ICC (WotLK) raid system is killing my guild!

[DreadLobster]

Clear Kara, Farm Kara with 2/3 groups
Gear up enough to clear Grull's and Maggy
Make sure everyone had completed the quest line and thus could now go to TK / SSC
Clear TK / SSC
Farm TK / SSC till blizzard added BT
Make sure everyone had done the quest line ready for BT
Clear BT
Farm BT till bliz added Sunwell
Farm BT / TK / SSC till you were actually geared for Sunwell
Clear Sunwell
Quit the game

Where did MH go!?!?!? Memory failure! DERP DERP DERP

[Evilmaniac]

I see this every year and with each new raid/other big content that comes out. It's nothing new your just noticing it now since it is directly affecting you.

[Nesingwary-Eliada]

The only thing I don't like about progression in WotLK is that T7/T8 is completely obsolute for like 90% of level 80's. Sure, people will still ding 80, but rather than do heroics then hit Nax/EoE/OS/Uld they just get all their triumph emblems, deck themselves out in T9 and little other emblem piece, then hop into ToC or ICC. I mean other than maybe zerging a 3D Sarth for the title and shot at the mount, or doing Maly 25 and praying for its 1% Azure Drake drop, there is no point in any of that content when you can be T9/T10 ready from heroics.

THAT is my one and only gripe. Though I'm not defending T7 per say... wasn't the best content, but Uld is wicked and a lot of applicants/puggers ignore end game earlier than 3.3

But hey, I guess you could do the same with badges in BC right? Badges/Emblems just seem so meh to me. They really need to work that system out if they are gonna have like medals or whatever it might be in Cata.

Could just be my server though, I know I'm spouting a lot of generalizations lol.

And no, I wasn't hardcore in BC or Vanilla. I farmed Kara and loved it (still stands as the best 10-man in game currently, imo of course).

[Rüster]

I took my break in Ulduar. Now I'm good until Cataclysm. Probably level slowly. Wait for the first raid instance to get on farm status then get carried through it. Get all the gear I need. Then take a break for the next tier. Come back do third tier content. About the same as I did this expansion. That way I can be fully break'd for the end expansion content.

And let's be honest. Naxx and Ulduar were stupid instances that they threw out early while they were preparing ICC. Icc is fun. I like every boss fight in there. But, ulduar? That place was annoying and gimmicky. TOC was fun. But, the whole having a tournament while a war was going on right next to you didn't make any sense. I did like how tier 9 looked. Minus it was all the same models with different coloring. And there was NO way to tell alliance plate apart.

But, yeah ICC is fun to me because I took my break during the stupid raid.

[Nesingwary-Eliada]

I personally think ICC and Ulduar are the two best raids to come out this expansion. Lore-wise they are cool and the design/visuals of both are awesome (but I love the Old God/Titan storyline so that obviously helps), lots of memorable moments in each imho. ToC did absolutely nothing for me. Round room, 5 encounters, incredibly un-immersive, blah. Only fight I enjoyed in there was Jaraxxus (mainly for his cool intro) and I guess Tirion Fordring's Dumbledor voice was kinda cool too.

[Ganj2568]

If raids were released as their current heroic difficulty most guilds wouldn't be stuck on Saurfang...


They'd be stuck on Deathwhisper rofl.

And I have seen a lot of this shit going on with my own guild but only one person I know has specifically said they are bored of the game and they are still playing. We've had people just stop playing (not even tell anyone) sell their character (not tell anyone) get "hacked" and be unable to play mysteriously, etc. We've also had a lot of people not showing up for raids for various reasons (work, other IRL issues etc.) which is very frustrating because if we had our core group every time we would have killed Putricide weeks ago.

We normally raid a 3 day a week schedule, and 4 days for progression. Because of people not showing up we've called a day for the last 3 weeks and had a lot of half days because of server lag issues and people not showing up.

Last night we ended up clearing most of the HMs (not sindy, pp, saurfang, deathwhisper) with 24 people in the raid and like 8 healers. The day before we had someone get on their alt just so we would have a shaman in the raid. It's the end of x-pac blues and it will only get worse I'm afraid.

