Is ToT too challenging causing the guild break ups?

[Gaman]

This argument is trotted out quite often. The evidence does not support it. Cataclysm was the decisive experiment that disconfirmed the theory that difficult content was what was attracting/retaining customers. Vanilla and BC succeeded in spite of hard/inaccessible end game content, not because of it.

Cataclysm confirmed people didnt really like long and hard 5man heroics, confirmed nothing about easy or hard raids /inaccessible end game content

[mireigi]

I hope you mean take the head to 70% by Rampage. Do 70% damage means by the time Rampage is over head only have 30% health left, and trust me that isn't necessary, as my guild use that tacts and no way we take head to 30% by end of Rampage.

Depends on your healer setup I think. Holy Pala + Disc Priest is the easiest setup for a 2 healer non-blue kill. Resto Druid + Mistweaver Monk, which we are using, is hard pressed to do the healing, meaning higher DPS requirement to avoid poison nova spam.

[Osmeric]

Cataclysm confirmed people didnt really like long and hard 5man heroics, confirmed nothing about easy or hard raids.

Oh, it disconfirmed that too. That's why they panic-nerfed T12 and accelerated the rollout of LFR.

[Linkedblade]

We have all seen alot of changes come with throne of thunder. In all honesty I think they are all for the better. But I wanted to bring to everyones attention the difficulty of this tier. this isnt to QQ about how it is too hard. because TOT is the best raid we have had since Ulduar. but to point out the stress it has been causing alot of guild and I wonder if it is the reason guilds are falling apart.

Becuase of the difficulty can this be the reason we see fatboss fall. and see Exodus fall apart. 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.

All in all. whatever the cause be. I wanted to see what the community thought. I know guilds rise. guilds fall. but this patch. not becuase content is bad. I believe the difficulty is causing strain and what wouldnt seem like faults in a raid team are now becoming very apparent. I just reflect and see alot of it happening.

No, I think playing the same game for a decade with the same people everyday is what is making guilds break up . . .

[mireigi]

indeed but you have 1 more dps than you would normally have thus making the dps requirement easier to hit, and we have a disc priest holy pally setup so the disc is helping too

Yeah, the two best healers for the fight IMO. Still, you cannot afford too many poison novas, the damage is just insane

[Dreknar20]

I like the difficulty personally. The issue that I have with it (in 10 man) is that everyone's job is so specific for each fight that if you have a few absences in one night, you may be stuck on 2,3,4 bosses because the new people you bring in haven't been through the ringer 10+ times to do it right..

isnt that true for 10 mans in general not just this tier?

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 10:44 PM ----------

Yeah, the two best healers for the fight IMO. Still, you cannot afford too many poison novas, the damage is just insane

yeah, my guild used same strat for first kills, dmg gets insane on last 2 heads, but thats where lust comes in

[mireigi]

No, I think playing the same game for a decade with the same people everyday is what is making guilds break up . . .

Possibly. I think it's more a matter of failing to adjust to the new difficulty after the easy introduction raids and the two previous casual expansions.

[Deleted]

ToT normal is simple to hard and to say otherwise is ignorant. All that needs to be done with raiding is encaspulated in my signature.

Actually i would say the opposite, i would rather play wow with 3 million subs and ToT difficulty lvl then 12 million subs and ds difficulty lvl.

Just admit it this game isnt for you.

[Grym]

Depends on your healer setup I think. Holy Pala + Disc Priest is the easiest setup for a 2 healer non-blue kill. Resto Druid + Mistweaver Monk, which we are using, is hard pressed to do the healing, meaning higher DPS requirement to avoid poison nova spam.

Yes but by NO MEAN you are required to take a head down to 30% by end of rampage in order to use that method, the quote I quoted in my previous post impost that in order to do the non-blue method you NEED to take head to 30% by end of Rampage.

[cabyio]

Yeah, the two best healers for the fight IMO. Still, you cannot afford too many poison novas, the damage is just insane

It really isn't hard to have ZERO poison novas. Heck, we even have none when we bring in a couple new dps.

