Hello,
I am going to try to explain here in the most basic terms why the 30 instance per/24 hour limit is very damaging for raiding feral druids. My hope is that even if you don’t agree with me, you will at least understand my arguments whether you play a druid or not:
If you raid as a feral druid like I do, then you might spend quite a bit of time per/week farming Manual Crowd Pummelers (MCP) for raiding. The typical use of MCPs is 1 per boss (excluding, for now, longer bosses like Chromaggus and Nefarian and also exluding wipes for now). So assuming you’re a dedicated feral raider, doing Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Onyxia, and Zul’Gurub once each per/week, you’d be fighting 28 bosses and would want 28 MCPs (I don’t think the use of MCPs is required in Zul’Gurub, but for the sake of argument lets say they are). MCPs have a 33% drop rate from the Crowd Pummeler boss in Gnomeregan. This means you would have to do roughly 84 Gnomeregan runs per/week to maintain this number.
Each Gnomeregan run takes roughly 4 minutes. 4 x 84 = 336 minutes of farming Gnomeregan, or 5.6 hours. However, as the instance lockout is 5 per hour, in actuality it’s more like 16.8 hours of being LOCKED to exclusively Gnomeregan (84 / 5).
For the sake of argument, lets assume I have a 9am-5pm job, I raid twice a week on Monday and Tuesday, and I don’t have time for any MCP farming on raid days. This leaves 5 days to farm MCPs. Obeying the 30 instance/per 24 hour lockout, this means I have to complete 84 runs in 3, 4, or 5 days. The 3-day example would mean between 6pm - 12pm Wed/Thurs/Fri, “playing” the game for me would be repeatedly logging on for 20 minutes every hour to do Gnomeregan runs. When before the 30-instance lockout I could log on all-day Saturday and get all the Gnomeregan runs done in 1 day, and then spend a few hours the other days doing enjoyable things in game like PVP, leveling professions, farming gold in instances, leveling alts, etc.
I could split it across 5 days, doing 17 Gnomeregan runs per day. But then if I want to do any other dungeon grinding (DM runs, BRD coffer runs, etc) or get boosted on an alt, I’m now limited to 13 non-Gnomeregan dungeon runs per day, or less than three “one-hour lockouts” across every character. And this doesn’t even take into account wiping due to raid progression, or bosses that require multiple MCPs.
Lets say I’m progressing in BWL with my guild and we wipe on every boss twice. That’s 12 MCPs + Chromaggus and Nefarian require at least 2 MCPs each, so that’s 24 MCPs total instead of 8. That’s an extra 36% of the total farming I’d have to do that week, ~132 Gnomeregan runs total instead of 84, and nearly 5 days of being exclusively locked to Gnomeregan across EVERY CHARACTER.
I don’t know what the future holds for AQ/Naxxramas progression. I don’t know if my guild (and guilds in general) is going to be wiping on bosses for 1 week or 10 weeks. I don’t know if every boss is going to require a MCP. But you’re basically telling me for the foreseeable future that I could be spending an indeterminate number of weeks doing NOTHING BUT GNOMEREGAN RUNS and raiding??? ZERO instance runs to farm gold or crafting materials. ZERO instance runs on alts.
I understand that this is a band-aid to try to stop botting, but it doesn’t work. These people have multiple accounts going all the time. Even if the accounts are dungeon locked to 30, They’re running bots in the open world to level, in BGs, selling fresh 60 accounts etc, creating new totally free accounts using WoW tokens and doing it all over again. The 30 instance per/24 hour limit should not exist. It will destroy people’s enjoyment of playing a feral druid by severely restricting how we can spend our game time outside of raiding. Please remove it and come up with a different fix to stop the botters.
