Burnout already?

[Theotherone]

they're all easy!

lol!

[Theotherone]

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.

Yeah 355 ilvl seems high for a PuG.

I've finally seen the raids on a constant basis (I went 10/12 on my hunter with a guild that was 12/12 farm mode, so that was kind of a blow through) on my priest healing as disc. I have to say, the challenge is fun. I went on loan to another guild to heal their 2nd 10 man run and ended up joining that guild on my priest (my GM blessed it, she's been too busy to raid these days), so after three weeks we're 6/12 and all learning together. It's a blast, even the stupid wipes are fun 'cause we know we'll get it, it's just a matter of time.

The raid content is punishing if you don't pay attention. I think the unforgiving nature of the mechanics of the fights is really the biggest difference - "yes, you really, really can't stand in the fire, it hurts...bad." The adds before the Council are a case in point, don't tank them correctly, or stand in the fire, or don't interrupt = enjoy the port and the run back. And they're unforgiving in the sense of lose one person on a boss fight and you're chances of wiping are much increased over WoLK. Now I assume as we gear up this will change; but bosses aren't loot machines anymore.

Victory seems so much sweeter.

[Kerchunk]

So relax.

Seriously. Any stress you feel about this game is self-imposed and self-perpetuating. Calm down. Stop raiding with people who get bent out of shape after every wipe. Don't expect to 1-shot every boss in iLvl 350 gear. Have a beer. Joke around a bit on vent. Discuss mistakes and mechanics calmly and rationally. If you have people in your guild who can't or won't do that, replace them. It is within your power to change the way you experience the game. If you don't like the current jive, change it. As a guild leader or officer you're in a position to do that.

If you want to raid with a bunch of slap-happy super hardcore assholes who turn every slip-up into a 15 minute tirade about "bads" because they think you should be 13/13 HM then, yes, you're likely to experience stress and eventually burnout during progression. But that's your CHOICE. Your first choice is the /ginvite and your second is the raid /invite.

Build a team of people who want to have fun. Find people who understand that when bosses have 1-shot-kill mechanics, even the best players are going to die because nobody will ever execute perfectly on these mechanics every time.

A word problem to illustrate: A boss has a 1-shot-kill mechanic. You have 25 raiders who are each 99% effective at avoiding this mechanic. The boss uses it 10 times during the fight. How likely is it that every raider successfully avoids every use of this ability?

...8%

There are people who can't grasp that concept. Tell them you're 99% effective and they will say "Great!" Then tell them you're going to lose at least one person to this mechanic 9 out of 10 fights and they will flip out on you.

Find people who get it. Raid with them.

[Katzazi]

I think that there are three core problems at the moment.

a) The clear 10man option as a viable raid size.
b) The easy normal (and at the end even heroic) ICC content for such a long time, followed by more complex encounters as cata tier1.
c) Guild levels + reputation + achievements.

The first part caused a huge amount of "new" small 10-man-raid-guilds. Many of them were parts of greater guilds who did not want to have all this guild-organization and struggle. The idea is that you only need 10 good friends/players and you can raid without hurt and organization and struggle, because you just know each other well enough.

The second part gave many people who did not raid before icc a wrong expectation what raiding is and what raiding will be in cata. There are so many people out there who classify themselves as players who want to raid hardcore and with dedication who cannot stand 1 hour of wipes on normal modes. Just because they never had to experience a wipe-feast before when they had no problems to do the icc hard modes with 30% buff. Since they had no problems to beat the icc hard modes they feel like experienced top raiders. When I speak with players who did raid in classic / bc / hardmode ulduar they all tell the same story. They have all this "very good, hard mode experienced, dedicated" players that get upset when they have to really work on stuff like Chogall, Nef or hardmodes for several nights / weeks without a kill.

I did a survey for my guild where everybody had to say how they want to raid in cata. It's a medicore playerbase at best. Everybody absolutley everybody said that they wanted to raid with the highest dedication possible and really want to have it hardcore like. Many of them said that they only can raid at one or possibly two days a week. Others arrive at the raid unglyphed, unenchanted, ungemmed without food and elexiers/flasks because they had not time to farm or want to replace the gear anyway and don't want to pay AH or GB prices. They are quite confused when someone complains because they never needed to do stuff like that before. And they keep telling me that they see themselves as extremely dedicated players. (It's not only my guild - I see it everywhere. Even when you read most posts in the HALP section of this forum, you encounter the same mindset.)

