In favour of attunements

[Ollin]

I think most people don't actually want attunements. What they want is for prior content to be relevant so progression actually matters.

In order to do that, the answer isn't attunement. That's the worst possible way to make people do older raids and dungeons; it's a drag. Want to make people do older content? Make the content relevant.

Make it so that you can't get the majority of your gear via badges. Certainly make it so you can't get a raid-quality set. Then set up a large number of gear-check fights in every instance - at least two, one at the start (that's tuned for the prior level of gear), and one at the end that's tuned assuming most people have the current normal level of gear. This will force that guilds starting out will have to do progression of older content, though it'll likely go faster given access to better pieces of gear here and there (just like TBC). But if you're just joining a guild that's downed those bosses already, you can get carried quickly and go through the fights without bringing everyone down, and they won't have to attune you.

This is why I suggest UBRS-i-fying old raids when a new tier of content is introduced. That puts the strain of attuning new characters to old content squarely in the court of easily puggable content that gets frequently run, allows experienced raiders gearing alts to see old content from a new perspective at a far more relaxed pace, and gives new potential raiders a taste of what the guild scene can be like without rewarding irrelevant gear that makes the people that worked for it a tier or two ago cry.

It also keeps a sense of progression fully intact.

Before you could go into UBRS-class Naxx you would have to gear up in heroics.
Before you could go into UBRS-class Ulduar you would have to gear up in UBRS-class Naxx.
Before you could go into UBRS-class ToC you would have to gear up in UBRS-class Ulduar.
Before you could go into ICC you would have to clear UBRS-class ToC, app a guild, and finish your (mostly blue ilvl 232) raiding-starter set for your spec.

On occasion someone would be able to skip a tier of content because their guild just said "screw it...bring your alt" and hauled your scrubby-ass through, for example, ICC or into an actual TOC alt-run, but for the rest of the community there would still be a strong sense of progression as they worked through all this old-content specifically tuned to be cleared by your average completely random PUG.

Would this be something the average high-end raider would be interested in? Probably not, but then again I foresee a lot of alts geared in parallel during tiered content in Cata because of the shared lockouts and general ease of leveling an alt these days. It's pretty much an idea for everyone else that the hard-core elite could use to steamroll through when they want to get a group of alts attuned in an evening assuming a content-completion-based attunement system (where you would need to kill specific heroic bosses to access Naxx, KT to access Uld, Yogg to access ToC, and anub to access ICC).

[Bladesong]

Raid groups are typically blighted by individuals whose knowledge of the game extends to blizzarding their way through a hundred heroic instances, and not much else. Players can turn up to the final raiding tier having completed nothing other than heroic five man instances (with no responsibility attached) and probably the worst raid instance Blizzard ever created in Trial of the Crusader. Many haven't completed any of the previous tiers, nor have come across the main mechanics of them or (worse) learned how to effectively play cooperatively with other people. In short, they are not prepared in either the gameplay or the social aspects of end-tier raiding and, essentially, make raiding a worse experience for everyone involved.

This was the original argument in favor of attunements, which most people seem to agree with. The problem with the proposed solutions is that they don't address the issue of teaching people how to play in a raid environment. Getting an item or downing a boss only guarantees that a person went through a raid once and to be honest, the people you think are bad have likely been through raids more than once and are still bad. The only way to ensure that someone is at least adequate at raiding is to make them reach exalted rep with the current raid as well as downing all the bosses (probably multiple times) before progressing to the next level of raids.

This is why I agree with Lulia that attunements are a bad idea - to accomplish the desired goal they need to be a long grind and if they are relatively easy then they are simply an annoying road block and don't actually address the stated issue. I also agree with the person that said the key is to keep the older content relevant (Felhoof?). Blizzard has already announced three changes that will go a long way to making older content worth doing: 10 & 25 man will drop the same loot, players will be limited in how many badges they can farm per week and shared 10 & 25 man raid lock outs (which pains me to say because I hate the idea of shared lock outs). Badge limit per week means that players can't quickly grind out a set of gear through heroics. Shared lock out means that if you're like most 25 man raiders and also doing a ten man of the same content, you'll now be doing your ten man in the previous content.

The only content that needs attunements are Heroic Raids and they already have it - you must beat the last boss of the normal content to even attempt it.

[Chamenas]

I dunno. I don't think that it's reasonable to say that anyone should or shouldn't be raiding. You can say that they should or shouldn't be raiding with you, but you have a lot of choices.

