... what do you guys think?
I'm done all the 5-man stuff and a good chunk of the instances on Heroic (except for Black Morass, what the fuck) and pretty deep into Karazhan and I gotta say I'm starting to get disappointed. We raid Karazhan 3 nights a week and I have to farm non-stop for reagents for potions and food and stuff the other nights. And in the beginning Karazhan is just stupid hard for the gear you come in with. And then the upgrades from Karazhan are pretty minimal and I can see the escalation in difficulty of the encounters going up and up but the gear doesn't seem to scale equally.

LFG is absolutely horrible, and I'm sure everyone will agree there. Its almost impossible to get a PUG group. So I have to rely on my guild's 5 warriors and 5 priests, and we can't recruit any more than that or we'll have a line to raid with us.

I also can't even imagine how horrible keying is gonna be for the Black Temple. Getting people keyed for Onyxia sucked when people left the game / you got new members. Getting people keyed for Karazhan and then having to do the whole instance and then doing all the other raids is like PoElements flagging all over again. At least in Everquest you didn't *have* to have a full raid. I remember doing things in EQ with 20 to 50 people. In World of Warcraft you need 25 people and if anyone d/cs you pretty much are fucked, regardless of the boss.

Also healing is a total bitch. Before we were able to get away with 1 healer a group, now in Karazhan you need 2 or 3 pretty much. And absolutely needing 2 priests, 2 warriors, a paladin, etc. in every Karazhan group is retardedly difficult for my guild who only has 40 members. That doesn't leave a lot of room for the other classes to fill in.

Suck's to hear that man, i know Blizz's intention in going with the 25's was to ease the burden on raiding guilds but looks like it missed the mark.
Would be nice to see blizz develop some raid content with put having to be at max #'s to even warrant zoning in (ala EQ style).
Maybe re-tune the instances a bit,add some mini bosses and spread the nice drops around a bit. I.E. % chance to drop similiar to the way world drops do.
I got nice purple sword last week of a timbermaw faction mob in Fel wood a week ago.
thats a nice feature for folks IMHO.
This way if you can only get say 19-20 people on you can still go in and make some hay with a chance at nice drops.


P.S. I read somewhere that this might have been intentional as a way of keeping the UBER guilds from chewing up the content to fast and that they fully plan on toning the instances down in a couple months.

It's hard now. Later, it'll be easy. Like people 5-10 manning Ony left and right for the past year+, when that was a hard 40 man originally. Don't worry much about that.

No one was beating any hard EQ fight undermanned when they were new either.

I want it all and I want it now! :)

I'm still having a frigging blast in this game. And I have a feeling I will continue to do for a long time to come.

My main beef is with the guild downsizing requirements. I was, still am, in a raid-heavy 40-man guild, and we've found that well... 50% of the guild just went surplus. Which is too bad for them, since they were cut, but it still sucks. However, with the 10/25man layout, we're having trouble squeezing in players at *all*. Take Kharazan. 2 priests, minimum. 2 offhealers, minimum. 2 tanks, minimum. Time to squeeze the mages, hunters, enh/ele shamans arms/fury warriors, moonkin druids, prot/retadins, rogues, warlocks and whatever else into the last 4 spots. Less than fun. Even though we run 2-3 raids every week.

With the 25-manners its less noticable, but definately there, especially since some encounters require up to almost half of the raid force to be healers.

I don't think its gonna be that much easier though Sanchek, unless they make it easier. If anything, I picture the trend getting worse and worse. We never used anything but health and mana potions in Molten Core and on Onyxia. Blackwing Lair we started bringing flask of the titans for our tanks. Ahn'quiraj we were bringing resist potions as well as all that other stuff. It keeps escalating.

Farming reagents 6 hours a week isn't something I care to do and won't do - and I can't get upgrades outside of Karazhan and Gruul's Lair because everywhere else is too hard - and i can't get upgrades inside Karazhan and Gruul's Lair because the bosses are impossible w/o all the potions and shit.

