I'm not disagreeing at all. Like I said, the RNG hates me as well. I just wish... if I want an item, when I log in, I would like to be able to do something to advance toward getting it. All of the different methods have problems with this (other than crafted or quest items I suppose).
More and more I am becoming that guy that hates "welfare" epics. This is because of a number of things. I suck at pvp (or my friends that I arena with suck at pvp), Hunters are horrible at pvp, my spec is the worst possible spec for pvp (survival with no CC improving talents), I have no arena gear to begin with, etc.
In reality, though, I think it's a pretty rational hate. Why did blizzard feel the need to make the pvp gear (or the badge gear, for that matter) better than raid gear? Is this just because of the problem of raid geared players totally dominating in the past (I wasn't around then)? Not only does it contribute to the welfare epic phenomenon - it totally trivializes content. I never got to do Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK for real, because no one wants to do them, because everyone has gear better than what drops there (apart from idiotic bits of itemization lolDST).
I'm not really understanding what your problem with the loot system is. On the one hand, you don't like welfare epics, but on the other hand, you want to be able to get any item in the game, by yourself.
As it stands, if you don't like PvE, then you can PvP your way into some good PvP gear. If you don't like to PvP, then you can raid for good raiding gear. If you are unable to raid, then you can earn badges in 5/10 man groups for really good PvE gear. If you are unable to find 5-man groups/Kara PuGs/Sunwell Trash Farming PuGs, then you can do daily quests to earn exalted epics, and money to buy crafted epics. Take a look at SabreMau, the resident Paladin expert. He's got Sunwell rated gear for his Ret paladin which he's obtained pretty much on his own, from what I understand. For his RET paladin. Speaking as a Ret paladin, I know firsthand how hard it is to get any sort of group as Ret.
This is why I'm in favor of "welfare" epics: I've never seen anything past Magtheridon, but I fimrly believe the best stuff in the game should be reserved for the hardest of hardcore raiders and the deadliest of PvPers - but not by a completely overwhelming margin. I'll be damned if I'm going back to the days of pitting my BRD blues against BWL epics - I hope we can all agree that the "welfare" epic system is definately an improvement over the olden days.
I'm not really understanding what your problem with the loot system is. On the one hand, you don't like welfare epics, but on the other hand, you want to be able to get any item in the game, by yourself.
As it stands, if you don't like PvE, then you can PvP your way into some good PvP gear. If you don't like to PvP, then you can raid for good raiding gear. If you are unable to raid, then you can earn badges in 5/10 man groups for really good PvE gear. If you are unable to find 5-man groups/Kara PuGs/Sunwell Trash Farming PuGs, then you can do daily quests to earn exalted epics, and money to buy crafted epics. Take a look at SabreMau, the resident Paladin expert. He's got Sunwell rated gear for his Ret paladin which he's obtained pretty much on his own, from what I understand. For his RET paladin. Speaking as a Ret paladin, I know firsthand how hard it is to get any sort of group as Ret.
This is why I'm in favor of "welfare" epics: I've never seen anything past Magtheridon, but I fimrly believe the best stuff in the game should be reserved for the hardest of hardcore raiders and the deadliest of PvPers - but not by a completely overwhelming margin. I'll be damned if I'm going back to the days of pitting my BRD blues against BWL epics - I hope we can all agree that the "welfare" epic system is definately an improvement over the olden days.
EDIT: Got a dude's name wrong.
Did I say "by myself"? I didn't mean to imply that. I am completely fine with the requirement for a group to gain raid-level equipment. I just wish there was a way to make it available more than once a week. Or less than once a week! Why do we need to reset raids every week? What if a guild can only raid two nights a week, but can't clear all of BT in that time? I suppose it's a data/hardware issues on blizzard's part.
The not being able to get a group problem is exacerbated by the wellfare epic dealio.
As for the rest - my problems stems from the fact that I don't really like PvP, but I have to PvP to get a number of best in slot items, precisely because those items are so good for PvE. And I love the options that people have to get gear when they can't get a raid group. Why is that gear better than the gear that one gets from raiding, though? If a way could be figured out to use the badge system to help guilds that are raiding fill in the drops they didn't get (something I think was on the minds of the developers), without automagically equipping every single player in T5-T6 level epics, I'd like to see that.
Essentially, if one were to make a character from scratch (I started playing in January), and one wishes to raid, the progression now flows as such:
Level to 70 -> Get carried through Kara -> Use Kara for badge gear -> Use Kara and pvp gear for Heroics -> All badge/Kara/Arena gear -> T6
At least that's how it's gone for me.
