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.

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).

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?

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.