The Glade 4.0

This is why I have 4 level 85's and 1 level 71 working towards 85

If I continue to play this game, I might have every profession eventually. I have a friend who already does.

The bonus right now, is that gathering professions like herbing and mining get great experience as well. If you have heirlooms and at least 1 of herb or mining, you can level a character extremely fast.

I have to 9 80s, 1 83, and Cataclysm didn't hold my interest. Currently working up a worgen mage on Katas' server, going for lore master as I go, not after I top out.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Not that it matters if you aren't concerned with level pace, but be aware that they changed XP gains once you hit max levels for each xpack. i.e. once you hit 60, vanilla exp drops WAY down to the point it's not worth sticking around for. Same for level 70 and outlands, 80 and northrend.

But, if you aren't worried with gaining levels efficiently, then it won't affect you much.

I too haven't found Cata that appealing. I enjoyed leveling via quests, but once I was done with those, I had no desire to do dungeons or raids. Thus, my only enjoyment is leveling up alts and tradeskills, making gold, and doing achievements on the side.

But to that extent, my playtime has gone down drastically. Still worth the $15/month. When I get bored with it completely, I'll likely quit until a new expansion hits down the road.

Well, circle of life happened once again. My guild disbanded. Anyone need a horde Tank/DPS (tank being main spec) with 354 average gear?

Armory link

Long shot, but what the hell.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Check your PMs Numbuk.

Sorry to hear about that Numbuk! Hopefully works out for the better.

Does actually bring up something I wanted to discuss. Have guilds been more volatile since Cataclysm? Volatile in the sense of falling apart or in some degree of instability, at any rate.

Normally I shrug off such "omg the world is falling" theories people have, since they always seem to either be based on anecdotal experience ("me and my two best friends are bored with wow, I give it 6 months til it collapses") or assume human nature has magically changed, often in conjunction with #1 ("people in this game are idiots now, have fun continuing to play with all the noobs but I'm out").

I'm afraid I may be seeing things based on anecdotal experience now so I wanted to see what others thought, from an outside point of view. :p

I've been with the same guild now since the end of October in 2007. We have always been casual... two nights a week for main raiding, with occasional optional stuff one or two other nights. Our raids aren't even that long, tending to last 2.5 hours a night. We do take what raiding we do seriously, and have over the years done quite well for ourselves given how little time we spend at it. Usually around #3 guild on the server, but there weren't that many serious 25 man guilds on the server at all to begin with. Our 10s have done quite well, including some server firsts, especially well given that those server firsts have beaten much better geared guilds who were far ahead of us in 25s. Relatively far, at least... our whole server is terrible compared to truly good guilds, but that's another story.

So, Cata hits, and we decide to keep going on as a 25 man guild as we have been for 3+ years. Here is where I think Cataclysm has changed things!

People that want progression first and foremost want to continue in 10s. We've never been a particularly big guild and we definitely don't have 25 good raiders. We can definitely fill a good 10 man raid though, if we tell the other 10-15 people to go find something else to do. So given that we didn't want to give up on those 10-15 other people, and given that there are now a lot more competitive guilds now since 10s "count" in Cata who couldn't field a 25 man guild before Cata, we had a fair number of those progression-minded raiders leave.

In short, what I see happening is that our struggling 25s still had a sense of value to them before Cata, but now that there are a million 10 man guilds pulling ahead of our struggling 25s in progression, people are jumping ship to do the 10 man thing.

My question is... is this phenomenon happening to other 25 man guilds? Were those "omg equal loot in 10 man means the death of 25 man raiding" people actually mostly justified? :p

Meanwhile my guild keeps moving along in 25s. We do exactly as well as our attendance on a given night suggests we should. This past Tuesday we get about 19 people online and only 1 mainspec tank, so we just do one 10 man and get a pretty easy first Heroic difficulty kill for the guild and effortlessly breeze through the rest of Bastion of Twilight. The next day we get 25 people online and clear every boss in BWD except Nef + kill Conclave and only have one wipe the entire night. Sounds great, but it's just as likely we don't fill the raid next Tuesday anyway and have to struggle with a 22 man raid, or split into two 10s if we have the tanks, or do something else non-optimal... which will make people grumpier yet.

