official World of Warcraft

[treemonster]

when looking for guild i like to go to a city and spam lf guild with something i'm looking for in a guild along side that in trade. you can usually get a semi random invite from there, and after that point it's just a matter of time to see if that guild that invited you is up to your personal standards.

[mikebiacsi]

Cool, ty.

[SMELTN]

Finally reached Outland for the first time ever. Looks quite cool, lookingforward to my flying mount more though. Whats the best way to find guilds that are recruiting? I'd like to get into some end game content at some point and pugs can be quite frustrating. I play on EU Magtheridon, I would class myself as a casual player, I usually play about 4-8 hours a week.

Just be aware that with a playtime of 4-8 hours per week, seeing end game content as in 10-25 man content may not happen yet. With Cata still fresh 90% of the guilds out there haven't finished the 10 man bosses yet, much less the 25 man content. Which means they will be spending 4 hours a night 3 days a week on average trying to clear that content. Also you will need a specific gear score to get into those raids, which means you will have to spend time doing a ton of heroics to get those items to put you at that level.

I am not trying to scare you off or anything, but to see end game content right now will take a lot of time

[treemonster]

sometimes end game content just means normal 5 mans or even heroics to some people. or even doing ultra casual raiding 6 months to a year after the content has been released.

sometimes.

but yeah, smeltn is right about that for sure. aside form getting the basic gear needed to be viable in raids, you're looking at 3 days a week 4-6 hour sessions with occasional 5 minute bio breaks at most. a raiding guild might take you as a social member if you can't commit to that kind of time spent, btu you won't get more than occasional invites to raids and only if there's a spot free because a regular member of the raid didn't show up.

as well even casual raiding means spending a fair amount of time farming gold for repairs and consumables and possibly gathering and crafting as well when you're not raiding.

that's in addition to doing the out of game research on raid encounters to learn the fights and memorizing them and translating them into the game.

ive seen casual raiders who don't want to do some of the above simply bang their heads on entry level content for months on end and never get past it. and in some cases simply wait for the next expansion when they severely out leve and outgear it and finally beat it for the first time. sometimes there's even guilds dedicated to legacy content.

[the evn show]

Whats the best way to find guilds that are recruiting? I'd like to get into some end game content at some point and pugs can be quite frustrating.

Ask your friends, if you don't have any: make some. Be on the look-out for guilds recruiting on your realm forums or in trade chat.

If you can only play once or twice a week for 2-3 hours at a time then raiding is still an option but you're probably not going to find a progression group (people doing hard-mode content now). An option that might be available is to seek out a fairly advanced guild and try to find a spot in their alt runs. "semi-pugs" are probably starting up any time now (people from several guilds coming together on alts to raid each week) - a spot in one of those typically means you'll get to do end game content with players who have already spent the time learning it on different toons.

There is no actual item level requirement to raid, but going in without a mix of 333 and 346 gear is going to be challenging. You can do it, but it'll make things much harder than they need to be and you'll have to be chugging potions, flasks, and food to make up for your crumby gear -- that gets expensive. Finding people who understand that gear < skill for cataclysm raiding is an epic-level end-game challenge in it's own right.

[SMELTN]

yeah as evn said, I think you for the best place to check out is your realm forums. There are always recruitment threads posted with details of the guild and raiding times and exactly what they are looking for. This is much better than asking in /2 chat because you will get spammed with invites from random 10 person guilds that are all in there lower levels.

[the evn show]

It's been a while since we've had some content so here's an old video of one of our Conclave of Wind kills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cKcfZMrPe8&hd=1

IMO it's one of the better encounters in the game and certainly more fun than Al'akir. It's not particularly challenging

once you work out a strategy to deal with the various mechanics but flying around platforms and the coordination is

a nice change of pace from most raids.

[SMELTN]

evn I want your unit frames.. At least the background look and all.. I am still loving Elv UI to much, but I want to change my unit frames to look like yours

[the evn show]

evn I want your unit frames.. At least the background look and all.. I am still loving Elv UI to much, but I want to change my unit frames to look like yours

It's just pitbull with health/power bars set to black and "fill" instead of "deplete" and a semi-transparent black background.

The text entries for name/power/health/percent hp/etc should be easy enough to figure out.

[Shaun N.]

I'm actually quite bored with the game already, I have 2 85's now that are JP capped as I don't need anything else with them, I only really log on to do daily HC and get conquest capped each week.

