Well that's good news Guru. I was having a ton of fun until it hit me like a brick wall all of a sudden. I was getting zero enjoyment out of Kara, period. And every time I logged on, I'd hear the cries from the Guild about how badly they all want to go.

Even though Gruul was tougher, it was hella fun. Not a lot of trash, and even though the first night we probably spent about 3 or more hours in there, it didn't seem to drag that bad.

See, I liked Kara initially. Cool place, cool fights. But it takes so goddamned long for a casual guild to clear it from start to finish (especially if you're not running with your best geared guildies), and that damn lockout means we run the exact sequence of bosses and trash every single time.

Is there a way you can skip Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, and just farm Curator and beyond?

I'm all about winged dungeons. Hell, have 12 bosses but make 4 different paths you can choose from. I think that's where they are going with Zulu'man, at least I hope. It just seems that Kara is one big week long endurance marathon race that punts you back to the starting line if you don't make it. I'd appreciate it more in short bursts I think.

Also, half way to exalted and all I have to show from Kara is the bracers. Gave the KD to my tank friend. For a while there it was a running joke that Kara simply hated our tanks.

You nailed it completely - we have a great "A" team we ran and owned most heroics in. Then, when in Kara, that "A" team combines with a "C" team, and our results are.. painful. And there's more "C" players every day it seems, and it's our duty to bring that "C" up to "B" and eventually "A". We had to lock down our Guild to absolutely no invites unless you are a healer or tank, because every DPS class under the sun wants a free Kara ticket.

I guarantee if it was just our top performers, we'd have already cleared Kara and been on our merry little way ages ago. The problem comes from the other guildies who we feel compelled to get geared, and it's the easily the biggest obstacle we have (trying to be fair, helping others out). I do love helping out, but I love my sanity even more. Having to run this stuff not only for yourself but for every other member is kinda rough.

I guess anytime you have to compensate for others, the result is going to be dreary. You'll eventually get there, it just takes much longer, and is much more expensive (repair wise).

On a side note, I do have a 70 Lock I use exclusively for PvP (god it's fun) and a 70 Hunter to mess around with. But of course, no one ever wants me to play with those toons (and god forbid have fun!) because I'm the Kara meat shield.

I seriously doubt we'll ever have a guild only Gruul's run, and quite honestly, I don't have the patience or time to care. My only hope is more Heroic 5-Mans and Bite-Sized 10-Man runs for the time being.

I'm starting to think my issue is more with running a Guild instead of being just a tag-along there for the ride

This was the biggest change IMO in the BC.. in the past with 40 man raids up until the really end end game (AQ40 second part and Naxx) you could basically do all the raids with half the people paying attention and contributing in a meaningfully way...Especially if your healers and tanks were the good players you could eventually kill everything in MC and BWL just by sheer endurance.

DPS players prior to BC had it super easy.. they barely had to function for the most part.. now in the BC DPS classes are usually the make or break of all raid encounters.. with enrage timers you no longer have the luxury of taking as long as you want to kill something.. your DPS players have to pay attention.. keep themselves alive.. and continue to dps at a high level.

Our biggest problem is with 50-60 active members, there's only 3 tanks and 3 healers. Being burned out on content wouldn't be a problem if there was a more compelling way to get people to freaking tank or heal in this game, because there would be more than enough "cliques" within a guild to get geared. As it stands now, only a small handful of people hold the key to progression, because people don't want to tank or heal. Something's wrong with that.

And it's near impossible to sap and steal a tank or healer "from the wild". Chances are, if they are good, they are completely owned by a guild. And who the hell stays guildless if they are fully specced prot/holy?

Some of our guildies took the hint and rolled druids and pallies to help offset this a bit, but it's just sad when the majority of people all say the same thing day in and day out "LF Tank and Healer, G2G"

A guest pass system could help if Blizzard ever implemented one.