Really, if it's a PuG, it's all fair game. There are plenty of ways to separate out the wheat from the chaff now. There doesn't need to be attunements to also do the same.

Which is why I specifically have problems making the comment. But yes, there are people out there that are simply not prepared to raid. They shouldn't be raiding. It's not to say they can't prepare themselves and make themselves capable of raiding. But, to put it in the clearest way possible: You should only be raiding if you're contributing to your role in a raid. If you can't contribute the minimum of your role, you're being carried and you shouldn't be raiding. Whether or not people want to carry you is up to them, it doesn't mean that you're adding something to the raid, and if you're not adding something, you shouldn't be there.

So yes, there are people who shouldn't be in raid. At least not until they prepare themselves a bit better. But attunements are not the answer to that problem.

[Maèl]

While I agree with that, that's a social problem. You can't fix social problems with technical solutions. Any attempt to do so has up to now not performed that well.
Keeping people who shouldn't raid out of the raids is a RLs job.

ATM, I'm assisting to keep 5 ICC10 man raids up and running. And we are forming a nice 25 man ICC raid. A couple of the best players went into hibernation for a couple of months and need to be geared up. IF I had to get them past Ulduar and then ToC first in order to get them into the ICC10 mans(where it's quite easy to gear one person when everybody is way over exalted), it would simply make my life miserable.

Though Ulduar still proves to be very popular in that raid pool(not everybody got the recipies), many of them never really got deep into that particular raid instance. I doubt that more than 25% of the current raiding toons made it to Kologarn.

Right now I can give this deal "You ALWAYS show up on time when you sign up and when in doubt you can make it, you will give me some warning. In return I will gear you up and you have a safe raid spot." I can do this for 5 people a week. I couldn't do that if I had to attune them first. Attunement to our 10 mans goes like this: you have a week to get into mostly ilvl232 ICC 5 man stuff and buy whatever ilvl245 you can lay your hands on. I actually like the 15% buff. It lowers the barrier of entrance for my raiders. And most of them are very well worth it.

For instance I have this hunter who fulfilled my requirements one week after dinging 80. On his first raid he was on blob kiting and blood price off tanking duty(he also did a fair bit of PvP). He saved my RL bacon because now I can assign an offtank with a good dps offspec to that particular raid. They did very well on their first attempt on blood princes on their first night together. Rotface died very, very quickly considering most of them never made it past Saurfang before. If I couldn't have added that hunter for that raid I would have called it since both tanks were warriors and none of them would have had the skill to kite the blobs.

Attunement to raids should work by impressing the raid leader who leads raids who decides who gets in and who stays out. Nomore backtracking to lady vashj/kel just to keep the BT raid up and running. That was just stupid.

[Chamenas]

I'm very confused by why people keep agreeing with me about bad raiders and then acting like they're disagreeing O.o. I'm not suggesting, in any way, to fix the fact of bad raiders has anything to do with attunement or technical limitations. Quite the opposite.

[Maèl]

Dude, I didn't disagree with you.
ATM I'm in a very RL heavy role(ok, I'm assisting the main RL who ATM organizes 16!!1111 raids a week) and I do not want to know how bad a situation I would be in if I had to make sure all who have signed up are properly attuned.

I'm checking:
1)Gear(with the 15% buff I have very minimal requirements)
2)Gemming/Enchanting choices(these tell you a lot about the player)
3)Gear progress
4)play style
5)behaviour(this is the biggie; you will be kicked immediately, mid raid, if you cause trouble)

Sooner or later I will fully take over quite a few raids since I can't see how one person can organize 16 more or less casual raids. I've started asking everyone who signed up if he will attend the raid 24h before it starts. I'm planning the raiding careers of everybody who attends regularly because we will have only one 25 man ICC raid.

I do not want to manage attunements.
"Lul! Y cnt I entr teh instence? BUGZ! HACKZ!"
I do not want that in my life 5 minutes before the first pull.

Attunements might help as QA for randomly gathered puggers. But it will not help any for organized raids.

[desolation0]

I think most people don't actually want attunements. What they want is for prior content to be relevant so progression actually matters.

I agree.

I kind of think they over-did the improvement from tier-to-tier on gearing this expansion, from a gearing standpoint you could practically guarantee everything in Naxx was obsolete as soon as Ulduar dropped, assuming you had enough gear to start on Ulduar.

One little catchy idea was having a few heirloom-like items dotted around an expansion that level to the baseline of the current tier.

