In yesterday’s post, I talked about how my raiding alliance has essentially given up T5 content in favor of moving into T6. I won’t make any bones about it, I’d prefer not to jump right into T6. I feel like our raiding alliance, as it was constituted, could have pushed to finish the T5 stuff before moving on. It seems that nowadays, though, a LOT of raiders are doing the same thing.
I’m a completionist at heart. It probably has something to do with my history involving video games. I vaguely remember having the Odyssey2 when I was little, and when I was about 10 years old, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released. I still remember going to Ace Hardware with my best friend at the time, and watching as him and his parent plunked down the cash for the NES cadillac version with ROB the Robotic Operating Buddy and all.
From the moment we started up Super Mario Brothers, I was hooked. I will never forget my first REAL gaming experiences with the NES and Mario.
One of the key things that Mario taught me is to always search every nook and cranny for secrets. In the early games, there really were only a few, but you can see that in the evolution of the adventure game, the devs cater to completionists like myself. There is often a collecting bonanza to be had, and countless hidden gems and treasures to acquire if you really want to “finish” a modern adventure game 100%.
As such, I always like to not just finish levels, but scour them for every last hidden gem before moving on. I’m not a fan of backtracking, I prefer to either get it all or leave it entirely.
This has affected the way that I look at progression in World of Warcraft. SSC is the “level” I have been playing in raiding for the last few months. I’ve put in a lot of time and effort to learn the bosses, and contribute to the raid’s success in any way I can. We’ve still only tried Lady V ONE STINKING TIME and we’re moving on. It’s like we’ve been working our way through world 1-1 through 1-2 to 1-3 in Mario, and then never getting through the Castle at the end. Maybe I’m being a little OCD, but it’s driving me nuts.
Do you fight your way through any Zelda game only to give up and start on a new game when you get to Ganon? NO!
Do you give up on Metroid when you get to Mother Brain? NO!
Do you give up on GTA when you….uhhh….get a girl? NO!
Now, I KNOW that the Lady Vashj fight is tough. However, I don’t belive it’s due to gear. I don’t think we can go gear up in early T6 to the point where we flat outgear the encounter. Hell, a good deal of people in our raid are already outfitted in a LOT of the 2.4 badge gear. It’s like we’re partially in T6 gear already! From what I understand, the T5 endbosses are about SKILL and ORGANIZATION - NOT gear.
So, maybe it’s not really about gear anymore. Maybe we just don’t want to try to deal with the bevvy of wipes it will take to get the Lady V fight down. Maybe we don’t want to make the hard raid selection decisions it would take to get through it. Whatever it is, we’re moving on.
Nowadays when looking at guilds that are recruiting, you’ll often see stuff like this: 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK, 3/5 MH, 3/9 BT. Since they removed those attunements, everyone is doing it like that. A lot of them take a few lumps with Lady V and/or Kael, and then just give them up. They tackle the first few relatively “easy” bosses in MH and BT rather than put in the work to finish T5.
I just don’t know if this is good or bad.
The Pros of Skipping to T6
- You don’t have to bang your head against the proverbial wall of Lady V and Kael. There’s no two ways about it, they are tough, tough fights and you cannot, at least at this point, outgear them. Perhaps you can in some ways when Wrath hits, I’m not sure. Many people (Matticus for one) say Kael in TK is the toughest fight to learn in the game.
- You get shiny new gear, better than the stuff that drops in T5. Let’s face it, with the 2.4 badge gear, a lot of stuff in T5 isn’t all that appealing anymore. You can get better just by running heroics/Kara and hoarding badges. The T6 level gear, though, is at least on par with the 2.4 badge gear, if not better.
- You get to see new content that perhaps you wouldn’t have seen before. A lot of people, myself included, never thought they would step foot in BT. We can do that now, even if we can only get through a handful of bosses. I know I never thought I’d step in Naxx either, and I never did. (The upcoming “new” Naxx doesn’t count!) New content is good content.
- You get to say “we’re also 3/5 in MH, 3/9 in BT”.