[Grym]

I dunno if ToT is too difficult or not, I didn't have any problem with it, but from the sounds of it, a lot of people do.

But they cannot make the game too easy either, if Normal mode was as easy as LFR, I foresee 2 issue:

1) people clear it with eyes closed, too easy, got bored, quit.
2) since people can blast through normal, they will think they are HC material, now they try HC after the dumped down version of normal, and found the gap to be too great, then demand HC to be nerf.

While may be they can make it a little easier, they can't make it so that 99% of the players can clear it, people at the lower end of the skill spectrum just have to suck it up I guess?

[Scathbais]

I don't believe ToT is too hard at all. Just because you actually have to pay attention to raid mechanics, doesn't make it too hard.
Exodus fell apart because they burned out from raiding too much. Attempting full heroic clears while undergeared contributed to the burnout.

Having said that, I think content should be nerfed to help players push past the next hurdle. I do not agree at all with the decision to no longer periodically nerf content. Heroic DS became a joke with nerfs but in general, they help keep the player base happy and healthy.

[mireigi]

isnt that true for 10 mans in general not just this tier?

Yes it is. 10man raiding is a curse. If you have too few players, you are hurting when people are abscent. If you have too many, you have to rotate players a lot, slowing your progress or risking that players leave. Stepping up from 10man to 25man is insanely hard to do unless you merge with one or two other 10man raiding guilds.

Would be a lot easier, if health, damage, number of mobs/adds/events, etc and amount of loot scaled with the number of players, with 10 and 25 players being the lower and upper limit. That way you could always bring your entire raidteam while recruiting for 25 man raiding.

[Kalcheus]

Blizzard made more money when casuals were not able to see 100% of the content like they are today. (BC, and Wotlk having the highest sub numbers). So what have they really gained by making the casuals happy? They have gained less money.

(not an attempt to bash casuals, just pointing something out)

Blizzard also made more money when the Democrats were in charge of the House of Representatives. Are you going to blame the Republicans taking the House in 2010 for the loss of subscriptions?

(TL, DR: Correlation =/= Causation)

[Deleted]

Blizzard made more money when casuals were not able to see 100% of the content like they are today. (BC, and Wotlk having the highest sub numbers). So what have they really gained by making the casuals happy? They have gained less money.

(not an attempt to bash casuals, just pointing something out)

This, i mean NOONE can say how things would end up if they kept wow less casual from the turning point. Not even blizzard could tell you, what if they would have more subs today cause they stuck to their guns? We will never know.

Nice that no besserwisser can say anything about that at least!

[Calgar]

I don't feel it is too challenging on some fights and other fights are crazy. I am doing 10 man and it seems like it is a lot harder then it should because of some of the mechanics. We are 11/12 normal and lei shen is a big old bag of potatoes because of the RNG of the fight, like we will have like 3 good attempts and then 10 bad ones just based on the RNG during the platform stage.
Maybe this is just me bitching because I just want to kill him haha

No offense, but the attitude in this post is exactly what some of the "hardcore" raiders in this thread are getting at, there is no RNG in this fight, every platform has its abilities, all of these abilities are activated in a specific order at a specific time, and the entire fight is learning how to deal with each part of the fight, it is, however easier to claim its all random, and blame the encounter for you being unable to improve.
For example, are you aware that in the first transition you can group the raid into groups of 1/1/4/4 (ten man) with the 1's being tanks, as the only ability that will hit the tanks quadrants is bouncing ball? (and if you take the diffusion chain out in the first transition, for the P2 transition you can then group 4/4/2 with the 2 being tanks and as you have taken the diffusion chain out of action the other two groups can just stack.)
In normals, the entire fight is about knowing what you need to do and being able to do it while holding down a decent dps rotation, theres no fight you even need to two heal really and a third healer makes most fights super-safe unless you are doing something silly.

Just my two cents.

