How bad is the summer slump really?

It's widely agreed upon that WoW is not at its most popular at the moment. People are looking forward to Cataclysm, but the content currently in the game feels worn out. Is there anyone who wanted to see ICC and hasn't actually done so yet? It seems that there's little left to do if you aren't an altoholic or a dedicated achievement hunter. People are playing less and less.

Or are they? I mean, I have yet to see anyone disagree with the notion, but at the same time we don't seem to have anything solid to back it up. As far as I'm aware Blizzard hasn't released any information about their subscription numbers in quite a while, and anecdotal evidence of someone's guild going quiet doesn't really prove anything, does it? Dalaran still seems reasonably busy to me on my server, and while dungeon finder queues on my healers were instant the other day, that doesn't necessarily mean that fewer healers are running dungeons. (Maybe more people have switched to tanking instead?)

As we were discussing the summer slump in my guild, one of my guildies had the brilliant idea of using WoWProgress as an indicator of current raid activity. Raiding isn't all there is to do in the game, but it's definitely an important part. The statistics for my home realm Earthen Ring were an eye-opener for sure.

Let's start with the newest raid, the Ruby Sanctum. It's been out for one and a half months now, and only twelve guilds on my server have cleared it on 25-man, one of them on heroic. Considering that the site has records of no less than 91 Earthen Ring guilds killing bosses in 25-man ICC, that's a pretty poor turnout. Few people seem to care about Halion.

The ten-man stats paint a pretty similar picture. 31 guilds have successfully cleared the Sanctum on ten-man (two of them on heroic), but compared to the 110 guilds that have been active in ICC-10, that's pretty much nothing.

The ICC statistics themselves also show a very obvious slump in activity. Of the forty most progressed 25-man guilds, only eight have recorded any sort of progression in July or August (meaning a new boss kill or an achievement). Before the summer pretty much all of them had at least one progression kill a month, usually more. No less than sixteen of these "top" guilds haven't achieved anything remarkable since May or even earlier. It's unrealistic to think that they just hit a brick wall that they simply couldn't get past, all at the same time and at completely different points of progression. (Only five guilds are on 11/12 heroic.) They just don't seem to have the numbers and motivation to push on anymore.

Again, the ten-man picture is slightly less dire, presumably because these runs are easier to organise and can serve as a fallback for 25-man guilds that end up being short on numbers. But still: of the forty best guilds that are still progressing (that is to say, discounting the two that have killed the Lich King on heroic mode), less than half have killed anything new in July or August. Clearly interest in this format is currently on the decline as well, even if not quite as steeply as in the case of 25-man.

I do think that this is a strong indicator that in-game activity is on a sharp decline, at least on my server. Presumably the statistics for other servers paint a similar picture, though there might be variations of course.

Of course now I wonder how this compares to previous summers, or to the months before the release of the current expansion. I know my guild didn't fall apart the way it did recently back in previous summers, and before the release of WOTLK we were actually franticly trying to clear the Black Temple just before the final nerf. We didn't bother working on the Sunwell anymore after killing Illidan, but that drop in interest happened about two weeks before expansion release, not six months ahead of it. Too bad I don't have any numbers from other guilds for those times.

What are other people's experiences in that regard?

Halion impressions

Yesterday and today I went on raids to clear the Ruby Sanctum on ten-man. They were two different raid IDs, but both consisted of guildies and friends, not always on their mains or in their main spec, but nonetheless solid groups. Neither raid got him down, though we got close several times. Still, I felt pretty bad about our failure, especially yesterday as I also happened to be raid leader on that run.

In hindsight I think that I had nobody but myself to blame for that disappointment though, seeing how I made the mistake of reading the European official raids and dungeons forums before the raid, where a thread had already popped up claiming that Ruby Sanctum was oh so easy, people were supposedly one-shotting the boss in pugs etc., which influenced my expectations accordingly. Don't make the mistake of believing everything on the forums!

I'm not claiming that the fight is the hardest thing since heroic Lich King, but it's not nearly the pushover some people make it out to be either. Basically it's not terribly complex, there aren't a lot of different things to watch out for, but situational awareness is key and if you mess up, you're dead.

As a healer, I can never decide whether I love or hate fights with insta-gib mechanics. On the one hand it's nice to not be expected to heal people through their mistakes; they have to learn how to get it right on their own or die. On the other hand... I can't heal people through their mistakes, and if they don't get it right on their own we wipe. Wah! Or at least that's the way it felt on ten-man, maybe twenty-five man is a bit more forgiving about individual player deaths in this particular case (I wouldn't know as I haven't had a chance to try it yet), but on ten even losing one person can quickly mess up the delicate balance between the two realms in phase three and then things tend to spiral out of control.

I also found it noteworthy that Halion seems to be another one of those encounters that are a lot harder on the healers than on anyone else. In tonight's raid I was tanking the boss in the physical realm and it was a pretty damn dull job really. Pull him into position at the start, go through your maximum threat rotation until he goes into phase two, twiddle your thumbs until he returns for phase three, then rinse and repeat what you did at the start. I suppose tanking him in the twilight realm would be a bit more challenging as you have to watch out for the orbs like everyone else, but since you don't have to worry about anything aside from that I reckon that it can't be that much harder.

On Thursday on the other hand I was playing my priest, and healing in the shadow realm was complete madness. Considerable AoE damage going around at all times, constant range issues with some dps, then someone gets the debuff and you have to check whether they are far enough out yet so it's safe to dispel - all this while still keeping an eye on the shadow orbs, and in the meantime the tank gets gibbed by a breath-and-melee-hit combo if he wasn't topped off while the boss got a little stronger in the shadow realm... it's not exactly on the same level as the Lich King fight, but there's still quite a lot to take in at once and I can't blame people for repeatedly messing up on that part in one way or another (including myself). I'm sure it's something that will come to everyone easily enough with some practice, but certainly not after one or two tries, at least not for me and my guildies. Maybe next week.

Oh, and I definitely can't see this boss being very popular with pugs. This isn't a Sartharion, where it doesn't matter if half your raid gets hit by a flame wall. But then I think we've got a bit spoiled in this expansion, expecting a newly released raid boss to go down after a few attempts or even to be puggable in the first week.