[Nirual]

Burnout is just natural. It doesn't matter how challenging the content is. If you are running into a brick wall (Sindra took my guild months), people will get bored because there is no progression. If you are downing everything fine, people will be bored because the content has become trivial.

Lore from tankspot adressed the issue fairly well here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Ciderhelm#p/u/4/EVrIZq3niMo. In short, if you are experiencing burnouts, consider taking measures to mix things up. If people arent signing up, you might even consider taking a week off entirely

Old guilds quit, new guilds are formed. It's something i have learned over the 4 years i have played too. 4 years is an incredibly long time to play one game, and is often something people tend to forget.

I have also learnt that it can only take 1 person to leave a guild for the whole guild to fall apart.

This has been my experience aswell, and although I'm now in a more stable guild that has lasted for longer than WoW itself (started as a WC3 clan, although only a few of the old members are left), I'm still seeing new guilds spring up left and right that are forgotten a few weeks later.
I'm hoping the Cata guild changes will help things by providing benefits for sticking with a guild. It often seems to me as if many people consider guilds to be nothing more than a list of people to form raids with, and not a community that is working towards a goal. If the guild gets stuck at a boss, they'll look to get into a more sucessful one rather than help to find solutions. Hell, I've seen a guild leader do that. Ninjaed the whole vault before he left while he was at it.

[drulz]

ITT: My guild can't do hardmodes so I'm going to pass the buck and put blame somewhere else.

[TelDrud]

ye I know WotLK PvE system just sucks big time.
Everything now is designed for noobs and kids (ok there are hard modes but still ICC should be hard as whole raid, not only hard modes or few bosses).
WotLK is without real challenge and you can't say otherwise cos its lame enough to see some kid with any ICC boss kill achievement. I know rly a lot of pro players that have quit WoW cos its just to nabish in this days. They were disappointed and I am too and I also quit the game few months ago because of this, but I will return when Cata comes with hopes that things will get back before great WotLK PvE nerf soon after the Ulduar came out. And btw Ulduar in first week was great it was hard enough and it should be hard cos its t8 raid. If you don't have enough skill for raiding go do something else, at least in WoW you can do a lot of things.

[Oneleg]

Anyone else having the same experience? I think i saw a post about it a few weeks ago.

Two weeks ago one of our best raidleaders quit wow because he was bored with raiding. Before and after that there were 2 or 3 people who quit because they didn't like to raid anymore and because of personal reasons irl.
Next week 5 people are going to quit raiding, including me, because they are bored with raiding. We raid this last week so officers can find new people to replace us.

The normal/heroic system is just incredibly boring. We are "only" on 8/12 HM on 25 man. We have more then enough potential to clear 11/12, but there is just not enough motivation.

I have never seen this before in the 4 years i play WoW. 8 or 9 people quiting raiding in just a few weeks just because they get bored. The guild is fine, great progress, nice atmosphere. It's just the content, in my opinion.
I think this raiding system is just failing. Anyone else experiencing this?

"I could be president of the US, but I am just too bored to do that"


whatever, if you don't want to play anymore just quit, do you really think you will be missed, and the game be lesser because your not in it? Every time I see one of these QQ I am quitting threads, it just makes me laugh at how people think they need to say bye.

[Gurkalicious]

"I could be president of the US, but I am just too bored to do that"


whatever, if you don't want to play anymore just quit, do you really think you will be missed, and the game be lesser because your not in it? Every time I see one of these QQ I am quitting threads, it just makes me laugh at how people think they need to say bye.

He wasn't at all saying "bye" he was wondering if anyone else was experiencing burnout in their guilds.

[Gotjuice]

Ppl grow up and move onto other things. Take me for example, for various reasons I'm not raiding anymore and the only time I play I use it on arenas because thats what I enjoy the most.

[Soothing Voice]

I doubt unmotivated players were giving half of what they could do into the raids, and I bet you agree. So in a weird way, its a blessing in disguise. Get rid of people who aren't motivated, replace them with people who give 110% because they need to impress new guildies. Profit.

[Orehor]

lol, guilds have died and ppl have quit/burned out since the begining, has nothing to do w/ current content. My current guild is only 9/12 on normal 25, we've had a slump for a few weeks but we've got new folks that are eager and we killed Blood Queen for the first time Tuesday night, and tonight we're gonna beat the healing dragon!!!