I don't really care that other people have cool gear... ok I care a little. But the fact that their having epics means that groups won't let you in to a Heroic without overgearing it, and the fact that no one needs drops from content that I wanted to progress through...
I just hate the mindset the general population has gotten in to. "If you're not decked out in PvP/Badge or better gear, you can't come to our SM:GY run!"
I totally agree, however, from the perspective of a PuG, who would you rather have? Some dipshit in greens/blues, or some dipshit in epics? Expecting that the member is likely to be a dipshit no matter what, at least the better geared dipshit should (SHOULD) put out more damage / mitigate more damage / heal (err... more damage), and shows that they've put more time/effort into their character (or were able to manipulate/ingratiate themselves into a crew that'd carry their butts through stuff).
I try not to sweat people's gear level much, but my general rule of thumb is that if my alt is better geared than your main 1 1/2 years into the expansion, there may be trouble. (of note, none of those alts have better than Karazhan gear, aside from possibly a badge piece here and there)
I know people take breaks or levelled REALLY slowly or something, but c'mon, no, I don't want you tanking Karazhan in Dungeon 3 and a few greens.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Well, yeah. My guess is most of us here (and you sound) reasonable about what to expect for a gear level. I just know, though, that I'm going to ding 70 with my alt Pally, have 12k health and armor, 485 def, a ton of avoidance, and people are going to refuse to let me tank Heroic Mech because I don't have 5 pieces of badge gear and the S2 weapon/shield.
I used to have people turn down my hunter for Kara pugs because I wasn't geared enough while I was sporting the prince bow...
Its because most people absolutely suck donkey dicks at the game and can't succeed without being severely overgeared. You don't want to group with these people.
Essentially, if one were to make a character from scratch (I started playing in January), and one wishes to raid, the progression now flows as such:
Level to 70 -> Get carried through Kara -> Use Kara for badge gear -> Use Kara and pvp gear for Heroics -> All badge/Kara/Arena gear -> T6
Pretty presumptuous to say that this is just how it works.
Unless you outgear it or are already connected you're not getting into a PUG Kara unless you're T5+ (since people these days think you have to outgear everything you do). If you're not a specific class/spec you're probably going to have an issue even finding a guild to let you in to do Kara. And even then if you do any guild still doing Kara quite possibly sucks.
It's a stupid fucking situation in the game right now as raiders spit on anyone not already in T5 and then cry about how small their app pool is when they shit all over anyone who would dare want to go to Kara wearing blues and PvP epics.
It's a stupid fucking situation in the game right now as raiders spit on anyone not already in T5 and then cry about how small their app pool is when they shit all over anyone who would dare want to go to Kara wearing blues and PvP epics.
Precisely. If you can't get carried through Kara for your first 40 badges or whatever, you're stuck (pvp epics can help here, but even those are shunned sometimes. And I don't like pvp).
I don't do much pve, but one of the last times I did a heroic, we picked up a blue geared ele shaman for our pug slot. They clearly had made some effort getting their class set from regulars, and benefitted our team. So we tore up the place with winfury and he got like 3 epics for his time.
Full blues is the req. for heroics and kara. I've beaten kara with a raid decked out in blues and only the epics we picked up on the way to prince.
Let's be clear that there are different levels of "carried" here.
Compared to someone in T6, anyone in "karazhan gear" is being "carried".
Compared to someone in Karazhan gear, anyone in blues and greens is being "carried".
But Karazhan has been nerfed, and I know I did it in mostly Dungeon Blues back at release, in a group with mostly blues.
The only people I'd turn away (personally) are people still rocking half their gear from pre-TBC instances, and the rest mid 60's AH greens, and that's only if I simply didn't want them along and was looking for an excuse. I've had people on board with abyssmal gear, but if the other 7-9 people on board are at least in the T4 + some badge stuff, you could have someone in there that's naked and probably be fine. The run might take an extra half hour or so, but if groups out there can 8/9 man the whole place (or less), the other warm bodies really just speed the process up.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
The thing about kara is that a full t4 tank is actually overgeared for the instance. Thats in the original version. The nerfed version is about as tough as one of the easier heroics.
But a lot of raiders, I think, are simply addicted. If they ever admit that it's not fun, then they'll also be admitting that the hundreds of hours they've already spent on it are a waste in every way.
The thing is, when you decide to raid (or continue raiding), you're putting things on a scale. On one side, the fun of killing new bosses, seeing interesting content that the majority of players never see, acquiring powerful items, etc. On the other, killing the same old bosses over and over, teaching new people these things, waiting for that one thing to drop that never does. One is fun, the other is very much not fun. Whichever way the scale tips further should determine what you do. But then sadly the potential of fun is often enough to keep people raiding even when it's more not-fun on average. Right now I enjoy a few fights in BT and Brutallus and learning Felmyst. Everything else I would rather not do. But in order to be able to do those few fun things, I HAVE to do the rest. That is what sucks.
