[Minirage]

prepare for epic qq.

I'm the tank officer of a guild who has VashJ killed Vash multiple times and is just starting on KT. When a guild member shouted over guild chat the new 'exciting' news it felt a sudden shock followed by a huge amount of anger.

Our little casual guild started raiding late, we did beat the first attunement nurf, but this one caught me by surprise. You see, the first attunement nurf did not have a great impact - we were just a few kara squads with the ability to kill gruuls and we coop Mag with another guild.

Since our first attempt on Hydros till last night when I heard this news, it has not really been that much fun - it has more or less been a full time job. I am a hardcore player in a casual guild, perhaps I should have parted tides long ago, but I like most of its members and believe in them.

Attrition has been very bad. An analogy would be comparing our attrition rate to that of Easy Company (Band of Brothers). I've had to attend over 93% of our raids since we started - you see, our server has a complete lack of players that have the ability to tank or even want to tank for that matter.

Gearing up ferals, prot paladins, prot warriors, fury warriors who can OT when needed was pretty much a nonstop program. A couple months ago, about the time we first started Vash, I finally found a prot warrior who I knew could let me rotate out and take it easy - do something in RL, watch football, whatever. But even that warriors' tenure was short - he had to stop playing.

Due to this attrition I have had to recruit enough tanks for any encounter plus 50%. This is because I can not rely on anybody but myself to show up to any given raid. Doing so has brought about much scorn from not only the tanks that have been in the guild for some time, but the other classes as well. Every raid I would grit my teeth and wait for the incoming bombardment of hostile tells;

-"why did you just recruit a new feral, I wont go on a rotation system..."
-"why is that lesser geared tank coming, don't you care about progression?"
-"why is he coming to this boss, i've been waiting for loot off this boss for months now..."
-"fine...if im on rotation then im just going to log

[ok pause...we had to make a thing called sosdkp just to get our raiders to show up when they were being rotated out for the sake of redundancy. No one understands that if someone's power goes out, or whatever reason, we have to cancel the raids. No one understands that the next tank that quits will park our raid indefinatly. No one gets it, no one is patient, just damnable misery. So we created this absurd amendment to our DKP system, shelling out the same amount of DKP as a raider who was actually inside the raid the whole night, just for being online and available as needed..sigh. /pause]

-"Is there a reason you are not taking me tonight, have I done something wrong?"
-"Why can't I come to the raids, I'm just as good as him"
-and a seemingly infinite amount of more misery directed at me.

It has gotten so bad that I think twice about even logging in sometimes. I play on an unguilded alt. Or I just...idk rather stare at the wall or watch dust collect.

Making tough decisions on who is coming with us to Hyjal and who is not. Benching the rest. Gearing those that I think will stay and that can perform, only to see them quit or jump ship to another guild. Having people dislike me because I won't let them come.

The misery of finally almost getting enough tanks together, all this hard work, all this BS, just to finally hear that it was basically all for not. Yes, the attunements to BT and Hyjal are lifted, great!

All this misery man. And now I sit here pondering all night, do I really want to do this all over again? Am I a sadist?

Disliking this change is more than a form of elitism. More than what people say, "oh you just want to have better gear than casuals". I genuinely worked my butt off, and took a lot of licks. Again, did I enjoy this? - sometimes, but more often than not, no...not one bit. Relearning FLK for the 10th time due to new healers or tanks is NOT fun. But we struggled, and are almost there, and we are doing well on Kael.

So that's it. Just wondering how other officers, that are around our stage of progression, are handling this news.

[Rak]

We have our second night of working on Vashj scheduled for tonight. Our core players have decided not to step into Hyjal or BT until we kill Vashj and Kael. It makes no sense to skip them considering Kael'Thas is one of the best encounters in the game.

All of us officers expect this to cause guild drama with the people that don't want to work hard for it. People will probably end up quitting to join a guild that will jump into BT and get nowhere. We don't have enough raiders to afford the losses either.

But we, the officers and core players, are not going to sacrifice our gaming experience to cater to a group of people that just want better loot and less work. We are going to kill Kael'Thas and we are going to cheer on vent when it happens. The people that decide to jump ship and be lazy because of it can play the game with no satisfaction at all for all I care.

The good part is that after we finally kill Kael, not only will we get three tier 5 chests per week, some snazzy titles, and excellent rings... but we also won't have to go through the annoying process of attuning future recruits.