The Cons of Skipping to T6
- You didn’t learn the “true” tests of T5. You never learned some of the toughest fights in the game, that at one time were meant to prepare you for T6. Remember, this 2.4 badge gear is still new. You’ll hear old raiders say “Back in my day, we couldn’t skip Lady V or Kael, we had to fight them uphill, both ways, on 13″ CRT monitors, too!”
- Because you didn’t learn the tough T5 fights, you will most likely get stuck in T6 as well. That’s why you see 3/5 MH, 3/9 BT so often. If you don’t learn organization fights in T5, you aren’t going to do it in T6. Though I suppose by the time you are really tired of the early MH and BT bosses Wrath will be here.
- You can’t finish the attunement quests for T6, which do give some nice rewards. You also don’t get to strut around IF or whatnot knowing you’ve helped kill Lady V and Kael. The real Kael, that is.
- You’re a quitter. Ok, not really, but I couldn’t think of another con to stick here.
Well, that about sums it up. It turns out the cons are pretty simple, you’re going to get hung up in MH and BT just like you did at 5/6 SSC and 3/4 TK. There are some very tough fights that require everyone to be on their game. Perhaps you just want to see the content and get the drops you can, and I suppose I can respect that.
As far as the pros, you do get to see content you otherwise might not see. Now, you aren’t going to take down Illidan any time soon, but you can at least bleed on his doorstep if you want. There is also some nice gear to be had in the early bosses, and it could potentially help you go back and take down that Nasty Naga.
Well, in the end, I’m going along for the ride myself, so what does it matter? The completionist in me will have to take a back seat, since I don’t make any decisions. I am thankful that I can show up, though. I’m also a mere 100 hps away from the 9k requirement that has been set for BT, so it looks like I probably will be going on Saturday. I do look forward to it, and hope we can at least perhaps take down the first boss or so. Look for a rundown of the lowdown some time next week. Thanks for reading, and be sure to let me know what you think. Is the “New” raid progression better or worse?
Tags: Raiding, Rant
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July 15th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I’m going to use a phrase I’ve never used before: QFT. (And in the “quoted for truth” sense, not the “quit effing trolling” sense.) I agree with absolutely everything you’ve said here.
I am just barely starting to get to the late-T4/early-T5 content and have started getting offers for recruitment from raiding guilds. But, inevitably, whenever I dig I find that they haven’t even finished SSC before moving on to MH or TK. Bummer.
I am torn — I’d love to see that content before Wrath makes it a wasteland, but how am I supposed to feel about that level of half-assery? I think I’d just end up more frustrated than would be worth it.
July 15th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Yes very interesting issues, I do think it has so much to do with Wrath, and people wanting to see new outland content before it becomes obsolete.
After all, the encounters are designed to be super challenging in order to keep people playing when there are no expansions on the horizon. In my (limited) experience the challenge of raiding is much more about getting 10/25 people to do the right thing at critical moments, then it is about anything else… Why did we wipe on Shade in kara? because someone knocked their mouse during flame wreath, and 2 casters stood under blizzard for 5 seconds. NOTHING to do with gear, spec, class knowledge, consumables, or raid class makeup.
WIth all the badge rewards, getting the right gear to progress is the easy part: calling people out for being low skilled/too slow/unwilling to pay attention at crucial moments - and then having them develop those skills - thats really what I find the raiding challenge is about. And if your guild has decided to skip that challenge in SSC + TK, and instead look for that challenge in unseen content… well, I can understand why.
Last chance to see BT & MH??? Will anyone ever go there ever again after Wrath? Will we even bother to organize 25 man raids, when you can see all the same content with 10? When getting 10 people to click/not click the right buttons at the right time is a hell of a lot easier than 25 people, no matter how skilled your group may be?
July 16th, 2008 at 6:34 am
I wish Blizzard would up the quality of loot in BT and MH when wotlk comes out to encourage people to complete them.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Just because you’re working on T6 content doesn’t mean you should forget about Kael and Vashj. The Band of the Eternal is one of the best games in the ring for most classes, so skipping those two means you miss out on the best items.
