Cracks starting to show?

[Lantyssa]

Bolded part is the important bit.  If it's possible for an undergeared tank to hold threat against overgeared damage dealers who aren't dumping threat or being otherwise attentive, the system breaks down everywhere else.  Threat simply ceases to matter in raids.

It's a lot like healing and players who can't avoid damaging encounter mechanics: if it's possible for the healer to heal through poor players playing poorly, healing good players is a completely trivial task.

It's possible, but they'd have to go with a normalization instead of a net difference.  Normalization makes their ever-increases numbers pointless.

[caladein]

There was a long period of time where threat really didn't matter in raids, and things were fine.

I'm struggling to think of two tiers or major patches in a row where threat wasn't an important aspect of a fight.  Either there was a risk of pulling off outright or there were big abilities that only "didn't hit the tank" if everyone stayed under 100% threat.

[Rendakor]

Neither ICC nor ToC had any fights where threat was super important; the closest I can think of was Keleseth in the Blood Princes encounter, but that was because he was often ranged-tanked. Naxx 2.0 didn't either that I remember. Ulduar might have, but fuck Ulduar.

Paelos, any chance you can copypasta your ragequit posts to a different thread or something? I don't see how they're relevant to any discussion we're having here.

[caladein]

Ulduar might have, but fuck Ulduar.

[Xanthippe]

Neither ICC nor ToC had any fights where threat was super important; the closest I can think of was Keleseth in the Blood Princes encounter, but that was because he was often ranged-tanked. Naxx 2.0 didn't either that I remember. Ulduar might have, but fuck Ulduar.

Paelos, any chance you can copypasta your ragequit posts to a different thread or something? I don't see how they're relevant to any discussion we're having here.

I'm confused.  I thought this was the appropriate place to post such things.  When did this become the thread to discuss raid mechanics?

[caladein]

I'm not making any comments about the monkey's posts, but this hasn't been a no-rebuttals zone even if it is the more negatively tinged of the two main threads.  It can be now I guess?

[Rendakor]

If he was posting why HE was ragequitting, ok. What's the point of reposting shit from the official forums without saying anything that hasn't already been said here?

[AcidCat]

Here's today's quitting post in the segment I like to call, FUCK YOU CATA, I'M OUT!

Nonraider Perspective

Hmmm, thanks for posting that, spot-on for the reason I left. A someone who never raided, I still always felt like I had a lot to do. After a month of Cata, that feeling was just gone somehow. I think it was just a lot of little things - and that more of the same feeling just became overwhelming.

[Dren]

I finally pulled the plug today during lunch break.  That's 2 accounts from me.  I'm a casual player that plays a lot of hours (whatever you want to call that.)  I just can't get into raiding even at a 10-person level.  5-person is my limit and you just can't get personal groups to do this much anymore since 10 and 25 are "The Thang!"  PuG is hell on earth for me, so no thanks.

PvP was fun for awhile, but that too has gone to requiring joining large groups to succeed past a point.  Changes made recently only support that even more.

I was turned off even more during my cancelling process.  The only thing that comes close to "Raiding isn't fun and that's what this game is," was "I find Raiding, Battlegrounds, and Arenas too intimidating."  Seriously?  Great public relations Blizzard.  Pissing me off while I'm quitting your game is pretty stupid.  I suggest you use a different word than "intimidating" there, like "too time consuming," or "too dependent on others that can't ever learn to stop standing in fire," or "takes too long to herd that many people together to actually do something."  At no point did I feel intimidated and I really doubt anyone else has either.  Perhaps they mean intimidation from other players that feel you need to eck out another 0.2 dps to be adequate?  Ok, you got me there...  By the way, that's not fun either.

[Sjofn]

Reposting RAEG is fine, I just wish he'd spoiler the longer ones.

[Paelos]

Reposting RAEG is fine, I just wish he'd spoiler the longer ones.

Sure I can spoiler them for ease. Not a problem.

[Paelos]

If he was posting why HE was ragequitting, ok. What's the point of reposting shit from the official forums without saying anything that hasn't already been said here?

Two reasons. One I'm giving you a perspective of different people beyond my own. You won't see my pulling in quit posts from just random places. I think both posts I pulled offer some unique insight into what happened to their experience in game.

Two, it's not just about the fact people are quitting. It's that they are STILL quitting. I'm pulling that off the front pages of the general forum and they aren't just pissy FUCK YALL posts. These are people with legitimate concerns I wanted to show here as a continuation of the purpose of this thread.