[Kalcheus]

No offense, but the attitude in this post is exactly what some of the "hardcore" raiders in this thread are getting at, there is no RNG in this fight, every platform has its abilities, all of these abilities are activated in a specific order at a specific time, and the entire fight is learning how to deal with each part of the fight, it is, however easier to claim its all random, and blame the encounter for you being unable to improve.
For example, are you aware that in the first transition you can group the raid into groups of 1/1/4/4 (ten man) with the 1's being tanks, as the only ability that will hit the tanks quadrants is bouncing ball? (and if you take the diffusion chain out in the first transition, for the P2 transition you can then group 4/4/2 with the 2 being tanks and as you have taken the diffusion chain out of action the other two groups can just stack.)
In normals, the entire fight is about knowing what you need to do and being able to do it while holding down a decent dps rotation, theres no fight you even need to two heal really and a third healer makes most fights super-safe unless you are doing something silly.

Just my two cents.

I don't think most of the people in here have an issue with how difficult Lei Shen is.

[mireigi]

I don't believe ToT is too hard at all. Just because you actually have to pay attention to raid mechanics, doesn't make it too hard.
Exodus fell apart because they burned out from raiding too much. Attempting full heroic clears while undergeared contributed to the burnout.

Having said that, I think content should be nerfed to help players push past the next hurdle. I do not agree at all with the decision to no longer periodically nerf content. Heroic DS became a joke with nerfs but in general, they help keep the player base happy and healthy.

I don't think content should be nerfed to appease the masses who cannot or are slow to progress. Instead there should be an option to lower the difficulty, similar to the buff/debuff now present in MSV, HoF and ToES, but disabled by default. That way you can choose to have an easier time or do the raid as intended.

[l33t]

If by challenging you mean stupidly long boss fights and absurdly heavy time-consuming trash packs, than yes, I think it is.
I hated Sha of fear progression nights because of too long fights draining people very fast; and now we have almost all the bosses last just as much as Sha. What is worse, that even on farm good 1/3 of time during raiding, that precious time, is wasted completely on trash packs. The very symbol of trash absurdness is bridge before Horridon. We still don't understand what exactly Blizz wanted us to do there, because running directly with 4 adds on tails to mid-miniboss is impossible, and killing souls while running over the bridge is also impossible due to beams; so what we do is get our Bear to last miniboss and kill him solo, in something like 9 minutes, while we slowly pull souls one by one to the stairs and moving to the middle. The process is boring to no limits, and every time we're there, our vent is filled with rage and swears. Another good example is Megaera trash, it is also absurdly time consuming due to its numbers. Another good example is Animus trash, we've wiped on it more times than we did on Twins (actually we are wiping on it one or two times every time we're approaching Animus, even now, because they change every week), god damn it, stupid mobs with little to no signs of how to kill them and even more stupid oneshot aoe mechanics. Also I should mention trash before Lei Shen, their shield mechanic is nothing but yet another stupid time sink. And that unskippable movie after Council... arrgh. Actually, ToT has only one good trash, and it stands in the room before Twins, although Twins themselves are even more disappointing due to being as "hard" as first boss is.
TL : DR I think any trash that lasts more that one minute and any boss that lasts more that six minutes should not exist, really. Instead of artificially time-sinking every god damned critter in raid, they'd better make fights a lot more dynamic than we have now. I, though hating bosses based around raid-focus and raid-stamina challenge, don't mind having one or two such bosses in tier; but to have almost all the tier covered with everything required 10+ minutes to kill is absurd. It is much, much worse than having Patchwerk bosses; actually, I'm missing Saurfang all the time because it was nice, quick and dynamic fight.

[Calgar]

I don't think most of the people in here have an issue with how difficult Lei Shen is.

You miss my point, I was using the guy I quoted as an example to prove a point, that those who complain about difficulty are not looking past the fact they cant kill a boss to the reasons why they cant kill a boss, you could replace Lei Shen with Horridon and add some Horridon based advice, my point is, to say RNG is preventing you from a kill is a negative viewpoint, its not, "we need to get better" its "the fight is bullshit" and thats why people are finding ToT hard, because they have an external locus of control and are not willing to accept the fault may lie with themselves.

Hope this makes it clearer.