WotLK to MoP: A Trend Analysis of Raiding Difficulty.

[Osmeric]

I have to admit, I'll be extremely frustrated if they make the Siege of Orgrimmar more similar to Icecrown and Dragon Soul, just to launch the next expansion with Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear reloaded. I sincerely hope we hear some commentary regarding a solution, and I now know what I hope said solution is.

I don't think anyone will be fooled if they nerf T16.

[Pua]

I don't think anyone will be fooled if they nerf T16.

Nerfing is the wrong way to go - it needs to be easier out the gate because, to me, blanket nerfs are extremely patronizing.

"We didn't make this content for you, baddies, but we'll gut it just so you can kill a couple of things. Have fun, lolz".

[Deleted]

I think the OP has a point, but wonder if there are other more reliable metrics to measure raid difficulty? Like how quickly a given guild could clear content?

For example, my guild killed the first four bosses of ICC (10N) in about 5 weeks. It took about 3 months and one week to kill the first four bosses of ToT (10N). We only raid once a week now, whereas in ICC, it was probably twice, so that should be factored in. This matches my perception of the respective difficulty. If I was to put my finger on it, I think what's changed is there's little to no redundancy - everyone must be on their game and no one can be carried. It's quite tightly tuned for a guild like mine. Personally, I like the difficulty, but most people on my server don't (hence the decline in raiding guilds noted in the other thread).

As a sidenote - one feature of ICC was how the difficulty ramped up. We farmed the first half like crazy, but hit a wall with Putricide/Blood Council. I suspect it took nerfs to get past them. If you compare MoP raids with the second half of ICC, MoP might even be easier.

But the key expansion imo was Cataclysm. The first two tiers of that were punishing and my guild had no appetite to raid: it ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes until the Firelands nerfs.

[Deleted]

Yeah I have a buddy who plays wow since the beginning and even though he could raid in any progress raid he just doesn't want to because he doesn't like what "challenges" do with peoples psychs and he said "I just need a reliable sign from blizzard in which direction they want to go. Then I can finally make my decision if it is worth to put effort in the game now for then or not." He was very active with DS going on, we raidet together on like 3-4 toons... Then with MoP he wiped like 100 times on stone guard with his group before he went into "no more normal raid"-mode and leveling one alt after other. Man he is a very nice guy and I enjoyed my raids with him every time and alone for my sake I hope blizzard will send some sign. And not from GC, because GC is all but not capable of realizing how to play the game he designs as sad as it sounds...

[Demeia]

Nerfing is the wrong way to go - it needs to be easier out the gate because, to me, blanket nerfs are extremely patronizing.

"We didn't make this content for you, baddies, but we'll gut it just so you can kill a couple of things. Have fun, lolz".

Blanket nerfs cushion everyone, unlike the valor upgrades which reward those more willing to spend time on the game. I never found them patronizing. I think they were reassuring: sooner or later we'll kill this boss. Most of the messes they made with this game is making it more challenging to "help the players become better." Personally, I think stronger guilds than ours are almost always very ruthless ("sorry, your dps sucks, get out.") That's one way to play an MMO but certainly not the way blizzard should be designing.

I screamed against the 25m to 10m change...and I was one of the players who was wiped out by it. "Three tanks, 6 healers, 15 dps", I argued, "now becomes two tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps." The ten-mans eat the tanks and healers but don't soak up all those dps players. Harder enrage timers mean you can't take sucky dps players. Blizzard needed most normal raids to carry some players and you just don't do that as much with 10m.

But now they seem to be thinking, "let's return to 25m superior loot model". I'm going to bet that kills their game. They should have never made the change but if they try to force us back, well, I have a raid full of people who never, ever will do 25m again.

They should probably just suck it up and accept the only way to give birth to 25m again with enraging their player base is to remove shared lockouts and find some clever way not to overgear players (maybe tokens instead of drops the second time around).

[Djuntas]

No surprise here. Ofcourse wow's raiding population is dwindlling, when no incentives are given to raid.

Just bring back that TBC raid model already. Entry bosses needs to be easy (Think lootreaver etc) so all get to see some off the raid, and then let the bosses scale up. All this seperation between the playerbase is crap: One mode to rule them all.

[Brodeo]

i hate what lfr has done to this game and im probably going to unsub. people who think it doesnt affect the raid community at large really have poor perspective when looking at the big picture. i used to raid hardcore but my schedule got the better of me. LFR doesnt scratch that itch. Weekend pugs used to, but with LFR those have fallen to the wayside. Both because the average player now has no desire or need to improve himself and because most people who WOULD pug are just running LFR and calling it a day.

