I am the guild leader of a raid guild that was working on C'thun before BC. We only raided three nights a week but were probably the 4-5 most progressed guild on our server. We tried to maintain a very small raiding core, and I think the three nights a week schedule really helped eliminate burnout. I wanted to post on some of the topics our officers are thinking about.

First, let me point out the things I like about BC.

1) The normal-mode 5 mans are very well designed. Short, fun, and with appropriate rewards. A good guild group one shots everything, is done in an hour, and everyone has fun. The difficulty is such that even a non-optimal group composition can do most of the dungeons.

2) I'm enjoying the arena. While our mainly PvE specced 5v5 team is only batting about .500, it is fun and really gets the blood pumping.

3) The questing was more varied and fun than I remember the 0-60 process being.

That said, I see some serious problems on the horizon.

1) The scale up in difficulty from 5 mans to heroic 5 mans and Karazhan is intense. We cleared through MoV on our first timer, then spent this week banging our heads against Romeo and Juliet. Most of our team has the best gear out of 5 mans. Since our gear is not going to get much better, and our skills will improve only so much after 2 years of raiding, the only way we'll be able to reliably beat this level of content is using massive amounts of consumables. At least 2-4 flasks, and food, pots, and elixirs for everyone. This kind of consumable mania is really against the spirit of our three nights a week, semi-casual raiding philosophy. If I need to spend 8 hours a week farming for raids I will likely not raid. Consumables are far too important now.

2) The gear improvements from raiding are too poor. This ties in with the consumable issues - if the tiered sets do not scale up more than we've seen with T3.5->T4->T5 then more difficult content will just mean more consumables, more farming, and less people seeing raid content. The power increases we are seeing from tier gear are really small compared to the benefits of consumables. I think a lot of the problems with itemization/consumables is related to PvP - Blizzard is trying hard to make raiders not overpower dedicated PvPer, but in the process they are making the benefit/reward ratio so poor raiding is going to be hard to sustain. One hour a week (10 5v5 arena matches) gets you a PvP epic every three weeks in the arena. Before BC I'd estimate raiding was something like 30 hours/epic. That is a factor of 10.

3) The keying process is too difficult. I'm not worried about our normal raiders - what I'm worried about is attrition. What happens 5 months down the road when we need a fill in for the black temple? We'll have to recruit someone in blues, run them to revered with 3 factions, then through heroic 5 mans, Kara, etc. etc. etc. Because the keying process is so difficult the top guilds on the server will be even more relentless trying to pry members away from less progressed guild. A suggestion here would be to make the raids like Arcatraz - the person with the key can open the door. If not, replacing members is going to be very, very difficult.

4) There seems to be a distinct lack of 25 man raids that are going to be doable by "normal" guilds. If every 25 man boss is Loatheb, where does that leave us? I understand the desire to provide a challenge for the elite guilds. I understand that you don't want DnT or Nihlium clearing the black temple by July. However, you need to provide 25 man content that can be cleared by a group of adults with lives. Ideally, this would mean:

Perfect execution is not required - 1 or 2 DCs or random deaths (except the tanks) would not mean a wipe
Consumable use is minimized - Only flask the tanks and use mana pots for your internal tuning
Aim for a normal guild to be able to down the encounter after ~10-20 attempts - no barrier encounters
If you are going to make resist fights make the resist gear craftable and relatively easy to get

As a side note, Karazhan violates almost all of these guidelines.

5) Healers. 40 mans seemed to be designed around something like 35% healers. Scaling that to 25 mans means 8 healers. R&J in Kara seems to require at least 3 main healers + 1 hybrid. The problem is very few people actually enjoy being healers. The prayer of mending nerf is just salt in the wound. It is very hard to find enough healers - I'd love to see 25 man content tuned for 6 dedicated healers and maybe 2 hybrids healing on healing intensive fights.

