I have a question about how other people’s guilds handle raid progression.
To preface, our guild has 7 bosses in ICC25 on farm. The first four, rotface, festergut and blood princes. Beyond that our activity on other non farm bosses seems willy nilly.
What I mean is we’ve been working on Putricide (once), the dragon we need to heal (two or three times) and now they want to work on blood queen. It seems like we’re getting pulled in lots of different directions and need to be on top of strats for a bunch of bosses because we never know what we’re going to be working on.
I kinda understand not beating our heads on one boss for too many nights in a row, but I raided in vanilla wow and BC and when you wanted to progress, you worked on a boss until you got it down, then moved onto the next boss. So I’m used to that and perfectly willing to wipe on a boss all night long if I have to.
I’m relatively new to this guild, so I’m not planning on saying anything or offering any advice or feedback on it. I’m just wondering how other guilds deal with progression bosses.
Oh, one other tidbit. FWIW, this guild has never killed Yogg on 25s, nor have they cleared hard mode ulduar, so I suspect they have a history of not knuckling down and working on really hard content.
In the best progression guilds I’ve been in, we tend to focus our attentions on a single boss. Which is not to say we won’t bounce around some, when it’s clear that we’re really hammering our heads against a wall, but by and large, as long as we’re still improving with each attempt (or at least diagnosing problems), we’ll stick with that boss.
WoTLK introduced the “No Raider Left Behind Act.” To put it in perspective for you, (not to be insulting) you’re probably in a guild that in TBC wouldn’t have gotten past Karazhan. If you are looking for progression, you should give your two weeks’ notice and apply to another guild that fits your schedule/needs as a player.
Of course, sometimes guilds just ebb and flow with no rhyme or reason. I know my own Vigil has been hit by some hard times because of Starcraft 2’s beta and just general apathy towards the progression race.
All true, but I would add that there are also Heirloom enchants - in particular the Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant and the various Arcanums for helmets. These all require high reputation (or at least the best ones do) with a particular faction, so making the heirloom means only your main needs to do the rep grind to get them.
My current guild focuses on a boss until we kill it. We worked on Putricide for 4 weeks or so (without even looking at the Blood Princes even though we knew we could kill it) until we got it down. Like SFG the key was to keep making progress, and to be honest remove or replace players that just weren’t getting it. We finally got everyone on the same page and got it down. And, of course, 2-shotted the princes right afterwards. Now, we will work on Blood Queen until we kill her before moving onto Dreamwalker.
Some will say this is bad because it reduces the number of badges/loot we get, which is true. But focusing on a “hard” boss makes your players better, and helps highlight areas of improvement. Farming easy bosses just means that when you hit the hard ones (like your Yogg-25 example) you don’t have the tools to get it done.
Just one opinion, of course. Coming from a very casual progression raiding guild - only six raid hours per week. Not sure we can kill the LK in that amount of time, but we’ll have fun trying!
That’s actually different from how my guilds worked. While we might save easier bosses to use as a bit of a break from the harder ones, we never skipped them entirely.
Raids were created as endgame content for every phase of the game, so there are level 60 raids, level 70 raids, and level 80 raids. However, the content for each expansion will eventually outlevel even the highest tier of raid gear from the previous version of the game, so while you’ll still find people running the old raids for fun and the occasional drop, no one other than dedicated old-content raiding guilds (who turn off their XP at 60 or 70) runs them on a serious basis.
So, while there will be raids you can run starting at 60, it’s not something you’ll focus on until 80.
That’s seriously considered very casual? It’s about five hours more per week than I ever intend to spend on grinding my nose against raid dungeons. At the level where you end up raiding, it becomes way too much like a very badly-compensated second job. I’d much rather spend my available WoW-time after 80 playing Achievement Whore, frankly.
Possibly. No one’s really certain when Cat’s going to drop, but assuming you take roughly the same amount of time getting from 44-80 that you took getting from 1-44, you’re likely to have some time to raid Wrath dungeons before everything goes KABOOM.
Icecrown Citadel has been announced as the last *tier *of raid content before Cataclysm. However, we’ll be getting another small raid with gear of similar quality before Cata. Certainly, some hardcore raiders may take a break once they’ve cleared the Wrath endgame until the expansion comes out; but I guarantee there will still be guilds and PUGs running at least ICC right up until the launch of Cata.
Yes, six hours per week is definitely casual: that’s only two days of three hours per night. For example, my last guild officially raided four nights a week, for four hours at a time. And that was just for 25s; 10-mans were on top of that.
Yeah, it’s very casual. The previous guild I was in (which is actually less progressed that this one) raided at least three nights a week. Any group that can reasonably call itself “hard-core” raids at least three nights, and often four or five.
I’m reasonably sure that we won’t even kill the Lich King on 25s raiding only 6 hours per week - there just isn’t enough time to get the fights down unless you one-shot everything. We’ll probably end up extending raid lockouts once we get there just to get our practice in. Hell, I’m just happy we’re as far as we are considering the time limitations we have.
As far as it seeming like a job, well, I just disagree. I play less than I used to, and feel like I’m having way more fun. I play my main only during raid times (and maybe run the random heroic once or twice a week, and farm a little fish for feasts). Working with others killing big ugly bosses is what I like to do. I could be doing hard-modes by raiding 5 nights a week, or not raid at all, but I found a balance that works for me.
The great thing about WoW is you can do hard-core raiding, casual raiding, do achievements and questing, or dance on a mailbox in Orgrimmar, and still enjoy the game in your own way. You couldn’t pay me to grind on Loremaster, for example, or do reputation grinds, but some people love that type of grind. Vive la difference.
Dayum! 1K large even when you level??? I’m a 68 at present, so thanks for telling me that before me and Da Wolk’ went shopping at Frederick’s of Darnassus!
Unless you’re doing some major spending on big ticket items (and there’s no reason to - Northrend showers you in quality blue gear) then you’ll net 1500-2000g just in the trip from 70 to 80.
You’ll definitely want to cut back on how much you use the spirit healer graveyard rez though. You’re getting to the point where that’s prohibitively expensive.
Nah, man, no insult taken. I’m a “pretty good” raider, but I’ll never be a truly top level player. I don’t have the patience to spend that much time perfecting every aspect of my gameplay. I’d rather play my guitar or something than spend an hour on the training dummy getting another 30dps from my rotation.
I should say here that I have no problem with the level and speed of progression in this guild. We only raid 3 nights a week and only two nights are required, so it fits my schedule. I’m just a tiny bit frustrated by the approach taken with progression bosses. I really want to get in there and beat my self senseless until the boss dies. Not take a break from a boss and go learn a whole new boss. You lose most of your momentum that way.
You lose 25% durability to all armor and weapons (including stuff in your bags, I believe). This means that when you go to repair them you will have to pay for any normal durability losses plus that 25%. As your gear gets better, that starts getting expensive! :eek:
You also get the 10 minute debuff that makes you weak.
Well, then, of course, there’s Epic Flying, which lets you use the FAST flying mounts. That costs 5000g, unless you buy it at Honor Hold in Hellfire, where your rep with Stormwind will get you a discount. I believe it goes:
So if you’re Exalted with Stormwind, you can purchase Epic Flying training for just 4000g at Honor Hold. If you buy at the Alliance base in Shadowmoon Valley, you’ll pay full price no matter what.