The pool of new raiders just isnt what it was previously and thats a huge contributor to the falloff recently. New raiders arent conditioned for adversity, they havent needed to min/max and probably dont even know what that is, and they always feel as if they can go elsewhere if the raid leader yells at them. Its pitiful. I felt privileged to raid when i first started because there was always someone good vying for my spot if i didnt do my best.

[Pua]

They should probably just suck it up and accept the only way to give birth to 25m again with enraging their player base is to remove shared lockouts and find some clever way not to overgear players (maybe tokens instead of drops the second time around).

I actually think the next expansion will herald the birth of the single-size, 15-man raiding scene. It's simply the best of all the options, will cause the least amount of hassle and will allow the surplus DPS players to be hoovered up by essentially doubling the number of them that you have.

[DakonBlackblade]

Imo the fights have become too complex, its frankly putting off alot of ppl form raiding, you want to kill a new boss you gota learn all his 35 skills, it used to be a handfull of them. I mean the boss can be hard and not have 300 skills seriously.

I dont mind the complexity, I quite like it in fact but I am the minority and newer players and casual players just feel overwhelmed by the shear amount of stuf the bosses do. The first boss in the entire expansion has a tank swap mechanic that requires a math teacher to explain to your tanks how it should work and the second boss on ToT has liek 700 skills, thats not encouraging for new players.

As a result the raiding comunity is bleeding players, those who raid raid but almost no one new comes to the scene, they have LFR where things are less convoluted and drop loot as well, they dont need ot be super good and they still win, diferently from modern day raids, and they dont feel like second class citizens because theyre pulling okay dps instead of murdering the metters. Normal modes realy needs to be way more acessible, theres an heroic mode for a reason.

I actually think the next expansion will herald the birth of the single-size, 15-man raiding scene. It's simply the best of all the options, will cause the least amount of hassle and will allow the surplus DPS players to be hoovered up by essentially doubling the number of them that you have.

The time for doing this is long gone, this ship has sailled, if they do this theyll disband every 25 in existence and kill at least half the 10s, when they decided theyd makke 10/25 share a lockout and drop same loot they shouldnt have done it, they shouldve implemented 15 men instances period, the oportunity for that is gone now tough and implementing 15 men size on the current scenario would be the death of WoW raiding. quite frankly what they shouldve done is when they downsized from 40 to 25, they shouldve gone all the way to 15, they lost 2 oportunitys to implement 15 men size as the only raid size.

[Deleted]

I think the OP has a point, but wonder if there are other more reliable metrics to measure raid difficulty? Like how quickly a given guild could clear content?

For example, my guild killed the first four bosses of ICC (10N) in about 5 weeks. It took about 3 months and one week to kill the first four bosses of ToT (10N). We only raid once a week now, whereas in ICC, it was probably twice, so that should be factored in. This matches my perception of the respective difficulty. If I was to put my finger on it, I think what's changed is there's little to no redundancy - everyone must be on their game and no one can be carried. It's quite tightly tuned for a guild like mine. Personally, I like the difficulty, but most people on my server don't (hence the decline in raiding guilds noted in the other thread).

As a sidenote - one feature of ICC was how the difficulty ramped up. We farmed the first half like crazy, but hit a wall with Putricide/Blood Council. I suspect it took nerfs to get past them. If you compare MoP raids with the second half of ICC, MoP might even be easier.

But the key expansion imo was Cataclysm. The first two tiers of that were punishing and my guild had no appetite to raid: it ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes until the Firelands nerfs.

I have been putting together some data. The intention is in the end to both check the the progressive difficulty of each raid since T8. It is not complete yet. What I do have complete however is the data for full clear normal modes after 1 month. That is 1 month after each tier is released, how many % of the guilds that killed first boss that killed last.

The results look like:

from easiest to hardest.

(T9 10) < (T9 25) < T13 < T12 < T14 < T15 < (T8 25) < T10 10 < T11 < T10 25

Now this is very crude results. Things to note is that the extreme gating in T9 leading them to be very easy. Also the short lengths of T9, T13 and T12 of course making a full clear easier. Also, T8, there is no stats for how many guilds cleared the first boss, so the 'first' boss in T8 is counted as guilds that cleared the first 4 bosses. So T8 should probably be ranked a lot harder.