So.. problems sound familiar to other 25 man guilds? Or is it just more or less my own guild and it's coincidental with Cata release? Always hard to say without an outside point of view.

At least from my experience, people went 25s for the better stuff while usually preferring 10 man raids as a more enjoyable atmosphere.

It may just be just me and my friends, but we can find 10 of us that we have a great time raiding with much easier than we can find 25.

It's because blizzard made them share the same loot tables and raid lockouts. If 25s still had the superior loot, you'd see more 25 man raiding guilds staying together. But since you get the same loot out of 10 mans, there is basically no reason to even run 25s anymore.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Which is funny because Blizzard said there's no way that would happen.

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Holy shitsnacks!

This, totally.
I've got a hunter alt with +45% earned XP between heirloom gear and guild rewards, and mining/herbalism as his professions. I leveled him from 26 to 40 in 3 days.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I know the old argument that same loot in 10s means no one does 25s anymore, but I was wondering what other people were experiencing in their 25 man guilds. We have too many people to just do one 10 man raid, and we historically have ran the smallest raid rosters of any 25 man guild cause we never had substitutes on our roster. For half of ICC we didn't even have 25 on the roster, though we did have... unofficial subs in the guild who may as well ahve been called raiders, I guess.

So the situation is still too big to be a 10 man guild, yet half of the time we're too small to do 25s. Even on the good nights where we get 25 and roll over most normal modes, we can't match our progression that we pull off easily whenever we put together a good 10 man group (as opposed to diluting talent between a pair of 10 mans that run concurrently.) This isn't the same situation as the old argument goes.

I don't see 25 man raiding going anywhere overall... it definitely should have shrunk when Blizzard changed the loot in 10s to equivalent loot, and I'm fine with that. As they said, people that would prefer 10s but raided 25 cause there wasn't much of a choice before unless you were quite casual... those people shouldn't feel stuck in 25s when they would rather be in 10. 25 man raiding hasn't died off like any of the doomsayers were worried about, but I'm wondering if others have experienced perhaps a minor portion of doom, beyond the usual guild troubles that have persisted since well before WoW.

Meh. I guess if problems persist and enough people leave we can drop to 10. Just spent our first full night on Nefarian in 10 man in an extra scheduled raid, and got him down as well, basically 1 and a half nights of attempts. Top three guilds on our server are 6/13, 6/13, 5/13 heroic progress atm, with #4 being only 2/13. As of tonight we're 1/13 and have all normal modes cleared, despite the months of not really trying due to spending time with 25s or split 10s. We could easily be competing for #1 on server, and that's what is bugging a lot of people when we have a fail night with a 23 man raid struggling to do Chimaeron again or whatever.

Well, the beauty of the new system(as much as I dislike it in general) is that you can start off the week with a 25 man. If you can't field the full 25 in the next raid, you can break it down to a 10 man and still progress from the same spot your 25 man was on.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Except that is wrong at some level.

25s are basically still easier than 10s from a content standpoint. i.e. it's easier to cover for someone's mistake, you have much more overlap in buffs and in general more room for error than in 10s because you have 2.5 times the number of people to handle the encounter with. They take more cat herding to coordinate, but otherwise they are easier.

Yar, we've been doing this as something of a compromise, especially as our #1 most progression-minded person is leaving for the summer and he wanted to see all the bosses killed before he left. It's not an ideal situation, since it's very hard to think about how things would be better in a good 10 man when you're wiping on Atramedes all night cause people don't understand that the closer you are to a dragon, the easier it is to run around it. It's definitely a big help though.




It's actually turned out to be somewhat balanced between 25s and 10s... or at least, balance in a certain sense: some fights are harder on 25s, while others are harder in 10s.

