Guilds Falling Apart a Lot This Patch

[Osmeric]

The problem with replacing dps for the game as a whole is it doesn't stop the tier being too difficult for the average player. It makes sense from the PoV of each raid leader, but you wind up with a sea of also ran would be raiders who get pissed off and leave the game, citing raid difficulty on the way out as the reason why.

In the hardcore mindset, everyone can win at musical chairs, they just need to stop being bad and grab a chair.

[Valium104]

Seriously? My guild has never been better, everyone's showing up because we want to kill H Sha before 5.2 for FoS. We even increased raiding days.

[Stede]

An elitist that can not stand in bad stuff and use the 3-4 buttons that is needed to clear heroic mode? How is it that we clear this amazing super hard normal mode with alts still with many blues and the occasional green? And it is YOU, the player, that needs to learn to play then things would be better for you and your guild. How much time do you work on mini/max? Simcraft? Do you pull the numbers you should for your class/spec? Do you have macros made to make it easier so you can pull better numbers?

Blizzard designs the fights around people with heartbeats like right now we are testing on the PTR and give feedback on them. If you dont pull the numbers you should the fights become harder. If people dont learn from mistakes the fight gets harder but they are replaced. Blizzard isnt guilty of anything, if people produce the numbers they should for their gear you would walk through normal mode.

That's the key. I can rank on a fight, but if the other 9 guys don't all do their job, then it doesn't matter. I always find it amazing how long a group can spend progressing on a boss, and how quickly it can go on farm once he's down. Normal mode is still challenging. I always compare T14 to T11. And the one thing that sticks out to me is that the dungeons in T11 were brutal compared to what came with T14.

I don't get why folks compare T14 to T13, either. How many guilds cleared T13 w/o any buffs and called it easy? There was really only 2 months before progressive buffs rolled out.

[Fenixdown]

Frankly, I feel this trend will continue as more and more people jump on the "10's are easier, screw this 25-man crap" bandwagon that has gotten drastically worse this expansion than it ever was in Cataclysm.

25-man guilds are dropping like flies, and honestly after a 25-man guild disbands most of those raiders don't go on to raid elsewhere. They usually just quit the game, as the options for them being individuals that enjoy the greater challenge and larger social atmosphere of 25-man content are left with massively fewer options at their disposal (and don't give me LFR as an option, that is not a real option).

As far as 10-man guilds go, sometimes I think people stop showing up because they a. come to the realization that 10's are indeed easier, and any slowing in progression means that you are simply on a bad raid team, or b. because they have all the gear they know they can get and don't care about the rest of their raid team (something you will see happen in 25's, but hurts 10's much more as usually the pool of reserves is much smaller).

Either way, raiding as a whole right now does not seem to be in a good place. As much as some people may not want to admit it, it was much healthier in Wrath. While I don't fully agree with the design philosophies of the system back then (it needed some tweaking, for sure, but Blizzard went way overboard), that type of system would make the raiding community as a whole a much more vibrant place.

[Darmalus]

LFR has removed the low-hanging fruit from the recruitment pool. People that like raids because of the art/story, weather they are terrible or magnificent players, have gone off to LFR, often out of convenience.

This means that the remaining people who want to raid probably have a much shifted additude towards raiding from previous teirs. The people who were just happy to be there are largely gone now. The ones that are left generally have much greater demands for any guild they join.

This expansion may prove the death of the casual raiding guild. Or at least it's maiming.

[Tenjen]

always happens at the end of a tier, just doesnt always happen to us.

[Deleted]

Then why play this game? You obviously want everything easy and handed to you.

Who said anything about what I wanted? I didn't.

You realize most popular games have rankings attached to them? You wonder why? If you arent going to read up on your class and pull the numbers you should then you shouldnt expect to progress. You dont get progression rankings from logging into a game. The bosses are all tuned around very realistic numbers, not elite numbers, but average, you realize that if people can clear them in mainly blues that it is you, not the game. If you are sitting at a 490ilvl and someone in a 470-480ilvl walks through it then the problem isnt blizzard. It shows that content can be cleared with lesser gear if the mechanics are followed and the classes played correctly. If you dont do any of that right and you wipe numerous times and you dont learn, isnt that a bad sign? To not learn from mistakes and repeat them most likely.