Haha. The hat from Don Santos is disenchantable for a large prismatic shard -- and you can reset him and get five LPS per hour. :P
Huh? Where is he? I need to farm LPS for my mage to level enchanting and 5 an hour is good going.
This hardly sounds like an efficient farming method. I mean how much gold could you make spending an hour doing dailies and then buying those shards? Especially if you were running with the 2+ people you'd probably be taking to kill Don Santos with? I guess people who do those dailies anyway and want additional gold it works, but eh...
Nothing from Wowhead is saying that you need other people. They said it was soloable by most classes which is very appealing because I just want the hat to look cool. If my paladin can solo him, as ret, then lets the shards flow.
It's an excellent system for 10 mans. I've always been a strong advocate of that, and think that DKP, SK or any other complex loot system for Karazhan or ZA (especially with ZA's 3 day reset) is way too much effort.
I think the joke that got lost here is this.
I made the joke that terrible people will always find a way to abuse any system built to try and enforce fairness. In my experience this normally happens because one of the terrible people becomes one of the enforcers and it's all downhill from there.
Kaleedity replied that random was a system. People seem to have mistakenly believed he was advocating it as a fair system -- it's not, and I've seen the people claiming to be enchanters need rolling on everything, or "forgetting" that the group agreed to "all pass, then /rand" when something they want drops, to prove otherwise.
New Truism -- one line throwaway jokes are too subject to misunderstanding...
Yeah, it has gotten really annoying, whenever I offer to heal a PuG heroic, they usually ask me, "oh, what's your +healing at?" I don't know why that annoys me so much, but it does. (The answer is, "high enough, even with my farmer's broom and don carlos hat").
But if anyone asks me what my +heal is before inviting me to a PuG, I usually say, "nvm, good luck finding a healer".
Did I say "by myself"? I didn't mean to imply that. I am completely fine with the requirement for a group to gain raid-level equipment. I just wish there was a way to make it available more than once a week. Or less than once a week! Why do we need to reset raids every week? What if a guild can only raid two nights a week, but can't clear all of BT in that time? I suppose it's a data/hardware issues on blizzard's part.
This to me falls under the philosophy of the best stuff going to the best raiders. While the whole instance reset thing may be artificial difficultry due to technical limitations, it's still qualifies, to me anyway, as a "if you're not geared/committed/skilled enough to clear the instance in a week, then maybe you don't deserve the gear at the end yet" sort of factor.
And the "by myself" thing was a misinterpretation on my part. My bad.
The not being able to get a group problem is exacerbated by the wellfare epic dealio.
As for the rest - my problems stems from the fact that I don't really like PvP, but I have to PvP to get a number of best in slot items, precisely because those items are so good for PvE. And I love the options that people have to get gear when they can't get a raid group. Why is that gear better than the gear that one gets from raiding, though?
I only have experience with Paladin gear (and I wear PvP stuff for everything because I loooove PvP but suck at making money), but I find it hard to believe that with all the craftable BoE Nether Vortex/Heart of Darkness/Sunmote stuff out there, that it's still impossible to supplement your badge gear with enough craftable stuff to get considered for a T6 guild. I mean, a lot of the T6 guild members who post on this board say that if you have a good personality and put effort into the gear available to you, that they'll at least consider you.
If a way could be figured out to use the badge system to help guilds that are raiding fill in the drops they didn't get (something I think was on the minds of the developers), without automagically equipping every single player in T5-T6 level epics, I'd like to see that.
This is a prime example of Blizzard not being able to please everyone. Can you imagine the horror Illidan/Sunwell guilds would face if everytime they needed to recruit someone, they'd have to drag 20 some odd veteran raiders back through SSC/TK before they could gear up their recruits in BT/Hyjal so they can finally go back to Sunwell? I'm sure many raid leaders were driven to the brink of madness back in the days of Black Temple/Hyjal attunement. By allowing the general populace access to gear 1 to 1.5 tiers below bleeding edge, the pool for recruits for high-end guilds stays viable, and non-raiders don't get curb stomped in PvP enconters. Meanwhile, top end guilds still get better equipment, bragging rights, and the right to participate in some cool encounters as reward for their dilligence. It seems to me like the best solution for an impossible situation.
Additionally, as the gear level of the general populace rises, content that raiders skip becomes PuGable. If you really want that DST, Gruul is definately PuGable these days. I see PuGs for him forming up all the time on my server.