This is probably oversimplifying a bit, but it seems to come down overall to two factors: AE abilities and overall fight complexity.

More room to spread out in 10s argument holds true for some of these fights, and in others it means the AEs tend to be more brutal in 25s (Theralion's Engulfing Magic comes to mind.) But as we saw first long ago with Sartharion + 3 drakes, a lot of times the fight mechanics stay the same from 25s -> 10s yet you only have 2/5 of the people to handle it. Compare what you give up to get a 3rd tank in 25s (assuming 7 healers, you lose 1/16th of your dps*) vs 10s (assuming 3 healers, you lose 1/5 of your dps).

10s are also subject to higher likelihood of simply lacking an ability... practically the entire Cho'gall fight is built around controlling some things, all of which require some pretty specialized abilities. You could have an otherwise find raidcomp in 10 man walk into Cho'gall and simply not have some key abilities required for the fight that pretty much any reasonable 25s would include. Blood DK, Bear tank, Resto Druid, Holy Pally x 2, Warlock x2, Fury Warrior, Assassination Rogue, Unholy DK would be a perfectly competent comp for most fights, but they'd be at a significant disadvantage for Cho'gall due to missing some key abilities... something that a 25s just wouldn't have to worry about. Doable, certainly, but replace a Warlock and DK with a Hunter and Ele Shaman and suddenly the adds are trivial and hey, Bloodlust is pretty sweet for the last phase.

So you wind up with some pretty wild variance in difficulty between 25s and 10s. Ascendant Council 10 is such a shadow of its 25 man self, most notably P2 being kinda scary in a 25 man raid cause of what essentially is an insta-wipe in Chain Lightning if it's not handled correctly by all 3 people, every time. Chimaeron has historically proven way way harder for us on 25s than in 10s, due primarily to his Caustic Slime being able to hit more than 2 of one healer's assignments at once... not possible on 10s.

Yet trying Nefarian on 10s is like an exercise in jury-rigging a fight unless you have a Frost DK as part of your raid. My group essentially had a Hunter handle the adds in P1 with Misdirecting to a tank pet, which worked great up until MD's temporary threat started to wear off. Maybe it was just some fail on our Hunter's part, but as a Resto Druid I ended up having to halfway tank an add or two for about 10 seconds making good use of Nature's Grasp and sometimes even having to go bear to Taunt and Root one that was getting out of position.

25 man's answer? Just bring a 3rd tank and trivialize it with a very minor hit to raid dps.

So... it really depends. :p Individual fight mechanics trump any inherent qualities of 25s vs 10s. It has turned out in this tier of raiding, for heroics at least, that 10s have been overall harder at the high end (especially the end bosses... all of them but Al'Akir.) I think the case for most guilds, however, tends to be that 10s won't suffer from skill dilution to the same degree than their 25s will, and that probably deserves to be factored in to however much you the reader wishes to count it.

Bring the player, not the class?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Definitely has taken a step back on that policy in Cata 10 mans. As far as I can remember, ICC 10 mans only really had one issue there, that being Pally healing was OP thanks to beacon on something like half the fights there. Of course, no one cared a ton about ICC 10 mans anyway. This making 10s "equal" to 25s, which has worked to a fairly significant degree, just puts the spotlight on the 10s balance issues.

The fights are all certainly doable without having X spec in your raid, and I don't mean to say otherwise. It's just an issue of pretty huge difficulty imbalances if you don't. Bring a Frost DK (or even have a Mage spec Frost... dps loss is plenty worth it) and a Prot Warrior to Nef and you're going to have a significantly easier time of things.

There are many fights like that. In general raid composition is much more critical for making solid progress in 10's than it is in 25's, just because you don't have the same coverage and redundancy.

I don't agree that 10s are harder. They have been fairly easy this tier. The difficulty is getting enough people online. Which would only be more difficult in 25s.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick