Attunement was certainly a mixed bag.

The Alliance Onyxia attunement was a huge, annoying, quest chain that involved a lot of what they've tried to get away from (going in and out of the same dungeon more than once) but, oh, the sense of accomplishment when you finally finished! A lot of the BC-type attunement (eg: Kara) was, again, almost its own reward - though the various technically issues folks in my guild had trying to get through Black Morass (computer crashes, disconnects, etc) were a whole other issue.

I kind of miss attunements - kind of like how I miss all my old keys and my keyring - but I think the current design philosophy doesn't allow for it. I could see, maybe, having a simple attunement quest but they'll probably never go back to the old style.

Honestly, I miss it. It was a way for people to demonstrate that they were serious about raiding. Someone who went through a billion steps in order to get access to a raid was probably also going to show up on time for pulls, bring their own consumables, ensure they were stocked with reagents, etc. There's no gateway anymore, which is nice because it's less hassle for every alt that hits max level, but it also means that any jerk can just try to waltz in, with no way to separate out the lazy people with no consideration for the other 9 or 24 people in their raid.

Well, look what happened with the Cataclysm implementation. They had a simple requirement that to queue for the dungeon you had to at least find its entrance... and apparently someone had a problem with that because they removed that feature. Which was a shame, because I deliberately never discovered Stonecore on my alt and now I would have to have that in rotation if I queued for non-troll heroics on her.

It was a nice little bit of customization that they abandoned, and I miss it.

@ Nina Katarina

Actually that is exactly why they removed the "discovering first" requirement from the Cata heroics. People were deliberately avoiding discovering the overly long dungeons, or those considered to be certain wipefests like Stonecore. They could then queue for randoms and just get Vortex Pinnacle and Old City repeatedly.
Attunements are one thing, but when a system allows players to make random dungeons not so random...

@Nina: I never had Throne of Tides until a random Heroic after the change. I wish I had though about that with Stonecore. I had 15 heroics under my belt and 3 achievements for heroics. Someone called me a liar, I linked my kills of Ozzy. 12. I only killed the first 2 bosses 5 times...

I liked attunement. Basically I just like getting that sense of accomplishment, it's a lot rarer to get that in WoW these days since so many things are easy now. Yeah, yeah, hardmodes on raids are still difficult, but what else is there in PVE?

Attunements "questlines" could be used so nicely for (re)introducing (the (bosses of) the raid. Some quests, not hard, not time-consuming, just a little lore to please us lore-lovers.
If the raid comes along with one or more 5mans, have the players run them _just once_ for that attunement. They really missed out on that with ICC, the 5mans felt somehow detached from the raid, which could have been improved by having an attunement questline explain: "Ok, first, you and some other adventurers, lead by Lady Jaina/the Dark Lady, try to sneak in through the side entrance, but when that fails and you hardly escape the Lich King himself, you decide to join the Ashen Verdict's assault on the front gate."

There's certainly a flip side to removing attunements and lowering the bar for entry.

Yes, lengthy attunements meant simply being able to raid represented investment, but it also meant dedicated officers would have to farm the same instance daily to have an attuned raid team, and unintentionally fostering a sense of entitlement, ie. "it's the guild's job to get me attuned."

Meanwhile, lifting attunements has enabled quite a few people who would never have attempted raiding to get their feet wet, find they like it, and go on to excel.

I can't speak to raid attunements since I don't raid (and I didn't start playing until about a month after Wrath's launch, so by the time I got a character to the right level for Vanilla or TBC raids, almost nobody was doing them anyway), but I can say I'm really glad they did away with attunements/keys for TBC 5-mans. I've been going back lately and soloing the TBC dungeons for RP gear, and I'd be really annoyed if I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to farm, or just to see the content I missed while I was leveling.

I was also getting really frustrated when I was working on Loremaster (the old version) and trying to get all the Outland zones done, and in some zones the only quests I could find were these attunement/key chains that I couldn't do solo at the time (mainly in Shadowmoon Valley). Fortunately, I was able to avoid those after finding a guide that pointed me to some of the hidden/obscure/out-of-the-way questgivers that I'd somehow completely missed.

Optional questlines that delve into the lore of a raid or bosses within, with some decent rewards = Good.

Forcing people to do time-intensive and sometimes tedious activities just to get in the door = Bad.

If you want to differentiate yourself as an uber questline-completer, it can be as simple as a vanity item or a title. Hand of A'dal would be a great example of that.

I agree with Pyro. The best part of the attunements was the lore involved. Particularly the Alliance side of the Onyxia chain. That's what I miss the most. I would love to see them come back, but as mostly optional. Maybe with a nifty trinket like the arcane resist one from the Kara attunement or (as suggested) a title or other vanity reward for completing it.

While I did like the dedication shown by those finishing attunements, it could get fairy oppressive and ridiculous to get alts or returning friends into raids. Overall, bring back the lore chains and leave the "keying" gone.

@Pyromelter:

What you seem to fail to understand is that Hand of A'dal was REQUIRED to do the raids at one point. It wasn't a vanity title for the most hardcore questers--it was a way to reward the people who did the attunement back when it was required to enter the raids in question.

My feeling is not every raid needs attunement, but the big ones should as a sense of story and gear/competency check. I'll use ICC as an example, it released with the three dungeons, which had a storyline, but the raid was going on at the same time and ignored that storyline. If they had required a player to have gone through the 3 dungeons before raiding ICC, but just once each, I don't think it would have been a huge requirement.

Then, in the dungeons, you introduce some of the raid bosses, without being a direct fight. You introduce some of the mechanics of the fights (say a raid boss that has 3 powers, but you see 1 or 2 of those powers on different bosses in teh dungeons).

And just as important, you introduce the trash packs earlier. Maybe in teh dungeon the 3-4 packs have 1 badguy, but in the raid you combine those bad guys into varied groups.

Granted, folks will still be run/carried through a dungeon and it's not some sure thing that they know what is happening, but right now there's no gate at all.

An attunement scheme like the one BC had is fine if you're deliberately designing an MMO where endgame raiding is a niche minigame supported by a base of players who get left out.

That isn't the game Blizzard set out to make, they look back on attunements as a failure, and I can't disagree with them.

I liked attunements, but just because I enjoy the involved and long-form storytelling. This can be accomplished in other ways, though.

The one downside to attunements being removed is that it is one more thing that contributes to the player-base becoming more and more entitled to have it all. Everything is supposed to be easy these days and open to everyone regardless of the eort put forth....and I guess I don't agree with Blizzard on that philosophy. But that's ok, I enjoy the game anyway, attunements or not.

@The Dewd

On behalf of all Horde that went through the Onyxia attunement...

"HAS ANYONE SEEN REXXAR?!?!"
/eye twitch

F that guy.