From a different perspective, as a player who enjoys the Tank role, there's the reverse to the "A" team/"C" team perspective. I was really enjoying playing Sunseeker, learning and leading through the 5-man in my quest to upgrade gear and get Kara ready. After a week where I ran 26 instances (which is a huge amount for me, to say the least.. more than my first 69 levels combined), I hit a bit of a burn out phase. As I was ready to get back at it, it suddenly occurred to me that *I* was the "C" team... and worse yet, I was the "C" tank.. a role that isn't one that being "C" is helpful at all. Yeah, I know.. there's some OTing, etc.. but.. prot paly isn't a good DPSer and healing is also a bit weak. If I am a "C" tank.. imagine what I am as a DPS or Healer.

Now let's say that Krindle actually skipped a run.. that prospect isn't much better (maybe even worse). Why on earth would I want to try to lead/tank in his footsteps with those used to his abilitiy, knowledge, and equipment/gear? No thanks. That place sounds hard enough as it is.

That's one of the reason I am playing Aes so much.

I enjoy the healing role, too - almost as much as tanking. As a healer, though, you are part of a healing team (in the 10-mans). Not the sole focus. Being a "C" with two "A"s healing isn't as bad as being the sole "C" tank.

In truth, a part of me thinks that it would be for the best if us "C"s (as it was put) just learned the ropes on our own, filling in with the "A" team only as needed and as desired for them. I'm having (and have had) a blast playing with the likes of Leap, Ry, Fidd (of late).. and people like Fed, Joe, Trip earlier on (all of whom are well on their way to being "A" listers by now, probably ).

I can't speak for others not on the A-List, but I do know that the last thing I would want is for the hardcore GWJers to feel obligated to help me gear up. I have fun when we get even a partial GWJ run going (with pug fill-ins)... but that's the point. I have fun. I would rather endure the worst pug than drag a friend into a group who wasn't going to enjoy themselves along the way. I'd rather never group with someone than be responsible for their loss of enjoyment in the game.

Anyway... it's not easy being lower tier, either. There's not just pressure for the "A" list to help the "C", but also pressure for the "C" to live up to "A" levels.

All that said, I have no complaints about Blackhand GWJ Alliance. There's a lot of good people and we have good fun when we get to group. I just wanted to point out that being less than the cream isn't so easy, either. And, unlike most roles, the pure Tank is harder to be enthusiastic about when the guild has already designated someone else as the one.

My priest is almost exalted with Violet Eye, and I've got zero loot from Karazhan so far, but thanks to PMC/Whitemend with a bunch of 70 blues I'm able to handle the whole place anyway. In the old days, you didn't have a chance against Domo/Rag if you were still in dungeon blues. I recently gquit* and don't miss Karazhan a bit, it is like they forgot to design in the carrot and included two sticks instead.

*Pro tip: When your main priest hasn't had any healing loot drops ever, don't give the first Gloves of Saintly Blessings in six months to your IRL druid friend there on his second run. Then the next week, especially don't then announce the runs will be skipping Attumen from then on, then refuse to give your priest the first usable Tier 4 glove token he's ever seen because "the Gloves of Saintly Blessings are better for priests." I'm just sayin'.

That's part of my continuous improvement way of thinking. However, before we did our "4man" run, I was at all the required numbers for a main tank - 102.4% (uncrushable), 490 defense (uncrittable) and over 11.5k unbuffed hp. I had to go BEYOND Kara to get another upgrade in the meantime - I bought plans for Boots that you can only get in SSC & The Eye, but that was the only upgrade I got while I was waiting. I got sidegrade swords for different encounters (high def, high spell damage & high stam), resistance gear for gimmick bosses (pretty much 300 for every element), and healing gear far in preparation where a Pally tank is not designed to be. But there were no upgrades to my gear left - none!

As it stands now, the only way for Krindle to improve is to run PvP to get a better threat generating weapon, yet as we've seen so far, it is hardly needed for the rest of our time in Kara. The stats I have right now are enough to take on Gruul or Mag (13.2k hp unbuffed, 40%+ avoidance, 15k armor, 230spell damage). - two raids above Kara. And, once I get decked out in the other 4 drops Kara can provided, he's ready to tank SSC & The Eye. So yes, it was "helping people get up to our point", it still is, and we finally feel done with Kara, we'll have to get 15 more people to that point to go to Gruul's Lair (or Zul'Aman if it's out by then).

