Paragon, the famed Finnish mega-guild responsible for multiple world-first World of Warcraft boss kills, is dropping out of the raid game entirely. It’s the end of an era.
You might be tempted to chalk this one up as a sign of the times, of WoW’s waning appeal. Guild leader Seita, though, said the decision came on the heels of logistical issues and a long, exhausting legacy:
We have decided to stop raiding which obviously means we will not be a part of the world first race in Legion. In the end it came between going international, playing with suboptimal Finnish roster or quitting. For a while I was seriously considering going the international route, but in the end decided it was not worth the trouble for me. This question has been looming over our heads for a long time as it has always been a challenge to get a solid Finnish 20-25man roster together and this time there was no 10man option to bail us out.
Going forward I have no idea if we will be playing WoW in any capacity in the future, we will have to see what is the situation when Legion launches. In the meantime you might see some of us in the fields of Overwatch.
I would like to thank everyone who played in progress raids with us and made this all possible.
Paragon treated new WoW bosses like dominoes, lining them up and knocking them down with calculated fury. They saw their best successes during the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria cycles, where they picked up multiple world firsts including heroic mode Garrosh Hellscream.
They go as far back as Wrath of the Lich King, and most recently they helped lead the charge on Warlords of Draenor, picking up a world first on mythic Imperator Mar’gok in Highmaul. They were also second on mythic Blackhand and Archimonde, shortly behind rival raiding elites Method, who recently split into multiple guilds after troubles of their own.
Paragon’s accomplishments reverberated through World of Warcraft at large, with other guilds picking up both specific boss strategies and entire guild strategies and techniques from them. It’s not a stretch to say that they were partially responsible for the way the game evolved, at least in the upper echelons of raiding.
They have a lot to be proud of. I wish them the best.
Comments
3 responses to “One Of The Best World Of Warcraft Guilds Is Calling It Quits”
WoW really needs to implement the flex-style Norm/Heroic grouping systems to Mythic. I’ve lost count of the number of times we couldn’t raid due to only scraping together 18 for the night >
No they really don’t. Fixed raid sizes allow them to make specific mechanics designed with a certain number of people (and classes) in mind. Flex raiding doesn’t allow this to occur, or results in stupid differences in difficulty depending upon the number of players involved (because of said mechanics), which undercuts the challenge (such as it is) of mythic content.
Well then I think as the population continues to decline more guilds will disband since they can’t make the 20 man minimum for Mythic and we will have even less people tackling that content which isn’t good for the health of the system / game overall. I’d be very surprised if Blizz wasn’t looking at this decline and seriously considering it. We’ve already seen them implement cross-realm Mythic raiding in an attempt to band-aid this problem.
Now I’m not super hardcore, I’m 735iLevel and cleared the first 4 Mythic bosses at least, but really the only mechanic that doesn’t scale well is ones where you split the raid and have to tackle issues in different areas… and even then I think they could still scale it with a bit of thought.
More guilds NEED to disband, and all decent players need to be steered toward bolstering the rosters of competent guilds.
Blizzard’s implementation of the “content for all” philosophy, where people don’t need to be in a real raiding guild in order to see the content, has led to countless individuals who either spend their time in LFR, pugging content (usually getting carried), or with small groups of friends insisting on being little kings in their own little guild kingdoms and refusing to join real guilds.
The result is 90% of the guilds out there having zero chance of progressing through the current tiers at the highest difficulty, while they eat up 90% of the viable raiding base, making it next to impossible for real guilds to recruit.
Blizzard needs to do away with LFR, x-realm raiding and flex raiding (or at least seriously minimize the flex system to a +/- of 1 or 2 people). Guilds also shouldn’t be given credit for kills unless 90% of the group belongs to the guild. They also need to go back to separating the 10-mans from the larger groups (either 20 or 25) — in both gear and prestige.
Blizzard has removed all incentive to join large, organized, competent raiding guilds, leading to the ruination of the game.