Burnout already?

[Selene]

I think the biggest issue with Cata is just a general Antipathy with the xpac. I have noticed people that were diehard raiders now have to get prodded to even gear up a character to try to raid. Or people that used to never miss a raid, are now absent at raid time.

[klausi]

I think the biggest issue with Cata is just a general Antipathy with the xpac.

I've to disagree. The biggest issue is the crazy learning/adapting curve, Cata starts where WotLK stopped. There's no entry level of raiding, absolutley every raidboss will crush you without proper execution from 95% of your players. And the gap between a decent geared player and a decent skilled player is bigger then ever. There's no rotation you can execute blindly while dancing to the Heigan song, everybody lose a ton of dps if they don't pay attention to their proccs and the environment/specific boss mechanis at the same time. That's a huge step up from everything we've done before in WoW and a lot of "progress raiders" from the last addon quickly come to their hilt, especially on heroic mode.

This addon is very demanding and Blizzard just overshoot it for Joe Average.

[Kojiyama]

Well, there are clearly different problems for different guilds.

The difficulty on normals is not an issue for my guild. Most of my guild has been playing for 4-5 years--many of them being in the guild since they first started raiding. So we are facing other struggles with lack of content, hardmode pacing, etc..

I can certainly see how the barrier to raiding for new players would be fairly extreme though. I know many of the normal mode fights initially felt fairly challenging to me (as much as people knock normal modes for being easy) as an experienced raider--and this is from the perspective of having killing Anub-25H before ICC--so I can imagine this is all a bit overwhelming for a new player trying to get into the raiding scene.

Just from my perspective personally, I find it difficult to see any reason to log into WoW outside of raids. I honestly cannot think of a single thing I would do in the game that would be of any use or benefit to me at this point. Unless you really enjoy WoW PvP (which I can't say I do anymore) there is just too little content. This leads to burnout pretty fast.

[Selene]

Well, there are clearly different problems for different guilds.

The difficulty on normals is not an issue for my guild. Most of my guild has been playing for 4-5 years--many of them being in the guild since they first started raiding. So we are facing other struggles with lack of content, hardmode pacing, etc..

I can certainly see how the barrier to raiding for new players would be fairly extreme though. I know many of the normal mode fights initially felt fairly challenging to me (as much as people knock normal modes for being easy) as an experienced raider--and this is from the perspective of having killing Anub-25H before ICC--so I can imagine this is all a bit overwhelming for a new player trying to get into the raiding scene.

Just from my perspective personally, I find it difficult to see any reason to log into WoW outside of raids. I honestly cannot think of a single thing I would do in the game that would be of any use or benefit to me at this point. Unless you really enjoy WoW PvP (which I can't say I do anymore) there is just too little content. This leads to burnout pretty fast.

Hence why I said there seems to be general Antipathy with this Xpac no matter the reason (i.e. things are too hard, bored, etc).
Just using you to help validate my statement from earlier.

[Bovinity]

I've to disagree. The biggest issue is the crazy learning/adapting curve, Cata starts where WotLK stopped. There's no entry level of raiding, absolutley every raidboss will crush you without proper execution from 95% of your players. And the gap between a decent geared player and a decent skilled player is bigger then ever. There's no rotation you can execute blindly while dancing to the Heigan song, everybody lose a ton of dps if they don't pay attention to their proccs and the environment/specific boss mechanis at the same time. That's a huge step up from everything we've done before in WoW and a lot of "progress raiders" from the last addon quickly come to their hilt, especially on heroic mode.

I guess we have different views on things. I can't really imagine being burnt out on something due to it being a challenge. =O

[Quinafoi]

I guess we have different views on things. I can't really imagine being burnt out on something due to it being a challenge. =O

M'uru, Destroyer of Guilds

Not to say I agree necessarily with the other post, but content difficulty has been a factor in the past.

[Tengenstein]

Just from my perspective personally, I find it difficult to see any reason to log into WoW outside of raids. I honestly cannot think of a single thing I would do in the game that would be of any use or benefit to me at this point.

Ditto. Very ditto.

My guild's 10/12 normal, and having great fun on our first two nights on Nef, but for the most part my mains parked up outside BWD, while I fool about on alts.

