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WoW: Burning Crusade Attunements

On top of that this was Pre-LFG so if you didn't have an active group of friends or an active guild you were pretty much screwed. I started playing just after TBC launched and I had to really scratch and claw to get into a top tier guild to raid BT before SWP came out.

I have to say, main reason I don't play anymore is that LFG panel with cross realm system. It just killed the feel of community for me. I know it's sometimes hard to get a group to do stuff without it, but at the same time it made people to stick around and not give up so easily. You actually met people from the server community, maybe even made friends with them and did dungeons again together. When that LFG panel came, people just started to abandon group after wiping once. There really is no reason to try and keep a good name for yourself, you know you most likely will never meet those people again.

Before LFG system I made lots of friends in my realm when leveling up and doing instances. For me server community is pretty much the most valuable thing in MMOs and when it was killed off, there is just really no reason to play. It's like playing dota with randoms but less fun. And playing dota with randoms is far from fun.
 

Zushin

Member
Ah BC. Still remember how hyped I was just getting Champion of the Naaru a week before they nerfed Mag and took away the title from that quest line (back when there were limited titles to obtain). Unfortunately the guild fell apart some time during TK so never got as far as BT attunement :(
 

border

Member
When that LFG panel came, people just started to abandon group after wiping once. There really is no reason to try and keep a good name for yourself, you know you most likely will never meet those people again.

Once LFG came out, people would start abandoning just because your group wasn't plowing through a dungeon as fast as they wanted you to. If it was taking to long to complete stuff they'd bail even if you weren't wiping.

It's strange how that feature simultaneously improved and ruined the game.
 

Azusa

Member
It is fine.

I dont like how most modern gamers want more and more simplified games. WOW BC attunement quest was truly epic mmo quest and require an effort to finish all dungeons. It was an achievement. But now all current mmo are so streamlined, easy and boring after a hundred hours or so.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
They frankly made all TBC content after you hit level cap too damn hard trying to please the top end raiders, who weren't going anywhere. They did a much better job in Lich King finding a balance so more could enjoy the end game.
 

Kysen

Member
Those attunements hard blocked every guild but two on my server. I was one of the lucky ones to be in one of those guilds. So I got to clear every raid but sunwell (fucking muru). By the time wotlk hit the gear disparity between hc guilds and casuals was insane.
 

Thoraxes

Member
Ah BC. Still remember how hyped I was just getting Champion of the Naaru a week before they nerfed Mag and took away the title from that quest line (back when there were limited titles to obtain). Unfortunately the guild fell apart some time during TK so never got as far as BT attunement :(

As long as you had the original quest chain and never dropped it over the years with the original quest chain IDs, you could still get the title years after they made it so new people couldn't.
 
I'm pretty sure only one person in the group needed a heroic key for running the 5 mans.

Attunements weren't so bad. The real timesink from my experience raiding in TBC were the consumables farming. Food, DPS potions, Flasks, Elixirs, Oils... even materials for Drums of Battle. As a warlock i also had the joyous task of soul shard farming before each raid too!
 
one of the coolest and most awe-striking atmospheres and entrances to a new expansion land in any rpg, imo.

but gd that chart reminds me that there was a reason why i basically quit wow during tbc: after half a year of trying to make the most of blizz's underwhelming world pvp, tbc was where it pretty much became certain 'war' pvp was never going to taken seriously by the devs.

i mean, it was questionable before that even, but after 40v40 AV, ahn'qiraj war effort creating some of the best world pvp i've had this side of eve, daoc or shadowbane, and even a bit of effort to add pvp towers to the plaguelands and market similar world pvp tower as a selling point of tbc, there was at least some small hope or reason to figure maybe there's a chance for more. tbc pretty much put the nail in the coffin tho.

returned briefly twice for a couple weeks each time, and wintergrasp and tol barad were ok for a bit tho.
 

Melubas

Member
Am I the only one that likes attunements and gated content? It gives a greater sense of progression and makes sure old raids are not forgotten.
 

Horp

Member
Attunements were great.
Back then the game was... what do you call it?... A GAME! That's it!
Not just a mindless button mash sheiss-fest with terrible story and graphics up until raids (not LFR, which is the most buttong mashy of it all).
 

