09-21-2007, 11:00 PM
Attunements are pointless and annoying. I surmise they were intended to prevent the kind of progression we'd see in the latter days of WoW 1.0 (the typical BWL clear, AQ40 clear to Huhuran, +Anub and Razuvious guild). I never really saw the harm in it, though. Allowing guilds to zone in and take out a pinata or two in Naxx really helped broaden the appeal of the place; if Naxx had required C'thun down, I imagine that the (already small) percentage of people who'd ever seen the inside of Naxx would have been cut in half, at least.
A problem that I've had personal experience with, despite being in a top-end guild, is the wrench attunements throw into recruitment. It's not possible for a BT/Hyjal guild to recruit without, in effect, scheduling a guild event to clear boring old content that offers no upgrades. Consequently, we've had to postpone recruitment and turn away qualified applicants because it's just not worth the pain to attune them to content we're doing. In that sense, attunements have even made it hard for the most progressed guilds to get past early content, despite our best efforts to.
Only the most snobbishly elitist guilds in the world support attunement in its current form. It's one of the many ways in which, I agree, Blizzard has made raiding incredibly hostile to casuals in TBC. It's way, way worse than WoW 1.0's 40 man raids ever were.
A problem that I've had personal experience with, despite being in a top-end guild, is the wrench attunements throw into recruitment. It's not possible for a BT/Hyjal guild to recruit without, in effect, scheduling a guild event to clear boring old content that offers no upgrades. Consequently, we've had to postpone recruitment and turn away qualified applicants because it's just not worth the pain to attune them to content we're doing. In that sense, attunements have even made it hard for the most progressed guilds to get past early content, despite our best efforts to.
Only the most snobbishly elitist guilds in the world support attunement in its current form. It's one of the many ways in which, I agree, Blizzard has made raiding incredibly hostile to casuals in TBC. It's way, way worse than WoW 1.0's 40 man raids ever were.