The Karazhan Mistake

(CAUTION: Before I link this interview with WoWarcraft’s Mr. Didier and Tigole (aka Mrs. Kaplan’s son) from the Games Convention in Leipzig, I’ll warn you that this site set off bells and whistles in my Firefox NoScript. So don’t click if you’re an extra cautious type. I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the page to Flickr and you can read the entire interview there.)

From an interview at the Leipzig Games Convention with WoWarcraft’s senior art director Sam Didier and lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan (Tigole) by ComputerandVideoGames.com’s Stuart Bishop — Tigole said:

The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players… who want to stick to that ten-person cap.

Well dammit boys, you learned the wrong lesson. You completely missed the most important lesson of The Burning Crusade, that is “The Karazhan Mistake”. And really, how could you miss it? I don’t know — I guess because you’re listening to the neo-uber guilds STILL, instead of the meat of the raiding bell curve.

Nevertheless. Since you all failed that portion of the final exam, let’s go over the material again (with some added explanations for the non-WoW people):

Karazhan is a 10-man instance with a reset timer of one week. It is firmly placed in the line of gear progression. Technically, you could skip Kara gear and step right into the first 25-man instances, I suppose, if you had a guild composed entirely of messiahs, prophets and gods. (Hint: none of us do.)

Therefore, since we all had to do Karazhan at some point, every guild either had to run multiple simultaneous weekly Karazhan raids with guildmembers tied to a single raid ID (no swapping of guildmates to the other guild Kara raids), OR, they ran a single Karazhan over and over and over and over many weeks to gear everyone up for the 25-man raids.

Was this fun? (Imagine I drew a huge question mark on the whiteboard at this point.) NO IT WAS NOT. I’ll pause while you take some notes. No pen or paper? Crimony. Never go into class or into the boss’s office without pens (plural) and paper. Write that down too.

We’re continuing. So here’s what happened with Karazhan. If the guild chose to run multiple simultaneous Karazhans, and if they required more than one night to clear Karazhan (typical), every once in a while some of the raiders had real life obligations and couldn’t show up that night and a replacement was needed. And so another guildmate was locked into a raid ID and was unavailable for the other Karazhans as replacements. Inevitably, one Karazhan raid would be the strongest and the others were weaker — either by way of gear or attendance or ability/knowledge of the zone.

While guilds would try to balance out the raids from week to week (to week to week to week), one set of guildmates were well prepared for the 25-mans and ready to go, and the others not so much. Mostly the geared/keyed guildmates would look for greener pastures and move on, or, maybe, wait around for what seemed like flippin-4-evah for the rest of the guild — either way, you’ve set up a pressure cooker for guild implosion.

This precarious period for guilds would last until they could step into the 25-mans (admittedly, that step was made much easier with the lifting of attunements), and continue until the guild could bid fucking adieu to the Kara trashfest.

Now write this part down: This was not lack of commitment or lack of ambition or lack of skeelz, this was poor game mechanics screwing over guilds. You can’t tell your players, ok have a raid force for 40-man gear farms, now slim down for 10-man gear farms, oops, now bulk up for 25-mans.

So here’s the deal. Either fix the fucking raid system for 10-man gear-required instances or stick to a 25-man progression model. Yes, we players love the ideal of 10-man instances, but not if we have to mess with guild numbers up, down, up again, now down … and finally back up again. (Imagine I drew alternating up and down arrows on the whiteboard.) Since, I dare say, you haven’t been active in guild recruitment and raid invites and /tells from the undergeared and the overgeared for quite some time, let me remind you, IT’S A ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS.

Here’s an example: Poor guildmate has a hard time getting into guild raids for a while, we’re overstaffed with his class, he’s undergeared because he misses the 10-man clear, whatever. I /tell him sorry mate, maybe next run. For a few weeks I tell him this and he complains of course, I listen, but damn, I have a raid to attend. He’s fed up and moves on to another guild. I’m relieved, albeit temporarily because I can see the future. Now we’re firmly in the 25-mans FINALLY, and oops, we need more raiders.