This two points lead to a lot of small guilds struggling to get raids going. They have to learn that not everybody is on the same page about raiding. And some just don't appear regularly enough. Since it's not enough to have a set of 10 players for a 10 man raid. You need backups for more or less every role (at least someone who can step in to tank and to heal and to dps). And many would do better if they even could replace some of the raiders they have to bring but are not of the quality of everybody else. It does not help that not everybody who loved to heal in Wrath can stand the "new" (old) healing pattern of cata, which results in a high need of healers (nearly every guild that is recruiting has a high want of healers).

The last part (guild levels + reputation) now makes it hard to fix this problem. Before guild levels and guild reputation it did not mean as much to change a guild. So if your guild has not already a quite high guild level it's hard to get people to switch guilds. And even then they think twice because you need guild reputation to be able to use mobile banking and stuff.

However the better fix to the problem would be some guild merges or raid cooperations. But guild experience and guild achievements makes it quite unattractive to either give up on your guild at all (since you lose all your reputation and everything you did to push those achievements) and raiding with people outside of your guild forces you to skip the raid guild achievements.

We have a raid cooperation with another guild at the moment for 10man raiding (we have 2 raids going and maybe will start some more, both guilds had problems to start one raid on their own before, but the player-base and class/role distribution is much better now. For all of us). We sat together to make it more official. Everybody agreed, that it would be a very good idea if everybody would be in the same guild. But nobody wanted to change the guild. And nobody wanted to give up the efforts we have done to several guild achievements. The sad part is, that everybody could live with the idea to change their guild-tag to the other name and we have similar ideas of guild lead and stuff. So we maybe would be one guild soon - if there would not be the new guild stuff.

We all agree that it's much easier to raid together (and maybe with players of even more guilds) because you just get more raiders of the same level to do raids and all of them have better raid experiences. But whatever we do the new guild-achievements -levels and -reputation leads to frustration. Either one side have to give up everything they achieved by now either individually or together with their old guild or we will never get our raid achievements. Or we both would have less rewarding raiding experiences.



All three elements lead to many small raids / guilds only being able to do low level raiding because they just cannot get a stable group together, with a high amount of organization to get the raids full at all. That's a high amount of stress for a low amount of reward. Something of that can lead to burnout and frustration.

[Muffin Man]

A word problem to illustrate: A boss has a 1-shot-kill mechanic. You have 25 raiders who are each 99% effective at avoiding this mechanic. The boss uses it 10 times during the fight. How likely is it that every raider successfully avoids every use of this ability?

...8%

Except some bosses are tuned in such a way that losing someone = raid wipe. Especially when learning a new raid encounter, your chances of auto-dying is a lot higher than 1%.

To big problem for me though, is in general the game doesn't feel any different from LK, and I mean the bad parts of LK. They promised that I wouldn't get 2 shot from an unlucky timing like against Rotface, and yet that exact situation happened on Magmaw (melee + mangle within .5 seconds).

Even more frustrating, the game mechanics are still very twitch oriented. We were doing Atramedes yesterday, Searing Flame ticks are less than 1 second apart. What is the max human reaction time? I read it's about 300 ms. Add in latency to even *see* the start of searing flames + the latency for the server to register the gong click and it's near impossibly to avoid more than one tick.

Spam healing hasn't gone away either, we lost a lot of people recovering from Searing Flames simply because our healers don't have enough AoE. As a 10-man group it's not impossible that we run with 2 holy pallies and a shaman. That's just our guild roster. Yesterday was 2 Shamans and a Pally. The Shamans just lacked the instant casts to top the raid off before the next modulation hit everyone (I'm not a healer so I'm just going off what they said, that they could aoe-heal fine throughout the encounter, but during o-crap moments like after Searing Flames, they just didn't have enough time to do it).

Atramedes in general encapsulates why Cataclysm isn't very fun for me actually. It's a fight that so utterly favors ranged that it sucks if I'm dps. I feel like I'm dragging the raid down on a fight that we already have trouble with. Then as a Warrior I have no means to effectively outrun air-phase sonic breath, although I came close with heroic leap and a lucky placed intervene target.

I do find Tron fun to tank and dps, and Maloriak isn't a bad fight either, it has the right amount of intensity and coordination. I think Magmaw just pisses me off b/c it's so buggy (getting onto him and them recording chains being in sync), otherwise the fight isn't too bad (other than that unlucky gib).

Chimaeron makes our healers want to quit, so we haven't attempted to him too much...

I dunno, we aren't a bad guild. We were 3/4's of the way through unlocking Algalon around when ToC came out. And we were doing tribute runs on Heroic ToC/10. So I trust that we should be up to the task here.

To be fair, our recurring problem is that we have flakey attendance, and if we're missing guild healers or tanks we're probably not getting far with a pug.