SPCTRE

Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVyKC_okPW8




So TBC was the last WoW expansion with so many gating mechanics to separate the hardcore players. I remember pre-patch Gruul and Magtheridon were nearly impossible for raiders fresh out of Karazhan so people couldn't get it done. As a resto druid, doing heroics was a right pain due to having no regular resurrections, so teammates who died have to walk back from the graveyard far far away (jumper cables ftw)
oh man, early Heroics were pretty amazing in TBC - remember backstabbing rogue mobs in Auchindoun?

dispatch a group of mobs, take a seat with my holy priest to fill up mana, BAM I'm fucking dead - I remember laughing so hard
 
oh man, early Heroics were pretty amazing in TBC - remember backstabbing rogue mobs in Auchindoun?

dispatch a group of mobs, take a seat with my holy priest to fill up mana, BAM I'm dead

Shadow labs wasn't that bad as a Holy Pally. I feel for your on that trash and 2nd boss though.
 

Cels

Member
i think every one of my characters rocked the hand of a'dal title

anyone who raided in TBC would have this title earned well before the release of wotlk
 

Parfait

Member
I liked this style of gating. Play the game to get to the better parts was fine.

The current gating of 'please wait 7 weeks warmly' is god awful.

Remember that all this gating didn't take place at the same time.
 

Maledict

Member
Meh, that chart is very misleading. Firstly as others have pointed out only one person in the group needs the key to start all the dungeons - so you can forget that, and the rep grinds associated with it. Plus the rep grinds to unblock heroic were not difficult at all.

Also theres some misleading information in this thread - the 4 vials dropping from KT and Vashj was never live at the same time as the instances they unlocked. When Black Temple and Hyjal were added into the game Kael and Vashj both dropped a vial for every raid member.

Really, attunements for TBC were extremely mild. The only issue was everyone needing the vials for tier 6, when the last thing you wanted to be doing each week was killing Kael'Thas.

Go take a look at what Everquest's Planes of Power required. That's an attunement system!

EDIT: http://home.earthlink.net/~brucehalpern/everquest/eqpopflag.html

Each one of those is a 72 person raid, that generally would take an evening to do. In non-instances servers, so you were competing against other guilds. Each boss generally would only spawn once every 3 days.
 

SPCTRE

Member
Shadow labs wasn't that bad as a Holy Pally. I feel for your on that trash and 2nd boss though.
yeah I imagine - they were great Heroics though, weren't they? not without balancing issues obviously (silence a caster throwing 600 damage spells, he melee hits you for 2K damage), but I remember having great fun overall
 

Philxor

Member
I only started just after the release of BC, but I never really found the attunements that much of an issue. I was in a number of really successful guilds (including a brief stint in the top Alliance guild on the server) so managed to see a lot of content and get pretty much all T6 and some SWP items to boot. I would imagine this helped shape my experience pretty dramatically.

I don't mind this sort of thing being a part of the game, but it just needs to respect people's time. As several people in this thread have said, there is really only one point in your life where you get to put so much time and effort into something like WoW and as people get older and their commitments elsewhere increase, it becomes more and more of a slog and the reward/prestige that comes with doing top tier content inevitably lessens.
 
yeah I imagine - they were great Heroics though, weren't they? not without balancing issues obviously (silence a caster throwing 600 damage spells, he melee hits you for 2K damage), but I remember having great fun overall

I couldn't really raid for over half of BC because I was still on dialup, so I mainly did dungeons. I still remember what were the easiest and hardest heroics pretty well. Did more Slave Pens than anything because it was one of the easier ones and next to Shatt. That, Ramparts, Mechanar and maybe Steamvaults were the easiest. Steamvaults also had the recolored T2 Pally helm that I still wear. I really like Botanica but people rarely ran it. Near the end of BC when I started to get into my Druid (who I've mained for at least part of 3 expansions) I ended up completing the epic flight form quest to be able to summon the boss in Sethekk Halls before they made him always up. Still don't have the mount after running it for years.
 

EmiPrime

Member
Attunements were a really satisfying part of progression and those quests in Shadowmoon Valley weren't a big deal, I did them without realising they were even for attunements (a big chunk of them while levelling).
 