I could ask former guildmates who moved on because they were slower than the rest of us in gearing up IF I liked being told to fuck off (which I don’t, btw), or I can look for a feeder guild, i.e. a guild behind mine in progression whose better geared people are looking for said greener pastures. And I can poach from guilds around the same progression as mine, which is poor form, I know, however, I’m already being told daily to “fuck off” by my former raiders, so being told to “fuck off” by other guild’s leaders isn’t that big of a deal.

Thank you, game mechanics.

Two ways I believe 10-man instances could still fit into a 25-man raid-gear progression model:

1. Raid IDs of 3 days for the 10-mans, similar to Zul’Grub. Dare I hope for 1-day raid IDs for 10-mans? No, I do not dare hope.
or 2. Guild-wide raid IDs. Probably the 3-day solution is much easier to implement.

(Imagine I wrote “Hope” on the whiteboard and drew a circle around it with a slash through it, cuz there’s a whole lot of shit I don’t dare hope.)

Be ignorant no more, consider yourself enlightened. Now go forth and develop.

106 thoughts on “The Karazhan Mistake

  1. I don’t think the problem is having more 10 man raids or even the reset timers. It’s the fact that Kara was more or less required to move into 25 mans. Whereas ZG and AQ20 weren’t in order to start into the old 40 mans.

    If they plan on still having 25 man raids in the next expansion, then make the first one the entry level one.

  2. Wow, I’m so glad I never got into raiding, this just doesn’t sound like fun at all.

  3. Yeah the one week raid timer on 10-mans has to go. Three days would be perfect. /agree

  4. I disagree with the 3-day timer. It screws over guilds just moving into raiding, and trying to learn the instance.

    It guarantees that you cannot have 3 standard raid days every week without the instance resetting in between them most weeks. People naturally schedule their activities around the week. I raid Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. Lockouts that ignore that fact of human nature are a very bad idea.

  5. Yeah, I’m stuck at the lower end of the end the gear spectrum in my guild right now. They are starting SSC this week and I still need badly to do Kara and run 5 mans to gear up. And if my guild steps into Kara its to farm a few easy gold for the bank, no taking the undergeared, they want to GTFO of Kara as fast as possible.

    So I’m stuck trying to play catch up with 5mans and pugs kara or either I leave for a Kara level guild and try not to shoot myself as they attemps to clear the place and survive the drama… guess I’ll try catch up for now…

  6. I disagree with the 3-day timer. It screws over guilds just moving into raiding, and trying to learn the instance.

    That’s very true.

  7. I’m in a small guild (about 15 lvl 70s) and we raid Karazhan Thursdays and Mondays. With the current 7 day resets, we usually manage to kill everything. But with 3 day resets we would never have gotten past the first bosses.

    I used to be in a hardcore raiding guild that’s now in BT, so I understand the pains running Karazhan and 25 man raids. But I agree with ontherocks – have entry level 25 man raids in Wrath of the Lich King so big guilds can skip 10 mans entirely. Don’t change the resets, at least if the instance is as large as Karazhan.

  8. Kara makes me cry, seriously. I almost hate to say it, but coming up a few short for a 40 man prebc did not cause nearly the frustration as the current 10-man kara and its 7-day raid id does – too many want in, so make more groups, then its balance problems – man, it’s like “The song that never ends”.

    An entry level 25-man would be great.

  9. At BlizzCon Blizzard commented that the vast majority of raiders were in Karazhan. Blizzard took this to mean players preferred the 10-man raids and decided to build more. There didn’t seem to be any consideration for the fact that as you go higher in raid progression your population shrinks a good deal. I would also think that such numbers may indicate a problem rather than a preference, guilds getting jammed up in Karazhan perhaps?

  10. Amen on the freakin’ timers and lockouts. Nothing worse than our Saturday group tanks not being there, and losing out on a Kara run for the week because the other tanks are locked to th e weekday group.

