Go play solo right now in TBC classic and let me know how geared you get.
Primal nethers are even still BoP drops from heroic dungeons at this stage.
Thought about it, but TBC classic wouldn’t be like how TBC was, I was told. It’s mostly raidloggers with generally a deserted open world. That didn’t sound fun to me, but I was interested at the time so I asked on the forums a couple months ago.
I do know that in TBC I was able to acquire decent honor gear on my own and could survive pretty well in BGs and open world.
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Give it a shot, you may like it. I enjoy it, its a different type of game that is enjoyable for different reasons.
You should also post about getting decent honor gear on the TBC forums. They could use the laugh.
How am I wrong? Unless something changed in TBC Classic, you’re able to acquire the last season’s arena gear with honor points, and that gear was quite good for PvP. I didn’t do much in TBC PvE-wise but I could always count on having fun in randoms in that expansion because of that resilience gear.
I was told that dungeon and group quest groups in Vanilla content (the stuff you gotta level through to get to BC) were basically non-existent though so I don’t think I want to give TBC classic a try.
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The honor rate is incredibly slow, and because most of the players aren’t awful this time around and most have raid weapons and offsets. That along with conquest gear, especially now in s3 gear which adds armor pen and cloth armor increases, is smoking anyone in old s2 gear.
Slow like makes honor farming a full set in retail look like light speed.
I guess it is different this time around because I don’t remember it being that bad back in TBC. ‘shrug’
Maybe one day I’ll be able to PvP again, somewhere.
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Players are different.
Information is too widespread.
YouTube was only a year old when TBC launched originally for perspective.
Everything is mathed out.
I enjoy it for what it is, but it’s not at all like when I played it originally. Can’t get that experience back 
Yup I realize that it wouldn’t be the exact same thing. I was genuinely interested a couple months ago though so I did actually make a post asking about how things were, but the answers I got weren’t very encouraging so I just never gave it a shot. With everything being so meta-driven, raidlogging being the norm, and the open world being deserted, it just honestly doesn’t sound fun.
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Guilds, like everything else, need to adapt and compete to be viable for the world and environment today. The problem so many people aren’t getting is guilds flourished because there were no other options for players…you didn’t have amazing tools we have today like cross realm grouping and robust websites/applications that greatly increased communication potential. You didn’t have tools like the current LFG tool which is in no way perfect but WAY better than the “tool” that existed before. There is a reason people didn’t use it and instead spammed trade and local chats for people to do stuff with.
Guilds are an archaic system that “can” be beneficial for some but are USUALLY built and favored to the GM and officers who get to flex their power and “rule” over the members down to the point where they literally have every say whether you are allowed to stay or not.
Notice how the means to prop guilds up basically amount to bribes or flat out game advantages “solo” players won’t get unless they submit themselves. No, it should fall to the community to make guilds succeed and you wanna know how that is done? Be better for the PLAYER at the cost of those in charge.
Build a guild that guarantees everyone who joins will get their AOTC and KSM achievements. Offer members perks like all consumables bought and paid for by the guild. Setup runs that focus on getting as many inexperienced and/or undergeared folks in and work your schedules around when THEY can run as much as possible. Plan and schedule cool guild events for everyone to just come and do something and have fun.
You aren’t the next Method so stop acting like you deserve the cream of the crop players and getting your tiny willies all riled up demanding to see their UI’s and past parses and making the applicant jump through hoops to be worthy of YOU and instead realize YOU need to be worthy of THEM.
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I was a solo player forever, but holy hell, joining a guild and a discord community really does make the game feel 1000x better.
You’re able to chat and play, find people for raids, M+, PVP, and generally build decent relationships as you spent more time together.
And then you have people to play with in other games as well.
I’d never go back to being solo, it’s terrible in comparison.
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There are people and guilds out there who don’t mind teaching new people. Some heroic guilds kind of rely on it to keep the raid team full. There is a fine line however between helping someone learn the game and not being able to kill a boss because someone or even a couple people have no idea how to do it. There was an AOTC guild I used to raid in that would start the night with whoever wanted to come, assuming we didn’t have more than the max allowed and you’d get to stay and see the fights until he were clearly hitting a wall. You’d get like 4 or 5 pulls to see if you could figure it out without getting to the point of keeping the raid from killing bosses. If you couldn’t figure it out then watch some videos, talk to some of the better raiders, and try again next week.
This is not how all guilds are and another example of a myth that needs dispeled. Which is why it’s good to open up communication.
No one is asking for solo players to be at a disadvantage. And most of the conversation here is how to connect with the players better.
No one in this thread has remotely acted this way, so I’m not sure why you’re raging like this. I encourage you to read the discussion.
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I read through it all you have my support
You’re correct that some of the issues with guilds is the variety of content they try and focus on. We run a PvP focused group that has a very casual raid and mythic + scene. The majority of our members only PvP and that’s fine because we’ve embraced it as our guild type.
The guild itself has a very active gchat and very active discord chat, members group together constantly, we’re supportive of each other, and congratulatory when someone bumps up to their next pvp tier.
We have 2 active RBG teams that run on Tues/Thurs at 7EST, and then we run another group on Mondays at 8 for newer/inexperienced players or for people to take alts. There’s also a ton of arena support with people helping each other out all the time. The experience level in the guild runs from people new to PvP all the way up to Glad and everyone gets along fine.
