Guild movement: Goal vs reality

How about calling for making HSTR simmable? It turned out ok for rancor.

Goodness, no.

With Rancor the gear rewards are equivalent to 11th place, but in HSTR the gear rewards are terrible unless you're in top 10, and they're not good unless you're in the top3. Even then I've had quite a few top3 finishes net me mostly garbage. It's not that the 3 or so salvage of all those g12 pieces are useless, every salvage adds up, but they're not enough when the rest of the gear is so frequently bad.

In my 215 mil gp guild, maybe 10 to 15 actually attack HSTR, its not that hard to get top 10 if you are active since the raid lasts about 45 minutes.

In my guild p1 takes about 20-45 minutes depending on who is hitting when. Then p2 goes in 5 minutes and p3 in another 5. If you don't have time to simply refresh over and over waiting for the moment to put in the best team for whatever your strategy is, you're not going to do well.

You can't expect people to enjoy sitting on their thumbs for up to half an hour, just tapping refresh and checking the percent left in the phase. And if you're in the lower half of your guild, it's NOT easy to finish top 10, even if you do engage in sitting around waiting for your optimal opportunities.

If I was Merc'ing I could score 60M easy, and I don't know what my best score would look like. As it is, I haven't gotten 60M even once. My best ever is only 57M, and as time goes on getting up that high gets harder, not easier, because more people have teams ready that can whomp p2 and p3 quickly, so it's ever more likely that you'll miss your moment.

I can finish 15% of p1 and then do 25% of p2 with JKR Jedi, I can take another 20% with one other squad (there are a couple options), if I don't want to save it for p4 kitchen sink, then I can finish 40% of p2 with clones. My clones aren't good enough to completely finish p3, but my death storm squad does 100% of p3 and then scores big in p4. But I never get a chance to do all that because everyone else is hitting as well.

Now imagine if you don't have great squads. Say you're in my guild, but hitting for about 12-16% in p2 as your best team. If you hit first with RJT in p1 that might be enough to get you in the top 10, but probably not. And we only have about 20ish people hit each HSTR.

Do you really want to sit on your thumbs for half an hour doing refreshes so you have a 10% chance of getting in the top 10?

Probably not.

So maybe it just seems easy to score in the top 10 because
a) the people who can't score in the top10 know that and they're the ones who aren't trying,
and
b) your 215m guild isn't like mine, and p2 and p3 aren't gone in 10 minutes flat, so everyone who wants to hit has time to hit before the next phase starts. I guarantee you it's not like that in more competitive guilds. And we're only 235-240m.

It's the difference between 1-2 people who can crush the raid and can afford to allow others a chance to hit before they go in and having 8-10 people who can crush the raid, so they have to jump in right away or someone else is going to solo the phase. Sure only 4-5 of those people actually score 35m+, but people have work, etc. or just walk away for a couple minutes and miss an entire phase. The people who are competing for the top3 make it incredibly difficult for the rest of folks to get in good hits.

So when people choose to blow off the raid instead of spending an hour fighting for a 10% chance (or less) at decent rewards, I don't criticize them. It's a choice that makes sense. And they sure as heck aren't "leeching". I get top 5 rewards every time I'm around to actually play the raid, and my rewards aren't dragged down even a tiny bit by the 25-30 who don't register damage.

The problem is as the OP says. If you want to grow as a guild together, then you have to have much less drop off in Raid rewards. You can still have better rewards for top3/top10/top20, but the current difference is so steep it practically begs people to change guilds rather than stay with the same people over a long time and develop friendships and mutually helpful relationships.