    A guild-based lockout could be bad (1/2 the lootz because everyone is saved to the same instance)

    Seriously though, if you can’t clear Kara in 3 days, your gear or raid experience level just isn’t there yet. I would imagine most can get at down tOpera or Curator in a single night.

  11. @ Foton,
    Foton, can I reference your post above on a topic I would create in the WOW boards?
    I totally feel the same way you do in regards to 10 mans. It is to the point where I only go to Kara when my GM personally invites me and asks that I go. I hate that place.

    Blizz needs to be called out on their bullshit about the popularity of the 10 raids.

  12. If you can’t learn through Curator using a 3 day timer over a few weeks or months, then maybe you need to change something.

  13. @ Laura and Evil M

    Please remember that there is a new player base that is entering into WOW that never had the opportunity to learn how to raid in 40 person runs (or even the 20 person run in classic WOW).
    This newer group of WOW player are facing raiding for the first time and killing murlocs off some coast does not compare to killing elites, even if they are Kara elites.
    It will take some players a longer amount of time to learn how a multi-person raid is supposed to work.
    There is that possibility that a 3 day timer would grossly affect a newer guilds progress.

  14. I disagree, if you have the opportunity to kill the first few kara bosses every 3 days, then you’ll get more experience doing just that and you’ll get through them faster each time until you’re able to take more and more in the 3 day window.

    Having said that, I’d love them to allow you to set when the raid ID expires, either 3 or 7 days, etc. That would be sweet.

  15. @steven
    Actually, I don’t have preTBC raiding experience. Although I’ve been playing since 2005. With my limited experience, I say raiding comes down to the following:

    1. Either people can listen to instructions or they can’t.
    2. Either people are willing to show up with gear and consumables or they aren’t.

    If a guild can’t get those two things going, the reset timer could be 2 months and it wouldn’t matter.

  16. I co lead a guild, we started doing Gruul, Mag, and three kara runs 4 nights a week.

    Once they dropped the SSC and Eye Attunement we do Gruul, Mag, Loot Reaver, and SSC three nights a week. We still run Kara on offnights with three groups but it is mostly alts.

  17. not-so-novel idea #1: Get rid of raid IDs entirely. What? You’re progressing too fast? You mean, you actually play the game all the time, with 1 ‘main’ toon? HOW DARE YOU! I PUNISH YOU FOR FINISHING THE DUNGEON (by forcing raid id’s and cool-downs).

    not-so-novel idea #2: Move to more of a ‘Scarlet Monestary’ instance that has 4 wings (yes, each with it’s own raid id, and a 3 day cooldown if you ‘must‘. /sigh), ensure it only takes 1-2 hours per wing (with a wipe or two). (I’d almost re-subscribe).

    Maybe I’m just bitter.

  18. I do not agree with this post.

    Were the previous raiding mechanics better? Hell, no!
    Your argument is that a 10-man cap will lead to part of the guild being very strong and the rest very weak? And what happened before? Could you really handle a raiding schedule with enough raids to fully equip 40 people?
    Maybe if you were a member of those รƒยผber-guilds you claim Blizzard is still listening to…

    The most common end-result of 40-man raids was to have 9 or 10 people with maybe one or two pieces of epic gear, not 40 complete epic sets!

    The raiding mechanics have definitely improved for the better and I’m glad there are more 10-man dungeons forthcoming.

  19. i totally agree with you on having fixed members with their ID’s to a 10 man. i could be wrong, blizzard doesn’t want that same character that killed a boss (moroes, for example) to go to another raid within that same week and kill the same boss. so far they probably thought that system was the best — but i totally disagree with that. honestly, our guild is a raiding core guild and we are focusing on core members to be there when we need them. of course, some odd-sh!t happens and one or two members in your kara-team doesn’t show up … so take another member from the guild to balance it out? eh …. they need to come up with a new system that can allow any member to go to any raid with no restrictions. i could say, if you kill nightbane, for example, on that one week then what loot drops there is the “only” time you would be able to bid/roll for the epics, and if you go in again within that same week ( or period of time before reset ) then you will not be able to get loot from that boss. it might suck cu’z you may want a piece that may not drop for you, but drops in the 2nd+ raid. but i believe that system should work well. i tossed my two cents, don’t flame me please ๐Ÿ™‚

  20. I don’t think Foton has ever argued in favor of a 40 person raid system. Think you misread that. He’s sayign fix the raid id system for that one 10 person raid in the gear cycle or go with 25 person raids all the way thru. Our guild had same issues with karazan and moving to 25 raids.