I don't really care that other people have cool gear... ok I care a little. But the fact that their having epics means that groups won't let you in to a Heroic without overgearing it, and the fact that no one needs drops from content that I wanted to progress through...
Trust me, if you a group won't let you in because you're not completely epic'd, you don't want in on that group. The reason being is that the person who turned you down is probably so skilless that the only way he can complete content is to outgear it. Forar is right, if you're garunteed a dipshit, take the dipshit in epics. But if I have a choice between taking a guy in dungeon blues who talks in complete sentances, vs. a guy in full epics who types like none of the vowels on his keyboard work, I'm taking the dude in blues. Not getting into groups that you describe is probably a mercy.
I'm not dismissing your issue though, it's definately a problem: as the gear quality of the general populace increases, so to does their expectation of your gear. But to say that it's impossible to find Heroic/Kara Pugs without full epics is hyperbole. And if it literally is impossible to find a Badge PuG, then you can, at the very least, earn enough epics to be PuG viable via exalted factions and buying crafted epics. The higher gear expectation is, in my opinion, a necessary evil considering the other problems that welfare epics help to mitigate.
I only have experience with Paladin gear (and I wear PvP stuff for everything because I loooove PvP but suck at making money), but I find it hard to believe that with all the craftable BoE Nether Vortex/Heart of Darkness/Sunmote stuff out there, that it's still impossible to supplement your badge gear with enough craftable stuff to get considered for a T6 guild. I mean, a lot of the T6 guild members who post on this board say that if you have a good personality and put effort into the gear available to you, that they'll at least consider you.
To be fair this is partly because desperate times call for desperate, er, recruiting policies. We would LOVE to restrict recruitment to people in BT/Hyjal gear when we need to replace raiders for Sunwell. But those people don't exist, they are quitting the game or transferring to guilds who are working on M'uru or KJ, not guilds working on Felmyst on an RP-PVP server. So the next best thing is to recruit people whose application and gear choices reflect effort/competence/understanding of their class, and then gear them up.
I can see the week limit being good on that level... it's just a coralary to my original grumpiness.
I'm actually a really good example of getting into T6 content with badge/etc. gear, heck, I still have a blue neck and ring for the sake of pete. I could have bipassed some of the PvP gear, sure, if I didn't want to have the best gear possible for my progression level - if I was content to slip by on the bear minimum and then leach some free T6 later. It's just a fact for some specs, pvp gear is the best in slot. I bought my badge stuff, my darkmoon faire trinket, my JC BoP trinket, the belt from SSC/TK patterns, everything possible before filling the last slots that still had PvP stuff as the best upgrades.
The problem of gearing up new members, etc. is exactly what Blizzard could solve if they wanted. Make T5.5 level badge gear require Badges of Awesome or something that you get from MH and BT bosses. I dunno. Any number of things would be good. Someone earlier suggested making T6 bosses drop like 10 badges a piece and making the higher level stuff cost more badges (it is pretty silly that prince drops more badges than X boss in BT).
And you are correct on group makeup as well. It just takes a really long time to find the good group that cares about your skill (and friendliness, sense of humour, etc.) more than your purps. I've been really lucky in that regard.
Seriously, this game has been so good to me it's not even funny. The only legitimate complaint I can make for my characters is in fact the lack of ability to do Gruul's for the DST. My server does not see many pugs. Sometimes there are guild runs that take pugs, and their loot rules are something like "roll on whatever you want but the DST is for rogue X".
Anyway, I just comment on this stuff because there must be a better way to do it, and I want to know what it is.
Mind if I cut into the casual vs raider vs PvP debate for a second? I'm about as "casual" as you can be and still get your money's worth out of a subscription. This is less about my attitude (I'm a little bit OCD and tend to be from the "anything worth doing is worth overdoing" school) than it is about the simple realities of my priorities. The Real World wins, period.
As I've mentioned before, there is only 1 night a week when I can commit to more than an 1 to 1.5 hours at a single time playing. There is actually a growing group on my server that "semi-PuGs" the raid content now, and in theory it's a great idea. It just so happens that they start Kara on Sunday before I could commit to signing on, or this would easily allow me to fulfill my "Want to get inside Kara once before WotLK hits" goal. I'm hoping they start another Kara later in the evening :P
I am essentially done with TBC content on my main. Oh sure, there are other small accomplishments I'd like to score on that character before WotLK, but in terms of the instanced content and equipment I've gone as far as I can (and PvP does not interest me). Anything else I could do invokes the "doing the same thing repeatedly" rule -- for example, I'm semi-seriously trying to grind Lower City to Exalted for a cloak enchant a friend of mine needs redone from time to time. I'm looking at running SLab 10 more times minimum to do that. Similarly if I do nothing but dailies for 60 days or so, I could get my elite flying mount.
