When progressing through a raid a challenging point will appear for many guilds. When do we extend? Time is a very sensitive resource that must be managed as much as performance.
Let’s say a typical guild will have 3 nights of raid progression.
This tier, if they were starting to pull Sylvanas for the first time, their options are:
Extend: Have all 3 nights on Sylvanas.
Re-clear: Spend 2 nights on re-clear and 1 night on Sylvanas.
The option you choose heavily depends on how valuable that re-clear will be in terms of how much raid power you will obtain which facilitates progress on Sylvanas.
The skip for this raid gets you past Painsmith and onto Kel’Thuzad after killing Kel’Thuzad four times.
Historically, raid skips would get you past the boss you have defeated, essentially skipping past them. However, the past few raid skips require you to do so much to obtain so little value for progression and by the time you’ve got them, they’re largely useless.
To use the above example again, by the time that guild has killed Kel’Thuzad four times and obtained the skip, they don’t need the loot anymore and would 100% opt to extend, however if that skip was obtained from Painsmith and took you to the same spot, and Kel’Thuzad enabled a Death Gate to Sylvanas’ platform you’d have a lot more flexibility in how you’d approach this scenario. You may opt to just skip Painsmith each week as that could be a barrier for your guild to re-kill consistently or focus on killing Kel’Thuzad 4 times so you can focus farm specific bosses before returning to Sylvanas.
Time Management is the game, and these skips do not respect your time as a raid team on progression.
35 Likes
If I’m understanding this right - are you suggesting 2 separate skips for the raid?
Yes, two seperate skips.
If we take a look back in time to HFC when we had portals to help mobilise around a large space this is the approach that was taken and IMO it was ideal as it allowed you to control the pace of progression more so than essentially, clear the entire raid 4 times and you can skip half of it.
Kill Gorefiend 4 times, portal to the 2nd floor (past Gorefiend) opens at start
Kill Mannoroth 4 times, portal to Mannoroth opens at the start
9 Likes
Some additional points to add here.
Raid skip unlock quests should apply to the current, and all lower difficulties. This is currently the case for most WoD/Legion raids like Emerald Nightmare. For some reason, since Antorus, the quests were modified to only provide the skip for the current difficulty. I would very much like to see this enhancement applied to all previous, current or future raids with skips. I am not particularly fond of having to run a raid 4 times on each individual difficulty. Even better would be for the raid skips to be account wide… 
Also, speaking of Emerald Nightmare, it was modified some time ago to instantly complete the raid skip quest in a single run (you now receive all 4/4 essences of clarity). For all other legacy raids with skips, please do the same
12 Likes
If we ignore boss balance and the eventual roadblocks that make the progression harder, I would even say that we could get one skip per wing of the raid, following the same template than the LFR?
Having to complete the thing 4 times is generally enough for the bosses to stop being interesting, and skipping them could make better use of raiding time: with the weekly lock, there is at least one month between the first down and the skip being available, which is already long enough. If a guild (or player in the context of the quest) downed Tarragrue, The Eye and The Nine 4 times, I think they earned the right to start at Ner’zhul if they want it?
This wouldn’t even disturb the RFW, which we expect to be completed in less that one month anyway.