#1 - March 22, 2011, 8:53 a.m.
My guild is mostly a network of real life friends and I'm afraid that this current incarnation of the WoW raiding paradigm is just incompatible with how we are able and interested in playing. It's killing us.
We were one of those guilds that wotlk really worked for. Most of us had played WoW since release. Some of us are strong players. Some are terrible. Some were PvPers and some pushed progression when the raids were 40 man raids. We're all pretty much friends of friends and when wotlk came out, we decided to make a go at playing together again. For myself, I felt excluded from raiding in Vanilla and BC - and was pessimistic about how things would go in wotlk.
We raided about twice per week, usually about 3 hours. Sometimes less. We rarely had a full 10 people on for a raid. Usually, we would have about 8 and we could grab the other two from a buddy list or a pug. We were fun to play with and generally downed bosses so people enjoyed playing with us. Our pacing usually had us clearing the 10m, 25 w/ alliance, and maybe 1-3 hardmodes on each tier before the next tier came out. It almost seemed to work out perfect, for us.
Heroics were a great time-filler between raids. We could keep in touch w/ ingame friends by running quick heroics with them (which helped keep ties to pugs). Also it was painless to use the heroics to gear out our alts so that our raid became more adaptable, both in terms of attendance as well as adjusting raid composition for bosses. I want to stress that having quick heroics available as a flexible small group activity throughout the week was pretty instrumental how we were able to function.
We were really excited to continue this pattern into Cataclysm, but it looks like the system was changed in enough small ways that it just doesn't work for our group of friends any more.
1) Heroics were too long. Difficulty aside, they became such a long time commitment that they went from a modular small group activity for us friends... to something monolithic and exclusionary. In LK, if a buddy signed on while we were doing a heroic - a simple 15 min wait had us playing together in the next heroic. This created a daisy chain of participation through the guild as people signed on and off. Now, the length of a single new heroic consumes such a great fraction of our play time at night that we're really only able to commit to a single run in an evening... which because of logistics, results in us never playing together.
At first this meant we weren't playing with friends throughout the week. Then it meant that gearing our alts to make the raid more adaptable was painful. Finally, it's resulting in us not signing on regularly, because we don't enjoy playing without our friends and there's no group activities to do.
2) Raid difficulty is just too much for us. We went to our 6th or 7th raid week before we got our first kill. To be honest, quite a few of us are bad players. Some of us are great players. If you add up all of our skill, it's just not enough. We try to help people improve, but what really happens is that they stop showing up. They know they're sucking. They feel like they're holding us back. So they stop showing up. Or they decide that they don't like the character any more. And we're hemorrhaging friends and raiders that we want to play with. We went from having about 12 people showing up to now having 5.
What is killing us in the raids?
Just playing the game is too difficult for some people. Our stronger players used to have alot more power to carry. We used to be able to tuck our weaker players into a 'safe' role. Now, every player in the raid is a point of failure and the margin for error is so small, that our good players can only carry a little bit.
Most players are managing some sort of guitar-hero style dps, healing, or threat generating rotation... while keeping track of positioning, boss mechanics, and on use cooldowns. They stand in things and miss interrupts.
If a tank screws up... everyone dies. If a healer screws up, someone dies (or he ooms)... THEN everyone dies. If a dps screws up, the dps dies... then everyone dies.
It's not any one thing! We just don't have any place to hide our bad players. Then we get divided on what strategies we should try - beginning the meta game of: "if we do a different strategy, maybe player X's inability to get out of Fire Y won't be an issue." But it's always an issue and it introduces new issues as people need to re-adjust to the new way.
We know we're sucking. We know we're failing at mechanics. Some of us are ignorant of the importance. How many shadow novas should a raid be able to miss before wiping? How many fires can a dps stand in before he dies? How many dps do we need to beat an enrage timer? How many missed mechanics can a healer heal through and still have mana?
It seems to be about 1-2 screw-ups. Where in wotlk... it was 1-2 players completely missing.
As an aside: The patches... OH THE PATCHES.
I'm banging my head against the wall more than enough re-learning how to play my classes in PvE and PvP as it seems a week doesn't go by without everything changing. Although it's especially annoying in PvP because even if your class doesn't change - balance changes result in a cascade of composition changes/synergies that you need to be aware of to be competitive. On top of that... we have to re-research and re-teach all those bad players we've just gotten up to performance levels in PvE. I almost wish everything would be left unbalanced, just so I can go a few weeks without having to re-learn a class.
Now, I'm not saying that the way things are designed now are better or worse than before... but it definitely seems like it's not something this group of friends is able to do any more.
-Clay