6) Tanks. We were planning on bringing 3 warriors and 3 druids to raids - 2 prot tanks, 1 fury, 1 feral tank, 1 cat, 1 resto druid. The Druid tanking nerf is extreme - I think it basically makes bears worthless against bleed immune mobs (all of Karazhan and likely much more), and their mitigation/HP worse than warriors, especially once T4/T5 becomes common and bears are still in quest greens. This means we'll bring 3 prot tanks, 1 cat, and 1 resto. Maybe a pally OT. As a guild leader I really like the option of having more than one class be a viable MT, but with the druid nerf and warrior buff I don't think I can justify anything but warrior tanks.

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Agree with the OP.

I dont see how many casual raiding guilds...i.e guilds with people who DONT play wow for a living can get through some of this content to get keyed for the 25 mans.

We're running an A and B group for Karazhan at the moment. The B team will not get past the 2nd or 3rd boss, the A group has downed prince. You want to help the casual raiders who've stuck it out with the guild for the past 2 years but there is a greater emphasis on player skill now and you just cant take the suck along everywhere, at least right now.

Either of the two current 25-mans ought to be made easier to get keyed for. Just so guild raids can be more inclusive if nothing else.

In regard to raids, I wish this expansion never came out. I agree entirely, when the rewards from karazhan raids just don't scale with the effort it is taking us to get.

Karazhan and Heroics are not all too hard. Karazhan is pretty easy to beat actually except shade of aran and although we've done the prince we have yet to do netherspite or nightbane(only tried netherspite one night). Some Heroics are ridiculous and some are almost impossible without a mage. I've fully cleared slave pens, underbog, sethekk halls and done the first boss in shattered halls. Underbog and Shattered halls are a lot harder then sethekk or slave pens.

Ok that being said, if you have your 5 man set from dungeons the pieces of non-tier items in Karazhan are either sidegrades or downgrades. Heroic itemization is horrible since you can only have three classes and the epics only drop off the last boss usually and you will have around a 50% chance they will be unusable because you can't go into a 5 man with all 9 classes.

The attunement for things like Hyjal are cool but at the same time it will be impossible to gear up replacements when you're at that level so basically a couple key people quit and your guild is done. Karazhan attunement can be done in a day. Serpentshrine Caverns can be done in a week. I am not fully sure about The Eye and beyond but it seems like it will take a significant time.

I also agree some healing classes are not fun at all to play. As a priest I honestly feel like I'm in raids for buffs and can't compete with other classes. All my heals that are useful and mana efficient are greater heals, prayer of healing and renews. The quick healing style of a shaman or paladin basically negates my heals unless I"m solo healing someone. On top of that druids are still better solo healers. I'm pretty close to quitting my priest except for raids since he sucks so badly to play. We were letting our priests go shadow but with the upcoming nerf it doesn't seem like that's a viable option either. A class that was great in 40 man raids is really feeling left out in 10 mans and who knows what will happen in 25 man raids.

10/10 I couldnt agree more. I really hope some of the more casual players read this.

I agree here about the consumables especially. The game has become to dependant on consumables and I only see it egtting worse as the content gets tougher. My guild has a similar raiding schedule. 3-4 days a week. When Blizzard or someone else puts me on the pay roll, then I will increase game time.

I am glad to see the discussion and what appears to be a move to improve the tiered sets. I was seriously looking to farm AQ40 for items that had better stats, just less armor in some cases. I even have greens with similar or better stats than the T4 items. Armor count seems to be all they considered when making the items and not stats, especially for pallies.

The attunement/keyeing process is far to difficult in my opinion. I think it needs to be scaled back considerably.

Interesting read and brings up some good points.

40 man content wise, my guild killed emps, and cleared the spider wing in naxx.

We're pretty small as well but we raided 5 times a week.

A far as my impressions of BC goes, for the most part i'm enjoying it. I feel a sense of lack of control regarding 5 mans, and getting people grouped up and getting their rep, however karazhan has been a fun instance for me. I haven't had to do any of that crazy consumable farm festing yet. I have been bringing my normal load as a tank (health pots, armor pots, whaetver food i cooked) and i know all the mana users have been bringing mana pots and such, but we haven't done any out of the ordinary farming.