Normal people don't care about rankings. They want to have fun.

If blizz designed bosses like some of you on here would like, content would be cleared in the first week on the first raid night. And for the people that would do that, there is nothing for them to do so they find a balance in the middle somewhere. So this extreme difficulty is actually in the middle and with nerfs, actually leaning downward.

Content would be cleared on the first night by the very hardcore. Everyone else would still have months of fun in front of them.

My point is that thehardcore are going to do it anyway, so why not just ignore them in design decisions. If you think of it as a bell curve - designing for the very, very good at the game is exactly the same as designing for people who struggle to get their character to walk.

Look at the raids numbers after wipes. Look at numbers after the night is over and see who is doing what. You dont want to gear a bad player because they will never pull what they should, so you are wasting gear. Recruit and find replacements for the bad players, in 10man it is hard to carry a bad player, replace them.

Sorry, but I don't want to be horrible to people over a game. I'd rather drink beer, laugh on mumble and just plod around having fun.

I'm far from alone and very far from being wrong.

[isadorr]

Considering that most of the people raiding right now likely raided in the past plus the fact that fewer guilds are progressing through normals tells me that this tier is not as faceroll easy as you claim it to be. It might be easy for you, but not for the rest of the players who enjoy raiding in a more relaxed atmosphere. It really isn't a surprise that people who are able to clear heroic modes are able to clear normals with alts in a lower ilvl, that's been going on for a long time now.

Typically by this point Blizzard has bee nerfing the content to help those guilds out, to give them a boost. They decided to forgo that with MoP and I think that decision is hurting those groups that need that small boost in order to get over whatever hump they have been stuck on. I don't see how changing normal modes would effect groups that have already cleared the content and are working on heroics.

I do have a strong feeling that should they decide not to add those nerfs in with this tier it will cause those middle-ground guilds that are casual/raiding to fall apart.

Isnt here a point where you need to change and learn? If your raid is pulling bad numbers in dps, healing or tanks with threat, shouldnt you address that? If you are going to play with your friends and that is it no matter how bad they are then you are making a decision that progression isnt important. So then progression doesnt need to be nerfed if you are making decisions on friendship and not numbers.

Really everyone knows who the good and the bad players are in a raid setting, look at numbers, fix those problems and progress. If you dont fix those problems then you shouldnt be upset about little progression. If the majority are all bad, what kind of progression do you expect?

here is what i see alot of, a casual guild wants to progress but run with friends, some are good and some are horrible, so they have bad progression. Then you have a casual guild that recruits, gets a good player to join through a friend, he raids one night and sees how horrible they are, asks what the situations is and if those players are getting replaced. He is told no then he leaves realizing he is wasting his time. Then the guild is back to little progression, recruit, replace bad players and then the good players you get will stick around seeing that you are making changes trying to get better. Dont keep bad players around because they have been there for along time or a friend of so and so, if you do then realize you are forgoing progression.

[Deleted]

we have been looking for a healer and a ranged dps for 3 weeks now. I spammed recruitment macro's and used forums. I use my macro atleast 2 hours a day. This far ive got one dude interrested. A 443 pala healer -.-

Ah, welcome to TBC model of raiding. Where you as a guild will have to gear up people and get your regular raiders to jump back into old content to gear up newblood.
Good luck with that.

Bliz seams to want slower sequential gearing, but the playerbase expects to recruit raid ready players.......that just is not going to match up. its why TBC had such a shockingly low proportion of people raiding, and why WotLK quite rightly brought in much better catch up mechanics. Bliz appear to have short memories and have forgotten the nightmare that was recruiting for a raiding guild in TBC, and are making the same mistakes again.

[yjmark]

This expansion may prove the death of the casual raiding guild. Or at least it's maiming.