What is probably noticeable is that T14 and T15 have been the easiest normal mode raids with over 8 bosses to clear 100%. (and no, it was not even a competetion)

Feel free to double check on wowprogress if you dont trust me. Stats are all there. The drawback as I said is that this is only full normal clears, does not take in account for people hitting walls on different bosses.

[Deleted]

That is 1 month after each tier is released, how many % of the guilds that killed first boss that killed last.

I think that's an interesting metric. A couple of thoughts:

(a) the sample selection effect: given the dramatic fall in the number of raiding guilds documented in another thread in this forum, it would be interesting to take a given sample of guilds (e.g. those who raided all tiers) to compute your indicator. If we've gone from 130 raiding guilds per server in T10 to 30 in T15, it's likely the 30 remaining are the more skilled.

(b) the end boss effect: the Lich King was a beast, even on 10N. Killing him in a month would be quite an achievement. There's a reason ICC was nerfed. It got seriously hard halfway through for the mass of raiders entering it. They could not kill LK without the nerfs. I'd be interested to see a mid-tier indicator - e.g. how many killed the first 4 bosses within a month? [1] I am pretty sure Horridon 10N is harder than Deathwhisperer 10N was and indeed that the first half of ICC was easier than the first half of ToT. But I also suspect the second half of ICC was harder.

[1]How do you handle the staggered release of tiers btw? Was LK even available to kill within one month of the first wing being up? Measuring progress from opening up the last wing of ICC might be a bit unfair, as raiders would have had more time to get gear of that tier by then than for a tier when the end boss was killable on launch day.

[Vargur]

Why are you even comparing different tiers of each expansion is beyond me. ICC and DS were the last of theirs, T14 and ToT isn't.
Compare instead T4 with T7 with T11 with T14.

Yes, T14 and 15 can be hard for casually skilled players. They're raids.

[Pua]

What is probably noticeable is that T14 and T15 have been the easiest normal mode raids with over 8 bosses to clear 100%. (and no, it was not even a competetion)

Those numbers aren't as relevant as they could be (a fair criticism of my opening post, by the way), and paint a far rosier picture than what's glaringly obvious when you look at the flat numbers. Also, the flaws in what you're doing have been pointed out a few times and you don't seem to care.

Tiers 14 and 15, to most reasonable people who've raided for a long time, are self-evidently more difficult than anything before them, purely by going off the number of mechanics per boss, the number of mechanics that are essentially one-shots and the sheer output requirements. No realistic person is going to dispute that. There are a couple of things to note here, however:

1) My post highlights the drop per boss in both Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear to be substantially more damaging than anything before it.
2) The percentage drop in raiders, since MoP started, is substantially higher than it's ever been. Substantially.
3) One-month clears will be the guilds with enough skill to do clear an instance in one month - which isn't many. This will make the numbers after a month look better.
4) The top end of the playerbase has improved over time, in some cases drastically, and so have things like mods or UI's.
5) Classes, in general, are now far more challenging to play optimally than they've ever been and this has a significant impact.

Lastly, as has also been hinted multiple times, taking these numbers in a vacuum doesn't tell you anything useful because it's not telling you where people are getting stuck or where they're flat out giving up. Guilds are happy to be progressing without killing final bosses, and we saw that throughout WotLK.

Guilds in Mists of Pandaria are simply GIVING UP.

This has never happened before in such numbers. The only logical explanation for this is that the raids are harder than they've been before, and that's what the Lead Systems Designer (who's been in the game since WotLK beta) is also saying.

I stopped full on progression raiding in Cataclysm, but started my raiding journey in The Burning Crusade. Some of the people I've played with in that time, who cleared content up until 4.0, would simply not survive in this raiding scene. Cataclysm itself culled a significant number of raiding guilds, leading MoP to having less "casual" guilds from which to make the numbers look worse.

If you want to have another convoluted argument about how normal modes are no harder, or how MoP normal modes are easier than they were in the past, you're going to have to deal with everything I've presented above and account for it.

Ignoring it isn't an option.

---------- Post added 2013-06-03 at 07:19 PM ----------

The time for doing this is long gone, this ship has sailled, if they do this theyll disband every 25 in existence and kill at least half the 10s, when they decided theyd makke 10/25 share a lockout and drop same loot they shouldnt have done it, they shouldve implemented 15 men instances period, the oportunity for that is gone now tough and implementing 15 men size on the current scenario would be the death of WoW raiding. quite frankly what they shouldve done is when they downsized from 40 to 25, they shouldve gone all the way to 15, they lost 2 oportunitys to implement 15 men size as the only raid size.