We've cleared to Aran, gotten netherspite to 40%, and had the big bad wolf and romulo and jullianne ( and yes i agree they make you lose faith in the world but we didn't do any mad consumables to beat them)

As far as keying is concerned, most of it ties in with basic questing anyways. So down the road i imagine most people will have a considerable amount of keying done just by doing quests for cash. Gear has been pretty much sidegrades, which sucks but we're killing pretty good so far with what we have.

Only gripe i have is that i'd like to see all the encounters tuned to a set class balance better. Gruuls lair is pretty unfriendly to melee atm.

As a bitter ex-raider (up to the end of AQ40, which is when I'd had enough), I was expecting to be somewhat irked with this post. However, it seems extremely reasonable, and if Blizzard listened to the OP, I might even consider going back to raiding. The consumables were really a killer for me as a so-called "casual" player, farming for them seemed to take up an inordinate amount of time, and if I wasn't doing it, I was merely pushing the responsibility off on to someone else.

It's certainly a tricky proposition to balance these places so that they're a challenge for ultra-hardcore raiding obsessives, and for more typical raiders, though.

The one thing I don't agree with is that the gear gained from raiding needs to be any better. However, I think it's almost a certainty that Black Temple will drop some fairly outrageous upgrades which will then be used to leverage PvP success by raiders, sadly.

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The one thing I don't agree with is that the gear gained from raiding needs to be any better. However, I think it's almost a certainty that Black Temple will drop some fairly outrageous upgrades which will then be used to leverage PvP success by raiders, sadly.

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They way things are headed now I wouldn't worry. There might be one guild/server who sees T6 before Christmas (much like T3 before BC). You're more likely to run into Santa Claus in PvP then a T6 player, and the arena gear is already equivalent or better than T5 for PvP. Resilience is king in PvP.

My guild stopped on Sapphiron pre-TBC and we are pretty hardcore. We raid 5 nights a week and 4 hours each night. That said, I hate farming consumables. It's boring. The Gothik fight is one of the most enjoyable in Naxx. It's a hard encounter and requires lots of coordination but it is doable without consumables.

Another problem in TBC is the drop from 40-man to 25-man and the addition of one class per side. The class balance requirements are such that we need to have around the same number of people show up everyday. The difference is that some are on the bench instead of playing. People are already getting frustrated and bored and the keying requirements will make replacing them much harder later on. Once we get to Mt. Hyjal, we'll likely stop doing Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Lair so the only way we'll get new people is to raid other guilds around or a little behind of our progression of their members.

Oh, and did I forgot to mention the loot sucks?

I agree about the skill factor. In 40-mans you could have 10 idiots and just babysit them. In Karazhan if one person is even lagging a bit, you can wipe.

I also don't like the increased need for healing when moving from 5-man content to harder stuff. In any 5-man one healer is fine. But you'll never see a 2-healer Karazhan group. Why? After 2 years Blizzard has not figured out how to make something hard without just making things hit so hard even with 4 attentive healers your tank can drop like nothing.

I enjoy the challenging content but it's really very one-dimensional.

The keying process I'm not sure is so bad. Really for the 10 and 25-man raids, you WANT someone who's been playing their character at 70 a lot, and if they have, they've already gotten their heroic keys and such, maybe even done some of the attunements.

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They way things are headed now I wouldn't worry. There might be one guild/server who sees T6 before Christmas (much like T3 before BC). You're more likely to run into Santa Claus in PvP then a T6 player, and the arena gear is already equivalent or better than T5 for PvP. Resilience is king in PvP.

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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.

whoa whoa. they told us they were shifting to 25 mans to make each individual's contribution to the raid more important than it was in a 40 man... you talked about 2 peolple D/Cing or afking or something... well dont let them do that. karazhan is not hard, get the right group make up from the start and you can clear it no problem, no flasks. I will admit that heroics is very CC heavy, but this will become easier with more kara gear. the gear from the 10 man raid is indeed better than 5 mans, don't kid yourself. and don't worry so much about the T4 > T5 issue, I'm sure you're not there yet and it will be adjusted before you get there.