I think it's going to shift it. I would bet that normal modes in the next tier will end up being easier than the current tier normal modes. That will allow more casual raiding guilds to clear normal modes during that tier. 30% is quite a low number for clearing normal modes by the end of the tier. I would assume that Blizz wants that number more toward 60-70%. Just my guess.

[Hulari]

My old guild from Cataclysm went from 25 man before Christmas down to 10 man through January and then at the beginning of Feb they dissolved altogether and merged into another guild. They even transferred as a 25 man guild to a more populated server to try and recruit more people and keep things afloat.

The guild I joined last week to start getting into raiding is currently a 10 man guild but before Christmas they too were a 25 man guild but so many people deciding not to play/raid forced them into 10.

I don't know why but heh. I think Blizzard should try and sort server imbalance out a little more.

[Xalzel]

My guild is having this issue, and although I hate to say it. Too much content?

[isadorr]

Frankly, I feel this trend will continue as more and more people jump on the "10's are easier, screw this 25-man crap" bandwagon that has gotten drastically worse this expansion than it ever was in Cataclysm.

25-man guilds are dropping like flies, and honestly after a 25-man guild disbands most of those raiders don't go on to raid elsewhere. They usually just quit the game, as the options for them being individuals that enjoy the greater challenge and larger social atmosphere of 25-man content are left with massively fewer options at their disposal (and don't give me LFR as an option, that is not a real option).

As far as 10-man guilds go, sometimes I think people stop showing up because they a. come to the realization that 10's are indeed easier, and any slowing in progression means that you are simply on a bad raid team, or b. because they have all the gear they know they can get and don't care about the rest of their raid team (something you will see happen in 25's, but hurts 10's much more as usually the pool of reserves is much smaller).

Either way, raiding as a whole right now does not seem to be in a good place. As much as some people may not want to admit it, it was much healthier in Wrath. While I don't fully agree with the design philosophies of the system back then (it needed some tweaking, for sure, but Blizzard went way overboard), that type of system would make the raiding community as a whole a much more vibrant place.

10man raiding makes it a lot harder to carry a bad player. IN 25man when looking at numbers you see the good , the decent and the people at the end needed to raid. In 10man one person can wipe a group, one person not carrying their weight makes the rest pick up all the slack. A bad player cant be carried through content like previous tiers and with more switching to 10man, that is a big reason for all of the slow progression. Each person in that 10man needs to do the numbers needed and their assignment on that fight. Every one of them and when they dont, they wipe. 25man we have ppl do stupid things but the top tier of players carry that bad player and we still progress. We still replace the bad player but we make it through the fight which is harder to do in 10man

[Deleted]

I dont know what the fights on the PTR are tuned to atm but if you cant clear normal mode i am guessing they will be very difficult for you. Thats why i was mentioning moving to another server or whatever you have to do because people are still going to need to clear current content for gear to clear the 5.2 tier. We have been doing testing on boss fights and they are not easy but very fun, i guess maybe thats the difference to me, i like a challenge. Some will say the 5.2 tier is wayyy too hard if it is kept the same but i think it will be fun.

You misunderstand, completely. I never said the fights were too hard, we never got the chance to get far. After cleared MSV our guild disbanded and it took a while to transfer old guild over. Our resident Mage then left to raid on an Italian realm since his English was pretty bad and our 2nd tank had to leave since he was approaching a pretty hefty portion of his University course during our HoF progression, halting that even further.

Because we simply haven't been able to raid as a guild our overall progression is low, despite many of us being able to PuG the fights or complete them individually with other groups. Naturally, we want to all raid together, but we haven't been able to recruit because our guild progression situation.

Stop judging people, please.

[Deleted]

Isnt here a point where you need to change and learn?

Isn't there a point where blizzard also needs to change and learn?

If your raid is pulling bad numbers in dps, healing or tanks with threat, shouldnt you address that? If you are going to play with your friends and that is it no matter how bad they are then you are making a decision that progression isnt important. So then progression doesnt need to be nerfed if you are making decisions on friendship and not numbers.