Raiding is dying anyway.

They either kill it with a thousand cuts (bandage fixes that paper over the cracks), or they simply pull off the plaster and rebuild.

[Deleted]

Very interesting read, I agree somewhat, but I've had this thought for a while and I've never really voiced it, so I just want to know what everyone else thinks about this:

In ICC days, on 10 man Heroic, my guild killed Blood Princes HC (first kill) after being put down to 9 man after about 45s (video on YouTube if anyone wants proof).
Now, if someone dies 45s into Horridon on 10m Normal, it is very VERY difficult to regain that kill. And you can make this comparison between now and WotLK with many many bosses, I think this is WRONG and should be changed but i'm dying to hear other peoples opinion about it on whether they agree or disagree, i'd appreciate any replies.

[Pua]

Very interesting read, I agree somewhat, but I've had this thought for a while and I've never really voiced it, so I just want to know what everyone else thinks about this:

In ICC days, on 10 man Heroic, my guild killed Blood Princes HC (first kill) after being put down to 9 man after about 45s (video on YouTube if anyone wants proof).
Now, if someone dies 45s into Horridon on 10m Normal, it is very VERY difficult to regain that kill. And you can make this comparison between now and WotLK with many many bosses, I think this is WRONG and should be changed but i'm dying to hear other peoples opinion about it on whether they agree or disagree, i'd appreciate any replies.

I think you're right, but it's difficult to objectively quantify.

Look at is this way; in WotLK, Rebirth could only be cast by one class and so could Bloodlust. This was never a significant issue, because the DPS requirements weren't so high and people weren't as prone to needing resurrected in combat.

Now, there are three classes that can resurrect a player in combat and three classes that can bring Bloodlust. The idea that a guild can be successful without these utilities is all but gone, so Blizzard have pretty much ensured nobody need ever raid without them.

That type of thing, to me, is telling.

[Deleted]

I think that's an interesting metric. A couple of thoughts:

(a) the sample selection effect: given the dramatic fall in the number of raiding guilds documented in another thread in this forum, it would be interesting to take a given sample of guilds (e.g. those who raided all tiers) to compute your indicator. If we've gone from 130 raiding guilds per server in T10 to 30 in T15, it's likely the 30 remaining are the more skilled.

(b) the end boss effect: the Lich King was a beast, even on 10N. Killing him in a month would be quite an achievement. There's a reason ICC was nerfed. It got seriously hard halfway through for the mass of raiders entering it. They could not kill LK without the nerfs. I'd be interested to see a mid-tier indicator - e.g. how many killed the first 4 bosses within a month? [1] I am pretty sure Horridon 10N is harder than Deathwhisperer 10N was and indeed that the first half of ICC was easier than the first half of ToT. But I also suspect the second half of ICC was harder.

[1]How do you handle the staggered release of tiers btw? Was LK even available to kill within one month of the first wing being up? Measuring progress from opening up the last wing of ICC might be a bit unfair, as raiders would have had more time to get gear of that tier by then than for a tier when the end boss was killable on launch day.

For this specific metric for ICC, I counted marrowgar kill 1 month after marrowgar was released and lich king kills 1 month after LK was released.
This seemed like a fair sample as
1. You had limited attempts
2. The staggered release gave people time to catch up and gear up
So all in all, they weigh out eachother in my opinion, or even favor the guilds in ICC in the fact that you got so much time to catch up and gear up.

Though yes, you touched something. A trend in ICC is that the first 6 bosses were fairly easy. As a reference, saurfang was about on a primordius level.
Although this is a trend unique to ICC. You do not see this trend in T11, T12 and T13.
The catch however is that the later bosses instead are a mile ahead of current bosses. So to make T15 closer to ICC, the earlier bosses needs to receive a nerf, however the later T15 bosses needs to recieve an even larger buff to compensate.
This can kinda be seen aswell in ulduar to some extent. The first 4 bosses got no data. The 3 bosses are on the same level as the easier ToT bosses, like ji-kun, tortos etc. However the keepers are a lot harder than every tot boss, and decent, geez. We are talking 500% higher success rate on Lei-Shen compared to Yogg.

So yes, an more extensive numbers checking would probably point to that the first few bosses in instances have been tuned up a bit and the later have been tuned down a lot, causing the bosses to be more linear in difficulty rather than ramping up extremely fast.

To be honest, it is a lot of work for me to put together as quite frankly I do not care that much to take the time to check every boss. I am just gonna dump the numbers out there.

