Primal Raiding Scene (Sep '17)

[Fitzpatrick]

I've seen a lot of dissatisfaction with the server recently and I've also noticed that <DTP> may be the only guild doing 25s at the moment. I have to think that these two things are related. Most seem to be approaching this as the server needs "fixing" but I have to disagree. Sure, as with every private server there are bugs. However, the staff has done a *great* job recently of expanding and fixing bugs and the server's stability has gotten considerably better since the new core and server hardware got it's rocky start.

Let me provide an alternative view:

With TBC release we had a flash of new players which invariably (as with all private servers) not all stuck around. Guilds fragmented, rebranded, restarted with new leadership, all of which I thought was a mistake. Stability is critical in a gaming atmosphere where turnover is so high. Now that the server's population has resettled at basically where it was, all these guilds seem to me to be trying to hold on.
Karazhan is a great instance, and a lot of fun to progress through, but it's not enough to hold a large guild of people used to 40 man raiding. Players need a challenge, and Karazhan only is challenging for so long before it becomes repetitive, despite the fact that I feel it is very well tuned.
Perhaps people are assuming that raiders will return with SSC release. I will agree that the intro T4 25-mans are not the most enduring fun of TBC, they are still fun and challenging content and quite necessary in both gear and attunement for SSC. Gruul is a great DPS check and staying-alive check for a raid hoping to progress in SSC, and Magtheridon is great for learning coordination in a 25man setting. While a guild *might* be able to bull doze through bosses in SSC on the backs of good tanks and a solid core, Vashj is going to destroy guilds where 25 people can't collectively work well together.

Just to illustrate, here's our entire Magtheridon Lair raid from yesterday:

You'll note there are 2 very near wipes in the Mag fight and a squeaker of a kill. Mag has some randomness and insta-death qualities that make it both fun and oooooh-shit!-worthy.

Solutions?

I feel like the players in the 25-man hopeful guilds should consider either mergers or raid alliances. Lets not forget that <DTP> and <VK> raided together for a quite a while, very successfully. Its time for officers to make some decisions about your guilds. Some guilds seem to have mostly lost activity of their officer core. If you are a player there, consider joining a guild that may be a bit more active. Having all these good players spread out across many guilds stuck in 10-man content is not healthy. Unfortunately, <DTP> doesn't really have much space, if any, in our 25 man roster. We can fit more into Kara runs, but that hardly helps anyone wanting to do 25s.
Perhaps players and officers can speak up here about which guilds are more active, or are still trying to field 25 man teams. I would like to hear who is and isn't so I can direct people into guilds where they may thrive. I see some guilds still running 10 man content, but from the armory it's hard to tell who's doing this regularly or with multiple teams, etc.

Please speak up, lets get some other 25s running!

[Spectrez]

Very interesting read Fitz.

Im personally very impressed of the staff after having worked with some of them for the last few weeks, and im confident they are making the server a Better experience with every passing day.

It would be nice to see some more big guilds on the server doing progression raiding but hopefully in time with the tw transfers that will be possible.

[natnat123]

i agree fitz, apart from a few minor things. the scripting is looking pretty damn good now. and so long as the bug reports i am uploading about vashj get fixed for release and tuning gets done correctly. vashj will be no easy task. im even tryying to get some info on the pre nerf MC she does in phase 3. recently, emu war and apathy have merged. so they are starting to run 25 mans also, but still pugging some i think. exalted rep and new horizon have done a few pug teams i think, and logic have been doing maulgar every week since launch. with anything up to 10 pugs, but unfortunetly, we still havent managed get mag or gruul. we have had some great attempts on gruul. but dont quite have the dps.

i think, rather than just pug runs, guilds need to merge. it will be much easier to form a good team if everyone is in the same guild. than it would be to just team up for raids. i think some people will come back to check out T5 when it is released, however, i am worried that if people still cant get regular 25 man teams going. then more may leave. so you are 100% correct. mergers need to be done for anyone who wishes to raid in T5+

P.S, if you ever need a very geared tank or dps for mags. please let me know. i would love to do him with you <Natnat

https://truewow.org/armory/character.ph ... at&realm=p

[Fitzpatrick]

What time do you guys have raid times? AU primetime? What time, server-time-wise (so I can direct people appropriately)?

[natnat123]

well, the 25 man is 8pm server time on Sat every week. we have 2 kara groups going atm, but they are both pretty much full every week. we did have an NA kara group also, but not enough regular NA peeps. so i dont know whats going on with that one atm. i currently lead the main group and, pretty much team lead the 25 man, so healers sort out healers, ect.

[doom2099]

Hi.

Murmur still doing 25s and prepping for SSC release also

[natnat123]

Hi.

Murmur still doing 25s and prepping for SSC release also

^

[kurthos]

Release of the two T5 instances should lead to T4 25 man raids being pugged.

[natnat123]

true, but pugging for it often means having a different team every week. getting 25 different people to avoid shatter damage is a pain

[flosr1]

well, successful Gruul (not only HKM) and Magtheridon pug raids were going on Feenix TBC multiple times a week. raidleaders there did gearchecks and asked some questions about the encounter at A'dal. It is just a matter of population.
You can argue now, how much of a viable server Feenix TBC was with items being sold for money etc. (imho it wasnt a viable server, it just had a big population), but the items which were available there, did not make players better, most of primal wow raiders have the amount of gear needed for those T4 raids (and those who don't need some kick in the ass from the guildleaders to farm some pre raid BIS).

So yeah, T4 pug raids should be absolutely doable on T5 release, they should even be doable now.

[natnat123]

they should be, but we cant stand at adal and do gear checks. the pop is so low atm that we dont have much choice in who we take because its eather take someone to fill a spot and start. or wait hours for someone decent to show up and by that time. others have left due to waiting.

