Heroic Modes for Casuals:possible?

[zloitima]

thanks for your responses!
as I stated, we only raid less than 4 hours a week in total and for now we can't choose heroic progression over normal farm, because many people still need gear from last bosses.
and yes, most likely our main problem is instability of our raiders.
a lot of people are having a break till MoP as well, so I was mostly concerned how about far we can go with raiding once MoP comes.
I personally don't mind current state, we're having fun. If even such group as we would be able to do heroics without problems, that would mean that it's just way too easy.

[Wih]

I was in a casual guild in ICC that raided up to 2 nights a week, 3-4 hours each night. We got our drakes well before the last of the buffs, I think we only had H Sindy to go when the 25% buff came in.

Casual or not, how far you progress is down to the quality of your raiders, the quality of your raid team/leader, and how many nerfs the content gets. I'd expect DS to be pretty damn easy even for casual raiders with low experience by the time the nerf hits 30%. It's more down to if your casual raid team has the co-ordination and tenacity to decide to go for progression over farm content if you have low amounts of time to progress in.

[Maelstrom51]

We raid 3-6 hours a week with a pretty unstable roster, and are 5/8 heroic atm.

[Xami]

We also raid for only 2 hours a night, but we do 3 nights a week and we're 5/8H. Granted, we have some experienced/skilled veterans along with more casual players, but I'd say our guild is quite casual. There are plenty of guilds that only raids 2 nights a week but are very well progressed, and those usually do a 4-hour raid.

When it comes to heroics, I think hours per raid matters more than raids per week especially if you have non-hardcore players. Longer raids allow you to get more pulls in on a boss and learn. With heroic bosses being more involved and requiring more learning and adjustments, I think 2 hours is a bit short. Once you're geared enough to do Madness N, any of the first 5 heroic bosses are beatable as long as you can put enough time (1.5+ hours) in one night.

[Larrius]

Why do you even keep playing on Chinese servers if you have problems with roster numbers. I am currently in China myself and play on Oceanic realm without issues, latency is around 150-160ms wich is better than most Aussies have.

And yes, it's doable. One of top guilds on one of oceanic realms is Chinese guild from Guandong/Taiwan I think, they raid like 2 days a week 3 hours a night and they cleared 8/8HM at 5 or 10% nerf, not really sure.

[Deleted]

Short answer: yes.

Long answer:
Casual players and skill difficulty are not relative.
Doesn't matter how casual you are, it's based on how good you are.
For example, look at the "world first" guilds, they'll clear the content in maybe an hour or two once they get the tactics down, whereas "hardcore guilds" could put in 20+ hours a week and still only be 3/8 or so.

[Aerimae]

considering all the changes blizzard made to give the casuals all the stuff hardcore players get...*sigh* you probably can

[Darkfriend]

Do you have good players?

Can you move out of bad stuff?

Do people show up consistently?

Do people learn fights?

How well does everyone know other's classes, and what they are capable of?

How good is your raid leader?

[Dracodraco]

Casual doesn't mean bad. Our alt raid spent 3 hrs a week for 8/8 heroic during 10% nerf, with 2-3 socials (old raiders) who hadn't actually experienced the content before.
If you're bad, then no, heroics won't be an option with that little time. If you're good, then sure, they will be (the nerf makes that very possible now).

[Shpetznaz]

My guild raids only 5hrs a week and we are currently 5/8H, so its definitely possible.

There are a few 8/8H guilds that raid only one night a week, but they are rare.

[Ater]

I play in a casual guild. We have spent 2-6 hours in Dragon soul every week since release, we have never spent more than 6 hours a week and we usually doesn’t spend that much, many weeks we have only 1.5-4 hours. This week we spent about 3 hours clearing 5/8 heroics and the rest on normal with about an hour trying to progress on boss number 6.

During our time in Dragon soul we have used 18 or 19 different players (we do 10 man), so you can’t say that we have a stable group that always use the same setup, but ofc some players are almost always available. If you look at our first madness normal kill and our 5 heroic kills I don’t believe that we have used the same setup for any of does.

We don’t use alts in our raids so the setup is far from perfect, we have used 4 of the same class at some occasions, not because that class was op but because that was the players we had available. We are almost always missing a class or two in our setup and we usually have like 2-3 priests, shamys and warriors.
The lack of “the right” classes is starting to become a problem for us now on heroic Warmaster Blackhorn, we are very meleeheavy and that’s not an easy fight to progress on when you have 4 melee and only 2 ranged.

[Mican17]

Quite a few of you who responded lack reading comprehension skills. His guild isn't spending 4 hours a week on heroic encounters. They're attempting a heroic boss 3-4 times before calling it quits. His question was "how many tries/raid time does 1st heroic kill take?"