  21. I don’t like the suggested idea that a guild is tagged with an instance ID, as some guilds (like mine) run two kara groups per week.

    The problem seems that we want to have short timers for when we’re learning, and slightly longer timers when doing them on farm.

    @Stark above – totally agree. Wing these instances with 3 day timers, and we can choose which bits we do when.

    The instances could be split into two parts based on difficulty, rather than totally separate wings with scaled bosses (like SM). So instead of doing the graveyard, then armoury, you’d do the Kara servants areas, then the Kara upper levels.

    BTW the best instance so far IMHO for my casual playstyle was Zul’Grub. Good base loot, it rewarded many return trips with good gear, and bosses were strategic. And you could pug replacements, and take Alts without much drama.

  22. @Andrew Breese: ZG and upper brs(when it was 15) were some of the funnest instance runs I had. Once you learned ’em, you got to enjoy the chatter.

    MC / Onyx / BWL / Naxx always ended up turning into either an easy run, or a “-50 DKP!” for the mage who was always standing (AFK) on the respawn spots for 20 minutes.

  23. I’ll skip by the fact that the writing and expression of thoughts was fun as usual. Kara has been one of the worst hamster wheels they’ve dumped into the raid scene in quite some time. I cringe at the thought that they actually think they’re helping casual guilds.

    By the time a small guild makes it thru Kara and gears up the regulars, their numbers aren’t large enough to ratchet up to 25-man content. To do 25-man regularly, probably requires upwards of 40 geared members, which you probably don’t have after crawling on glass thru Kara.

    What I see happen is small guild gets 20 something thru Kara then they have to start spamming the Trade channel for more people, who are ALREADY geared from Kara so they can advance. This should be telling someone at Blizz that they whole start at 10 crap isn’t working.

  24. @britt I think blizz thinks that too. lots of numbers in kara = people love kara. But god that zone sucks. Good suggestions here in this thread.

    great post btw, foton.

  25. I personally blame the difficulty of Gruul’s Lair. If Gruul himself wasn’t such a min-max driven fight, you could handle having 5 or even 10 under-geared people who got screwed by KZ’s bullshit, but as it stands you need everyone in the Gruul fight to be largely KZ geared.

    Alternatively, Gruul and Magtheridon should have been T5 bosses, with SSC relegated as the first 25-man raid, allowing a number of loot pinata kills early on to overcome the same basic problem: it’s a logistic nightmare to gear 25 people in a 10-man raid zone.

  26. Oh yeah, and the reason we apparently love KZ is as others have said: we can’t get the fuck out of it because we don’t have enough geared (and motivated, after having tried to move up several times now) players to get into GL properly.

    Still… providing a 10-man progression chain would work out just as well. Giving us Zul’aman means we can just give up on the 25-man game altogether raid ZA until WotLK. If, of course, the guild holds together that long.

  27. While Karazhan was originally very difficult and called for 7 day timer simply because it was pain to clear in less than 4-5 days, it’s no longer true.

    Many changes and nerfs along the way have turned Kara into the Kwik-e-Mart for epix, and in my guild of about 100 players (yes, big guild), even the most moronic newbies recruited last week manage to scrape together rag-tag croups that clear the place in two evenings (about 5-6 hours total), with the odd wipe-giveup on prince or nightbane. Even without full clears, their gear is progressing rapidly. More skilled groups clear it these days in 3-4 hours (one go). I think my personal record for a full clear is 2 hours 51 minutes. It *is* the new URBS, except that it still has a 7 day lockout timer.

