong in the direction Blizz has taken.

Here's a quote from the raid leader who left: (this was posted on the guilds forums)
(btw he is a druid and have removed references to the guild name/realm)




I also hope these nerfs I read about priests currently being tested on the PTR's don't happen cause that's going to be yet another stupid move by Blizz.

Wake up BLIZZ!!! Stop destroying your game! We love this game!! So please stop this path you have taken!

---

Leave the druid crap out of this post. This post is about raiding and the associated difficulty versus rewards. That being said, I have listened to some of the horror stories from people in my guild about Kharazan. Mages getting crit one-shotted for 15000 from a trash mob and other such nastiness.

Haha!

Thinking Raiders TOLD everyone this would happen in TBC.

"How are we going to split 9 classes into 25?"
"Oh, wait, we're going to see guild fragmentatiion"
"Great. Now our poor-playing buddies are even more shafted because of individual contributiion; we can't run into MC anymore and raid for fun knowing that we have a bunch of crummy players and it won't matter"
"Ohwait. The loot *@%#!s are going to quit in droves if they can't upgrade more."

Yes. we knew these problems would show up, and they did. Bad move on your part, Blizzard.

This thread summarizes the consumable issues, but does not include the upcoming attunement problems.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=79224546&sid=1&pageNo=1

Im sorry but if getting the key to karazhan is too hard for you, you really dont deserve to get into karazhan.

It takes about 10hrs to get keyed, max. Shadow labs is not hard, arcatraz you dont even need to go all the way through to get the key part, same with steamvaults. The medivh encounter in black morass takes all of 30 minutes to complete in a decent group.

I am a casual raider in greens and blues and honestly thought getting onyxia attunement was harder than getting keyed for karazhan.

So I am sorry, I dont think it needs to be made any easier.

Keying for Karazhan is simple.

Keying for Serpentshire requires a Gruul kill, which is not simple. Keying for Tempest keep requires completing several heroics, which requires revered with the appropriate factions. Here is what I am talking about:

http://www.worldofraids.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2698

And remember, the problem isn't going to be getting you raid core through these encounters, it will be getting new recruits through them in a couple of months.

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Q u o t e:


Mmmmm. I'll believe that when I see all the winning PvP teams voluntarily covered in as much resilience gear as they can put on. I don't think that's actually how it's going to be, unless they buff resilience quite a bit. Oh well. As for T6, well, could be, I still don't think it needs to be more powerful. More specialized, certainly. It's already amazingly attractive, far more so than any other armour in the game, if the Warrior T6 is anything to go by. I'm more worried about 150 DPS weapons, wildly overpowered trinkets and the like than T6. I mean, T6 for Warriors is likely to be super-defensive, for Priests, super-healy, and so on, and whilst some of that might help a little in the BGs, it's more likely to be the giant evil axe of doom, or the +1800 spell damage suit for Mages that will make people weep.

As I said though, I agree with most of what you're saying, especially about consumables and not making every boss-fight require mind-numbing levels of perfection. Some should, certainly Illidan should, but most, seems to be the case now? Ugh. Makes me remember why I quit raiding. When you only get to play 4-5hrs/day tops, it's not fun to spend that entire time in a raid dungeon dying over and over as your guild learns some particularly hideous encounter which also requires a nuclear megatonne of consumables.

---

Why should my PvE content be nerfed because of some cry baby's pvp whines? Blizzard should just auto change everyone into a set of basic armor upon entering the arena/bg so my content won't have to be runed by some kid who can't deal. Better yet, how about we reset all stats to 1 and give everyone a 1dps sword and no other gear at all, then no class/race/playstyle will have any advantage! That would be the most fair!

<face in palm>

Well, I had a nice short post written in response to this. The forums ate it. GG blizzard forums.

I have 2 problems with Karazhan:

1. The group requires 2 priests. So if I want to take my guild that used to run ZG and AQ20 every week, I have to split them into two groups, and one gets no priests and one gets two. Excellent.

2. Cleaves and AoE's. There is no reason to bring any non-tanking melee to Karazhan, and every reason to leave them on the bench in favor of any ranged dps, including Oomkins. I know this is being looked into. I expect it will get fixed at the same time as engineering and spellfire cloth: In the next patch. No not this one, the next one. Not this one either, the next one. The one after this. BAH.

