Gear or Skill: What Separates Great Guilds from Mediocre Guilds

[anyaka21]

I think all of this is a little different than others. I raid with 2 guilds atm. One is a server first progression guild that has gotten all raiding server 1sts on our servers. My alt raids with a casual guild and has pugged raids and raided with other guilds as he hit 80.

The difference is quite noticable. It's not just skill but it's attitude and committment. When I was trying to get my alt gear pre-bk, and post 3.0 patch (because content was easy), I'd also raid with casual guilds.

Casuals have a different mentality altogether. Example, after killing a boss in BT, loot to 15mins to divy up, then they'd take a 10 min break after that.

Raiders typically have the mentality that once the boss is dead, it's time for trash, and do loot while we move. It's about not wasting time and keeping people involved.

Raiding is about everyone not only reading up on strats pre-fight, but listening on vent when a new tactic is tried. Example on Malygos p3, when you tell everyone to get in a tight group so the heals will hit everyone, and then when p3 starts 5 people die becvause they are in melee range, and another 5 are around the other side not gettting heals and wonder why they died. That's casual, especially when they do it 5 times in a row and still don't understand the concept.

Raiding/progression guilds, this will happen once, and it's fixed. If it's not, then there's a problem, and those toons don't get invites.

Raiding toons are also about personal responsibility. Sure content isn't the most difficult, but raiders understand (without being told) the concept of flasking, pots, elixirs. They understand the need to improve not only their gear, but positioning, rotations, etc, for optimal tanking, healing, and dps.

Casuals dont' really worry too much about dps and the need for a minimum 3.5k on Sarth3d and getting versperon down as fast as possible, as another example.

[Elementium]

Entry Level Raids! More than meets the eye! (to Hardcore assholes that wanna hop into sunwell right away)

[Sanguissa]

Well, there i one other thing. Healers are OP now. Really really op, sart2-3drakes up are healing chalenge a bit, other content Can be healed thorught with faceroll! BAM! NEXT!

[theredviola]

The incoming raid damage at level 60 Naxx was extremely high, and posed a real threat to your raid. This is no longer the case.
- No one moves out of Faerlina's rain of fire anymore, and many other AE spells are not a threat.
- Trash mobs are all AEd to death
- no need to kite anub'rekan
- one person out of place on thaddius cannot kill everyone else, only themselves
- Razuvious's shout? That used to one-shot mana users in LoS

I could go on...
The difficulty is clearly much lower

I 100% agree. They should re-attune the 25 man version of Naxx this way to make if far more of a challenge. That way the "casual gamers" still get to see the content, while still (hopefully) challenging the "hard core gamers" and keeping them around.

[Lór]

Bullshit.

This is tantamount to saying (just pulling a random XBL game out of the air):
"Oh, so you've beat Halo 3 on all difficulty levels, but you haven't really beaten the game because you don't have all the achievements."

Wrong. I beat the game. I've beaten everything that is in the game, I have seen every encounter, every map, every gametype. The rest is trivial BS.

It is the exact same with WoW achievements. They provide nothing but the occasional title or mount. Achievements are not progression, they are not content. They are not the "new uber". They are optional hoops to jump through for no gain.

If you've killed every boss in 10 and 25 man, then you've seen all the content. Period. Granted, I will make exception for Sarth with multiple Drakes.

No self-respecting "hardcore" guild will end a raid because one of their core group had a crappy ping and lagged into poison at Heigan, ruining their chances at an "Immortal" achievement.

Finally, proud of "Champion of the Frozen Wastes", seriously? There's a boomkin on our server who's wearing the Argent Skullcap and using a green Wisdom Carver of the Elder sporting that title. He's just one of many people in really bad gear wearing it. Yeah, it's so "challenging" and rewarding.