And Kivorn, thats the real sad thing about it is that casuals wanted this smaller raid content that isn't possible for casuals to do. How many tears are shed on the forums about Black Morass being impossible with a PUG? I'd never dream of going into Heroics with a PUG and the Heroic Black Morass isn't doable unless you've got 5 dudes in full Karazhan gear. And aside from Attumen and the Animal bosses I doubt Karazhan will be all that PUGable. So now instead of people being able to play their shadow priests and moonkin druids and all those great fun things ... you need your 2 prot tanks (no ferals here please), your 2 holy priests, your warlock for banishing, your resto shaman and your holy paladin, and then 3 spots left for mages, hunters, druids, rogues, and everyone else.

Like people 5-10 manning Ony left and right for the past year+, when that was a hard 40 man originally. Yes, an expansion or two from now Karazhan may be doable w/o potions and with feral druids and shadow priests ... but do you really want to wait that long?

And Fil, leveling to the end game is fun. Thats always been the best part of Warcraft.
If you ever get to the endgame though you'll see its a different story. I felt like I was enjoying myself a lot more in Molten Core than in Karazhan, and really feel like raiding has gotten too hardcore for anyone that isn't in the uber-guilds willing to grind the potions and play nothing but the ideal raiding talent specs.

We were doing Kara in 50% PUG/50% guild in beta. It was unforgiving to screwups, but if you kept your shit together it was very doable in level 70 blues and no flasks. Have you guys tried cutting back on the consumables and trying? I really doubt you need them for Kara.

I mean, at release, even UBRS was considered "hard". Just have to put it in perspective.

The reason I posted this is we tried a night w/o the potions. Attumen was fine, Moroes with 1 priest and 1 pally fearing and me kiting the other 2 adds (and killing them) we wiped like 3x because we didn't have the dps to put 2 adds down and Moroes before the healers ran OOM.

Maiden our tank (warrior, can't use druids anymore) just didn't have the HP to survive through the AE stuns without a flask on. Added flasks and oils and elixers and he could survive em plus our healers had more mana from the mana oil so they could keep his health topped off plus non-stop HOTs on him - plus she died considerably faster.

Opera we could probably do w/o potions, but after Maiden everyone's got the potions on them already.

Also at "release" I was 5-manning Scholo and Strath with 2 paladins, a druid (balance), a mage, and myself (was a hunter then) because we didn't know you could raid them - and we never really though those instances were as hard as Karazhan or some of the heroics we face are.

I can't really talk about Maiden. I heard they made that harder since I did it last.

Moroes though, we did the very first time with one priest. I won't say it was easy, but it's very doable.

To compare release to Kara, think MC. As trivial as it became, it was a beast for awhile (and the nerfs helped).

I think you're just more optimistic than me. I'm gonna try the arena system monday with my team "Hairy Men For Hire" and while the gear from there isn't really much of an upgrade, it'll hopefully be fun. Otherwise I may bench the game for a while.

They're "reviewing" the consumables situation right. Hopefully they fix the issue rather then make it worse.

Anyways...

For Moroes, make sure people have http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=19141&locale=enUS;source=live

It was still working to remove the bleed as of last week. BoP also removes the bleed effect. Helps healer mana considerably.

For Maiden, make sure you bring a paladin and have him cast blessing of sacrafice on the tank right before repentance. It'll break it so you can keep on healing. Trivializes the entire fight. I'd be interested to see what your tanks setup is that he/she/it's having a hard time staying up.

The stacking you have to do is pretty retarded but honestly we've run Kara with like 50 different setups by now and none have had a hard time reaching chess at least. The only class I would consider 'essential' is a good shadowpriest (+900 dmg at least). Just makes so many fights stupid easy.

Didn't know about the blessing thing, we've been doing the fight sans paladin since none were 70 and keyed until recently.

Have to agree with you on the shadow priest. Heals and replenishes mana while keeping upan often very high DPS output (often rivalling me, which well.. pretty much no one else does).