Is ToT too challenging causing the guild break ups?

[Mad_Murdock]

Why do you have to get rid of them? why can't you just help them improve? I've raided in semi-hardcore guilds where you get benched if you can't meet x requirement, and I've raided in much more casual "circle of friends" style guilds, where everyone knew each other and raided cos it was a good laugh and neither type of guild kicked a guy for underperforming, we'd sit with them, discuss rotations, suggest sites they can do some reading on, etc, etc. I'm not talking about a magic wand and I'm not living in some fantasy land, but if you put artificial barriers of YOUR OWN construction in the way of you proceeding, that's not Blizzard, that's YOU my friend.

The kicking part was the radical jump. Our guild did exactly what you mentioned. We had two under performers, they have been under performers for years and for the most part we were always able to carry them. Come T14, those days were over. Those two people would regular get beat by the tanks on fights like the 4 kings and Blade Lord, Garalon. They were both range and any fight that required movement they stunk. So much that we simple couldn't get past fights like Garalon or Elegon if they were in raid. They got sat, we progressed great. We had alts raids to help them play and get some gear, but gear was never the issue. At one point one of them was our best geared person and still lost to the tank, normally doing 20-30k less than everyone else.

These aren't barriers of our own creation. I raided on an Alt with a guild that is still 2/12 and it takes about 5 or 6 wipes each week to get Horridon down. They knew exactly the strat to do, but heals, tanks, DPS just couldn't execute. And they are down to pugging 2-3 spots each week, because they can't find anyone who wants to raid 2 nights a week, I suspect eventually they will get tired of farming 2 bosses and just quit raiding.

So what options are really there besides
1) recruit more people fill slots or better people to take the place of slackers (on a server that is dying off like some many server now)
2) go back to the previous tier for better gear (2 months after the newest tier is released and LFR gives better loot)
3) abandon normal mode raiding all together (accept raiding isn't for you and call it)

[dokilar]

spring and summer are here, i dont know about other guilds but the guild ive been a part of for nearly 10 years almost always goes on hiatus up until the fall months.

the weather outside is amazing, i really have no intention of committing any real time to ANY video games when the weather is this nice. im not saying this is the reason less guilds are raiding but it certainly could be a contributing factor

[NeverStop]

The kicking part was the radical jump. Our guild did exactly what you mentioned. We had two under performers, they have been under performers for years and for the most part we were always able to carry them. Come T14, those days were over. Those two people would regular get beat by the tanks on fights like the 4 kings and Blade Lord, Garalon. They were both range and any fight that required movement they stunk. So much that we simple couldn't get past fights like Garalon or Elegon if they were in raid. They got sat, we progressed great. We had alts raids to help them play and get some gear, but gear was never the issue. At one point one of them was our best geared person and still lost to the tank, normally doing 20-30k less than everyone else.

These aren't barriers of our own creation. I raided on an Alt with a guild that is still 2/12 and it takes about 5 or 6 wipes each week to get Horridon down. They knew exactly the strat to do, but heals, tanks, DPS just couldn't execute. And they are down to pugging 2-3 spots each week, because they can't find anyone who wants to raid 2 nights a week, I suspect eventually they will get tired of farming 2 bosses and just quit raiding.

So what options are really there besides
1) recruit more people fill slots or better people to take the place of slackers (on a server that is dying off like some many server now)
2) go back to the previous tier for better gear (2 months after the newest tier is released and LFR gives better loot)
3) abandon normal mode raiding all together (accept raiding isn't for you and call it)

Wait for 5.3 and item upgrades. +8 ilvls on weapons and trinkets is a huge boost.

[Deleted]

Part of it, yes, but fuck me I do love it. At least you actually feel some accomplishment once you beat the bosses. I remember how good it was to finally beat Council at the start of the tier before the nerfs compared to, let's say, Primordius or Twins that we one-shot.

[reflection]

Think the biggest problem is the gear factor in ToT normal. Think the beginning (Horridon/Council) is pretty tough with gear arround ilvl 500. Even more if you are a casual guild where players don't try to push to the max.With gear 510+ the instance is A LOT easier.

I find the learning curve this instance pretty fascinating. There is really no Boss which we can not kill first kill after several weeks of farm. Usually there is always a Boss some guys in your guild constantly fuck up. But in ToT we can kill every Boss first try. So it's really a lot about tactics

[BergErr]

I'm not really sure what you're talking about. You have to kite the focused lightning on Jin'rokh so it doesn't drop in the wrong place. Lots of movement on council to avoid sandtraps and the lightning rush and kill the loa spirits, you have to avoid spinning turtles and stalactites on tortos, you have to get out of the raid if you have cinders and avoid the poison spit for megaera, there's flying and jumping around platforms and running against downdraft in ji'kun, force of will, health siphon and the maze for durumu, anima ring and crush for dark animus, primordius is a kite-fest and the twins is all about keeping the fire twin on the dark comets, which means movement.