Might take a couple of weeks out.

I might also grab a copy of DC Universe online and give that a play

[Gallifrey2]

I too am bored...for me it is the end game that I have issues with. I used to raid but now I just can not dedicate 4 nights or 3 for multiple hours on end. I just prefer to be geared enough to step in if the guild I am in is short and needs someone.

Problem I am having now is getting the gear even for heroics. I queue for Dungeons and quite frankly I am lucky to get into more then one per night....I really hate being dps now for this reason. The only thing I can do now is grind rep and level my professions, ah well. I am leveling a Druid with my daughter.....triple xp ftw!!!

[the evn show]

Problem I am having now is getting the gear even for heroics. I queue for Dungeons and quite frankly I am lucky to get into more then one per night....I really hate being dps now for this reason.

The problem isn't that you're DPS but that you don't have any friends to help you. Imagine we're ported back in time to a year ago and the RDF didn't exist, how would you find someone to help you grind out dungeons for your welfare epics? You'd check in your guild, your friends list, and in lfg/city/trade chat for people to group up with - you'd remember the people who were fun and try to play with them again. I think a lot of people let their social circles dry up a bit when the RDF allowed any mouth breather to slug through content that was 4-7 tiers obsolete and now it's starting to haunt them.

If solo RDF queues don't work for you then it's time to stop relying on them. I know for sure there are tanks out there that want competent DPS and healers to run dungeons with and that they don't trust the RDF to schedule them a "fun" group any more than the random hunter queuing does.

I have the option of instant RDF queues on my paladin and priest but I'm never going to use them because it means risking a bunch of cross-realm keyboard-turning fire-standers. I'll sooner fill my group with /trade pugs than the RDF if I can't find people on Real ID or in guild because at least if I get a good player from trade I can look them up the next time I want to run something.

[Gallifrey2]

It is not a lack of friends or guildies....rather I have just been able to be on when they are and the ones that are on are already past me and either raiding or in heroics.

[the evn show]

On the state of end game

Nefarian is a pretty challenging fight no matter how you look at it: if you've killed him you've certainly got competent tanks, healers,

and DPS. Even if he's easier on MODE-X than MODE-Y he's sufficiently challenging that at this point in the game he's a good gauge

of skill and to a lesser extent gear and time played. Of those who have killed him a little less than 800 guilds have gone on to do

hard mode content.

For normal mode it seems pretty clear than 10-man is more popular than 25-man: Maloriak is killed 8 times more frequently on 10-man

than 25-man. Nefarian has been killed a little more than twice as often on 10-man than 25. There may be some information to be

gleaned about the relative difficulty of certain 10/25 normal mode encounters but I don't find that stuff particularly interesting. Once

you restrict yourself to only the 'progression minded' guilds (6/12 or better) the completion rates for normal mode raids are in

the neighborhood of 25% and I think that's about right for this stage of the expansion.

Moving on to hard modes:

In absolute terms the number of 10-man guilds is roughly twice the number of 25-man guilds at the end-game level. For

this discussion I'm concerning myself with the top 1% of all players: those working on hard mode raiding

When it comes to guilds with one hard-mode boss kill the numbers are identical: 520 (give or take) 10 and 25-man guilds have

killed wyrmbreaker. After that things start to get interesting.

• Chimaeron: 25-man: 5.7%, 10-man: 0.6%
  
• Conclave of Wind: 25-man: 6.85%, 10-man: 0.4%
  
• Maloriak: 25-man, 4.5%. 10-man: 0.32%
  
• Artamedes: 25-man: 2.4%, 10-man: 0.22%
  
• Magmaw: 25-man, 1.8%. 10-man 0.12%
  

These are percentages of their respective raid guild size. Starting with identical numbers of guilds in hard mode content we find that

through all of hard-mode content, 25-man guilds are completing content at a rate one or two orders of magnitude larger than

what 10man guilds are. Given that our discussion was limited to the top 3% of all raiders - and then quickly narrowed even further

I think it's fair to say differences in player skill at this level are fairly small and that the difficulty of the encounters is playing a larger

role on the success guilds are having.

Considering the rather large difference in success rates I think we can come to one of two conclusions:

• 25-man hard mode content is markedly easier than the 10-man version.
  
• Recruiting and coordinating 25-people capable of hard mode content is markedly easier than recruiting and coordinating 10.
  