I like what I'm hearing about the design goal for WotLK being 1-hour instance runs. That would open two more days for me to instance run. I also like the concept of being able to grind a second rep by wearing a tabard (I chose human over gnome for my mage explicitly to speed up all the reps I knew I was going to need/want to grind).
I'm not expecting to have the same gear as someone that can play more than I can -- that's absurd. But I want to see more than those same dailies six days a week, and the same instance or two once a week every week. And I also think it's crazy when people start expecting me to have top-tier gear for heroics (seriously, I've been turned away from a couple of heroics for not having enough DPS -- as a frost mage in full FSW & Spellstrike and no greens).
To be fair this is partly because desperate times call for desperate, er, recruiting policies. We would LOVE to restrict recruitment to people in BT/Hyjal gear when we need to replace raiders for Sunwell. But those people don't exist, they are quitting the game or transferring to guilds who are working on M'uru or KJ, not guilds working on Felmyst on an RP-PVP server. So the next best thing is to recruit people whose application and gear choices reflect effort/competence/understanding of their class, and then gear them up.
This is what I would be looking for. I don't expect to jump into T6+ with lower tier gear, but I remember pre-TBC when I was raiding guilds would actually have feeder guilds to pull new players from. Recruit lower tier players, do lower level instance runs with them on alts or whatever, and find who's good and gear them at the same time. This doesn't happen anymore, people just try to recycle the same (burning out) raid population.
I would have more sympathy for the end game guilds if when I saw them advertising for PUG T4/T5 stuff they didn't basically require people coming to just be people from other top tier guilds. Sure it might cut your clear time in Kara by an hour but you're just perpetuating your lack of applicants.
I was in top tier raid guilds pre-TBC and can handle my shit in a raid, but since I was burned out and raid-retired when TBC rolled around I watched raiding pass me by. Now I would kind of like to see the content but there's pretty much no way that's going to happen since it's impossible to get there. (Plus it doesn't help I have a rogue/moonkin/elemental shaman, gogo lack of desirability.)
TLDR: If guilds were smart they would stop gearing up their 7th alts and start filtering/gearing up potential slot fillers.
So the next best thing is to recruit people whose application and gear choices reflect effort/competence/understanding of their class, and then gear them up.
Yeah, that's how we got most of our core raiders back when we recruited so we could move on from Karazhan to 25-mans. It's better to get someone with good enough gear that actually knows how to play than some well-geared random mouthbreather.
That's how we got our brief raiding alliance -- we did some random heroic with two guys from another guild. They were in half dungeon blues, half Kara epics, but really knew their shit, and were clever and funny to boot. So we approached them and started talking about scrounging up enough people between our two guilds to do Gruul/Maggy.
They were mostly RL friends in that guild and eventually disbanded and stopped playing, but it was great while it lasted.
If you haven't ran it yet you totally have to. All the bosses are great and I even find the trash really fun, plus ten person raiding is several kinds of awesome.
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TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
Halazzi looks like my couch got up and decided to walk around hitting people. BTW Is it legitimate to complain to a GM that i've run 2 ZAs a week for coming close to 2 or 3 months now and never even seen the bloody hexhood drop? Can i open a ticket and ask to trade in a pile of stupid voodoo gnome trinkets for 1 useful item?
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I'm not really understanding what your problem with the loot system is. On the one hand, you don't like welfare epics, but on the other hand, you want to be able to get any item in the game, by yourself.
As it stands, if you don't like PvE, then you can PvP your way into some good PvP gear. If you don't like to PvP, then you can raid for good raiding gear. If you are unable to raid, then you can earn badges in 5/10 man groups for really good PvE gear. If you are unable to find 5-man groups/Kara PuGs/Sunwell Trash Farming PuGs, then you can do daily quests to earn exalted epics, and money to buy crafted epics. Take a look at SabreMau, the resident Paladin expert. He's got Sunwell rated gear for his Ret paladin which he's obtained pretty much on his own, from what I understand. For his RET paladin. Speaking as a Ret paladin, I know firsthand how hard it is to get any sort of group as Ret.
This is why I'm in favor of "welfare" epics: I've never seen anything past Magtheridon, but I fimrly believe the best stuff in the game should be reserved for the hardest of hardcore raiders and the deadliest of PvPers - but not by a completely overwhelming margin. I'll be damned if I'm going back to the days of pitting my BRD blues against BWL epics - I hope we can all agree that the "welfare" epic system is definately an improvement over the olden days.