Man I loved the attunements from BC, and outside of probably killing Kael and Lady V it wasn’t that bad. Plus Black Temple attunement gave in my opinion the best title in the game and I still rock that shit to this day.
 

Entropia

No One Remembers
I don't see a problem with a reasonable attunement quest chain for raid. Back then Blizzard released multiple raids at once so it was feasible that you had to complete the easier content to get to the harder stuff. The way Blizzard handles raid content on a tier-to-tier basis, there isn't a possibility for raid attunements as people want to be able to raid it as soon as it comes out. Blizzard had a small attunemenet quest chain to open up the Karazhan dungeon that was added in 7.1. I thought that was pretty cool. And with the whole "Account-wide" thing it's not like you had to do it on your main, and then on your alt(s). Back then if you wanted/needed to change characters you had to re-do all of these things on your alts.
 
Yeah I have no issue with attunements at all. If they are done well it adds to the experience/story line.The last thing I need is LESS to do once I'm in endgame.
 

Arkeband

Banned
Attunements definitely made it harder to raid, but that just made raiding more prestigious and ensured that there was always something more for players to see and do and aspire to.

Today's MMO's including WoW have such a pampering mentality toward players that it ends up shooting itself in the foot by letting them see everything on easy mode with no restrictions and automatic party finders, and then there's nothing left for 90% of people beyond upgrading gear for the sake of upgrading gear, and barely any reason to actually engage with the community.

BC was so exciting because while I was working my way up Karazhan, I knew I had multiple other tiers to work through after it that I hadn't even stepped foot into yet. My journey was just beginning.

Today's MMO's would have made Karazhan obsolete by the time SSC hit, in a misguided attempt to make sure "no one misses out".
 

Se_7_eN

Member
I miss the attunement system and boss "Cleave" abilities.... Added goals and difficulty.

MMO's these days just seem so watered down in comparison to WoW: BC that I can't get interested... Guild Wars 2 was incredible, until I realized someone who spent 400 hours in the game would be on the exact level as someone who just reached max level.
 

Kareha

Member
This is why TBC will always be the best for raiding for me, you actually had to put in the effort to get to where you wanted to be.
 

Se_7_eN

Member
This is why TBC will always be the best for raiding for me, you actually had to put in the effort to get to where you wanted to be.

Thats what I miss the most in MMO's... It wasn't a "You're max level and now raid ready". You actually had to struggle to get raid ready, and if you weren't up for that, then you most likely wouldn't make it in the raid.

You knew that the people you were in there with already did some hard and difficult content.
 
The only issue was everyone needing the vials for tier 6, when the last thing you wanted to be doing each week was killing Kael'Thas.

This is not a minor concern for a guild that has to deal with a non-zero amount of churn, you ended up with very few quality candidates poached from other high-end guilds and nobody else could effectively recruit without inducing more churn as players got sick of killing Magtheridon, Kael and almost all of SSC to attune new players. This is exactly the reason these lengthy attunements don't exist anymore, they were deleterious to actually growing the major organizational unit of end game social interaction.
 

Linkark07

Banned
The best expansion.

Preach it.

I also loved the attunement requirements. It actually made older content still relevant despite new content coming. That's a problem I have with current WoW; sure, it is better for people that return after being away for months, but that also means all that old content becomes obsolete, unless you are seeking achievements or gear for transmogrification.

As for me, the best I could do was climb Karazhan. My guild was too small so we only managed to try and finish Kara; never tried TK or SSC until the WotLK patch hit.
 
I remember my primary job in many instances was to "Sheep Moon".
Oh man, you made me 'member how overjoyed we got when the different markers patch hit.

Thank god we don't have that shit anymore, attunements where the cumber stone for doing dungeons and raids.

Wildstar took it even further than TBC, can someone bring that table up please?

went googlin
NaNBVbE.jpg

what the shit. I mean, sure, you can discount the first step, obv. Cuz duh. but still, fuuuuck a lotta those checks.

I miss the attunement system and boss "Cleave" abilities.... Added goals and difficulty.

MMO's these days just seem so watered down in comparison to WoW: BC that I can't get interested... Guild Wars 2 was incredible, until I realized someone who spent 400 hours in the game would be on the exact level as someone who just reached max level.