I started playing a few weeks into Wrath so this is my first expansion, and i had kinda assumed this is what is was like, that there isn't much content at the beginning. During wrath what did we do to fill the time between raids? maybe its cos we're no longer double dipping both 10 and 25 man so we're not raiding as much? I used to do both runs on my main with the guild, have an alt 10 man run with the guild, and then pug a 25, and then pug 10s & 25s with another 2 alts. so maybe 8 runs through ICC a week.

Now with 10 & 25s sharing a lockout, the increased difficulty of raids, at least on my server there aren't alot of raid ready alts at the moment, and pugging seems to be dead.

Wrath shipped with 15 encounters, so in a reset you could be downing up to 30 encounters, Cata shipped with 13. It's just not such a large time sink.

[Theotherone]

Now with 10 & 25s sharing a lockout, the increased difficulty of raids, at least on my server there aren't alot of raid ready alts at the moment, and pugging seems to be dead.

Pug raid activity is starting to come alive on my server - acutally it's showing a pulse. Usually, it's "BWD know first two bosses" or "BoT know first two bosses." It's not much, but it shows people are getting there and trying the easy bosses. (I know, I'll now get the elistests saying "they're all easy" - there I save all you uber players the time of having to say it.)

[Bovinity]

They're all easy!

[Nez]

I am having a hard time deciding if WoW is boring now, or if I am just bored of WoW if you know what I mean.. I also really only sign on to raid or to prep for raids anymore. 4 level 85's. 1 in starter raid gear, the other in raid gear, and I just do not even feel like working on another.

On a side note, my front yard is looking a lot nicer this year than previous springs when I was not bored with WoW.

[Deathplz]

I can't imagine a guild that was "bored" with ICC/RS progression not being able to find an "easy" boss in Tier 11 normal modes.



There are already tons of fights in normal modes that are so severely undertuned as to almost be comical, and Conclave is actually one of them.



There already are, there's a reason almost every guild breaking into heroic modes downs the same 3-5 bosses in the same order.

Bovinity, you don't get it, you are one of the lucky ones that plays with skilled people, and not trying to raid with friends that are not as skilled. This is the roughest tier ever to be a GM, to the point where from 50+ guilds on my server, we are down to 30 and less when the guild transfer option comes out. This tier of raiding is not entry level, and has no "easy" bosses, look up numbers and you will see that there are less people downing bosses in Cata than there were when Naxx was fresh.

/sgined
GM about to burnout

[Bovinity]

Of course, because Naxx was pretty much as undertuned as you could possibly make a raid instance. Combine that with the fact that all the strats were well-known long before the instance was released and sure...you'll have a raid that people are clearing pretty darn fast.

[Deathplz]

The point is, many raiders find this tier overtunned, and if you are not logging in for a wipe fest ... what else is there to log in for? None, and I hate getting the question from Guildees "when are we moving to Rift?" I don't know, my situation is not unique, or else we woudlnd't be having this conversation.

[Bovinity]

Tell them to stop worrying about Rift so much and move out of the fire. Chances are, with that attitude, they're not taking the raiding very seriously at all anyway, and that's pretty much going to be a barrier to any progression. Attitude is probably the biggest part of a successful raid, because it sure doesn't require a huge amount of dexterity, reaction time, tactics or talent.

[swelt]

I would say cata tier 1 raid tuning (or indeed, the whole shebang of heroic gearing and craftables) is a huge bit of reactionary design in response to the perceived failure of wotlk tier 1 to offer any challenge (malygos + sartharion hard notwithstanding). Blizzard saw the ease with which people jumped straight into naxx and into epic gear as a design failure. They overcompensated. What we have now is the result.

The sweet spot sits somewhere in between the two imo... some intentionally easy entry level content, both at the normal and heroic raid levels, with steady ramp ups from there. It's so much easier to keep a guild motivated when they are progressing.

[Kojiyama]

I also feel like if they want heroic raid encounters to be anything other than an race about PTR testing and subsequent sprint to kill in the first N weeks for the top 1% guilds, they need to have a more clearly defined approach to pacing the encounters and framing the heroics as interesting progression.

