Double post, in which I fail on Sindragosa and worry about the future of my guild

Sindragosa

I read a twitter comment (a tweet?) from one of the tanking bloggers a few weeks ago about how the iceblock mechanic in Sindragosa is really unforgiving. I have now discovered that this is true.
It's a really punishing fight, and our attempts last night were not helped by the fact that I was tanking (for the first time in about 4 weeks - very rusty) and I had horrible spiky lag.

I wiped the raid twice. Firstly - and here's a pro tip - the boss casts frost breath just after the fifth stack of mystic buffet (amusingly mispronounced as "mystic buffay" by just about everyone in the entire world - like it's an all-you-can-eat restaurant for wizards). This means if you are swapping tanks at five stacks you either have to run in front of the boss before you taunt and risk eating the frost breath (so both tanks get hit for 30k), or you have to wait until the boss has cast frost breath before taunting. The alternative is to do what I did, taunt the boss a nanosecond before she breathes, ensuring that she breathes on the raid.

The second wipe was some sort of crazy taunt bug - I taunted, so my taunt was on cooldown (and my MT refused to let me vigilance him for some reason), but after the fixate period ended the boss switched targets to the MT (who was hiding behind an iceblock). I used challenging shout but by then of course every one was dead.

That bug is infuriating. It may be due to lag, or it may be that my taunt is missing (although that's really unlikely since the boss definitely targeted me). I'm tempted to glyph taunt to be honest.

Blue post

I saw this today. Now what does GC mean by that? I applaud the fact that he recognises that 25 man guilds have a massive advantage when it comes to acquiring emblems, since emblems are acquired twice as fast when you can also run a 10 man raid on your off nights. It's frustrating for me to have emblem costs set artificially high because it's assumed you are running both.

Nevertheless, how can the problem be fixed? The most obvious, and the one that GC seems to be implying, is that you will be forced to choose between 10 man and 25 man raiding - ie that the raid lockout will cover both 10 man, 25 man and heroic settings. This will absolutely destroy many 25 man guilds - including ours.

Gevlon posted a while ago that the only way a non-hardcore raiding guild can survive is if there is a core of dedicated competent players - raid leader/organiser, MT, at least two good healers, some dps who can be relied upon etc. These people may get frustrated at the lack of 25 man progress, but the guild develops a guild-within-a-guild which runs a higher level 10 man team. These guys therefore get their hardmode loot and their achievements via the 10 man group. This seems reasonable to me, and is certainly the case in my guild. Will these guys remain in the guild if they can only raid one lockout per week and they can't get past Rotface because of some idiots who can't kite oozes? I think not.

Making one overall lockout will therefore in my view destroy a huge number of longstanding guilds.

A better answer would be to grant emblems via weekly quests, or some other similar mechanic to ensure that you only get emblems the first time you complete part of a dungeon, in whatever size raid.

Let's hope that Blizzard come up with a solution to the problem that doesn't kill off guilds.