    So, my vote would definitely be on 3-day reset, or alternatively 7 day reset, with the option of manually resetting once 3 days has passed from saving to the instance – kinda best of both worlds.

    I agree with a couple of earlier posters that if you can’t clear Karazhan in 3 days after a few weeks of practice, you are pretty much hopeless and simply Suck At WoW.

    I can’t see how it could be breaking up guilds, unless you already have too few people to actually raid. When the raid cap dropped to 25, it didn’t change the fact that you really need 60-70 active players to staff raids without problems. You can turn that into 5-6 weekly Karazhans, two runs on each 25-man and plenty of ‘room’ for RL emergencies and class imbalances. Yes, it requires mature class leaders juggling who gets to go where etc, but in our example everyone who wants to, gets to raid 3-4 evenings a week, with the option of picking Kara, Gruul/Mag, SSC, TK, Hyjal or BT based on their gear level and attunements/progression.

    Only guilds that stop their recruitment after they can safely staff one Karazhan run into these problems. Grow bigger. The only issue with growing bigger is that you need mature players who can look beyond ‘me, need, give, now, must-be-in-every-raid’. I can see how it might be a problem for a pile of pre-teens with attention disorders, but in my opinion there is no real reason to develop a game based on their Special Needs.

  28. When the raid cap dropped to 25, it didn’t change the fact that you really need 60-70 active players to staff raids without problems. You can turn that into 5-6 weekly Karazhans, two runs on each 25-man and plenty of ‘room’ for RL emergencies and class imbalances.

    god, and you dont see that as a problem??!

    o wait. You’re the .5 % that’s in BT. and the rest of us have “special needs” like a family and a job.

  29. When the raid cap dropped to 25, it didn’t change the fact that you really need 60-70 active players to staff raids without problems. You can turn that into 5-6 weekly Karazhans, two runs on each 25-man and plenty of ‘room’ for RL emergencies and class imbalances.

    god, and you dont see that as a problem??!

    o wait. You’re the .5 % that’s in BT. and the rest of us have “special needs” like a family and a job.

    It might be a problem to some, but it’s a statement of fact on the current situation.

    Many high-end raid encounters call for specific raid builds – “you need X tanks to kill this boss, you need X shadowpriests here” etc. To have the necessary buffer for RL emergencies (yes, we BT raiders tend to have a life as well, I for example usually raid only 3 nights a week), class imbalances and other things, the bare minimum is two extra characters for each possible character class/spec “slot” to rotate players (yes, we have that life, so we can’t raid 5-6 days a week – so we rotate people around). So for a raid of 25, you need 25 + another 20 or so as buffer/replacement/rotation or you will end up with nights when you can’t raid because you don’t have enough people online. Then, the step to actually supporting multi-tiered raiding (some in kara, some in T5 instances, some in T6) you need again bit more depth in the roster… the end result is that a guild should have around 60 players to comfortably be able to do all things TBC offers. Merge with someone, organize raid alliances… fix it.

    Raiding does *not* require you to do it 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. I have full-time day job, and I very rarely play on both days of the weekend – most weeks I raid two weeknights and longer one sunday afternoon, and perhaps spend another night or two (3-4 hours a night) farming some consumables or playing a random alt. Same is true for most of our guild’s players as our average age is around 25-26. All it requires is maturity, ability to organize large groups effectively (delegate, be dependable, be capable of sticking to pre-agreed schedules) and some L33t PlaySkillz(tm).

  30. Lono.
    If your guild is in SSC, the only reason to do karazhan is to gear up new apps, the undergeared, or alts. You make more money doing dailies.

  31. aaron

    I had a talk with the GL yesterday and decided to quit the guild for an less advanced one but one at my level. I’d rather wipe in Kara than bench for a few months and hope to grab some loot when the leaders feel like giving some. I don’t like feeling like a beggar.