So you just wrote almost all movement for 9 bosses in 3lines~. Add a sentence or two and you got the whole tier.
Most things dont even matter to all in the raid and many got skills to just ignore it anyway.

[Otimus]

Complete the previous content before heading to the next?

I sure as fucking hell hope they don't artificially extend a tier of content just to make a small minority of people who twitch and spasm at the idea of having to keep doing old content when new content is out happy.

[oraz4000]

I tank for a 10-man raid with 2 heroics down (8/16h pre-5.2) and I don't consider any of that content to be too challenging.

I DPS for a 25-man raid with no heroics down and hasn't killed Lei Shen yet. They have, however, finished Lei Shen and heroic Jin'rokh by switching to 10-man. This raid has been known to switch to 10-man to finish a boss when the 25-man is repeatedly failing. In fact, we only just got Iron Qon down on 25-man last week (we had previously killed everything on 25-man besides Iron Qon and Lei Shen).

Considering my knowledge of the fights from 10-man, I have an excellent view into what is causing problems for the 25-man. The main problems are that a lot of the raiders aren't very raid-skilled. Some of them have awesome DPS, but terrible awareness. Sometimes the strategies they use are sub-par. Sometimes the players simply ignore instructions (by never switching off Horridon, for instance, or continuing to AOE on Primordius trash after it's been called to stop).

Both groups are completely capable of clearing the raid, though the 25-man requires more practice to do so, and needs to cement those lessons over a longer period of time. Neither 10 nor 25-man difficulties present so much of a challenge that it causes guild issues. Indeed, even if the raid can't fill with raiders, we never have issues recruiting acceptable pugs.

So, no, ToT is not too challenging. Ulduar was harder than ToT. Icecrown, pre-zone buff, was harder than ToT. Plenty of raids have been just as hard, if not harder than ToT. Guilds break up for a number of reasons, but I'm not going to attribute much of that to the difficulty of ToT. More likely is that those guilds breaking up have a high amount of lesser-skilled players, putting out sub-par DPS and standing in fires. Of course your guild is going to break up if you can't kill Horridon. If your guild can't kill Horridon, the problem isn't Horridon... it's your players.

Im sorry but thats just laughable.

[Deleted]

ToT is perfectly tuned on normal, tbh. The bosses are hard enough to take some wipes, but not so hard that it grinds your brain out. A guild can kill the bosses relatively easy, assuming they don't give up after 5 wipes. As they kill bosses, they get better gear and the raid becomes easier.
The only thing that could change is the order of the bosses (Horridon should come later).

[Bawk]

I don't think the bosses are over-tuned. People use 'over-tuned' as an excuse as to why they're wiping when ToT relies heavily on personal responsibility to raiders. If your raiders aren't mentally capable of taking charge of personal mechanics, then that's why its hard. Has nothing to do with over-tuning.

Normal is easy mode. Just the way its always been.

[Deleted]

I also dont think that normal mode ToT is overtuned. Every half-way decent grp can clear it, being 10m or 25m, doesn't matter.
And hell, you don't even need THAT much gear as everyone is saying. I hopped in a 10m alt a few weeks back with my blook dk alt, they just had Lei Shen left and we killed it in like 3 attempts, my dk had around 505 ilvl and everyone else also under 510.

[Orby]

Blizzard has always had the middle raid be the hardest since WotLK,

Ulduar
Firelands
... and now Throne of Thunder...

[Deleted]

I think difficulty is spot on, if you can't (or rather whine abour wipes) clear normal modes, better stick to LFR.

[Deleted]

they aren't to hard. LFR is for the easy bosses.

I guess you never did Lei Shen LFR then. Takes an age of wipes to kill him once the buff stacks high enough to cover for all the dead people.

[Deleted]

I guess you never did Lei Shen LFR then. Takes an age of wipes to kill him once the buff stacks high enough to cover for all the dead people.

I just killed him 2 weeks in a row at first try, people learn.