Attunements might help as QA for randomly gathered puggers. But it will not help any for organized raids.

The game seems to be taking a what works for the masses attitude lately, whether you're for it or against it.

Generally I agree that attunements are bad for the raiding population overall.

...you can't expect players who are new to the game mid-expansion to know enough to research all the realms that are available to start their toons or pay $25 to trasnfer once they realize they do want to raid at 80 and made a mistake at the character creation screen.

I made a mistake at the character creation screen.

[Airowird]

My take on the attunements and gearing/accessability in Cataclysm:

In case you forgot: Blizz is planning 2 tiers of PvE points to be able to buy gear with: Progression Points and Farm Points. One is for progress raids (such as ICC now) and the other are for old content.
What I think/hope Blizzard should do is add a third rank, Heroic Points.

As such, you would have 3 vendors for all the stuff as well.
One is clearly the higher raiding tier, like Frost is now, the other two would be all the other Emblems. But there would be a difference between what you could get in heroics and what you could get in raids.
Imagine that Farm Points would be what you currently need to buy the T9 set. Heroic Points would then fill in the other slots. Someone who just got out of Heroics would then have half heroic half ToC gear, on average he would be looking for Ulduar, possibly hardmodes. After a run or 2 in Ulduar, he'll be running around in enough gear to tackle ToC, 2-3 weeks later, he farmed enough Farm Points to be ICC ready ... and he'll have done enough boss fights to actually know to not stand in colorful stuff on the floor!!

This would be further boosted if weekly raid quests weren't the first boss in, but rather the 4th (or 2nd-3rd in cata). e.g. Naxx weeklies would be a wing endboss, giving you the opportunity to do some extra bosses for Farm Points!

For raiders it would be fairly easy to make the itemslots that are filled with Heroic Points to have equivalent drops in the raid itself, giving them the options of either purely doing raids, or farm besides to get a guarantee to get your gear.

And as added bonus: Atleast you'll be weeding out the 'noobs' by simply checking who has T11-14 and who not, as gear will actually differ for raids and heroics.

[protonly]

Attunements in the form of engaging, entertaining quest lines that involve the raid tier you are working on are good (think Nightbane). I'm all in favor of "gear check" attunements but not for resist sets. A number of encounters in TBC required insanely expensive resist sets for one fight only. If a resist set is required then make it required for a whole raid instance/tier that way it is worth the gold/mats/badges.

The attunments that existed in vanilla and TBC were just too insane. WOTLK swung the other way and got rid of them all. Need to find some middle ground.

[protonly]

I do not want to know how bad a situation I would be in if I had to make sure all who have signed up are properly attuned.

Do it the old way we did it: only recruit people who are fully attuned and/or give your people exactly one week to get attuned or it is a gkick. It worked in vanilla naxx and all of TBC in my guilds.

Of course this won't fly at all in today's pug-it-all-screw-the-guild mentality.

[gacktt]

So anyone who wants to raid current content has to be on a full server or play continuously since launch? That sounds like a reasonable and fair work around. Uhhhm, no.

Obviously, I am being a little extreme with my counter example, but you can't expect players who are new to the game mid-expansion to know enough to research all the realms that are available to start their toons or pay $25 to trasnfer once they realize they do want to raid at 80 and made a mistake at the character creation screen.

I hate to break it to you but 70% of all servers are mostly ghost town/mid population with terrible progression and extremely underskilled trade chat puggers, the closest they've done to beating content is watching the elite guilds x-fer to them due to low latency as a result of being a ghost town. It's been that way in classic, bc and wotlk.

[Loganisis]

I'm with sifuedition. I didn't start playing WoW until a couple months after WotLK dropped, I didn't hit 80 until fall and shortly thereafter ToC opened up. It felt like I was stuck in molassas as the game was flying past me. I'm also on a server that is not terribly eager to go back and complete older content. Individual attunements are geared for the players who are at endgame content with each patch drop, not for the larger majority of players.

The guild attunement process sounds like it could work. Players would still be individually account-attuned but once enough guild members were attuned then the entire guild could run.

Individual attunement would still be important, but not necessarily a hinderance, the focus would be more on guild progression.

[NewfieDave]

Nomore backtracking to lady vashj/kel just to keep the BT raid up and running. That was just stupid.

Was it stupid because attunements are a bad idea, or because there was a lack of reward for time invested in running the previous tier of content?

How would you feel about attunements if raid content was more of a non-linear progression, rather than the current model where the new raid always trumps the old raid?