Suggestions:
Fix crowd control here so it can be done by someone other than the least populated class in the game, which makes up less than 10% of the server population at 70 has to make up 20% of my raid. Real suggestions: Make the mobs not undead. Put Paladin turn undead on a more reasonable cooldown, and/or make it root instead of fearing. Give mages an effective CC against undead, or make their existing CC work specifically against these undead. 4 solutions. Pick one.

Cleaves and AoE's: I know rogues have been complaining about this. It surprises me that it's not more vocal. YOu know what to fix, now fix it.

If the OP is correct in his speculation that it will be next xmas before guilds 'beat BC "content. Why even bother unless your at the top of the content chain. Simply wait it out and get better than Karazan gear stats. From green items and quest drops in the next expansion. The laugh at the people who were "uber of the uber " for a whole 6 weeks after spending 2000 hours + raiding and farming for BC.

I think some of the trouble is this.. at least, this is how it seems to be on my server...

1. Post expansion, MANY brand new 'expansion' guilds are being made. Plenty of pre-expansion raid guilds have broken up because people leave and go to one of these. "Hey.. I get to be main tank!" etc.

2. These guilds ALL have recruiting posts, they flood the forum server. Rather than joining forces, people are pigeon-holing into small, very focused guilds. So we double (or triple, or more) the NUMBER of guilds who are fighting over the best players on the server.

3. Ramparts can be pugged. Same with underbog, etc. But the time you hit shadow labs, pugs are no longer really cutting it. And that's not THAT far into 'progression'. So, if you don't happen to be in a tight knit group, prepare to be frustrated. REALLY prepare for it if you intend to rep up for heroic, or actual raids. Some of the frustrations are those people are talking about in this thread.

4. The people who did used to be 'casual' players, are finding out there is not much casual to DO in expansion after you get to a certain point. So they get frustrated, bored, unhappy, etc. Some reroll (a classic move when you are frustrated) but rerolling, and being launched back into the 'old' content all over again, is the death of the game for some people who never rise back up from it.

5. End result: LOTS of small guilds, lots of casual-minded people discovering they are no longer so casual. Meantime the ex-uber-guilds from that server are still miles ahead of anyone else, so nothing has really changed anyway from that standpoint. Expansion is fun, but the abrupt ramp-up in difficulty shocks a lot of people.

Things are not that grim, overall. Naturally with such a slew of content the pot was going to get stirred. I hope that over time adjustments are made to normalize things.. this is all brand new content.. think of how long it took bliz to balance out the original game content, outlands is huge.

We'll see how it goes!

Karazhan isn't that bad.



My guilds A group uses some consumables and has downed Prince.

My guilds B group(that I'm in) have downed Prince and only our first Prince kill did we use a few flasks. Personally, all I used was a few pots, Wrath of the Titans book, and 1 of the 150 Wizard Oil charges I have. I think Prince is downable w/o Flasks/Elixirs. Only other fight consumable wise we used was some Greater Frost pots on Aran.

C Group is on Prince with minimal consumable use.

D group is just starting now.



I can't comment on 25-man past Maulgar(we downed Maulgar w/o much consumables) though.




>>>1. The group requires 2 priests. So if I want to take my guild that used to run ZG and AQ20 every week, I have to split them into two groups, and one gets no priests and one gets two. Excellent.


I'm often the only Priest in my Kara raid. Sometimes we have a Holy priest too.



>>>>2. Cleaves and AoE's. There is no reason to bring any non-tanking melee to Karazhan, and every reason to leave them on the bench in favor of any ranged dps, including Oomkins. I know this is being looked into. I expect it will get fixed at the same time as engineering and spellfire cloth: In the next patch. No not this one, the next one. Not this one either, the next one. The one after this. BAH.


Have you done Aran? Good luck w/o melee DPS. We have a Rogue and DPS Warrior in every Kara raid. You could do without them, on all but Aran, but they aren't liabilities.

The interdependence between 5, 10 and 25 man instances for attunements was a bad idea imo.

---

Q u o t e:
Well, I had a nice short post written in response to this. The forums ate it. GG blizzard forums.