% of guilds that killed first boss that killed the last boss of said tier after 1 month.

Notes:
Decided to exclude T9 due to the extreme gating there. It is fairly safe to say that T9 was an easy tier, but it was also short and gated. So the data does not fit well.
T8 is based of 4/13 being the 'first' boss as there is no data for the first boss only. So it should be far harder
T10 LK is based 1 month after LK was released, not 1 month after the instance was released.

T13: 40%
T12: 25.6%
T14: 20%
T15: 12.7%
T8 25: 11%
T10 10: 8.2%
T11: 6.5%
T10 25: 4.6%

If you however take a different approach, and check how many % of the guilds that did not complete the last boss, and divide that by the amount of bosses before the last boss, by doing so, checking how many % of the guilds are standing wiping on a boss in average, i.e. attempting to cover for shorter/longer tiers, we get different results.

So, % of guilds in average stuck on a boss before the last boss in each tier after 1 month.
Again, same applies as before. T8 should be significantly harder due to tracking starting on the fourth boss not the first, ToC was insanely gated so not really reliable and T10 is counted from 1 month after LK was available.
Decided to include T9 even though the gating. T9 is counted from 2 weeks after anub'arak was available to make the gating fair.
T11 used magmaw as first boss as it was the early boss with the most kills, even though halfus was close. T11 should probably have more "first boss" kills due to split tiers.

Again, from easiest to hardest (lower number = less % of guilds wiping on bosses = easier raid)

T9 10: 5%
T14: 7.27%
T9 25: 7.38%
T8: 7.4%
T15: 7.93%
T10 10: 8.34%
T11: 8.5%
T13: 8.57%
T10 25: 8.67%
T12: 10.62%

So what we see here is that the shorter tiers, while having extremely high successrate of killing the entire instances, their individual bosses can be just as hard if not harder than the longer tiers, just the fact that the tiers are shorter make them become cleared faster.
T12 ranked the "hardest" on each boss individually. If that is fair or not considering the length of the tier I do not know.

---------- Post added 2013-06-03 at 06:46 PM ----------

Very interesting read, I agree somewhat, but I've had this thought for a while and I've never really voiced it, so I just want to know what everyone else thinks about this:

In ICC days, on 10 man Heroic, my guild killed Blood Princes HC (first kill) after being put down to 9 man after about 45s (video on YouTube if anyone wants proof).
Now, if someone dies 45s into Horridon on 10m Normal, it is very VERY difficult to regain that kill. And you can make this comparison between now and WotLK with many many bosses, I think this is WRONG and should be changed but i'm dying to hear other peoples opinion about it on whether they agree or disagree, i'd appreciate any replies.

Yes, and we 4 manned twins without a healer (tank + 3 dps) from 30%. All the other people died on a tidal wave.
We 8 manned dark animus when 2 peopel had to go
We 8 manned durumu when 2 pugs got hit by the first knockback. It is all relevant.

Blood princes was a fight that was 100% tactic, 0% brute force. It basically had no relevant enrage. Maybe you could handle a dead player from the start there. You couldnt on say saurfang, sindragosa, bql, putricide etc.

Every tier got those fights that you can complete with less players. I would not like to do Lei-Shen or Iron Qon with 9 players, but you could probably get away 6 manning Jin'Rokh for your first kill. It all depends on the boss.

[isadorr]

Big question.

If you're in a guild that only really does raiding as a group activity, you'd best hope you're good at it. Coming in to MoP, I think a lot of guilds hit the T14 "wall" (Stone Guards, Elegon or Heart of Fear), which left members ditching for guilds they might have liked less, or just falling in to LFR. Assuming the latter, those players really have to ask why they're bothering with a guild at all if it's not providing them anything.

That lack of social cohesion is, potentially, at the root of all this. When 25-man guilds were at their peak, so were subscriptions; this implies (and I mean IMPLY, not outright prove) there's a link between large guilds and whether players stick or not.

Look at it like this:

A 25-man guild has more room for redundancy (less cancelled raids), more room to try players out (who might be new) and more players (increases the likelihood of players doing "something" together).

I honestly think the destruction of 25-man guilds is the biggest contribution to the subscription loss.

To take your idea further, a 25man can carry bad players a lot easier than 10 man so as 10man raiding becomes more popular this less or no room to carry a bad player like there was in 25man. I dont think it is a secret that the player talent base is becoming worse and most likely wont get any better as every tier now there are threads complaining about raid difficulty.