Best thing about it, really. Game made gear easy to obtain and left quite a lot of room for personal skill expansion and experimentation. Sure, the players would be geared the same, but they most likely wouldn't play the same.
 
I never thought the BC attunements were a big deal because if you were raiding your were doing all of that stuff anyway. Getting disconnected all the time on Hyjal was a real problem, though.
 

Aranjah

Member
Farthest my guild got with raiding was Gruul's/Magtheridon's Lair and doing Kara over and over, and then a bit of Zul Aman (but I was a feral druid so I didn't get invited to that one :( ), so I think the only one of these attunements I ever really did at-level was the one for Karazhan. I think I did go back during Wrath and do another one or two of them with some guildies now that we out-leveled the content.

That said, I miss attunements, and I miss the pre-LFR days. I gotta agree with the others in this thread saying it'd be nice if attunements still existed in the form a more basic quest chain, that at most required running some 5-mans. Nothing too ridiculous, but something that shows some initiative that you went and did it, and provides some additional intro lore into the raid you're unlocking.
 

Meia

Member
Attunements also meant you had closer knit guilds, honestly.


Anyone you brought into your guild meant it was another person you may have had to run attunements for, and as a healing officer in our guild, I pretty much did all of them with everyone. This was also the expansion that introduced the daily quest system, and I remember fondly some of the reps they added as the expansion went on. So, when you weren't raiding, you had 5 mans for attunements for others, reputations to grind that rewarded new flying mounts(since flying was also just added), and a lot of different raids to do every week.


LFR wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but this coupled with removing attunements, then throw in server transfers/mergers, and now the rise of "mercenary" players got introduced. These people would join your guild, keep to themselves, and then poof when they found a better guild, using yours as a stepping stone. This did happen in TBC of course because of attunements, but it just got worse and worse as the game got older. Gone were the days of spending like 6 hours in LBRS to get a few people attuned, or 7 hour BRD. Not saying the groups had to be that long, but people were willing to actually stay that long in groups sometimes to EVERYONE could get fully attuned to something. People don't have that kind of patience anymore with instant gear from world quests/lfr.
 
What this accomplished (for good or evil) was a forced social hierarchy which meant not everyone was on the same footing and work had to be put in to be successful.

I remember in vanilla things like 40-man raids on UBRS when it could be done with far fewer people. Many would just "/afk sandwich" and pick up end game type loot.

I stepped down from full time raiding shortly after the launch of TBC. We were world 1st on viscidus (Death & Taxes claims this but the time stamps of the kill were not verified), usa 2nd c'thun kill, and one of only a handful of guilds to complete Naxx40, so it was a pretty "hardcore" guild. (Incidentally we had some of our major raiders server transfer to Death & Taxes so we had an interesting intertwining of players and drama, as yes, WoW drama.)

Maybe it was the elitest in me but I appreciated having to work as a non-raider to see success and progression outside of a raid environment. I tagged along on content when it wasn't bleeding edge, but to get in, it meant I had to put forth effort to even do that.

The reason my mech-engineering googles are rose-tinted was due to the fact that there were so many goals and achievements to be worked on and many could be performed solo, but ultimately social interaction would be required to progress, often times forming in-game and even out of game relationships.

You can make anything look like a spaghetti diagram, but as a player interested in the goals, I was never confused on the task I needed to complete next. Maybe a quick wowhead article to clear things up, but never did I stare at the screen and not know what to do.
 

Iadien

Guarantee I'm going to screw up this post? Yeah.
Meh, that chart is very misleading. Firstly as others have pointed out only one person in the group needs the key to start all the dungeons - so you can forget that, and the rep grinds associated with it. Plus the rep grinds to unblock heroic were not difficult at all.

Also theres some misleading information in this thread - the 4 vials dropping from KT and Vashj was never live at the same time as the instances they unlocked. When Black Temple and Hyjal were added into the game Kael and Vashj both dropped a vial for every raid member.

Really, attunements for TBC were extremely mild. The only issue was everyone needing the vials for tier 6, when the last thing you wanted to be doing each week was killing Kael'Thas.

Go take a look at what Everquest's Planes of Power required. That's an attunement system!