Guilds can work as long as you have a focused goal in mind, and the guild leadership sets the example by making people feel welcomed and included.
Also, since i’m here if this seems appealing to anyone you can find us on (US) Lightnings Blade, the guild name is General Goods.
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Why can’t you make your own guild? You seem to always ignore the part when I say you can make your own. Being guildless is already viable, you can do a lot if not everything without being in a guild now. You still have to be social, you cannot get around that if you want to do any type of group content. Besides the biggest benefits of being guildless is not having to deal with guild drama or playing around a guild schedule.
Players have all the power but it depends on the amount of work or effort you want to put forth. It just seems you don’t want to put any effort into either looking for guild or making one but you want incentives for doing nothing. Lastly no one is forcing you to do anything, it is optional game play. If you end up picking a bad guild and staying in it, that is a choice you made. It is not something that has been forced on you.
I think something that might be missing from the post. It’s the evolution of combats addons.
Yes they are helpful, but in the long run they have become a detriment. Fights become more complicated, people are incentivized to min max every thing (or forced). Teaching fights has become a rare thing, now you either know it and have the addon, or you don’t get the invite.
The addon makes the community think of players as assets, means to an end rather than a fellow player to have fun discovering and overcoming the challenges of the fight ahead.
For me, the first question is “Do guilds have intrinsic value or are they a response to playing the game?”
If they have intrinsic value then yes, they need to be propped up and encouraged by Blizz to support a function that is very much a part of the game. At one time they were with 40 person raids, questlines that were nearly impossible to solo and a player base large enough that guilds run by jerks could be abandoned knowing that there were better one’s out there.
Modern WoW isn’t like that any more. The player base is much smaller, the player base reflects the deep fractures of the larger culture and the ranges of ages, interests and time have created huge spreads of wants and needs of players but without a player base large enough to accommodate all the splinters.
Before the end game was pretty much raiding but with so much history, that isn’t the case for casuals like me. In BFA my endgame was completing all class halls. In Shadowlands, it is currently completing all the raid based mog achievements. I’m having a lot of fun and the gear I get just playing world stuff gives me the freedom to make up for my lack of genuine skill and have fun rather than get frustrated at 70 year old reflexes trying to raid or do M+.
Likewise my need for socializing has diminished over time. A retired I.T. worker not being social? What is this world coming too? Like the Murloc Discord channel. Great people, some very intelligent conversations and total people overload. Being a part of an active guild would not work for me.
TL:DR
Too few people and too many things to do for guilds to be an intrinsic value. Too many opportunities to solo fun stuff to make them a support necessity. I think guilds are very good and I deeply miss my guildies of years past. Just don’t want to start over.
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I agree with your comment on explaining mechanics.
We have been teaching mechanics, but along with that is the complexity of gearing and understanding how each spec works. [1]
Back in the day, if a guild member linked two pieces of gear in chat you could tell with 99% certainty which one was better just by examining them and asking a couple of questions. What spec are you, and what content are you doing. Now… Sometimes it is easy, but a lot of times it isn’t. Even the online guides will point you to a simulator.
I can do that, but I’m a SW programmer with ~45 years of experience. Someone that doesn’t have a full time STEM job, and just wants to kill dragons with friends? Not so easy.
Back to mechanics. Some of our returning players quit after WoTLK or Cata. So SoD normal is their return to raiding after being gone for years. I think SoD is a harder raid than ICC. If you had played straight through the expansions I don’t think you’d notice that difference. So I think the fights are harder, the classes take more to get the best numbers out of them, people have less time, and they are older. 
In addition some times their expectations are out of line. You can’t just jump in and pick this stuff up in a couple of weeks. Some people forget it may take a few months to figure things out.
In Cata/MoP if someone was having trouble, and they were playing a character I was familiar with, we could head over to the training dummies in SW. In an hour or so we could work the kinks out and get people back on track. I can recall a couple of hunters in our guild that got booted from Cata Heroics for low DPS. One guy was clocking ~1500. An hour later he queued into a Cata heroic and was running over 6k while doing mechanics. He was pretty excited. Then he left us to go off to a raiding guild on our server. lol
Now, things aren’t so simple.
All of the above means the leadership job of getting a team through the current content, while rewarding, seems (to me) to be a little bit harder these days.
[1] I spent yesterday afternoon/evening taking new players through the steps to unlock the runecarver, getting a memory, and getting the soul ash to craft a Legendary. There was a lot of google searches, and back and forth to figure out where they were in the quest line(s). On the other hand because they were starting out in Torghast, we had to start climbing at level 1 as group. So they all got their perfect run on their first Fracture Chamber run.
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Guilds are an outdated concept that actually serve no purpose outside of organized play for more difficult content.
Blizz did this to themselves.
EQ guilds had a very important purpose, as there was no instancing until PoP at the very end.
But once you remove the actual need for a community device like a guild by making the entire point of the game instance driven, ya your guild membership will fall.
You could revitalize it by making guilds more geographic based. For example it’s pretty clear you can tell where I’m from. If there was a way to link Blizz accounts with other accounts IRL that would prove to be worth while imo.
Are there guilds out there that will not just abandon a struggling player though? Say I want AotC, but I’m not a great player. Even though I try my best, sometimes I panic when lots of stuff is going on and big things are on the line. I’ve gotten literal chest pains before when we’ve gotten close to big kills like that. You know how typically intense 4th phases of final heroic bosses can get.
Because I have the charisma of a wet noodle.