Raiding, quests and attunements.

[Tempus]

TLDR:
I addition to the current "kill last boss in instance to be able to activate hardmode", add quests that require you do do hardmodes from the last tier of raids as an optional way to get hardmodes. So good guilds can start right on hardmodes, instead of having to take normal first when they actually overgear that content.

Howdy, now its not a unusual mentality around that WOTLK has been too easy and that TBC was much better with its forced progression (to some extent) and attunements. On the other side most of the hardcore guilds say they have never faced content this hard, and that means its normal to say "come back when you have done HCLK".

I belive i know what causes this feeling of the content being too easy while there is still so much hard content out there is the fact that you have to do it on normal before you can start doing it on heroic, making people sick of the content, and some people being happy with just seeing it. Now attunement quests have been debated in and out, people miss them, but they dont want to go through the pain of attuning every new player the guild gets.

To unlock heroicmode theese days (wotlk) you need to have one guy who has done the last boss on normal. What i suggest it that you make hard raid quests in previous raids (on heroic mode) to be able to open the next raid tier up on heroic instantly when it comes out. It should be bound to your guild AND a player. So you can choose heroic in a guild run if the player isent there, or choose it in a non guild run if the player is there. That way the guilds that want to do the challening mode can go straight to the heroic modes and whipe on the bosses there instead of snoring throught normal first on all bosses with their higher than nessecary ilvl gear just to unlock the heroic mode.

There would need to be an adjustment with item lvls though, so you werent required to farm nromal first to get the gear to do heroic. This could be solved by heroic granting the same itemlvl as the next tier normal mode. Its diffrent than today, where you will get better gear from 25 man heroic than you will from the next tier 10 man normal. But it would decrease the ammout they would have to scale gear each tier. It may keep the heroic players abit too infront of the normal players, and anyone who want to start doing heroic mode has to get normal gear first, from the same dungeon. It would recreate a more sensible raiding path. You would basicly have 4 "tiers" of players. The newly dinged, the badge farmers, the raiders and the heroic raiders. Where anyone can get up to the badge farming lvl, but you would be required to go through the raiding bracet to be viable in the heroic modes atleast ( well its kinda like that today, but the diffrence between normal and heroic would be bigger even tho the itemlvlscaling in the expansion could be slower)

Anyone have any feedback? What do you say? Would you like to compleete pain in the arse hard raid quests to be able to skip farming stuff on normal before you are able to meet the bosses full strenght?

(abit about myself since people WILL ask. Played since vanilla, vanilla progression, twin emps and instructor down. In TBC i progressed as one of the better guilds on the server to the two first bosses of hyjal before i went casual and pvp due to irl issues, joined my guild in later content as backup, saw everything up to and including muuru. Was away first 7 months of wotlk, saw the end of uludar with my guild as a backup, started raiding casually a year ago with some old friends in a 25 man guild, ckilled LK 25 normal with 1 raid a week at 15 % buff, have since done some heroic modes in 10 man with half pugs. So i did get to see the content this exp due to it being easier, but i understand so well what people miss with the linear progression, not going through here, and then lets do it one more time just harder.)

[MAGAmobile]

This kind of thread has been talked about to death and back, but I'll chime in on it I suppose. Attunements were a good idea in the past because of the mentality and direction that the developers wanted to go with in regards to raiding. It worked rather well because people would do them and they would get profit from it. However, attunements have major drawbacks that hurt both the developers and the raiders alike. The thing with attunements is that no matter how they are implemented, it pretty much cripples any chance any person has that is new or not to get somewhere they know they are capable of getting to. It continues to go downhill for guilds that may form later on in the expansion due to guilds dying and many other things. It would also be a nightmare for alt runs that people do lately for gear or fun.

What happens if for whatever reason the person feels or has to class change for the benefit of the guild? How would the keying work out if the guild were to transfer somewhere for whatever reason, whether it be for better stability or for better times for the majority? Would the key be removed? How would it stay stored with the guild and what would happen if the guild were to be suddenly broken up by the gm or by someone who hacks their account? Would there be a grace period for it?