Did I say "by myself"? I didn't mean to imply that. I am completely fine with the requirement for a group to gain raid-level equipment. I just wish there was a way to make it available more than once a week. Or less than once a week! Why do we need to reset raids every week? What if a guild can only raid two nights a week, but can't clear all of BT in that time? I suppose it's a data/hardware issues on blizzard's part.
The not being able to get a group problem is exacerbated by the wellfare epic dealio.
As for the rest - my problems stems from the fact that I don't really like PvP, but I have to PvP to get a number of best in slot items, precisely because those items are so good for PvE. And I love the options that people have to get gear when they can't get a raid group. Why is that gear better than the gear that one gets from raiding, though? If a way could be figured out to use the badge system to help guilds that are raiding fill in the drops they didn't get (something I think was on the minds of the developers), without automagically equipping every single player in T5-T6 level epics, I'd like to see that.
Essentially, if one were to make a character from scratch (I started playing in January), and one wishes to raid, the progression now flows as such:
Level to 70 -> Get carried through Kara -> Use Kara for badge gear -> Use Kara and pvp gear for Heroics -> All badge/Kara/Arena gear -> T6
At least that's how it's gone for me.
I don't really care that other people have cool gear... ok I care a little. But the fact that their having epics means that groups won't let you in to a Heroic without overgearing it, and the fact that no one needs drops from content that I wanted to progress through...
Also still bitter about DST.
I try not to sweat people's gear level much, but my general rule of thumb is that if my alt is better geared than your main 1 1/2 years into the expansion, there may be trouble. (of note, none of those alts have better than Karazhan gear, aside from possibly a badge piece here and there)
I know people take breaks or levelled REALLY slowly or something, but c'mon, no, I don't want you tanking Karazhan in Dungeon 3 and a few greens.
I used to have people turn down my hunter for Kara pugs because I wasn't geared enough while I was sporting the prince bow...
You would sometimes see similar crap pre-TBC for things like the 45 min baron runs.
Pretty presumptuous to say that this is just how it works.
Unless you outgear it or are already connected you're not getting into a PUG Kara unless you're T5+ (since people these days think you have to outgear everything you do). If you're not a specific class/spec you're probably going to have an issue even finding a guild to let you in to do Kara. And even then if you do any guild still doing Kara quite possibly sucks.
It's a stupid fucking situation in the game right now as raiders spit on anyone not already in T5 and then cry about how small their app pool is when they shit all over anyone who would dare want to go to Kara wearing blues and PvP epics.
Heroic Old Hillsbrad, patrols between the bridge and the tower north of Southshore.
I expect that to get changed soon. Maybe make him save you to the instance or make the hat un-DEable.
Precisely. If you can't get carried through Kara for your first 40 badges or whatever, you're stuck (pvp epics can help here, but even those are shunned sometimes. And I don't like pvp).
I don't do much pve, but one of the last times I did a heroic, we picked up a blue geared ele shaman for our pug slot. They clearly had made some effort getting their class set from regulars, and benefitted our team. So we tore up the place with winfury and he got like 3 epics for his time.
Full blues is the req. for heroics and kara. I've beaten kara with a raid decked out in blues and only the epics we picked up on the way to prince.
Compared to someone in T6, anyone in "karazhan gear" is being "carried".
Compared to someone in Karazhan gear, anyone in blues and greens is being "carried".
But Karazhan has been nerfed, and I know I did it in mostly Dungeon Blues back at release, in a group with mostly blues.
The only people I'd turn away (personally) are people still rocking half their gear from pre-TBC instances, and the rest mid 60's AH greens, and that's only if I simply didn't want them along and was looking for an excuse. I've had people on board with abyssmal gear, but if the other 7-9 people on board are at least in the T4 + some badge stuff, you could have someone in there that's naked and probably be fine. The run might take an extra half hour or so, but if groups out there can 8/9 man the whole place (or less), the other warm bodies really just speed the process up.
The thing is, when you decide to raid (or continue raiding), you're putting things on a scale. On one side, the fun of killing new bosses, seeing interesting content that the majority of players never see, acquiring powerful items, etc. On the other, killing the same old bosses over and over, teaching new people these things, waiting for that one thing to drop that never does. One is fun, the other is very much not fun. Whichever way the scale tips further should determine what you do. But then sadly the potential of fun is often enough to keep people raiding even when it's more not-fun on average. Right now I enjoy a few fights in BT and Brutallus and learning Felmyst. Everything else I would rather not do. But in order to be able to do those few fun things, I HAVE to do the rest. That is what sucks.