[Norrath]

2.4 won't hit live servers for a while yet. I expect at least a month if not two of testing.

[Centx]

My guild has bee in hyjal and bt for months, and we still get solid upgrades from Kael and Vashj, with being able to kill them without clearing the other bosses it wouldn't make sense to kill them if you haven't been farmiog illidan for months (we will have our first illidan kill in the next week or two, before 2.4 guaranteed)

Mini, if you are no longer enjoying it, and would rather play an unguilded alt, it is time to move on. I left a similar situation recently and moved to a guild that was a little more progressed (my guild was 6/6 3/4, current guild was 3/5 mh 4/9 bt) I could not be happier with my decision, it was like a giant boulder was lifted off my shoulders and I can actually enjoy raiding again.

[Nariju]

How am i handling it? I'm rampaging.

We're 5/6, 3/4 atm, but i expect Vashj to surrender today. And i'm SO hoping we'll get Kael before the Patch. Our Guild Lead and most class leaders (well, seems all but me) are like "First bosses MH/BT are supposed to be free loot, so why should we stick with the hardest fight there is and let him keep us from progressing further if it's no longer necessary?"

And i can perfectly understand them. We're in no way a hardcore raiding guild but pressure on players has definitly gone up recently. You don't want to spend months on a single boss encounter. So after attunement is no longer an issue motivation will sure go down, which makes it even harder to face kael. And with new instances to explore, you definitely don't want to stay behind. Loot is what drives most people and you can't hold them just because you find the fight itself more interesting. (and it's not even 'Kael-Loot' vs. 'Rage-loot', its the TeeSix!!amagawd!!! approach i hate)

And there's my personal issue with ssc/tk. Although i'm class officer, i'm not an active raid member since my internet connection for whatever reason doesn't allow for 25mans. I MTed up to Gruul, but then i moved and "lost my job". I did ssc pre the day they killed this attunement and i still have to kill mag to see tk in good conscience. So with 2.4 i'll probably never see them at all, and i'm pissed. maybe i just resign and explore that old rl-game until wotlk.

[Finelle]

Minirage, if you're having to recruit extra tanks, wouldn't 2.4 be a godsend? I mean, if your server has no tanks, imagine what would happen after you stepped in BT/Hyjal and a tank quits? You'd either have to hope that your app has completed attunement, or end up sacrificing a whole two raids at least to attune the new tank.

[Narshe]

Btw, some people forgets that these are test realm patch notes. Imagine what will happen if Blizzard revert the changes about free ep....attunements.

[byechee]

Blizzard has always wanted their content to be accessible by a wider range of players, and so lifting the attunements was an easy and logical choice from their standpoint. BT/Hyjal will no longer be the "end-game" when 2.4 comes out so there's no real reason to lock people out of it.

[Clifford]

I feel your pain. I am the raid leader and tank officer and a lot of the 2.4 patch notes felt like a kick in the nuts. We are a casual raiding guild (but professional) and I made the decision in December to push us into BT. We had already grown the guild to a point where Kara and Gruul were non-issues and even managed to killed VR once or twice. My goal was to get into BT before the middle of the year as that seemed a likely date for the expansion.

So in January we started SSC. By the end of January we had completed (5/6) SSC and (2/4) TK. We have had two hours on Lady V that were chaotic but the fights seems doable. The 2.4 patch notes hit me after this first attempt. I like the idea of not having to clear all the bosses before encountering Lady V, which is great for us as currently we need one evening to kill the first 5 bosses in SSC. However, I don't like the thought of removing attunements to BT. Why? Simply because I want to feel justified in being there. I want to walk into the temple with my head held high. That is my goal! but the decision isn't mine alone as I have a guild to keep happy.

So I will continue to push SSC and my hope is that we can kill Lady V and Kael'thas before 2.4 hits. That is my dream! but the timeframe is unlikely.

[Ciderhelm]

Right now is an ideal time to weed out the players who don't belong and find the players who do.

This isn't a new event in WoW history. When Naxxramas was announced, all of the same issues came up for guilds in AQ40. Why keep on going if you can just get easy T3 loot?

If you want to use it to your advantage, find the players who'll show up on your raid nights and keep them. They're the ones who deserve to be there. Even if you don't kill Vashj and Kael (which I suspect you guys will), you can go back and kill them a bit later.