[Selyndia]

Was it stupid because attunements are a bad idea, or because there was a lack of reward for time invested in running the previous tier of content?

How would you feel about attunements if raid content was more of a non-linear progression, rather than the current model where the new raid always trumps the old raid?

The problem with the Vashj/Kael attunements weren’t so much the reward for that boss (Though admitedly the Risk versus Reward of Vashj and Kael was FAR different than the Risk versus Reward for early Tier Six content.), it was that initially you couldn’t just go in and kill Vashj and Kael. Redoing tier 6 attunements meant that you had to make sure everyone that was working on the attunements was at the appropriate point in the quest chains (The long one that started in Shadowmoon Valley, took you to the Arcatraz, etc) and then they were ready to continue it. Then you had to give up a night to clear all five of the earlier bosses in Serpentshrine Cavern, which given the amount of trash, even for top guilds took a couple of hours, making sure everyone who needed it grabbed the quest from the Seer after Fathom-Lord died and making sure they all got their Vashj vials. Then you would need to spend time going back into Tempest Keep (But it really couldn’t be immediately after you just cleared SSC, because all those that got the appropriate quests had to ditz around in Shadowmoon getting ready for the next part in the chain) and then you could go in, making sure to kill Al’ar for his part in the chain, clearing the rest and then dropping Kael.

At best, you manage to only cost yourself one long night of raiding (And forcing the next raid night to be Hyjal to finalize the Black Temple Attunement). At worst you end up giving up a week of real raiding to get more attunements. Yes, Kael and Vashj had some pretty nice loot (Belt and Robe off Vashj, Necks off of Kael, etc) and it was on par with the Tier 6 stuff. The problem was the 8 bosses of essentially garbage you had to clear (And HAD been clearing for months) to even get to those bosses. The time sink almost never felt like it was worth it.

That’s why I favored the ‘guild attunement’ option I listed above. It allows the guilds to work on it. A new guild would have to go through the quest chain and progress appropriately (And it likely wouldn’t take very long) and essentially fits a guild into its own spot in progression. The quests don’t need a drop off the last boss (Let’s say, with a WoTLK parallel for Tier 7, the quest mobs would be Thaddius, Horsemen and Sartharion; for Tier 8 they would be Ignis , Thorim and Mimiron; etc) but it would show that they’ve been making progress. It also keeps people in guilds (One of the worries people have with a further rise in 10 man popularity and ease of pugging of raids) and encourages people to work together. Similarly it would offer an appropriate level of reward in addition to the attunement for those completing it, encouraging people to actually do them on their own as well. Since the attunement is now linked to the guild, recruits and new players/alts in said guild will still have full access. It also discourages the “Guild of the Week” crazes that I know I’ve been seeing on my server, in which about 7 to 10 guilds randomly form every other week, tout they are going to be gearing up for new content, then dissolve just as quickly into other guilds. Stable guild environments now actually would have a tangible reward in the form of an attunement and would be encouraged.

[NewfieDave]

That sounds like the complaint is that there is a lack of reward for spending a full night raiding in previous tiers of content. Attunement itself does not feel like a reward, but if there are other drops/achievements/quests/new content to be enjoyed in an old instance, then people might not mind coming along on an attunement run.

Imagine that when Ulduar came out, it required killing KT in Naxx as an attunement quest. There likely would have been complaints from some people that they have to clear through a ton of old content to get new people attuned, just like what you described in SSC/TK. But what if the option to teleport directly to the Saph + KT wing was released at the same time as Ulduar? That would have made the attunement process much faster.

Edit: What I'd like to see are more raids with a short linear path to the end boss, and many optional side bosses you can choose to do or skip along the way. I'd also like to see more variety in boss difficulty and corresponding item levels within each tier of raiding. For example (and these numbers are purely for illustration, not meant to be properly balanced), imagine that Naxx drops ilvls 200-232 depending on the difficulty of the boss, Ulduar drops ilvls 213-245, ToC drops ilvls 226-251, and so on.

[Trogdorrior]

Back in the day, Guilds had the question, "What are you attuned for?" in their applications. This whole argument, as always, boils down to a sense of entitlement. Who is entitled to collect the best gear, run the best raids, join the best guids, et cetera.