Although heroics are of greater value given their tangible rewards, they have started to feel very much like achievements to me. Asking players to tie their own hand behind their back for a challenge appeals to some, but generally does not appeal to all.

On one hand, they are being framed as 'progression', but on the other hand the kill statistics reflect their difficulty not being tuned in a way that would reflect that. I mean, 182 guilds having killed Heroic Ascendant Council and almost 30,000 having killed normal? That's a bit out of whack and clearly designed just to be challenge for challenge sake. Outside of Sunwell, that is generally not how enjoyable progression raiding has been historically developed.

Yet, on the other hand, the clear rates of normal mode are far too high to be considered truly 'endgame' type content. Many of the 'easier' heroics are showing kill rates typical of most end bosses at this point in the progression curve--yet they are in a somewhat haphazard and fairly random order and allocation. (e.g. in BWD Omnitron is the lowest outside of Nef in Heroic despite being one of the highest in normal, and Chimeaeron is the highest despite being the lowest outside of Nef!) You then have heroic bosses with ridiculously low kill rates that are really out of reach of all but a handful of guilds for the forseeable future.

I don't mind heroics being difficult for difficulty sake. It gives the top-1% guilds something to really focus on. However, it really doesn't offer anything very interesting or compelling in its current implementation to a large number of guilds. From my experiences, it seems to do more harm than good in triggering a lot of guild hand-wringing about 'should we or shouldn't we' and causes some almost unavoidable burnout due to the whole rehash/"I don't like dying to bosses we've already killed" experience.

[Griff]

I admit that my enthusiasm for the game has diminished somewhat as well. I think the current state of raiding is great with challenging encounters that seem very well-tuned and for the two nights a week when I'm actually raiding, I have a blast. The rest of the time, I'm at a loss for what to do.

My biggest gripe with the game is the obvious and intentional time sinks that are supposed to 'give you something to do' but are essentially just repeating the same task over and over again. (I guess raiding could count for this, but it is offset by the team nature and the effort to improve your play that should accompany each pull - you don't really need that push while grinding dailies)

Archaeology is kind of fun, but the constant shuttling back and forth across the cont and the grindy aspect makes it lose its appeal fairly quickly.

Leveling alts - the rework of the old content and new talent trees made this a lot of fun ..until I hit northrend. Slower leveling and just being in Northrend in general has sapped my will until I just run a dungeon until my rested XP runs dry. Moreover, the thought of grinding another full set of cata reputations for gear so that I can start running heroics/raids with on alts is also admittedly an uninteresting proposition.

[Caric]

This is probably as close as I have come to shutting down the game for good. If Uncle Sam would get on with it already and let me have my tax refund I might have already switched over to Rift. Large swaths of my guild just don't show up any more, our officer corp is just done. I can't even have fun alt grinding which is what I would normally do ... normals aren't rewarding, heroics are still in a place (even post nerf) where it is just to much time and attention required to run an alt through them after I get done grinding my daily on my main.

Questing is more painful right now than at any point I can remember in this game's history, questing on rails just ain't much fun. Never thought I would be at a place where farming mats would be the high point of my in game experience. Sigh.

[Selene]

Pug raid activity is starting to come alive on my server - acutally it's showing a pulse. Usually, it's "BWD know first two bosses" or "BoT know first two bosses." It's not much, but it shows people are getting there and trying the easy bosses. (I know, I'll now get the elistests saying "they're all easy" - there I save all you uber players the time of having to say it.)

Haven't seen much in the way of PUGs on Horde on my server, but Alliance people are asking for a min ilevel of 355 for PUGs O.o which seems a bit outrageous to me.

[Selene]

Bovinity, you don't get it, you are one of the lucky ones that plays with skilled people, and not trying to raid with friends that are not as skilled. This is the roughest tier ever to be a GM, to the point where from 50+ guilds on my server, we are down to 30 and less when the guild transfer option comes out. This tier of raiding is not entry level, and has no "easy" bosses, look up numbers and you will see that there are less people downing bosses in Cata than there were when Naxx was fresh.

/sgined
GM about to burnout

I completely agree, hell several of our top guilds have fallen apart recently on my server, hell one of the Horde guilds that got the Dark Phoenix mount has fallen apart, so it shows they are no slouches.