WHO ARE YOU. Did you find a home yet? Please? Don't give them reason to argue that we should let Jelybean raid on her stupid hunter. :x
This hardly sounds like an efficient farming method. I mean how much gold could you make spending an hour doing dailies and then buying those shards? Especially if you were running with the 2+ people you'd probably be taking to kill Don Santos with? I guess people who do those dailies anyway and want additional gold it works, but eh...
I think the joke that got lost here is this.
I made the joke that terrible people will always find a way to abuse any system built to try and enforce fairness. In my experience this normally happens because one of the terrible people becomes one of the enforcers and it's all downhill from there.
Kaleedity replied that random was a system. People seem to have mistakenly believed he was advocating it as a fair system -- it's not, and I've seen the people claiming to be enchanters need rolling on everything, or "forgetting" that the group agreed to "all pass, then /rand" when something they want drops, to prove otherwise.
New Truism -- one line throwaway jokes are too subject to misunderstanding...
But if anyone asks me what my +heal is before inviting me to a PuG, I usually say, "nvm, good luck finding a healer".
Tanks, however, are allowed to be however much a prima donna they wish to be.
This to me falls under the philosophy of the best stuff going to the best raiders. While the whole instance reset thing may be artificial difficultry due to technical limitations, it's still qualifies, to me anyway, as a "if you're not geared/committed/skilled enough to clear the instance in a week, then maybe you don't deserve the gear at the end yet" sort of factor.
And the "by myself" thing was a misinterpretation on my part. My bad.
I only have experience with Paladin gear (and I wear PvP stuff for everything because I loooove PvP but suck at making money), but I find it hard to believe that with all the craftable BoE Nether Vortex/Heart of Darkness/Sunmote stuff out there, that it's still impossible to supplement your badge gear with enough craftable stuff to get considered for a T6 guild. I mean, a lot of the T6 guild members who post on this board say that if you have a good personality and put effort into the gear available to you, that they'll at least consider you.
This is a prime example of Blizzard not being able to please everyone. Can you imagine the horror Illidan/Sunwell guilds would face if everytime they needed to recruit someone, they'd have to drag 20 some odd veteran raiders back through SSC/TK before they could gear up their recruits in BT/Hyjal so they can finally go back to Sunwell? I'm sure many raid leaders were driven to the brink of madness back in the days of Black Temple/Hyjal attunement. By allowing the general populace access to gear 1 to 1.5 tiers below bleeding edge, the pool for recruits for high-end guilds stays viable, and non-raiders don't get curb stomped in PvP enconters. Meanwhile, top end guilds still get better equipment, bragging rights, and the right to participate in some cool encounters as reward for their dilligence. It seems to me like the best solution for an impossible situation.
Additionally, as the gear level of the general populace rises, content that raiders skip becomes PuGable. If you really want that DST, Gruul is definately PuGable these days. I see PuGs for him forming up all the time on my server. Trust me, if you a group won't let you in because you're not completely epic'd, you don't want in on that group. The reason being is that the person who turned you down is probably so skilless that the only way he can complete content is to outgear it. Forar is right, if you're garunteed a dipshit, take the dipshit in epics. But if I have a choice between taking a guy in dungeon blues who talks in complete sentances, vs. a guy in full epics who types like none of the vowels on his keyboard work, I'm taking the dude in blues. Not getting into groups that you describe is probably a mercy.
I'm not dismissing your issue though, it's definately a problem: as the gear quality of the general populace increases, so to does their expectation of your gear. But to say that it's impossible to find Heroic/Kara Pugs without full epics is hyperbole. And if it literally is impossible to find a Badge PuG, then you can, at the very least, earn enough epics to be PuG viable via exalted factions and buying crafted epics. The higher gear expectation is, in my opinion, a necessary evil considering the other problems that welfare epics help to mitigate.
To be fair this is partly because desperate times call for desperate, er, recruiting policies. We would LOVE to restrict recruitment to people in BT/Hyjal gear when we need to replace raiders for Sunwell. But those people don't exist, they are quitting the game or transferring to guilds who are working on M'uru or KJ, not guilds working on Felmyst on an RP-PVP server. So the next best thing is to recruit people whose application and gear choices reflect effort/competence/understanding of their class, and then gear them up.
I'm actually a really good example of getting into T6 content with badge/etc. gear, heck, I still have a blue neck and ring for the sake of pete. I could have bipassed some of the PvP gear, sure, if I didn't want to have the best gear possible for my progression level - if I was content to slip by on the bear minimum and then leach some free T6 later. It's just a fact for some specs, pvp gear is the best in slot. I bought my badge stuff, my darkmoon faire trinket, my JC BoP trinket, the belt from SSC/TK patterns, everything possible before filling the last slots that still had PvP stuff as the best upgrades.