As a casual player, nothing, and I really mean nothing, upsets me more than seeing someone in t10 gear with lower dps/dd, and far less situational awareness when I, in my i232 gear, run my heroics. I'm not in favor of attuning because I'm a hard core raider that wants to keep the "noobs" out, it's because I'm a hardcore player that can't fit raiding into my schedule that wants to keep the "noobs" out.

Why should someone be entitled to t10 content, and ultimately gear, even though they've never touched a raid before, just because they have a RL friend in a top end guild? Why should they get to skip the effort that is supposed to go along with collecting that gear for any reason? People farm raids all the time on a lot of servers anyways, I don't think it's going to kill anyone to fly through naxx to get 5 or 6 people attuned for Ulduar.

I do not, and will never like the idea that someone is "better" than anyone else in this game. Everyone had a friend that couldn't beat a level of Sonic the Hedgehog for the life of them, but that doesn't mean that they are obligated to put down the game so that they don't taint it.

Attunements ensure, wether you like it or not, that the majority of players in top tier gear have earned it.

[Kazeyonoma]

That sounds like the complaint is that there is a lack of reward for spending a full night raiding in previous tiers of content. Attunement itself does not feel like a reward, but if there are other drops/achievements/quests/new content to be enjoyed in an old instance, then people might not mind coming along on an attunement run.

Imagine that when Ulduar came out, it required killing KT in Naxx as an attunement quest. There likely would have been complaints from some people that they have to clear through a ton of old content to get new people attuned, just like what you described in SSC/TK. But what if the option to teleport directly to the Saph + KT wing was released at the same time as Ulduar? That would have made the attunement process much faster.

Edit: What I'd like to see are more raids with a short linear path to the end boss, and many optional side bosses you can choose to do or skip along the way. I'd also like to see more variety in boss difficulty and corresponding item levels within each tier of raiding. For example (and these numbers are purely for illustration, not meant to be properly balanced), imagine that Naxx drops ilvls 200-232 depending on the difficulty of the boss, Ulduar drops ilvls 213-245, ToC drops ilvls 226-251, and so on.

And by doing this, how does this "attunement" help at all in weeding out good players/bad players? it just frustrates pugs who can't get in, and allows baddies to be carried by friends all the same. attunements are bad. Period.

[mavfin]

And by doing this, how does this "attunement" help at all in weeding out good players/bad players? it just frustrates pugs who can't get in, and allows baddies to be carried by friends all the same. attunements are bad. Period.

That pretty much covers it. Attunements don't keep out bad players. They can always be carried in by someone.

All attunements really do is annoy anyone who came to the party a little late, and they give elitists a bigger sense of entitlement than they already have.

[NewfieDave]

You can't say that any one player is better than another (hooray for equality!), but you can say that one player is BETTER AT THE GAME than another player.

Casual vs Hardcore is an oversimplification, and the words are often defined differently depending on who you ask. It's not a binary measurement where one player is hardcore and another is casual. People generally fall somewhere between depending on all kinds of factors:

High Skill vs Low Skill
Lots of available time vs Little available time
Good social networking skills vs You have 0 friends
Willingness to research and improve yourself vs Laziness and wanting to be carried
Willingness to work for the betterment of the group vs Self-centered loot whore

Each of these is a sliding scale from awesome to terrible.

Attunements in a vacuum will not prevent bad raiders from being carried through them. If you can be carried through new content, getting carried through the previous tier should be even easier, just time consuming. I like the idea of attunements as a method of forcing people to move through progression in logical steps, but getting rid of bad raiders is best left up to the raid leader.

The only way to make people earn the top gear is to make the bosses that drop it too hard for bad raiders to be carried through.

[Trogdorrior]

And by doing this, how does this "attunement" help at all in weeding out good players/bad players? it just frustrates pugs who can't get in, and allows baddies to be carried by friends all the same. attunements are bad. Period.

In the event that a guild decides it is in their best interest to carry someone - perhaps a RL friend of one of the players that started during ICC and does not or cannot contribute at all - all the way through Naxx, Ulduar, and any or all of the other necessary raids just so that player can get t10 gear, then I really don't know what to think about that guild. I don't think their priorities are straight. If a guild wants to take the time to "carry" a competent new recruit through old raids so that they can participate in the new content, then that seems like a sound decision.

I believe, firmly, that a players must contribute to a boss's death, be it 10 or 25, norm or hm, before they can move on to the next boss. Blizzard is not enforcing a sense of teamwork, comraderie, and effort by allowing players to just skip bosses they can't beat or move from their guild working through ulduar into a more successful icecrown guild where they essentially get carried through the content.