They opened up Vashj and Kael to partial clear status so you can just do what my guild is doing and go Hydros -> Lurker -> Vashj, and Alar -> Kael (just a few mobs to clear in the TK tunnels which are easy to do quickly, no need to kill VR or Solarian).
July 17th, 2008 at 6:29 am
I’ve tried to explain this a few times but the message doens’t be getting across. I happen to be the raid leader in Pum’s guild that represents us to the alliance. Let me clarrify a few things as to why we took these steps.
99% of this is boiling down to our alliance being a group of casual guilds, stress on the casual.
1st: We have NOT given up on T5 content. You could make an argument that we are giving up on T4 content (gruul/Mags) and I’d agree with you. That’s only occuring because we are all casual guilds and we can not afford to add a 4th raiding day to the run calendar. We have never said we don’t intend to kill Kael and Vashj; We infact deperately want to do those things so we can advance some of the quests that lead to Hyjal and BT. However, we did some homework and decided to follow an accepted path through the instances that doesnt’ take us to those guys now, but we wil return to them.
We did cut the # of days baqk because we honestly are on the cusp of not needing a second day in T5 content. In SSC we are farming 4 outta 5 in 4hrs pretty easily. We go into every SSC run planing to do a min of 5 bosses but normally we knock off 4 due to time constraints. We normally loose that 5th boss and getting shots in on LV due to our casual nature; We have people that are new every week and we have people who are making mistakes and/or not doing what they are told and/or refusing to look at omen and pulling agro and getting them and usualyl others killed. We don’t berate them about it but if its a theme they do get told to back off and potentially go have a word with their guild rep AFTER the raid. If we continued a second day of T5 content we’d spend 4hrs banging against potentially one boss and honestly that’s WAY too long to be looking at one encounter. After 2hrs most people have had enough in our guilds and loosing interest.
That takes me to progression. The T5/T6/T6.5 content is NOT linnear. That seems to be a fixation in the casual community. The hardcore guys figured it out but casuals like us struggle with it after banging on the whole kara progression rules. Before we made the decision to do this, we did some research. The first 2 bosses of MH and BT are roughly at the difficulty of the middle bosses right before the respective final bosses in T5 content. We decided to adopt a model akin to the hardcore guys where we run all but the final bosses in Eye and SSC, then bounce over to MH and BT and hit the first couple there, with continuing runs in SSC and Eye to keep it fresh. After a while we’ve built up some T6 class loot, We come back and we’re able to now squeeze time into that one-day run to start taking shots at Kael and LV. This briding of the end of T5 and beginning of T6 is a pretty common occurance. Take a look at Wowjutsu and the raiding boards you’ll see ALOT of guilds are holding at the final bosses in T5 and hitting the T6 first few to add an extra leg up to hit Kael and LV.
Lastly, let me add this, The gearing and comptency level of the alliance is readyu to start MH and Bt. We’ve alreayd proved that. We’ve dropped the first two bosses in MH 4 times now with at least two of those times being first shots. We’re now getting to the third boss without alot of difficulty and takign shots of him. We’re getting him below 50% pretty much any time we see him and have taken him to 1% health twice now and just couldnt’ seal the deal due to an early mistake one individual made that caused a wipe. We’re still dealing with mistakes, but that’s one reason we call ourselves an alliance of casual guilds. Our first steps into BT are at the end of next week and having been the person reviewing the early bosses I am pretty confident the first two bosses are very doable; They are mechanics we’ve seen already. Great example, Supremus is just VR with a different orb mechanic. Same strategy, just pump out more DPS and quaf some potions.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Long time reader, first time poster.
My guild also did the Jump to T6 content without finishing T5. We did it to make things interesting, and we ended up with moderate success. Not only were we 3/6 in SSC and 2/4 in TK, we successfully downed the first boss in hyjal on the first attempt, as well as 1 shotting supremus in BT. We are now 4/6 SSC, 2/4 TK, 2/5 MH, and 2/9 BT. We have started to refocus our attention back on T5 content just to get our players focused on the dynamics of the teamwork involved, while we still have 1 raid per week devoted to T6 content.