[Nahela]

It's kinda funny from a guild leader perspective. First raiding tier in forever that hasn't been completely steamrolled and lots of people in various guilds worldwide 'burning out'. Some people just can't handle not everything being handed to them.

[Bender]

It sucks ass but it's nothing new. I've been experiencing this since vanilla, and the reasons you just listed are the most common excuses. The best guild I ever was in lost it's GM, entire officer staff, and most of the core raiders you knew and loved because they didn't like the way TBC was going. It will always be the same.

[TyGuy25]

My point though is the content isn't really challenging, and when you step into a newer instance, there is NO REASON (progressively speaking) what so ever to go back and do the older ones.

When you were in BWL, you went back to MC. When you were in AQ 40, you went back to BWl.

When you were in Ulduar.....effe naxx and sarth. When you went to ToC, effe ulduar.

Im in ICC now, no one gives a rats ass about ToC anymore. The point is, you get such inflated gear, and now 10% (soon to be 30%) more damage / hp / healing? Like I don't care who gets to see the content, but thats why raiding is boring. You can just run it as it if it were a higher level 5 man while leveling a toon.

"Oh I can Do SM? Who needs Rfk!!"

And I don't really have a "gripe" with the Emblem system, because before they let players skip Vashj / Kael, the people who were herp derp, still couldn't do BT and Hyjal.

The point was, a lot of the encounters have "hard" Modes, that you don't need. We couldn't do a Hard mode in ToC for what? three, four weeks after its live release? So by the time hard modes came out, everyone who was in ToC, had gear that was BETTER then Ulduar hard mode gear. So essentially, they give us hard mode gear to "over gear" the next instance to come out normal mode? If we could do Hard mode => Hard mode, and get like a complete tier better gear, there would be no gripe, and a lot of the raiders, who are getting burnt out, wouldn't be so much, because they would have to work for a kill. Also, the time limit /attempt limit on Hard modes, is stupid. Why should we be punished, for trying a boss thats hard? Oh nope, you tried to do hard mode twice, KK GFTO see you next week. Why can we not go up against a boss thats hard, smash our face into it, and possibly down it and get a lead on everyone else? Why are players who want something hard kept on the same short leash as the people who don't care, for about 2 months before we're allowed to run ahead?

The point is, Hard modes don't offer anything, and the over all PROGRESSION is whats lacking. You pretty much move to a new instance, farm what little tiny bit they offer for a few weeks, then are pretty much 110% ready to move onto the next boss that they release, because you could only do like the first four bosses of an instance, then are done.

I think a lot of people took my original post personally, and whatever take it as you will. I was just stating MY OPINION, if you want to get offended, eh your problem not mine. Most of the people who get offended, are the ones who take full advantage of being handed gear, and raid content.

No change of instance, and no reason at all to sit in the instance once you've beaten it, no real reason to farm it. You see it once, GG, stop playing until the next one. The gear hardly carries over, and blizzard will just hand you the last week's gear via badge system, so you dont even need to do the older raids and PROGRESS.

Also, being good at raiding, does not make me "hardcore" Its quite possible to breeze through the content, on a Friday night, and have the rest of the week off. I've done tons of pugs, and look at other guilds that my friends are in, talk to my IRL friends on different servers , etc. etc. The point is...the majority of wow players ARE BAD, don't want to learn, and THINK they're good, so they do it wrong, and refuse to ever take advice, or get better. Blizzard designs raids now a days for these kind of people. So people who are decent or better, get burnt out, because its easy for them to trash a raid instance.

My current guild only raids 9 hours a week too btw. There are at least 6-7 guilds on Draenor that are far below us in content, and sink a lot more time into then we do. 3 hours a day, 3 days a week? Well its more like two now, because we trash the instance aside from LK / Sindragosa in 3 hours, and we just do those two the next night. More people will spend more time a week watching TV, then I do to playing wow. ...I wonder if those people are hardcore tv watchers.......

TL: DR

From a Raiders standpoint = Shitty system current day
From Blizzards standpoint = Good system, makes the majority happy, so we make money.