[dgreenbe]

I feel like Fitz is probably mostly right here, and the part he was missing--that there are about 4 guilds clearing 25s atm--shows that people talking about "dead server" might be sharing their perspective but server is more active than they think.

However, we should also be realistic about this path forward. I've looked into mergers, and in some cases the best option for a merger dies too fast and merges into a big guild before 2 cores can merge. The most likely scenario in many of these cases is a 25-man guild with only a few raid slots, so a few of the best players from a guild will leave and join this new guild and the rest will sit in a hollowed-out guild that will die, and dead guilds often get people to just leave.

This is especially true because, as was said, Kara can get tedious, especially with how long it takes to clear since boss HP is stupidly, unchallengingly, boringly, high (the same mechanic making Gruul take forever until a wipe).

So what we'll wind up with is some top-performers--probably hunters, etc--raiding 25s successfully and the rest may very well quit. But that's the way Primal is now, and as mentioned dead guilds often result in people leaving (Aa small guild core lugging around a semi-active half-geared guild through 25s won't last long), so might as well get working on salvaging what we can, although I imagine half of it will involve gquits and drama.

While I think the staff does a great job, I do insist that another issue in my perspective is the gameplay. Not just the HP, as mentioned, but also struggling specs. Perhaps in the successful guilds this isn't an issue, but elsewhere I see people dissatisfied with their spec, and they either quit or try to reroll, struggle getting RDF to pop, then quit.

So probably two-pronged path ahead here:
1) Make Guild forum here more active, with info and posts on raid times, needed roles, and available slots so people can see what fits and officers can see what's going on and start discussing things with each other ASAP (this isn't a clean solution, but I agree it probably offers best chance of a strong server).
2) More immersive gameplay to attract players and keep them playing, with an easier path to 70 or at least 60 (as jetterroo explained) and less luz HP-boosting and improvement for specs cursed by the patch and by Primal rules (ideally not through artificial multipliers and such, since this doesn't seem to have resulted in a ton of balance, but since staff puts a lot of effort into that, if it works why not)

Edit: just wanna make clear I'm not trying to nerf content or anything, just some fights are just unnecessarily long and it makes some encounters turn into a snoozefest

they should be, but we cant stand at adal and do gear checks. the pop is so low atm that we dont have much choice in who we take because its eather take someone to fill a spot and start. or wait hours for someone decent to show up and by that time. others have left due to waiting.

Yep, that's basically the situation. I was heavily involved with pugging on Feenix TBC, and part of the difference is definitely server population. But another part is that raids on this server are different--half the specs are just too garbage to make the raid smooth, and even decent gear isn't enough due to boss HP boosting. The key to success for pugs there were good raid leading but also a strong core of experienced players, mostly lower-geared alts who knew what they were doing. Those alts are going to be too weak here, less common due to a slow leveling process, and then on top of it might be a bad spec. The people dedicated to having strong alts like jetteroo are the types of people who make this sort of thing work.

There were a few odds-and-ends, like rogues being able to cloak Mag cube debuff, but those are the main issues.

[jetteroo]

yea i m in same guild as natnat but i m in oceanic times (UTC+8) so at some point i probably need to either stay awake for my guilds gruuls/mag or join a pug grp for gruuls/mags for SSC

https://truewow.org/armory/character.ph ... ee&realm=p (thats my main)
I have a drood too

But i think the current primal scene needs a re think about the way forward.

While guild mergers can solve the short term issues, it will not solve the medium term /longer term issues - i.e. server pop really needs a boost. cos even with mergers, we will still see players bleed away from the server for watever reason - you will always need new blood to replenish

[flosr1]

about the specs...
yeah i am kinda tired of mentioning it, but the specs are really far away from being balanced. i know not all specs and classes can be equally good and maybe they shouldn't. but at lvl 80 wotlk, all specs are at least close to equal. here at 70 we are missing talents, glyphs and spells which results in a lot of unbalancing. and no matter how many people say that Shadowpriests are strong enough, i refuse to admit that shadowpriest, elemental shamans, disc priests, prot paladins and feral tanks are the way they should be. not all tanks or healers should be the same but they should be closer to each other. that is one thing that frustrates me a lot when discussing things with the staff, because sometimes i have the feeling this server became a playground for a few people in charge and the players are not taken serious. I know it might just be the way i see it, but from all the experiences of the last months, it is hard to stay objective. I know that a lot of people agree with that. and trust me, you don't even want to know what the majority of aftershock people write in discord about that topic. we cleared 4 karazhan raids a few weeks ago and did 25m raids in less than 2 hours. and suddenly next week, they are just gone because they are bored? you don't believe that yourself do you?

i really try to not be too negative here. fitzsimmons wrote me a private message about that and i respect him as a person and also his opinion. he might not know this, but i really do. we had our differences in the past, but i agree with a lot of his opinions. but not all and the state of the server is something i do not agree. also i do not like how things are being censored or people instantly warned or threatened when things are being criticized.

anyway, back to the topic. this thread is a good idea, at least the part of bringing guilds and people together.

[Almsivi]

While this thread is made for players by players and I don't want to hijack it in anyway. I'd like to assure you we as staff really appreciate such initiatives.

From our side we will try to improve our communication methods with You. In order to avoid lack of information and increase the quality of services we provide. While it doesn't guarantee bringing people back who left during our last core update (got reverted as crashes were caused by TC releasing unstable and untested stuff ) Hopefully we will earn back your faith in admins decisionmaking.

I'd like to promise you we will try to avoid such issues in future.

Also we won't censor things as long as discussion is kept civil.