[Kurzior]

It really depends on what kind of players you have, and much more than that, how you deal with specific fight mechanics. As a perfect example, my guild worked on heroic Rhyolith for 4 nights (about 2-3 hours each) before we finally killed him. That ended up being something like 25 attempts as we were killing other bosses during the same period. However, one night after getting Baleroc, we decided to try heroic Beth and 1-shot the fight. Part of that was just that we went in with the attitude of trying it and playing it out just to get a feel for the fight. At the end, we lost both tanks and our dk pulled a pretty amazing taunt+nitro-boost-kite to get the kill about 10 seconds past the enrage.

The point is, there's no set formula of 'you must attempt this boss X number of times' to get a kill. Some bosses that are easy for some guilds take weeks for others. Some boss difficulties hinge heavily on raid comp, especially for specific strategies to work out. Just because you know someone who killed a boss 3 attempts in, don't expect the same from your group.

Generally, I would say that if you prepare adequately for the boss, it shouldn't take more than 2-3 raid nights to kill for a decent casual guild. By preparing, I mostly mean that you should know the changes for heroic or the general mechanics and strategy for the fight. If you spend 3 nights on the same fight and still aren't close to a kill, you probably need to take a close look at why that is. Sometimes people get tired and start making more mistakes. Sometimes you don't have the dps/heals/tank-survivability. Sometimes its a simple matter of not having a sufficient grasp of mechanics or a strategy that works for your specific raid setup.

All that said, in your case, I'd suspect a more stable raid group would work wonders. There's just not enough you can say about having 10 people that are used to playing with each other and know each others' tendencies. As a healer myself, I can vouch for the fact that healing with my usual resto druid partner seems infinitely easier than healing with someone I'm unfamiliar with, simply because I understand how he's going to react to most situations and I don't have to cover everything out of concern that my healing partner may not do what I expect.

[curtisc88]

My guild raid 6 hours/2 days a week and we are currently 8/8HM. Depends what you classify as Casual. We are serious about getting bosses down but don't raid often.

[Maleric]

basically every heroic mode is like 1st time for us.

That's your problem right there. To down heroic modes you have to learn them first. And learning them takes a lot of wipes, even for a guild full of fast learners. It's definitely possible to clear content on a casual schedule - there are well over 100 1-2 night/week guilds at 8/8 HM right now, and many more getting there - but these guilds have to go through the same learning process as everyone else. That means spending a few nights wiping per hard mode, on average, until stuff clicks.

If your roster isn't stable enough to bring a consistent group from night to night, you won't down hard modes whether you raid one night a week or five.

[zloitima]

That's your problem right there.

Yes, i guess it all comes to this.
We had quite good run last night though, almost downed Ultra with one of the wipes on 28k (0.03% wipe, who had less?)
then again we had changed to normal because some people had to go and we wanted to down DW.
I will talk to my guildmates and try to combine fully stable group and maybe increase raiding time for MoP.

[Tides]

I think you should be able to do a few of the heroic modes.

Casual players doesnt mean that you are bad players, in my experience those two gets lost in translation and casual turns into bad. This is false!

Morchok, Yor'sahj and Ultraxion are two valid choices for attempting some heroic progression.

---------- Post added 2012-04-12 at 05:52 AM ----------

(0.03% wipe, who had less?)

Saw a screenshot of someone wiped on him - All dead ultraxion casting the big raid wiper all dots fallen off him - Baws on liek 50k hp :P

[Aquamonkey]

Short answer: yes.

Long answer:
Casual players and skill difficulty are not relative.
Doesn't matter how casual you are, it's based on how good you are.
For example, look at the "world first" guilds, they'll clear the content in maybe an hour or two once they get the tactics down, whereas "hardcore guilds" could put in 20+ hours a week and still only be 3/8 or so.

Those world first guilds do hundreds of pulls on each boss before they down them. Most hardcore guilds take about as many, just spread out over a longer period of time and nerfed by the extra gear from taking more lockouts.

[Nephlim]

We raid DS 2 nights a week from 745 - 1030 so only 5 1/2 hours a week and were 6/8, we would be 8/8 but we've had to puga person every week for 4 weeks because of connection issues/RL issue/ etc. So yeah its easily possible. (We got 6/8 on the 5% nerf)

[announced]

if ur guild knows the tactics of heroic yorsarj and can 2 tank it (1 being a blood dk) u should be fine to kill it in 1-2 pulls.. the enrage timer is laughable with the 15% nerf ( we kill it with 2-3 mins remaining now)
morchok same story
zonozz may be difficult due to not everyone killing eyes fast enough..
ultraxion should be doable as heroic mode is really simple with the correct soakers.

so thats around 4/8 heroic u can do easily.