AS a player I rage, but to be truthful, I fully understand that Blizzard wants to make money, and well, they gone and done it. dumb the content down, and let people overgear it, bingo, you've made a gold mine.

[ChazleDazzle]

You are the minority. To most guilds, ICC isn't "herp derp don't stand in fire" win. For us, the progression is somewhat challenging at times. For you, they added hard modes. The only thing they failed to do is give it to you right away so you could go straight from ToGC25 to ICC25 Hard. Going from ToGC25 to ICC25 Normal is almost like doing ICC 25 Normal after you've cleared it a bunch and have a full set of gear from it. Of course it's easy. But ICC25 Normal isn't meant for people who were farmin ToGC25 before ICC was released.

This. I guess I could understand where some of you guys are coming from...I started playing wow about 2 months before WoTLK came out, and wasn't even 70 yet when it did. But I've been working on progression with guilds from the day I hit 80...Naxx may have been old for other people, but it was new for me and it was great. I hate maly, I like the idea, I hate the execution. Love sarth and the quasi-hard mode there, and when ulduar came out....Well, I normally play window mode with AIM up and iTunes running...everything else was closed, game was full screen, all the options were turned up, and I was in love. Ulduar rocked my socks. The fights were fun and interesting, the progression was tough (I still haven't downed yogg, but thats mostly because we moved on when toc came out...) I will agree that toc was pretty lame, but I don't see anything about ICC being lame. I haven't gotten very far in because I had to take a break because of RL stuff, but I loved the first four bosses, it took us a couple weeks to get saurfang down. I love the mini-bosses before festergut/rotface/pp, and I love the ideas behind the fights.

So while some of you have been raiding since 60, a lot of people haven't...some of the mechanics might be getting old, but for a ton of people, they aren't. And most guilds (at least on my server) haven't even downed Sindragosa yet on normal mode, there are only 3 guilds that are on hard modes (i believe...) so I think that wotlk, while overall, i would agree was not as good as it was expected to be, i think the raiding was overall done pretty well.

OT: When I get bored with raiding, I find something fun to do with it. When a raid is on farm status, our guild will try new ways to do the encounter to screw around and have fun. Our raid leader throws some music on over vent, pallies randomly DI people for shits and giggles...raiding can still be fun, you just need to find a way to do it.

[Leidus]

From a Raiders standpoint = Shitty system current day
From Blizzards standpoint = Good system, makes the majority happy, so we make money.

AS a player I rage, but to be truthful, I fully understand that Blizzard wants to make money, and well, they gone and done it. dumb the content down, and let people overgear it, bingo, you've made a gold mine.

This attitude always makes me laugh. All the changes and features you hardcore raiders trash because of how they affect the "casual" population, they were made for you.

Faction transfers and server transfers: Done to help you find a raid group when there isn't a spot in one on your server/faction.

Emblem gear: Done so you can gear up and move onto harder content (hard modes, next tier, whatever). Yes, people could farm Kara for BT level gear back in the day, but that didn't change the fact that the gear was injected to help struggling raid guilds make the jump past BT and into Sunwell.

Emblem Gear point 2/No attunements: The lack of attunements and the ease of gearing up via heroics to T9 level isn't a bone to casual players. It's so when you have 4 people quit your raid, you're not screwed while searching the relatively small population of raiders looking for a raid that are already attuned and geared for your particular instance.

You may not like the way these things were implemented, but stop pretending they weren't done specifically because hardcore raiders like you asked for them. The fact that it has a double benefit of making the game immensely more satisfying for the players you think are lesser deserving that you is just icing on the cake.

[Elo]

It seems like you're missing the fact that hardmode isn't supposed to be a different instance, yet more of a replacement of the actual instance for those who wish to do something that's harder for better gear, the essence of the instance is the same, but the effort required for a successful raid is much higher, and therefor you can give something to the players who wish to progress for realm firsts and something to the players who just wants to see the content but isn't essentially as interested in the gear.

There are some valid points here, if Blizzard would really have thought it through they would have made it possible for guilds to choose the hard mode from the start, instead of doing the normal modes and then realize the hard modes are the same thing as the normal modes with a few additions. This would make hard modes feel fresh as you hadnt seen the normal modes yet.