    I find that Kara in itself is not bad or horrible. In fact I find it rather fun. What’s not fun is the incredible amount of time you have to spend in there in hope your guild eventually pulls through. I mean right now on my server we have two sort of end game guilds. The raiding guilds who are on the 25 mans and the “Kara-feeders” guilds which are stuck in kara because once the members are geared they leave for more advanced guilds because they are tired of waiting around. And that’s probably what I will do too. I’ll gear up in kara and once I’m done with it I’ll have to shop for another guild who needs me to progress in gruul/mag/ssc. Blizz made the game that way and I suppose I’ll have to play by these rules.

    I don’t think blizzard ever intented guild loyalty or progress as part of their endgame plan. Rather they must think guild jumping is a perfect way of playing the game.

  32. I’ll definitely agree that it was a mistake to skip around from ten to 25 mans in terms of progression, they should’ve picked one model and stuck with it the whole way through, with a few off set numbers for screwing around. (MC,BWL VS ZG,AQ20)

    However, I will say this for them: You see a lot more people in Kara due to needing it to progress to the 25 mans, but what you may not be considering and what their internal numbers may be alerting them to, is the astounding number of people who don’t want to be in larger guilds, or guilds who seem to be nothing but loot whores, etc, in order to do the larger instances. I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of players who’re infinitely more likely to find nine friends to go raid with, as opposed to the ones who might be of the same mindset, and refuse to deal with the extra fifteen jackasses. To sum up; there’s probably a lot of people who will be able to do ten mans, who never do the larger raids. Not for lack of skill, but out of want to avoid the big guild drama/greed.

  33. /signed

    I felt like slapping someone when I read “The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular.” The #1 biggest gripe I have with BC is the one thing they think they LIKE! ARGHGHHGGGGHDfdfhaldfghasildfuhlasdf

  34. It’s sad that it took 35 comments before someone even mentioned the possibility that people may just be enjoying the smaller 10 man dungeon without the idea of progressing forward. Every single player I know that raids Kara, has NO plans to progress past that. Kara is their new UBRS/ZG. Everything above that is for that magic 1% of players.

    Blizzard knows one thing for usre; hardcore raiders will do anything to progress. It may just be that Blizzard doesn’t care any longer and finally are focusing on what the majority is out there enjoying.

    So, if Kara is a true speed bump for raid progression, it can take a firm last place in the “fix me” line behind many other issues affecting far more players.

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  37. kara is perfect for the crowd that enjoyed running ZG AQ20 only. Meaning the guilds which neither wanted or could progress into the 40man arena.
    For the high end raiders kara is and has always been a nightmare, since it was REQUIRED for progression, but had a different size than the following instances.
    The second mistake of kara was that it was not designed properly… There is too much trash and a too linear instance for it to be truly fun.
    I honestly thought after Nax that blizz had learned to design a proper winged instance (actually i thought that after SM but was promptly proven wrong), but every single instance in BC i entered was back to the old design (one long instance instead of completly seperated wings).
    Honestly, i wonder what feedback blizz is reading, since quite honestly they keep going backwards instead of forwards.

  38. One point is forgotten, kara drops mutch more epic loot than ZG did. A 7 day timer makes that possible for game balance. Its about half the raidnights and twice the loot. So maby its a a ratwheel but not as mutch as the old instances.

    But I agree that the jump between 10 and 25 is a bit problematic.

  39. I have to disagree with this post, Karazhan has provided our guild and me specifically with great content. With previous 40 man raids and now 25 man raids most guilds schedule them during prime time to attract the most available people thus catering to the ‘Raiding Crowd’ย (i.e. people that play mainly from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM nightly). By providing a 10 man raiding instance this has opened up the window of raiding from those prime time hours to a vastly broader audience.

    For example our guild mostly made up of adults with children, single working adults and college students etc. We typically have real life stuff going on during prime time and our world does not revolve around WoW. So we have people going to 3 different Karazhan Raids one being more traditional (6:00 PM server time, one late night 9:00 PM server time and one very early in the morning 4:00 AM or some crazy time.) If the 40/25 man raiding requirement had been kept in place we would have fewer people raiding and our only raid would be a more traditional time.