Champion of the Naaru was 10, no 20, times more challenging than Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

Your post is bullshit. People want and need challenge, they want to fulfill goals and to aim for achievements. Just a simple example.
You train for a marathon and you finish it in 5 hours. Then you'll see people, that finished the marathon in under 3 hours. Many people made the experience, how a marathon works, how you have to overcome your thoughts to give up and so on, but then they start to propose a new goal, finish a marathon in under 3 hours. After a certain amount of time and training, they finally finish it in under 3 hours.
That's, what achievements are about. You propose a goal and want to reach it.
People often did this before blizzard implemented the achievement system. Just think of the Molten Core Speed Runs in under one hour or killing Ragnaros without a son of flame phase or just kill bosses without losing any players. Now there's a system ingame, that tracks achievements and that shows, that people did.
Of course you won't get paid or you won't get a physical reward for that or even virtual items (in most of the cases), but you will reach a goal, that you've desired to reach.

[frankster]

Achievements are a cheap way to get away from having to create new content. Raid progression should be about killing new bosses, seeing new instances and new lore. Not about doing the same bosses again but with stupid gimmicks.

choose:

1) easyish bosses, hard achievements
2) hard bosses, hours of wiping on each boss.

same amount of content either way. pick one.

[Gillihan]

choose:

1) easyish bosses, hard achievements
2) hard bosses, hours of wiping on each boss.

same amount of content either way. pick one.

Actually, Malygos is still Malygos whether you are trying to beat the default enrage timer or the achievement one, same as all of the Naxxramas ones.

The only fight that changes is Sartharion, and that's still only one boss.

Hard bosses that require progression =/= one-shotting bosses and coming back next week or the weeks after, (after you have upgraded gear off those bosses you've been one-shotting) to work for achievements that reward nothing (towards upgrading gear).

It's very different.

[frankster]

killing malygos < 5m != killing malygos

you might have to wipe for a while, or at least fail the achievement, til you can meet the dps requirements.

its just the same as if they put a 5m enrage timer on malygos instead of 8m (or whatever it is)

[Gillihan]

killing malygos < 5m != killing malygos

you might have to wipe for a while, or at least fail the achievement, til you can meet the dps requirements.

its just the same as if they put a 5m enrage timer on malygos instead of 8m (or whatever it is)

Except it's not.

Just change your own wording a bit:

"you might have to wipe for a while, or at least fail the encounter, til you can meet the dps requirements."

Instead of wiping on hard bosses until meeting those DPS/healing/coordination requirements, people are face rolling content and by doing so, gearing themselves up more and more. As each week passes, the majority of the achievements become easier and easier. If, instead those bosses were harder to begin with, those people that couldn't do more than face roll, would not benefit from the luxury of getting to upgrade their gear each week, thus making achievements easier.

[rabbimojo]

Personally, I think the new approach to raid design is pretty solid. I realize some people take issue with it, but you disliking it or me liking is not hard fact, just opinion.

The post above mentioning how you can get upgrades without meeting the achievements is hitting the nail on the head, here.

What Blizz has realized is that most of their players are pretty bad. Probably most of the people who read this post are bad players and don't even know it. The thing is, the entirety of WoW's gameplay hinges on being able to invest time to acquire guarantees of progress (or at least something in that direction).

Previously, raiding was something of a wall, either in terms of gear (obvious), individual raider skill (obvious), or raid organization/leadership (typically less obvious to mediocre guilds). What Blizz has done with Naxx, and presumably all raid content after this, is provide an actual route to acquire the gear and experience they need.

Previously, BC, how did you get 25 man raiding experience? Suppose you're some terribad guild: You just hope your leader has the charisma to bring the whole raid together wipe after wipe, and/or that the players want it badly enough. Most casuals do not, and stop attending. Now, you can bring them together for default sarth, get some practice in leading, and in following, for everyone. Get used to seeing all those people, to working as a team. This makes raiding more accessible in many many different ways.

Whether some people like this or not is relatively unimportant. "The proof is in the pudding", or in this case, the 11.5-subscriber playerbase.

As for the question of whether someone who has killed all bosses sans-achievement has "cleared all content", it's mostly semantic. I think it's likely that most players are content just downing the bosses. I don't think they're going to claim they've done everything that can be done, and quibbling over the phrase "all content" is sort of silly. Some people don't think achievements are interesting content, some do. Personally? I don't. I can do them just fine, I just don't care to do so.. For some reason I don't get enough of a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment out of it to bring me back each attempt.