These are just a few questions that can be raised up from your statement, and the way the system is now works just fine where you need to clear the instance once in order to have access to heroic. It's somewhat of a stepping stone, a way to "prove" to the zone that you are ready to tackle heroic difficulty, even if you already were in the first place.

It's also a waste of developer time and money for Blizzard because it limits the amount of content people actually see regardless if they are actually able to defeat it or not.

[Tempus]

I am not sure if you red my post. Its ment to unlock the ability for the guild, so that any guildraid has the opportunity to unlock this. It should also not be the only way to unlock the heroic modes. The old "kill the last boss" thing will work in addition, the attunement quests will only allow the people who did heroic modes on the last tier to skip normal modes on the next.

[MAGAmobile]

That's kind of pointless then, don't you think? The system works fine as it is.

[Nerio]

Tying attunements into guild achievements would be a great thing for the raiding community I feel. Maybe not exactly what you're talking about, but how they worked back in BC.

The main complaints you hear about attunements were that having to redo them for alts/rerolls/new recruits was a giant pain and the butt, and that was true. If they're actual guild achievements however, none of those would be an issue.

As far as what happens when a guild transfers or gets hacked, if there is any protection in place to protect against other guild achievements it would cover this. If there isn't then I don't think its a giant deal. There are several more guild achievements that are far more difficult to do again than re-doing attunements.

In WotLK, what ended up happening towards the end is that new guilds would just raid the new content. Most would skip every raid before ICC and TOC, and I feel that hurts Blizzards mentality of getting people to see the content too. If there were attunements, maybe they wouldn't see the newest content immediately, but they are seeing content they would have otherwise missed.

In BC, even when the attunements were gone, guilds were progressing there way through T4 and T5 and T6. Every raid was getting some love, and everyone who wanted to raid could find a guild that was appropriate for their gear level. The reason for this was that gear was harder to obtain. Attunements could also accomplish a similar effect. In WotLK, gear was easy to obtain and attunements didn't exist, so raid instances that were as little as 1 to 2 patches old were barely ever seen (minus the first boss or two for the weekly quest). I really think you should have one of those two things in place so that new guilds progress normally, albeit at a faster rate than those who did the content when it was new, instead of skipping right to the newest stuff.

I started raiding at end of BC. My guild's progression started in T4 and went into T5, and into T6 and sunwell. When playing any game really, you want to see the events unfold instead of just skipping to the last boss. If I had started playing towards the end of WotLK instead of BC, I would have likely just grinded heroic dungeons and seen TOC and ICC. I would have missed Ulduar most likely, which I felt was an incredible instance.

There needs to be incentive to do all the raids and see the game. For those who are in raiding guilds when an instance is released, the incentive is to progress as a guild and also acquire new gear. For guilds that start raiding a few content patches later, there was no incentive in WotLK to raid those instances. Better gear was obtained easily otherwise and you didn't have to do those raids, so why would any new guild bother? Guild attunements would give new guilds incentive to see all of the content at least once, and to actually have somewhat normal progression.

[Tempus]

The problem then Nerio, is that it would completly kill pugs, unless ofcourse you only need one attuned member. The proposal i set up was to avoid fudging something up for any other aspect of the game.

However, if everyone needed to be attuned, maybe people would stopp the redicilous achivement and GS needs, and just go for attuned people.

[Nerio]

I guess it would hurt pugs, but there could be different tiers of pugs on a server. However pugs were in BC would likely be similar to how they would be with this, only not as bad. Definitely not as pug friendly as WotLK is though.

[Tempus]

I guess it would hurt pugs, but there could be different tiers of pugs on a server. However pugs were in BC would likely be similar to how they would be with this, only not as bad. Definitely not as pug friendly as WotLK is though.

Well, the pugs would have to be way more organized, and that again hurt those players who cant really meet up at spesific times each week. I know the casuals are kinda scoffed upon for making the game easier for all, but wouldent this change differentiate the dedicated players and casual pugs in a whole new way, in that the hardcores dont have to farm the casual content before they can start doing the content made for them? The whole reason to have hardcore and normal content is for normal to be puggable and acessable for everyone. Wouldent adding attunementquests to normal mode be conterproductive?

The quests should come with titles too by the way, so that you have a reason to do them yourselves even tho you reached heroic mode in the next tier allready by normal means.