Sure after the chaos and disorder that PuGs usually are (taking at least twice as long to do anything an on tier guild could do it in) they have a chance at maybe 1 item realistically. In the time that this PuG took to do whatever content, that person instead could have spent the 3-4 hours getting exp/doing a quest/farming which probably would have progressed their toon far more. Now imagine if the person chose to do that instead of PuG 3-4 times per week (a conservative amount considering how many PuGs there are these days), that is a considerable amount of progression that is being foregone for less than a 5% chance at loot.
I agree with a lot of what you've said bango, but seeing as this thread somewhat a response to my recent pugs I wanted to respond to this. In all my abyss/sanctum pugs, fwf/grupo has looted 6 items and pugs have looted 7. Considering some of these actually had more FWF players than pugs I dont think thats a bad ratio. I claim pleanty of stuff, but since I claim w/e myself and friends want, everything else that drops goes to pugs (and there is generally 30-60% FWF toons on these pugs).
I think the 2/3 flagging rule is okay, I can see both sides of the issue, but what really bothered me about the sanctum pug is that it was revealed that THERE IS NO WAY TO CHECK THE FLAG. We had 10 for sure flagged toons, and three that were unsure whether they were flagged (alts who had been on ulaz kills right before nexus was done, and a main that had been heavily boxed during a time a guild got flagged). I'd made a mental checklist of flags when forming the raid and figured we probably had enough, but because these three toons were unsure and there was no way to check, I had to kick people out (which I don't like doing)
I don't mind the rule in general, but I think it makes no sense where sanctum is concerned. You can get sanctum flagged at tier 7 if IP is clear. Additionally, the actual flagging isn't really difficult, yet can be a huge PITA for a guild that didn't progress heavily in Prison(or use ritual ringers).
People are also bringing up how bad t9/10 progression is, and if you ask me this is because of one encounter. Anyone there knows what I'm talking about. This one encounter prevents guilds from progressing past this tier, so they are stuck and they kill what they can (leaving fewer targets for guilds that are just progressing into this range).
CW/Exo should be in spires IMO. Spires is a great raid zone. Its well made, flows well, has interesting and challenging encounters, and early spires is actually probably easier than Sanctum. I wouldn't really care if they got a free pass into spires (my alt wants the free clears they will provide), but lore wise they should just make this certain encounter easier (still something difficult, but not the ridiculously buggy and random mechanic that makes the current encounter so hard).
It's hard for me to even know what is preventing them from killing it. There were some FWF attempts where it worked in a manner that was controllable and winnable by skill/communication, yet many other attempts this did not happen and it seems like you just have to wait until you get very lucky with who the mechanic targets, how often it goes off, etc. The latter is essentially how FWF initially beat it (combined with the fact that we actually raid with 18 real, competent people). We mashed out heads against it for many hours, and for days on end, until the stars aligned and we won. Maybe half of that time was learning/mastering mechanics, but the rest was just waiting for some luck/skill/random to combine properly.