You may say that makes me a bad player, I just think it shows where my priorities are. IE, I enjoy the lore of WoW and the experience of raiding, but I don't like waiting for the handful of bad players my guild carries to raids to figure it out. That's the worst part of raiding for me, and could almost make me quit. I would rather log off and switch to any of my other hobbies than wait for Joetherogue to pass his Raiding 101 Exam.

So yeah, big fan of the new approach, since it lets guilds choose how much they want to get into the raiding game.

[Saelind]

I can understand how frustrating it could of been for a dev who worked his bottoms off designing Naxx @ Vanilla to realize that so few of the players had the opportunity to witness hisy work (which was really good I have to admit).

But acting like "we learned from our previous experiences and we have progressed.." by giving us a microwaved content for us to consider it to be spectacular is a clear fail strategy.
i can also understand all the easier access/achivement=challenge blablabla thing but I really think that collecting titles and names will soon grow up to be ridiculous due to how overwhelming they will be. Logging in and spending 25 min to chose the title I will wear today from the 74869 title i have on my caracter sheet will just be.. sad..
The system will end up failling itself simply because more titles will never be as appealing as "MOR LEWTZ".

Morality: ok we got the point about the easy access but the boys in blue have to realize they will have to come up with somthin else than just titles and mounts that will end up to be the most disposable pixels in the game (--> 8/8 T1 still in my bank..). Increasing the ilvl margin between normal an heroic would be a start if they (as they promissed) will run a normal/hero Ulduar..

[Gomexus]

The difference between "great" guilds and "mediocre" guilds is pretty apparent...and it has nothing to do with skill or gear.

The reason people know of guilds like Ensidia (pre and post merger) is because of:

1) Fan sites like this one, wowprogress, wowjutsu, worldofraids, etc. advertise their achievements in game like they cured cancer. Top of the page, HUGE BOLD LETTERS, big write-ups of interviews with members "damn bra, I mean, we like totally button mashed that thing to death man! it was sweet!", and more or less glamorizing the guild as "cutting edge".

2) The guilds themselves are corporately sponsored, it's no secret, don't act shocked.


Now we should breakdown what really seperates these guilds in terms of "skill":

1) Skill is not a direct evaluation of speed. Anyone with half a brain should be able to clear content just as fast as the "great" guilds. 25 people who all have 16+ hours a day, with the same play schedules (log in from 8am till midnight server), with the correct class make-up, should be able to make things happen...if they weren't...that's when it would be worthy of the front page "LOL@SPONSORED GUILD WIPING ON MALYGOS!@!"

2) Skill is a direct evaluation of how well something is done. When Ulduar is released, Ensidia will claim world firsts left and right. Everyone eill sing their praises or /spit on them. What people don't ever hear about is that 16th place guild...the guild who cleared the same content before any strats were revealed...the guild that pulled off no death's their first attempt. No one hear's about "skill", all you ever read about is "speed"...Hence "world first" and not "world best".

As far as gear goes...if you are in a guild with 24 other people who all play at the exact same time and cannot get gear then something is wrong.


TLDR:

Great Guilds= Excessive amounts of available playtime.

Mediocre Guilds= Just as much or more skill with significantly less playtime.

[skakruk]

leadership

[turkeyspit]

Great Guilds= Excessive amounts of available playtime.

Mediocre Guilds= Just as much or more skill with significantly less playtime.[/b]

While I do agree with some of your post (ie. Fastest =/= Bestest), I cannot aggree with the above.

Guild A - spends 8 Hours of Raid time over 5 nights to down Sartherion with 3 Drakes up
Guild B - spends 40 Hours of Raid time over 3 nights to down Sartherion with 3 Drakes up.

By your definition, Guild B would be superior, eventhough it's obvious who took less time to down the boss.