Given the fact that you must first recruit 10 people before you can recruit 25 I think the second conclusion is on shaky ground

and the first is far more likely. It might help to look at it this way: if go 3/13 10-man tonight then you'd be tied for top-10 world

wide progression. Doing the same on 25-man you wouldn't even make top 150.

TLDR

• Out of 24,000 10-man kills of Magmaw, only 10 guilds have gone on to kill either Gay Dragons or Captain Planet.
  That's 4.3x10^-5% chance of success.
  
• Out of the 3,700 guilds that have a 25-man kills of Magmaw 35 have gone on to kill either Gay Dragons or Captain planet.
  That's a 0.01% chance of success.
  
• when you restrict yourself to only the top 1% doing hard mode raids, 25-man guilds are 100x more likely to be killing multiple
  hard mode bosses than their 10-man counterpart.
  

25-man guilds are disproportionately successful which seems to indicate that the content is less difficult with more players. Further,

25-man content rewards more and better loot than 10-man content which, over-time, will only increase the apparent differences

in difficultly.

For all of the above numbers are pulled from Wowprogress.com, guildox.com, and worldoflogs.com

EDIT, what's the point

I'm not arguing 10-man needs to be nerfed, raiding should be hard. I wouldn't mind seeing 25-man buffed so that people who prefer

to play in larger groups have the same challenging content that 10-man guilds do but I don't think it's necessary for "fairness" or

anything like that. Unfortunately I think that the apparent ease of 25-man content and the better/free-flowing loot on 25-man might

drive many 10-man guilds back to 25 for the sake of "seeing the content", getting gear, or just being competitive for recruiting/etc.

The other progression focused 10-man guilds on my server have already tossed in the towel and switched to 25-man content, I don't

want that to happen to my guild for that reason. If we're switching to 25 it should be because we've got 15 more people we really

want to play with.

[Shaun N.]

+Evn Have you downed Magmaw yet?

[the evn show]

+Evn Have you downed Magmaw yet?

Nope, given it a shot but haven't had much luck. We're going to give Chimaeron and Four winds a shot this week

and see how it goes. It's a 2-day raid week with the whole Jets thing this weekend.

It looks like roughly 6/12 hard mode kills are possible to do legitimately (raid stacking, consumables, and lots of

trial and error are fine. Exploiting a broken encounter is not). Going more than 3/12 means competing for top-50

world wide and that usually means "serious business" things like recruiting people to raid stack, longer hours, and

attendance requirements: all things we wanted to leave behind when we switched to casual 25 in ICC and then

to 10-man for cataclsym.

[SMELTN]

Great stats Evn. Really shows that there isn't as much progression going on as people really think.

[firey]

Just looking at http://www.wowprogress.com/

The top guild (Surprisingly not Ensidia) has 11/13 Hard Modes. The average seems like 8/13 Hardmodes (Going from 25 man) within the top 20 of course.

[the evn show]

Just looking at http://www.wowprogress.com/

The top guild (Surprisingly not Ensidia) has 11/13 Hard Modes. The average seems like 8/13 Hardmodes (Going from 25 man) within the top 20 of course.

If you're restricting yourself to the top 20 then 8/13 is the median and mode progress on 25-man. In 10-man the median and mode are 3/13 and 4/13 with the top guild being 6/12. Of the fights the top 10-man guild has killed, 2 of them are known to be exploitable but I'm not trying to accuse everyone who's killed artramedes or maloriak in 10-man on live of cheating.

• Artramedes could be bugged first by dragging him to the enterence and completely avoiding the sonar mechanic. Then it was discovered you could abuse soft resets and have an infinite number of gongs and so could keep him permanently stunned (and taking extra damage) to trivialize the encounter.
  
• Maloriak somewhat-regularly bugs out and stops spawning adds. I'm not sure what mechanism triggers this, but it's common enough that I'm sure someone has worked out what the cause is and how to repeat it.
  

I'm not accusing the most progressed 10-man guilds of cheating or not: I don't have evidence one way or another and I'm not suggesting that they do. I am trying to point out that "known buggy" encounters seem to be the only thing differentiating guilds with 2/3 from 4/13 and I wouldn't be surprised if at least a handful of those with 3/13 or better have exploited to get there. What that means is that the apparent differences in difficulty are probably bigger than they appear.