And Sun, I understand being a "C" tank, and Prot Pallies are a very difficult C-tank to play, since you literally need a drop from every dungeon, and they are all rare drops (<10%). To me, it's tanking on Hard Mode, since you need to know alot more about the class then other tanks (no offense to warriors and druids, but their itemization and talents for tanking are both easier to obtain, it's just the way the classes are designed).

I was actually having a conversation about this earlier on how great it is that I'm not the only tank to take that material, and full GWJ groups are getting set up that don't need one of the people who got exalted there four months ago. It's probably giving you much better skills then having an overgeared player tagging along. I think you guys are doing a great job

Original statement corrected.

Maybe Jut and Crazy (the others of the original 4) feel they've reached that point, but I'm still trudging along with the rest.

Well, I know that I'm having fun right now again. I think I'm somewhere down in the below D list though. I enjoy tanking, but I think I'm doing something wrong if I ever lose aggro. It's a bit of an unrealistic expectation when running with DPS classes that are 5-6 levels higher. Only 5 levels to go now until I can think about getting on the C list. Woohoo!

I burned out on raiding with my DPS class before BC came out and just killed the game for me. I stopped for 6-8 months and am really enjoying things again. The people you're with help a lot, but it's not all of it. You have to have something you're looking forward to. I started dreading everytime I logged in, but didn't realize how bad it was until I stopped playing. Find something fun that you don't have to force, it makes the rest tolerable if not even fun again. When you start dreading things, you fixate on the dread and it just snowballs.

Can't disagree with anything said here. I've been MTing for our guild since the day WoW released, and after tanking everything from Wailing Caverns to Tier 5 content, Karazhan is by far the most monotonous thing I've seen.

Blizzard made a horrible decision to design TBC so that you have to gear up for 25 man content in a 10 man dungeon with a lockout timer.

Karazhan is basically the Strat/Scholo/UBRS of TBC. Imagine how horrid gearing up for Molten Core wold have been back in the day if Strat + Scholo + UBRS was all 1 huge instance that you could only do once per week, and you couldn't get your Robe/BP off of General Drakkisath at the end of UBRS until you spent the 5-6 hours clearing Strat Scholo and UBRS up to that point.

Our guild is to the point that 90% of our raiders that regularly participate in 25 man content only need 1 or 2 more items from Kara...but theres no other way to get them so we have to keep spending hours a week in the place just hoping that the random number generator is favorable to us this week.

Kara should have been either half as long, or split up into 2 instances (front door and back door being on separate instances) with no lockout. If people need the Prince for his Tier 4 helmets, they can just run the 2 hour second instance from Curator to Prince every night until they get it.

Very poor design planning, but once you get past Kara it does get a lot more interesting, assuming you can get 20-25 competant people together at the same time.

Holy crap, I feel like my mom just caught me looking at porn.

How did he get in here??

I have another analogy that I took from Ky's post. Kara is BRD and you have to run the WHOLE thing!!

Again, the truth be spoken! I spent a Sunday soloing in BRD from 8am to about 6pm solid, looking to do the smelting Dark Iron Ore. In hindsight it was a complete waste of time, but that's how long it took me to clear out everything in the run. That's a solid 10 hours. Kara, I figure on a good day, 3 hours to do everything up to and including Opera, and 5 hours to do everything up to Prince. Figure in another hour or so to have Nightbane, and any issues that come up - puts you at 9 hours. 3x the time of normal dungeons on heroic. I gotta wonder what they were thinking. And now they're adding Zul'Aman as another 10man to mirror Kara...does intellect factor into this design?

Thank...GOD!
The part that's probably going to bother me about this is that it's supposed to be AFTER you become Kara geared. Doesn't really help the grind, but I'm hoping its more of a reward for going through that horrid...horrid place.

I was also trying to see what we could do in this situation. While I'm having a pretty easy time with my 'lock (24/37/0, currently 49, averaging 5 levels a week), it doesn't help our healing issue. Likewise, even if I rolled a healer, we would be unable to run without the tanks to do it, and since i'm filling that role already, it's kinda counter-productive. Hopefully my lock can help get another healer and tank into the fold, so that I have the option to go with the lock if our tanking/healing bases are covered.