Season of Discovery: The Gatekeeping Problem 

My raid leader alwayss says the best before we pull the boss "dont forget to have fun"

I think it's a compounded effect from the bump in difficulty between BFD and Gnomer. For example: I never had a clean run of gnomer in phase 2. Even the first Gnomer after phase 3 start took over an hour with a few level 50s. The guys I played with didn’t put in the time for research into their rotations, how their abilities work and "What am I doing wrong in this boss?". I didn't care if they didn't have Pre-BIS. The bare minimum, though, is to know how to play your class. I even had to show our resto druid how to play his class. He refused to take advice from others. Something similar happened with one of our enhance shamans. He was full BIS and doing less damage than all the other DPS in our raid by a wide margin. Need I remind you that enhance shamans were dominating phase 2. People who don't care about parses usually don't care about getting better. The whole point of the game is to get better. Whereas it's from gear, levels, or from learning new things. I don't understand the motivation for raiding in people who don't want to progress in the game. Half the battle in classic is just having correct, up to date information. I got tired of having people like this in our raid so I changed raid teams. Now I clear ST easily every time. I just want to play with people who WANT to get better/stronger every week. I don't care about high parses. Its just that, coincidentally, people with high parses WANT to get better.

Good enchants are nigh impossible with the current inflation on a casual base imo

I dont raid but not because of gatekeeping, loving the content man keep it going!

We’re how many weeks into the phase and I haven’t gotten a single Morphaz kill, I can’t commit to 2+ hr raids with my schedule and I haven’t been sent an INV because I have no parses, am I to wait till next phase to do this phases content? I have farmed out pre-bis + including most enchants as a hunter and haven’t gotten lucky enough to stumble into a raid lead who will give a brief explanation of the fight beforehand. Love SOD but the community seems to be deteriorating

The issue is the cost of wipes. Some classes have it easy but others are losing 15+ gold in consumes a wipe

The problem is there is no other way to determine player skills. Apart from asking them.

Just a thought - what if blizz implemented pug mode? Some of the more cordinated mechanics are just made simpler and you get like 1 last piece of loot so sweats don’t cry. That being said who cares ST loot is such minor upgrades haha

yeah I really hate gate keeping, and I am a Boomkin, for me to parse to 90-100 we need curse of shadow applied(it increases arcane damage), but if there is only 1 or 2 locks curse of elements and recklessness is over all better for the raid since more people do physical and fire damage over shadow, holy and arcane. Only good thing to having a boomkin druid is the innervates and dreamstate on the horde side for the nature increase to help the elemental attacks shammies nature attacks.

If they don't have some easy pre bis, easy to get world buffs, they lazy I don't invite. Don't care about parsing

All through classic ive rarely had issues raiding. Get on a high pop realm and find a guild with good raiding hours. These problems everyone talks about come from an expectation of quick and flawless clears. That level of ease requires prebis buffs and decent parses. Otherwise you can simply progress with a guild but expect wiping and maybe some partial clears.

And lots of people don’t have logs because runs they done have not been logged or they haven’t had the opportunity to actually perform in a clean clear. Hardly anyone is pugging now that its cleaved off a bunch of casuals. My guild couldn’t even fill 1 (any)dps spot on a weds night with summons ready to go so we just went with 19

Parsing killed the game for me.

From what i saw Crusader strike is horrible for this. It's a streamer Go GO GO 'LFM Gnomer needs to be 80 parse or better full WB and consumes" the smaller servers that have been killed was more "Hey we just need warm bodies to follow directions." As it should be. does it suck bosses taking twice as long to kill yeah. It sucks more if you don't have the heals for it. So as a metric i can see parsing as some what needed. but my rogue is pulling 800-1k DPS on fights and since our guild isn't optimizing groups i'm parsing 30-60 depending on how fast we as a group can kill the bosses and hour avg St time with potty breaks is 1hour-1h30m. so our parses aren't going to be insane.

It falls back to Blizzard designing these raids. Gnomer and ST are significantly harder than BFD hence more gatekeeping. Not sure why Blizzard made these raids so hard for being “level up” raids.

Once again wrath parsers have to migrate onto infecting servers

I pulled 1.8k dps on my warrior on the 1st boss In sunken temple which was only a 94 parse. You will have raids that are looking to parse specifically but even a warrior parsing 80 on the first boss is doing 1k dps. A mage parsing 95 is doing less than that. So in some cases you'll want a class that has a higher parse because they are simply a lower dps class. Besides all that I am someone who doesn't play with weak auras, dbm, meters, any add-ons besides questie really. That's not any sort of brag either but simply to point out that if you were a new player who never Interacted with Any of those add-ons you can still perform at a high level if you just learn the mechanics of the game. So again I think it comes down to ensuring you have someone who knows how to play the class and not someone who needs to be given a tutorial in the middle of an organized raid.

ppl will show up to a raid regardless, so why not just make the monotonous acquisition of world buffs more accessible? introduce an NPC in a major city that gives you every lvl-relevant world buff, but on daily CD.

Innervate is not needed for parsing mages as the boss dies so fast, also PI does not count for the parse

This is why I play a feral Druid on alliance. I work 60 hours a week and I’m almost max gear besides enchants. Hell I don’t even bring world buffs or potions. I’m not going to die and I do the mechanics though. No I won’t be top dps but I’m not going to die.

Dude theres even gatekeeping for bfd. Literally grps wont bring a lvl 25 cause youre too low

Not sure if sitting in a town/near a flower/talking to a person for WBs is too much of an ask. If you cant put the 10 mins of prep in beforehand why would I think you care about my time?

I don't understand why there's so many toxic players in world of Warcraft when we are all just a bunch of nerdy white dudes. I literally tanked sunken Temple on my rogue in full blues the second week it came out. I got sunken Temple on farm on my rogue tank without a guild. I just pug or fill in with whoever needs. If you look hard enough you'll find the type of players you want to be around. Sometimes you might even have to start your own group because there's nothing but toxicity but hey that's just life.

Gatekeeping is good. Its necessary. Far too many bad and entitled players not willing to do even the most basic of effort to be an effective member of a raid. If you gray parse this game isnt for you. Go play something else.

Listen, as a Gate Keeper myself this video has made my sales skyrocket! I’ve been selling all these old gates I’ve been keeping and they’re flying off the shelves!

I used to be top 3 shaman in classic. I haven’t had much trouble with gate keeping on living flame horde. Even though now I’m a mid parser. I am a healer though. Totally agree people should have world buffs and pre bis. Beyond that gate keeping is definitely cringe.

Depend on server. No problem on my server

You're right, Man. Parsing is cringe in classic, lol!

Raids were gatekeeped in tbc and wrath also, wasnt a problem then. The real problem is that people are just bad, and i dont feel like having someone do 10% of the damage they are capable of doing in my raid. This is not 2005, there are a billion guides of how to play your class and if you are parsing below a 50/60 thats cuz you havent read anything on your class so if you dont put time into your own character why expect 19 other people to?

50 Parse? Seriously? So you only want the top half of the player base? Thats the definition of gate keeping. Can't parse with no gear, and never been in the raid. What do you tell a person who's toon has never been in a parse but has cleared the content? Blizzard needs to completely do away with the API that tracks parsing, and get rid of Damage Meters like "Details". Both of them hurt the game for the large silent minority. Coupled with the large sink/investment required for factioning, consumable costs, and just the inherant raid difficulty/mechanics makes the whole thing tiresome. Hate to say it, player base wants Easy Raids, with good loot, it ain't fun wiping on Erik because the glowy things despawn as you run toward them to avoid his 1hko, TERRIBLE mechanics.