2 tanks
3 dedicated healers
1 hybrid healer/DPS
4 full DPS

I'd bring a shadow priest for VE, it saves you needing flasks for your heals.
bring one mage, one warlock, one hunter at least. these will help on moroes, opera, shade. 2 warlocks will help you immensely on shade, where as 2 mages would help on opera, depends on where you have trouble.

all I've seen in raids in TBC is that people have to be better than before, just because one person down is a higher % of your heals/DPS/etc.. it makes sense. if you're hitting a wall in kara, don't give up. try new strats, new class make ups. I'm not going to lie, I know nothing of the PVP rewards because I suck at PVP, and am much better at PVE.

I 100% agree that the attunements are too extreme, but from there I'm just not feeling ya, OP.

Karazahn is not too hard. It's tough, but in a good way. I'm happy to have an end-game instance for small numbers that isn't a freebie, and I wouldn't have it done any other way. Heroics are likewise challenging, but so what? Their entire purpose is to provide long-term end-game for non-raiders. They would be a failure if a slapshod group in half quest greens could clear them easily the first time in.

The 25-mans raids (from what I've read) DO seem too consumable dependant atm, but I have no doubt there will re-tuning and tweaking. My guild is only just getting into Kara so that's a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.

Gear is not going to ramp up as fast in BC, everyone's known that for a while. For tank warriors T4 is a clear upgrade over any available blues, and Blizz just posted that it's being further buffed. I'm not sure what more I could expect.

Seems great overall, to me.

I agree that Kara is doable with a strong guild group. Perhaps R&J is just tuned a bit too hard - if we got a different boss I imagine we would have cleared through Curator on our second timer. You must admit, though, that Kara and heroics are a giant step in difficulty above 5 mans. Romulo's DPS is comparable to the melee twin emp, which in a 10 man is pretty amazing. Add Julianne's DoT healing onto that and you NEED 4 healers, even doing all the spell steal/dispel tricks. I agree with the above poster that making fights hard by just blasting the hell out of the tank is not particularly fun and very hard on the healers.

There need to instances accessable to normal raiding guild without massive consumable requirements. Karazhan and Maulgar probably fit this description. Everything else sounds like 25-man Loatheb

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1) Since our gear is not going to get much better, and our skills will improve only so much after 2 years of raiding, the only way we'll be able to reliably beat this level of content is using massive amounts of "consumables". At least 2-4 flasks, and food, pots, and elixirs for everyone. This kind of consumable mania is really against the spirit of our three nights a week, semi-casual raiding philosophy. If I need to spend 8 hours a week farming for raids I will likely not raid. Consumables are far too important now.

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welcome to the new way blizz takes your money

I think the two biggest issues are consumables and dealing with keying and future attrition. Does anyone have any ideas on how these issues might be addressed?

I'd like to see consumables share the same slot - i.e. one slot that could be filled with a pot, food, elixir, etc. So instead of stacking 4-5 consumables you can only use one. Everything but health and mana pots would take up the slot - so no chugging greater stonescale pots while using flask of the titans. Then retune around this new paradigm.

For attunement I think making only the raid leader (or some fraction of the raid) need the key is very reasonable.

I fully agree with the attunements. It was one thing to rush someone through UBRS and LBRS, or through a BRD to get attuned. Its wholly another thing to have to run three instances, 3 more heroic, a raid (kara), and reputations. This is going to hit Horde the worst because of lower population.

Its been a touchy subject in our guild too and frankly its boring the hell out of people. You've got say 2 kara groups (core raiding groups - 20-30 people). Without fail, each night there are people sitting on the sidelines waiting to get in. I don't even play my main anymore while on the waitlist - alts it is.

I can't help but get the feeling that this new end-game is just more of the same. More 5 mans (which are more viable for progression than ever), more raids, more gear (and crappy at that). Only thing is its harder to participate (less numbers) and is more difficult to attain attunements.

IMO if this is what they had planned they should've just scrapped end-game raiding altogether and focused on 5 man content. They've played with the numbers wherein you have a 10 man dungeon (and not an "easy" one at that) being required for a 25 man raid. 5 man dungeon reps required for 25 man raids. Doesn't do much for guild cohesion when people are excluded. They should've said - 5 man tops - heroics for the uber guilds.