The problem of gearing up new members, etc. is exactly what Blizzard could solve if they wanted. Make T5.5 level badge gear require Badges of Awesome or something that you get from MH and BT bosses. I dunno. Any number of things would be good. Someone earlier suggested making T6 bosses drop like 10 badges a piece and making the higher level stuff cost more badges (it is pretty silly that prince drops more badges than X boss in BT).
And you are correct on group makeup as well. It just takes a really long time to find the good group that cares about your skill (and friendliness, sense of humour, etc.) more than your purps. I've been really lucky in that regard.
Seriously, this game has been so good to me it's not even funny. The only legitimate complaint I can make for my characters is in fact the lack of ability to do Gruul's for the DST. My server does not see many pugs. Sometimes there are guild runs that take pugs, and their loot rules are something like "roll on whatever you want but the DST is for rogue X".
Anyway, I just comment on this stuff because there must be a better way to do it, and I want to know what it is.
As I've mentioned before, there is only 1 night a week when I can commit to more than an 1 to 1.5 hours at a single time playing. There is actually a growing group on my server that "semi-PuGs" the raid content now, and in theory it's a great idea. It just so happens that they start Kara on Sunday before I could commit to signing on, or this would easily allow me to fulfill my "Want to get inside Kara once before WotLK hits" goal. I'm hoping they start another Kara later in the evening :P
I am essentially done with TBC content on my main. Oh sure, there are other small accomplishments I'd like to score on that character before WotLK, but in terms of the instanced content and equipment I've gone as far as I can (and PvP does not interest me). Anything else I could do invokes the "doing the same thing repeatedly" rule -- for example, I'm semi-seriously trying to grind Lower City to Exalted for a cloak enchant a friend of mine needs redone from time to time. I'm looking at running SLab 10 more times minimum to do that. Similarly if I do nothing but dailies for 60 days or so, I could get my elite flying mount.
I like what I'm hearing about the design goal for WotLK being 1-hour instance runs. That would open two more days for me to instance run. I also like the concept of being able to grind a second rep by wearing a tabard (I chose human over gnome for my mage explicitly to speed up all the reps I knew I was going to need/want to grind).
I'm not expecting to have the same gear as someone that can play more than I can -- that's absurd. But I want to see more than those same dailies six days a week, and the same instance or two once a week every week. And I also think it's crazy when people start expecting me to have top-tier gear for heroics (seriously, I've been turned away from a couple of heroics for not having enough DPS -- as a frost mage in full FSW & Spellstrike and no greens).
This is what I would be looking for. I don't expect to jump into T6+ with lower tier gear, but I remember pre-TBC when I was raiding guilds would actually have feeder guilds to pull new players from. Recruit lower tier players, do lower level instance runs with them on alts or whatever, and find who's good and gear them at the same time. This doesn't happen anymore, people just try to recycle the same (burning out) raid population.
I would have more sympathy for the end game guilds if when I saw them advertising for PUG T4/T5 stuff they didn't basically require people coming to just be people from other top tier guilds. Sure it might cut your clear time in Kara by an hour but you're just perpetuating your lack of applicants.
I was in top tier raid guilds pre-TBC and can handle my shit in a raid, but since I was burned out and raid-retired when TBC rolled around I watched raiding pass me by. Now I would kind of like to see the content but there's pretty much no way that's going to happen since it's impossible to get there. (Plus it doesn't help I have a rogue/moonkin/elemental shaman, gogo lack of desirability.)
TLDR: If guilds were smart they would stop gearing up their 7th alts and start filtering/gearing up potential slot fillers.
Edit: Ooh... Zul'jin?
Yeah, that's how we got most of our core raiders back when we recruited so we could move on from Karazhan to 25-mans. It's better to get someone with good enough gear that actually knows how to play than some well-geared random mouthbreather.
That's how we got our brief raiding alliance -- we did some random heroic with two guys from another guild. They were in half dungeon blues, half Kara epics, but really knew their shit, and were clever and funny to boot. So we approached them and started talking about scrounging up enough people between our two guilds to do Gruul/Maggy.
They were mostly RL friends in that guild and eventually disbanded and stopped playing, but it was great while it lasted.
How about everyone's favourite from back when wow wasn't about glowing purple crystals n' shit.
You and me... we have much in common.
Halazzi looks like my couch got up and decided to walk around hitting people. BTW Is it legitimate to complain to a GM that i've run 2 ZAs a week for coming close to 2 or 3 months now and never even seen the bloody hexhood drop? Can i open a ticket and ask to trade in a pile of stupid voodoo gnome trinkets for 1 useful item?