EDIT: http://home.earthlink.net/~brucehalpern/everquest/eqpopflag.html

Each one of those is a 72 person raid, that generally would take an evening to do. In non-instances servers, so you were competing against other guilds. Each boss generally would only spawn once every 3 days.

Yeah, PoP keying was hell. lol RIP life during that shit.
 

Polygonal_Sprite

Gold Member
TBC was the peak of WoW imo.

I loved all the attunement stuff including having to unlock the heroic 5 man dungeons which were actually difficult and challenging. A far cry from the AOE spam Wrath 5 man heroics. I lost interest in the game soon after the Wrath end game but WoW will forever be one of my favourite games of all time!
 
I miss the TBC attunement process because the raid itself "levelling up" and progressing to more and more difficult raids felt awesome as a group.

But from a design perspective, I realize it's a terrible idea as many guilds remained dead in the water from poaching, the 10-25 gap from Karazhan to Gruul/Mag was near-insurmountable (5 people are always going to get left out of something, and bringing up alts was terrible because you had to redo the whole process over.

Legion's an OK replacement for that, with the multiple difficulty levels for all raids, but it's just not the same.

went googlin


what the shit. I mean, sure, you can discount the first step, obv. Cuz duh. but still, fuuuuck a lotta those checks.

The graphic missed step 7a from the Wildstar attunement process:

Your character could randomly be affected by a bug that dropped your attunement progress and would not allow you to restart it. The official fix for this from their support people was you had to reroll your character.

Dear lord Wildstar was terrible
 

JCizzle

Member
I miss the TBC attunement process because the raid itself "levelling up" and progressing to more and more difficult raids felt awesome as a group.

But from a design perspective, I realize it's a terrible idea as many guilds remained dead in the water from poaching, the 10-25 gap from Karazhan to Gruul/Mag was near-insurmountable (5 people are always going to get left out of something, and bringing up alts was terrible because you had to redo the whole process over.

Legion's an OK replacement for that, with the multiple difficulty levels for all raids, but it's just not the same.



The graphic missed step 7a from the Wildstar attunement process:

Your character could randomly be affected by a bug that dropped your attunement progress and would not allow you to restart it. The official fix for this from their support people was you had to reroll your character.

Dear lord Wildstar was terrible

No fucking way lol
 
The graphic missed step 7a from the Wildstar attunement process:

Your character could randomly be affected by a bug that dropped your attunement progress and would not allow you to restart it. The official fix for this from their support people was you had to reroll your character.

Dear lord Wildstar was terrible

LMAO that is one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard.
 
God I accidentally wiped so many Kara runs with my Warlock's Seed of Corruption pulling groups through walls. I had no idea I was doing it at first haha. My guild kept yelling "this place is bugged!"

And for some reason, I remember Murmur being a Heroic group killer quite regularly.
 

Rizzi

Member
I miss the TBC attunement process because the raid itself "levelling up" and progressing to more and more difficult raids felt awesome as a group.

But from a design perspective, I realize it's a terrible idea as many guilds remained dead in the water from poaching, the 10-25 gap from Karazhan to Gruul/Mag was near-insurmountable (5 people are always going to get left out of something, and bringing up alts was terrible because you had to redo the whole process over.

Legion's an OK replacement for that, with the multiple difficulty levels for all raids, but it's just not the same.



The graphic missed step 7a from the Wildstar attunement process:

Your character could randomly be affected by a bug that dropped your attunement progress and would not allow you to restart it. The official fix for this from their support people was you had to reroll your character.

Dear lord Wildstar was terrible

Wow. That's incredibly terrible.
 

Mupod

Member
I remember our guild did the Arcatraz one by having one crack team clear it then summon in the entire guild to the end of the instance one by one.

It wasn't an issue for us because as mostly very hardcore players at the time, everyone did all that just because we wanted gear and something to do. Shattered Halls heroic speedrun was the hardest part due to that boss who drops aggro and one shots your healer.

Back then CC on each pull wasn't considered tedious. It was just how we were used to playing. But yeah, after WOTLK I guess it became the expectation that the default method for dungeon clearing should be mindless spam + aoe. I remember I took a break for a time and came back around Trial of the Crusader, as a tank my dungeon groups got super frustrated because I was marking mobs for CC, lol.
 
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