Why can't a friendly guild have some progress? it's entirely a tuning decision at blizz HQ. For some reason, rather than design raids for the tens of thousands of half assed social guilds out there they design it for the top end of the hardcore and let the normal folks struggle. It's a bit weird, frankly.

Really everyone knows who the good and the bad players are in a raid setting, look at numbers, fix those problems and progress. If you dont fix those problems then you shouldnt be upset about little progression. If the majority are all bad, what kind of progression do you expect?

The majority are never bad, buddy. They are the normal, the average. To be good you have to be better than average> if you are worse than average you are bad.

if the average DPS is 30k and the best dps is 60k, 45k dps is good dps, even if it won't get yuou progress. That's how good, bad and average work, good buddy.

here is what i see alot of, a casual guild wants to progress but run with friends, some are good and some are horrible, so they have bad progression. Then you have a casual guild that recruits, gets a good player to join through a friend, he raids one night and sees how horrible they are, asks what the situations is and if those players are getting replaced. He is told no then he leaves realizing he is wasting his time. Then the guild is back to little progression, recruit, replace bad players and then the good players you get will stick around seeing that you are making changes trying to get better. Dont keep bad players around because they have been there for along time or a friend of so and so, if you do then realize you are forgoing progression.

Someone just said you expect a game of musical chairs to magically produce more chairs if you are even more aggressive in removing chairs. Make no sense.

[Deleted]

Blizzard has a choice of making everything lol like Wrath but knew that was too easy. They added alot of easy bosses to keep progression guilds from clearing everything in one night and making it easy for casual guilds with easy bosses which they are. Adding 16 bosses made it so progression guilds would still clear them fast but the sheer number would slow them down but it didnt really slow down good guilds. They cant make every boss faceroll like baddies/casuals like and bosses on normal mode are not difficult. Really, we are gearing our melee's range alts for the patch and we full cleared with people still with blues and a couple greens. So how is that difficult?

As i said before, it is the watered down player base that is causing the majority of the problems with the raiding, not the difficulty. Players need to get better and learn to play, dont stand in fire, make focus macros to do your job, and learn your class.

lol like wrath? please link your Yogg 0 keepers kill and the date of it. Your LK hc kill and date (without the zone buff activated).

[isadorr]

Who said anything about what I wanted? I didn't.


Normal people don't care about rankings. They want to have fun.


Content would be cleared on the first night by the very hardcore. Everyone else would still have months of fun in front of them.

My point is that thehardcore are going to do it anyway, so why not just ignore them in design decisions. If you think of it as a bell curve - designing for the very, very good at the game is exactly the same as designing for people who struggle to get their character to walk.


Sorry, but I don't want to be horrible to people over a game. I'd rather drink beer, laugh on mumble and just plod around having fun.

I'm far from alone and very far from being wrong.

Progression shouldnt matter to you anyway as who cares about rankings? Go drink your beer and have fun with your pals. That is all that matters right?

[ihyln]

That's what happens when you give people options I suppose.

haha because terrible options are still options! amirite?

[Deleted]

Progression shouldnt matter to you anyway as who cares about rankings? Go drink your beer and have fun with your pals. That is all that matters right?

You don't have much fun if you can't kill anything without dozens of wipes. killing stuff and getting gear = fun. Wiping 142 times on some gimmick cockblock fight = not fun.

[Wisermage]

My server is a shell of its former self. But in reality, I could care less. The player base that has been playing for 5+ years are all getting older and with that you get people's motivation changing. I used to rely on raiding to give me enjoyment and everything else I could care less for. Now if someone doesn't show up to raid then I'm just as happy playing an alt, doing old content or just hanging out in vent joking around. I have never, until MOP, taken this approach to the game. I'm having more fun now then any other expansion. I think alot of players might have adopted this mindset and in the past if people stopped showing up to raid you would just find another guild. Now I can't be bothered to find another guild as raiding isn't the sole reason I log on anymore.