Tuesday 12 February 2013

Too soon?

Release date patch 5.2 is 28th of februar? So in two weeks? Is this too soon?

The guild I am in, Innovation, is now being crushed by Garalon, the 3rd boss of Heart of Fear. So how did we get here?

19-september-2012  Heroic Madness
One week before Mists, Innovation kills Madness HC, just in time.

19-october-2012  Stone Guards
On the second night in MSV, we take down Stone Guards

7-november-2012 Feng
12-novenber-2012 Spiritbinder
19-november-2012 Spirit Kings
Randomness has always been a problem for Innovation, So we needed two weeks for Feng, but after that, a new kill every week.

3-december 2012 Zor'yok 
Oh, HoF, well..Elegon was buggy somewhere, so we went to HoF and killed this one the first night we where in there iirc.

Christmas-vacation, which means two weeks of non-raiding.

9-januar 2013 Elegon
Finally, in the first raidweek we did in 2013, Elegon dies.

15-januar-2013 Will of the Emperor
MSV cleared

21-januar Ta'yak
Tornado boss down in HoF


Now looking at the big picture, except for Elegon, Garalon and Feng, Innovation only needs one week to master a new fight, what is more remarkable is that Innovation almost never wipes on a boss after the first kill. Since our first Will of the emperor-kill, MSV had been cleared in one night... yeah, we are strange.

Feng took us two weeks, there was some trouble with the last phase, but that was mostly due to lag, so people where a little slow, and the fact that almost everyone needed to blow up the raid at least once.

Elegon was a very different problem. Elegon was a DPS-race for us, and then missing 1-2 dps every week, well... we did kill it with 24 the first time though.

Garalon at this moment looks the same as Elegon, we just need a little more DPS. And then not actually the DPS/player, but another dps-player  :)

If I count quickly, 5 months, around 22 weeks, for 16 bosses...  with a christmas vacation included and a levelling-time. Yes, a new tier is too soon for Innovation now. There is almost no way we could have concluded the tier before that.

Innovation is a normal raiding guild, which means we certainly don't force our members to cap VP every week. The goal for everyone is to have fun, and not to stand to many times in the fire. And with that I think we maybe one of median-guilds. A guild that should get enough time to clear the content at a reasonable pace.

In Cataclysm, Innovation cleared every normal content before the next tier, and in the last tier, which always last longer then others, we even got a Heroic clear. There is not much difference between last-year raiders of Innovation, and the current ones. 80% is still the same. So we should be much further. or we should have been given more time.

The problem here is the number of bosses. The first Tier of MoP has 6 bosses more then the first Tier of Cataclysm. Look where we are, at the 9th boss.  And we are maybe able to take down the first one or two from Terrace, but we haven't been there yet.

So, recapping, or TL;DR-version;
Yes, the new Tier is coming too soon for Innovation, considering the numbers of bosses that are available in the current tier. And remember, around 5 weeks of the last 22 where lost due to levelling and vacation. A few weeks more would have been more lenient to take down, and maybe a late march-release would have been more logical.

But alas, in two weeks, the Thunder King needs to be killed...  once more unto the breach it is then.

[RED:... 3 hours after this post, Innovation killed Garalon and are now battling the enrage timer of meljarak).]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is 5.2 early? For Innovation, yes it is.
However when you look at the big picture here, most people are now raiding 10 man which doesn't face the same issues that Innovation often have to deal with, lack of attendance, people blowing the raid up. Because looking at it like this, in a 10 man raid, if you trust yourself, there's only 9 other people that might blow up the raid. While in 25 man it is 24.

10 man raiding progress is a lot quicker and there's a demand for more raids to come out for that reason. However, my biggest issue with how Blizzard have been doing things since Trial of the Crusader is that they introduce a gear reset every single raid tier where people are being brought up to the same level of gear as the rest to be able to do the new content. This is -bad- very bad.

As I am sure you know, it used to be say.. You did MC > BWL > AQ > Naxx or even T4 raids > SSC/TK > MH/BT > Sunwell. (There were some gear resets in BC but not near as bad and not every single tier)

What does this mean then? Well, for one all the gear from the previous tier becomes useless and no one really goes there unless it is for some specific item, transmog gear, legendaries, etc.

Yes, heroic gear from the current tier is still better but that is beside my point. Heroic content to me, is something that should be hard and challenging for the top tier of raiders on the servers to keep themselves busy with. However there is another backside to the gear reset system that I see as another problem.

If you have people drag their ass through the content that isn't the highest at the moment, people will have to learn and improve, gain experience with the fights there which means that you can raise the difficulty on the higher tiers if needed.

Some people will argue that they won't be able to join their friends guilds on a new character because it won't have the same level of gear as the rest of the raid. One solution to this, which was used in the past, is crafting. These days you have all these patters dropping but it rarely gets actually crafted as far as I know, because the crafted gear is not as good as the things that drop from bosses.

I used to raid on a pretty high level and if we had some new recruit that was a friend of someone else and got in because of that, it didn't take all that long to gear them up because of crafted gear and re-running lower tier raids on an off-night to get them up to the gear we had when we started the tier we were in.

And if you are going to make a comparison when it comes to bosses, it would be a better comparison to take the BC raids because they are closer in the layout than the Cata ones. Yes, Innovation didn't exist back then but the difference here is that Cata was 5 man heroics > First tier. Both MoP and TBC was 5 mans > MSV or Kara/gruul/Magtheridon. Then you moved onto the "real" raids.

One of my main problems with Innovation, which I will state here is that there are a lot of people who are not interested in putting in effort to improve. I'm not talking about spending hours upon hours running simulations of your character. But just about one single night to check up on your class. Take 10 minutes or something to read forums (Preferably not the official ones because they are just trash) to see what changes you can do and what you can do to prepare yourself for upcoming changes.

Yes. This pointless rant has been brought to you by WENNIE, BITCHEZZZ!