    Additionally they did some other stuff really well in Karazhan. The way they have attached the trash in each area to a certain boss is good. This allows raids to go for 2-3 hours and not have to reclear trash etc (Much better then say Molten Core). Vendors that can repair in the instance, oh you have to love that. Also they make very good use of each class, some fights a caster heavy group is good and some fights more melee DPS is good. Thus there is no optimal group to take into Karazhan overall.

    So I don’t think it can be argued that moving to 10 man’s is not a good thing for the game as it opens up raiding style content to more casual guild and players.

    This is not to say that there are not specific problems which Karazhan has introduced, which I have outlined as follows:

    1) Karazhan is a LONG linear instance. It would be nice if you could skip bosses etc. similar to the way you could in ZG. Although if you could run right up to the Prince it would seem this would diminish the accomplishment of the instance. Thus I think this is a balancing act. Reducing some of the trash would be nice especially between the Curator and Aran.

    2) 10 Man raids should have their own progression and in no way be tied to 25 man raids for gear progression or attunement. Although they should have progression.

    3) Early when we where raiding Karazhan the seven day lockout period was a big problem because when someone was out replacements where tough to come by. Now that people have had a lot of time to level alts etc it’s not very difficult to fill a spot or two from our friends list or guild. It would be nice to have a better mechanic to manage this but keep in mind there is a real need to throttle back a guilds ability to acquire epic loot other wise you’re going to have raiding guilds running raid instances (24×7) and then bitching that there is no content. You might not like this but it’s a fact of the current system.

    Lastly I think Karazhan and Molten Core get ripped on a bit because they are the first real raiding instances for their respective levels. So we have all seen them a lot and are tired of them, really tired of them. Anyway it sounds like they are going to have both a 10 man raiding track and a 25 man raiding track in Wrath of the Lich King which I think is good.

  40. Blizzard Screwed the Pooch from the very start of BC In my opinion. This would have made more scense Using Helfire as an example.

    5 Man Regular leveling ( Ramparts )
    5 Man Heroic 70 ( Blood Furnace )
    10 Man 68-70( Shattered Halls )

    In the end 4-5 leveling instances, 4-5 Heroic Instances and 3-4 10 Man RAid instances ( not 1 )

    Karazhan has to many mobs, is class restrictive, Doesn’t leave any “Doh” room for people who are average players. As a beginning instance it sucks!

  41. I’m in a small guild (about 15 lvl 70s) and we raid Karazhan Thursdays and Mondays. With the current 7 day resets, we usually manage to kill everything. But with 3 day resets we would never have gotten past the first bosses.

    The solution is quite simple, set a minimum limit for reset (if you really need one) and then let guild leaders manually reset when they want, up to a month if necessary.

  42. “Karazhan is a LONG linear instance. It would be nice if you could skip bosses etc.”

    Uhh.. you can.

  43. The raid leader or promoted assistant(s) should be able to reset the instance. Bing-bang-boom. You get what you want.

  44. I think Karazhan always requires a very specific class balance which can make it hard for guilds to form multiple raids for doing it weekly. Usually what happens is that the primary Kara raid group locks out the needed classes for each fight.

    I have to agree that the reason so many guilds are still in Karazhan is because its a roadblock for the 25-man raids. Small guilds love Karazhan simply because its the perfect size for them. Large guilds trying to get into SSC/EYE hate it since they need 25 decently geared people from Karazhan before they can proceed.

    http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2007/04/karazhan-roadblock-to-modern-raiding.html

  45. They should look to move back to the ZG style instance for entry level 10-man content.

    When I say that I mean “non-linear” where the guild can decide which boss they want to aim for. This combined with a shorter reset is really all that is needed to alleviate a lot problems IMO.

    The inherit problem with Karazhan from my perspective is that it is incredibly large, is very linear, and has a lot of trash. I feel this style of instance would perhaps be better suited for an end-game 10-man dungeon supported by several entry level 10-man’s ZG style.

  46. My favorite response is always the one that says “pfft well just get more guild members, merge, or ally”, always from the bigger guilds that don’t have the issues to begin with.

    That is what we call a disconnect.

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