How much of an impact did Legendary items and high leveled Artifact weapons have on your clear? Do you think you would still get world first if no one on your team had Legendary items and no +5%-15% additional damage from the Artifact Weapons?
Obviously all the legendaries and 5% dmg increases were necessary for the World First kill. But if those things didn't exist in the game, the bosses would have been tuned a bit lower to still say relatively at the same difficulty. The only problem is seeing how big of a difference there is from guild to guild due to rng of legendaries and AP farming. And unfortunately it is quite a bit, which kind of ruins the fun of the whole thing. I wish Blizzard would have reduced the benefits that you got from these 2 systems, but now it is just too late.
How much gold does progression wiping incur?
A LOT. However the main cost this time around (well as with most expansion starts I guess - just that this time the garrison farming had exploded the prices) was consumables. The cost of consumables for EN was disgusting :D
Each augment rune was several thousand gold and you have world quests rewarding less than 100 gold... We provided everyone in the guild with 700k gold at the start of the expansion to help out their personal preperation.
What is your opinion on post-Paragon level AP farming? I understand you want to get every edge possible, but surely as the level keeps climbing the return per time might at some point be better invested elsewhere.
What else could it be invested in that is the question? Unfortunately farming Mythic+ is the only thing to do, AP, chance on legendary and gear. All progress raiders will be trying to max out that paragon level. If you don't then you are at a competitive disadvantage before even setting foot in the raid. What this means is that sadly we need to farm hundreds of mythic+
How many weekly hours of /played go into being a world first guild?
Normally I would say not that many due to the content being on farm = a few raids a week to clear the raids. However Legion has been crazy so far due to the AP grind. You could say that the hour requirement is almost a full time job until Nighthold (so for the first 4-5 months of release). Gearing multiple alt characters for Nighthold split clears also adds up the time requirement. I would say roughly 20-40 hours a week right now just on maintenance and AP farm mode.
Ghostcrawler mentioned that he sees potential in competitive PvE. Don't you guys think that it's time to talk to Blizzard and advertise the idea of competitive, profitable PvE?
First of all in terms of the World First Race, the problem has always been that if there are guilds who want to do whatever it takes for the number 1 spot, they will not want to stream their progression live, which is the only real way to make a profitable PvE scene.
Now for the PvE races outside of progression. This has been an idea which we have discussed a lot in the past. And there have been some PvE races which were quite popular. Unfortunately it is really hard to organize such events, as it involves a lot of people (at least 40 if it is just 2 guilds racing), and you see in other esports how things go wrong when it is just 10 players with constant pauses due to technical failures. Now apart from that, it also is hard to have set rules that would make the race fair since gear is a big factor. Ideally it would be nice from Blizzard to have some form of server, like the tournament one they had in the past, where people would have access to the same gear. We are of course hoping that Blizzard will help making these races easier for the community, or even better organize some themselves like they did for Blizzcon in the past, but sadly it seems like it isn't something they focus on right now.
What do you guys think seperates someone who is in a top 500 world guild and someone in a top 50-100 guild?
What do you look for in trialling members outside of good parses and relevant experience?
Commitment is a big part. If you can't take time off work/uni and in general irl for at least 10 days during progression, then even if you are the best player in the world, it doesn't really matter sadly. Also, preparation is a huge part, you need to have 5 alts and keep them all relatively good in terms of gear/artifact traits/legendaries etc. Other than that, you need to have a good attitude towards the guild. A lot of players want to focus on their game alone, trying to max out their dps and look good on the meters, but realizing when you need to focus on the raid more than just yourself is essential. An easy example is looking at who killed the adds properly. Or on the other side, who was AoE whoring on the blobs on Ilgynoth when he shouldn't have.
I have always said to people that there is no magic trick to becoming a top guild raider. If you really want to do it, then it is like 50% commitment, 25% personality, 20% skill, 5% secret sauce