When you restrict yourself to the top 20 guilds, that's the most elite 0.00005% of players - the difference in progression is pretty damn striking when you're only considering "abnormally good" players.

Unrelated: Onyxia has her head back, which is strange because I've had it in the bank for the last 5 years. Oh well, she's dead again.

[firey]

It wasn't a dig or anything, it was simply saying that the top guild isn't done all the content yet, which is a good thing.

[treemonster]

it's not something i'd worry about this early on.

depending on your point of view, if in say 3 months from now only top .5% guilds have seen the current content, or even when the next tier of content is released and that's still the case, then i'd say there might be an issue.

but i mean if you're of the opinion that only the top .5% of guilds should see new content in a decent amount of time, then it's a good thing right?

on the other hand these are hardmodes and i think they should be reserved for top guilds. there shouldn't be an expectation for everyone to see and beat hardmode raids.

ofc no matter what i don't think it's going to change the mmo community perception of wow as "easy mode loot pinatas", even when the easy mode content takes more involvement and so on then alot of what the people saying that kind of thing consider to be hard(which most often seems to be no life grinding and ultra low drop rates for dungeon you do in 2-3 hours windows with no room for bio breaks)

on the other hand it creates an atmosphere for players with level 3 troll alts to call anyone not in the top .5% of their server scrubs for things they cannot do themselves, and often aren't even capable of doing entry level content on normal mode after nerfs and severely outgearing them. at least i saw a lot of that on all the realm forums i visited during tbc.

[Slane]

It wasn't a dig or anything, it was simply saying that the top guild isn't done all the content yet, which is a good thing.

Paragon just killed Lady Sinestra. The heroic only boss, which had zero beta testing. The only boss they have left is Al'akir. I'm sure they finish him off this week, meaning all content has been cleared. Judging by armory feed, they are clearing through BWD then presumably onto Al'akir. All content will be cleared shortly.

It's not a good thing that the heroic only boss was killed so quickly.

[the evn show]

It's not a good thing that the heroic only boss was killed so quickly.

It's not really any worse than the past:

WoTLK

• ICC, 6 weeks (gated by requiring the first lock out to be a normal mode kill)
  
• Anub'arak, 1 week (gating prevented attempts, he was killed the week he was released)
  
• Yogg+0, 10 weeks
  
• Algalon, 6 weeks (gated by 60-minutes of attempts per week)
  
• Naxx: hours
  
• OS3D10 (because it was harder than 25): 2 weeks
  

Go back to TBC:

• Gruul: 1 week
  
• Karazhan: 2 weeks
  
• Magtheridon: 6 weeks
  
• SSC: 10 weeks - (probably a bug, she remained "unkillable" for almost two months and wasn't killed again until after patches)
  
• TK: 4.5 months (gated by magtheridon as an attunement requirement)
  
• Zul'aman: about an hour
  
• Hyjal: 3 weeks (gated by vials)
  
• Black Temple: 2 weeks (gated by vials)
  
• Sunwell: every boss was killed the week they were unlocked
  

Go further to classic

• Naxx 40: 9 weeks (gated by resist gear)
  
• AQ40 - 4 months, gated by war effort and then bugged to be unkillable. Real time is closer to 2 months.
  
• BWL - 9 weeks (1 hour attempts on vael, the whole zone was buggy at launch, somewhat gated by resist gear)
  
• Onyxia - 2 months (gated by leveling and figuring out what a raid was)
  

We're coming up on 7 weeks into the current expansion but we had to blow at least one raid week to level and then clear all of normal mode to unlock hard mode. Assuming the last boss goes down sometime next week, and that "fixed" nefarian is killed again, this content will have had a completely average shelf life. If Al'akir drags on for a copule of weeks then this tier of content will be tied with pretty much every difficult bit of content except for the obviously broken stuff that had to be patched to be killable.

[+SOOPRcow MVC]

• Naxx 40: 9 weeks (gated by resist gear)
  

I wouldn't say Resist Gear was the issue... by the time you had finally managed to kill the 4 horseman you're raid would've had more then enough mats to kill craft the FrR gear. In fact both Saph and KT died much quicker then 4h. That all said, you could say it was Gated by enough warriors getting 4piece for the +5% hit to taunt :)

[Shaun N.]

We killed Halfus last night, I frapsed it but all the sound was super speedy :p - we all sound like chipmunks!