Why get better when you can whine and cry about it? There has been so many of these threads with people actually saying i will not try to get better and i dont care that i dont gem, enchant or play correctly yet they expect to progress and that is the LFR Mentality, which is where those players belong. LFR is there for just that reason so why dont people who want to play the friends and family of really bad players group up and do LFR? You see the content and get loot while hanging out with friends. From the different threads on here that was supposedly the priority.

Content isnt hard when it can be cleared in pugs.

[Deleted]

To take your idea further, a 25man can carry bad players a lot easier than 10 man so as 10man raiding becomes more popular this less or no room to carry a bad player like there was in 25man. I dont think it is a secret that the player talent base is becoming worse and most likely wont get any better as every tier now there are threads complaining about raid difficulty.

The players are better now than they have ever been. True story. The content is also harder than it's ever been. The gap between people who have played for 8 years and newbies is ofc vast. But what else do you expect? Fully formed raiders with a backhistory of years of knowledge to just randomly spawn for you?

Why get better when you can whine and cry about it?

Why get better when you can just leave and do something fun instead?

There has been so many of these threads with people actually saying i will not try to get better and i dont care that i dont gem, enchant or play correctly yet they expect to progress and that is the LFR Mentality, which is where those players belong. LFR is there for just that reason so why dont people who want to play the friends and family of really bad players group up and do LFR? You see the content and get loot while hanging out with friends. From the different threads on here that was supposedly the priority.

Already been addressed. Reading is fun and educational! Try it.

Content isnt hard when it can be cleared in pugs.

Which is one reason we know tot is overtuned. Unless it's not really a "pug" but a group of people who already cleared the place on mains, Tot isn't puggable.

[Deleted]

Those numbers aren't as relevant as they could be (a fair criticism of my opening post, by the way), and paint a far rosier picture than what's glaringly obvious when you look at the flat numbers. Also, the flaws in what you're doing have been pointed out a few times and you don't seem to care.

Far more relevant than the numbers in your post. That is undeniable. We are comparing apples and oranges. Nothing is perfect. I am comparing 1kg of apples with 1kg of oranges. You are comparing 1 kg of apples with 100 kg of oranges in an orange juice factory.

Your flaws has also been pointed out dozens of times and you seem to do a good job ignoring them aswell.

Tiers 14 and 15, to most reasonable people who've raided for a long time, are self-evidently more difficult than anything before them, purely by going off the number of mechanics per boss, the number of mechanics that are essentially one-shots and the sheer output requirements. No realistic person is going to dispute that. There are a couple of things to note here, however:

1) My post highlights the drop per boss in both Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear to be substantially more damaging than anything before it.
2) The percentage drop in raiders, since MoP started, is substantially higher than it's ever been. Substantially.
3) One-month clears will be the guilds with enough skill to do clear an instance in one month - which isn't many. This will make the numbers after a month look better.
4) The top end of the playerbase has improved over time, in some cases drastically, and so have things like mods or UI's.
5) Classes, in general, are now far more challenging to play optimally than they've ever been and this has a significant impact.

Lastly, as has also been hinted multiple times, taking these numbers in a vacuum doesn't tell you anything useful because it's not telling you where people are getting stuck or where they're flat out giving up. Guilds are happy to be progressing without killing final bosses, and we saw that throughout WotLK.

Guilds in Mists of Pandaria are simply GIVING UP.

Statistics says otherwise.

Yes, the raiders are declining faster and faster, that is true. However that it has to do with the difficulty of the raids, you have no data to back that up with whatsoever. In fact the data says the opposite. It would be more reasonable to conclude that raiders are giving up raiding because raiding is to easy than to hard.

Not that I am saying this is the case, I think there is a far more logical explanation.

Current raiding 10/25 split and LFR.

All data points to those being the guilty murderers of raiding.
If you want to turn a blind eye to that, be my guest.

The players are better now than they have ever been. True story.

No. Just no. Playerbase have never been worse than they currently are. It is borderline impossible to find a decent raider.

Which is one reason we know tot is overtuned. Unless it's not really a "pug" but a group of people who already cleared the place on mains, Tot isn't puggable.

Which raid was ever pugged with a full group of pugs that never done the instance before?

[Deleted]

No. Just no. Playerbase have never been worse than they currently are. It is borderline impossible to find a decent raider.

Nah, you just have unrealistic expectations.

games never been harder, players have never been better. Ofc the gap between the players and the game is too wide, but that's why the thread and others like it exists.