Skill is undoubtably a factor, and more important then gear. Even bosses with enrage timers (Patch, Thaddius, Malygos) will almost be guaranteed to die if 25 Raiders stay alive. Not standing in the ouch, getting heals off fast enough, mitigating enough damage via talents, coordinating your people for specific tasks, etc.. are what differentiates guilds.

Every guild has some great players, some good players, and some mediocre players. The "famous" guilds are able to pick and choose only the great players, because EVERYONE wants to be in that guild, whether it be for the fame, fortune, or the epeen.

[Deleted]

I wouldnt call raidsuccess skill, it's more a better understanding of game mechanics and reactions. when do i have to use what ability? something like this. oh and of course the knowledge to play your class correctly. the skill factor can be concluded as a movement based factor. I've seen quite a lot of people who can't move correctly :/

[anyaka21]

People also need to realize that this is achievements 1.0 for Blizzard. As goes for most everything in this world in terms of marketing, you pretty much have a test market. In other words, you try something out to see if it works.

Basically, what Sarth3d has shown, is that achievement rewards work. Make the fight harder and you get better rewards. For Blizz, this is a win/win situation. Casual guilds can down Sarth and win, Hardcore guilds can do Sarth3d and get better loot and that's a win too.

Expect this and more down the line, especially in Uludar. It will become the defining line between casual, good, and great guilds.

[ewhenn]

People also need to realize that this is achievements 1.0 for Blizzard. As goes for most everything in this world in terms of marketing, you pretty much have a test market. In other words, you try something out to see if it works.

Basically, what Sarth3d has shown, is that achievement rewards work. Make the fight harder and you get better rewards. For Blizz, this is a win/win situation. Casual guilds can down Sarth and win, Hardcore guilds can do Sarth3d and get better loot and that's a win too.

Expect this and more down the line, especially in Uludar. It will become the defining line between casual, good, and great guilds.

I agree here, and I like it to be honest.

People buy/play games to experience them. Not to be told by the player base that they arent 'leet' enough, etc.

Lets the better players challenge themselves to down a hard boss, yet it lets the players just looking for kicks see the content too. It's a win/win in my book.

[Malentra]

I wouldnt call raidsuccess skill, it's more a better understanding of game mechanics and reactions. when do i have to use what ability? something like this. oh and of course the knowledge to play your class correctly. the skill factor can be concluded as a movement based factor. I've seen quite a lot of people who can't move correctly :/

Google -> Define:Skill

A skill is the learned capacity or talent to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. ...

capacity to do something well; technique, ability. Skills are usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities, which are often thought of as innate.

Ability to use knowledge, a developed aptitude, and/or a capability to effectively and readily execute or perform an activity.

...refers to a person’s ability to perform various types of cognitive or behavioural activity effectively.

...is the ability to do something well. White Cloud was skilled at hand-to-hand combat.


A present, observable competence of a candidate to perform a learned act with ease and precision.

A form of intimacy: knowledge learned through detailed and repeated experience.

Is the correct application of technique under pressure <- (I like this one)

This refers to the demonstration of a particular talent. It can be a mechanical skill, such as operating a piece of equipment, or a verbal skill, such as making a presentation.

An ability to perform certain activities or movements with control or consistency to bring about a desired result. <- (this is a good one too)



I think its pretty obvious that a progressing raid force:

- Has leadership that can quickly formulate or choose a strategy that works best for the guild.
- Has a large fraction of raid members that are "skilled" i.e. able to apply the chosen strategy with control and consistency under pressure.
- Has enough time in their raid week that they can learn and execute strategy. (dependent on the skill of the raiders)

So basically:
Leadership
Skill
Time

Fini.

[Skippert]

So basically:
Leadership
Skill
Time

Agree.

Bit offtopic: (most has been said anyway)

Achievements are a cheap way to get away from having to create new content.

Well said. I'm happy that many people don't give much about achievements, because they realise it's just another system in WoW to keep you going, playing and paying, while it's not offering nothing new, just a title or mount for spending time on mostly (a difficult raid encounters is one of the few exceptions) useless things.