[ttak82]

my guild just downed dark animus this evening for the first time.
it wasn't that hard for a fight healing wise ( me on mistweaver monk ) it was more the learning of what to do and when.
still after a change of tactics and ppl knowing not to disspell the debuff to soon ( or let it run out ) it died.


tho i agree that tot has a ton of complex fights, it's not that more complex then DS HC.
first boss is a joke. horridon just requires dps to interupt on door 2 and some disspelling on the rest. and for 4th door to have someone pester the flame casters.
after that it's just killing the war troll and using some CD's to keep tanks up.

for me the hardest fights where mageara, durumu, and council of elders.
mageara for the rampage dmg on the final head. ( call raid CD's ppl! and not at the same time-.- )
durumu for the damm ppl that get beams but don't know wtf to do yet! also maze is fun with lag and having your graphics set higher then fair.

then council of elder for the damm zul the sand bitch... having him not dead before the sandstorm is making the fights 100x harder.
also having 4 bosses where 1 does a debuff where you stack.
other you kill the add while 1 person moves away from it
and some minor aoe healing on the rolling troll is simple.

then comes zul. does a good amount of aoe dmg while summoning tons of adds that rampage your dps before the tank can get em all.
tbh after we got zul down by zerging him the fight was so easy it was enough to make me ask the dps to step it up! seeing i nearly fel asleep.

for the other fights there not to complicated but also not faceroll.
good example is ji-kun!
you have 2 teams for the nests that just fly around and kill eggs.
you have a aoe phase and a don't fall of the platform.
for the rest it's about doing the dps and keeping ppl alive. while dodging some green shit.
hell you could even get a 3rd team to get some feathers and get that dmg buff from his feed cast!
this fight is not complicated like durumu where you have to notice add spots before beams fire
or running a maze thats unforgivable to lag or high spell effect settings.

still for me it's a blast seeing us progress and getting closer and closer to heroic modes. even for ppl like us that are allot more casual it's again fun! to have some bosses and loot to look out for.


still for the next ppl replying! if tot is so hard. what about DS?
dps didn't press the button and got 1shot?
what color do we dps again? ow shit we didn't enable the addon.
moar burst! comeon it's so close!!!! aw damm.... oke kill upper left lets try again
single target dps ppl! don't aoe! fuck 30% and 5sec till we die
hug the crystals!
drakes aren't going down fast enough! to many blasts are coming thru!
i'm iceblocked get me out! ow shit... 2 healers are blocked!

if you know what bosses these situations occured imagine how it was on heroic.
where you had even less margine for screwups!

I like your post 2 Thumbs up.

Not subbed now, so I have not tried ToT but judging from the comments and personal experience (as well as nerfs that have occurred), Normal mode ToT is probably not hard as long as people understand mechanics and learn how to work out strats for their comp/group (especially in 10 man).

I was a mostly a normal mode raider back in cata and our 10 man runs usually had a couple of pugs who would rarely use voicechat and sometimes were not that great (well, no one was super awesome in our group anyway) but once we sorted out tacts/roles, it was a lot easier. This included coordinating cooldowns, knowing when to stack / spread etc.

eg. if you did not know when to stack / move on chimeron, someone would die. 3 healers at Zon'ozz - where should the 3rd one stand? Which tentacle on spine to kill first and which one to leave? who is the backup guy on fiery grips? Stuff like that. All simple but relevant and game changing decisions.

And LOL at the DS references; so true.
Reminds of V&T in BoT: someone dispels the debuff too early and the target dies.. "ok who dispelled?!" ..."uhh sorry I just reacted too fast - thought you had a some aids thing"

[Masternewt]

I don't know. I think that devs would take more pride in making the hard mode bosses because it's more the way they want to make them. I don't think they take a lot of pride in making LFR shit. It's like if they were amusement park engineers. "hey check out this awesome badass roller coaster we just built!" as opposed to "oh, look, we made bumper cars...".

"We made bumper cars that stand still but make the bumping sound so everyone can have the bumper car experience but without the heavily coordinated and demanding movement of hand on the steering wheel." That's more like LFR.

[Buu]

I don't think Too challenging is the true problem. It's because it's NOT FORGIVING AT ALL.
Unless EVERYONE do their role with perfect synergy, the fight fails. If someone fail at something, other person have to instantly perceive that and respond immediately to compensate for that.
The fights are not allowing people to explore and improve. Or your ENTIRE GROUP perform at "110%" efficiency or it's a wipe.

[Tauriel]

or is it simply becuase the content is rolling out too quickly and we arent given a chance to breathe or take a break between races for top tier progression.

By and large, this is the most popular reason I've come across from other guild leaders and members. I hate to say it, but it seems like there really IS such a thing as 'too much content, too fast'.

[Deleted]

By and large, this is the most popular reason I've come across from other guild leaders and members. I hate to say it, but it seems like there really IS such a thing as 'too much content, too fast'.

I never heard anything like that in my guild, quite the opposite tbh.