I have 2 problems with Karazhan:

1. The group requires 2 priests. So if I want to take my guild that used to run ZG and AQ20 every week, I have to split them into two groups, and one gets no priests and one gets two. Excellent.

2. Cleaves and AoE's. There is no reason to bring any non-tanking melee to Karazhan, and every reason to leave them on the bench in favor of any ranged dps, including Oomkins. I know this is being looked into. I expect it will get fixed at the same time as engineering and spellfire cloth: In the next patch. No not this one, the next one. Not this one either, the next one. The one after this. BAH.

Suggestions:
Fix crowd control here so it can be done by someone other than the least populated class in the game, which makes up less than 10% of the server population at 70 has to make up 20% of my raid. Real suggestions: Make the mobs not undead. Put Paladin turn undead on a more reasonable cooldown, and/or make it root instead of fearing. Give mages an effective CC against undead, or make their existing CC work specifically against these undead. 4 solutions. Pick one.

Cleaves and AoE's: I know rogues have been complaining about this. It surprises me that it's not more vocal. YOu know what to fix, now fix it.

---

1. What encounters in Karazhan NEED 2 priests? ZERO. NONE. NADA. I don't think there's a single boss fight in the instance that needs 2 of any class. 2 priests makes Moroes a joke, but can still be easily done with 1 (haven't tried it without one, but a 2nd pally BOP will remove an extra garrote if you can kill the 4th add in less time than it takes for Moroes to vanish). We've done every boss up to Nightbane with 1 of each class and doubling up on a warlock/mage/pally/priest (depends on who's online). You don't NEED 2 warlocks for Aran.

2. A well played rogue is still going to be up on the top of the damage meters on any boss fight in Karazhan. Sure they take more damage than a caster, but they also have their upsides. I'm still trying to figure out what fight they don't do well with. Probably a bad idea to have them on Romulo, but I think I'd rather them kicking Julianne. They take consecrate damage against Maiden, just heal them. They also DPS pretty much the entire fight unlike casters that are stunned for 20% of the fight. Our rogue has no problem surviving and topping the DPS charts (fight dependent, but try to keep up with a rogue against Aran, he will DESTROY everyone else for DPS). We use a feral druid for an offtank. If he's not tanking, he's probably catform doing DPS right alongside with the rogue.

I think they did a great job of balancing Karazhan. You have the choice to heavily stack your raid for each encounter (which will dilute the loot like crazy, lock in 25 people to a single instance ID and cause massive internal drama) or to go in with a VERY balanced group (which is our method).

And how much crowd control do you need in the instance? Our first night in KZ, we had zero priests. We had 2 hunters and about a billion druids. Lots of traps on the pulls to Attumen. Easy boss to drop, even with an oddball group like ours. We didn't have a warlock.... so the pulls to Maiden were hell. But we still got there. And downed her. Our raid was badly balanced for even trying Moroes (wish we had of tried though). After Moroes, what else do you need CC for? Two tanks pretty much can handle everything. Sure a timely banish or shackle can come in handy, but nothing more than 1 on a trash pull.


As for comsumables, we've flasked our MT for Prince, Nightbane & Maulgar. We haven't got Gruul yet, but it's a fight that you need to figure out how cut way back on the shatter damage. Once you can live for 6-7 mins without anyone dying, then you can worry about popping massive amounts of DPS consumables to actually beat him. It'll suck for healers that are popping 3-4 large mana pots per pull, but that's pretty much a given for ANY raid zone.

We did up to an including Aran on our first KZ night of the week last evening. I didn't use anything more than 1-2 mana pots for consumables. We had a first pull wipe at 3% on Aran, it was getting late, so we made our 2nd attempt count. Blowing 4-5g worth of DPS pots isn't a big deal when it's going to save you a 30 min trash re-clear.

And yeah, I hate how the forums seem to have a 10-15 minute auto-logout timer built into them. I've learned to copy my post BEFORE hitting the post button, just in case :P

Thank you SO much, Tigole, for answering these questions. I've been active in another thread, http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=79224546&sid=1&pageNo=1,where we have been discussing much the same issues.

You have no idea how grateful I am.

I'll be able to go back to leveling my main without a specter of doubt hanging over my head.

*bows*