After all, what better way to display "Cracks starting to show" than by going with the words of many who voiced the same concern on their way out?

[Sjofn]

Reposting RAEG is fine, I just wish he'd spoiler the longer ones.

Sure I can spoiler them for ease. Not a problem.

You're a peach. 

[Ingmar]

Neither ICC nor ToC had any fights where threat was super important

Adds on Lich King and Anub'arak come to mind.

==============================

On the vengeance front, I haven't had any trouble holding aggro yet when tanking (sample size limited though), but I have had some with pulling aggro a bit as fury. I just take away from this that I am awesome though.

EDIT: I really don't think having to taunt once in a while is any great hardship in any case.

[Paelos]

Most of WotLK and most of Vanilla, threat wasn't much of an issue. Those were the two periods I referenced.

Threat mattered on Vael in BT. I can't speak to AQ40 because so few people did it, so I don't really think that matters. Naxx even moreso.

TBC went in the reverse. Threat was huge, survival was not. You were going to live, the question was if you could keep the cap high enough to get the dps needed to outlast the boss.

I struggle to think of much in Wrath that was a threat issue. Naxx, probably the Four Horsemen come to mind in the beginning, but only at the start.

[Setanta]

Re Vengeance: I had a raid equipped mage rip aggro off me non-stop in ZA (355 tank) so I just wispered the healer to stop healing him and let him die. By the 5th death he got the message. Meanwhile, the rest of us had fun.

He didn't see the funny side, but we did.

[luckton]

Re Vengeance: I had a raid equipped mage rip aggro off me non-stop in ZA (355 tank) so I just wispered the healer to stop healing him and let him die. By the 5th death he got the message. Meanwhile, the rest of us had fun.

He didn't see the funny side, but we did.

And that is exactly how I handle these situations when I tank.  DPS wants to be  , I just let 'em fall.

Also how I handle people that pull before I do too...I somehow forget where I put my taunt button for 3 seconds 

[Numtini]

On the subject of cracks showing, in the last month I've gotten all sorts of spam about "return to azeroth" rather than "your current live account" Dunno if that says something.

[Rendakor]

Adds on Lich King and Anub'arak come to mind.

I forgot about the adds on Anub'arak, those were indeed annoying because DPS loved to go balls out before they were on the ice patches. The only adds on LK I ever had problems with were the ghouls, but that was only if you had a War or Druid tank since they had bad snap-AOE-aggro.

[Sheepherder]

On the vengeance front, I haven't had any trouble holding aggro yet when tanking (sample size limited though), but I have had some with pulling aggro a bit as fury. I just take away from this that I am awesome though.

Back when I was subscribed Elitist Jerks had pretty much arrived at a consensus that threat stats are irrelevant to early Cataclysm.

[apocrypha]

Re Vengeance: I had a raid equipped mage rip aggro off me non-stop in ZA (355 tank) so I just wispered the healer to stop healing him and let him die. By the 5th death he got the message. Meanwhile, the rest of us had fun.

He didn't see the funny side, but we did.

Which is more or less how I usually handle it - ask the offending over-eager DPS to watch their agro a bit, don't bust a nut trying to re-taunt every single badly targetted trash mob they pull. With clothies and rogues they die fast and usually learn fast or ragequit fast. Plate-wearing, self-healing DPS doing this are more of an issue since they take a long time to die, during which time the poor healer is going oom at a rate of knots.

My *specific* issue is when DPS pull agro on a boss fight frequently enough that I don't have taunts available for a second or two and when that second or two of the boss pointing the wrong way wipes the group. Ozruk being the perfect example. Pointed at that mage in the back for just the 2 seconds when he does Ground Slam? Yeah, group wipe. That's a combination of badly designed mechanics, poor DPS skills and Blizzard currently having the Vengeance/DPS balance wrong and refusing to acknowledge it.

[Sjofn]

Plate-wearing, self-healing DPS doing this are more of an issue since they take a long time to die, during which time the poor healer is going oom at a rate of knots.

Only the nice ones. 

[Simond]

But if the DPS hold back to manage aggro, the tank and/or healer start bitching about 'fail deeps'.

[apocrypha]

But if the DPS hold back to manage aggro, the tank and/or healer start bitching about 'fail deeps'.

Pugs... lose/lose! 

See this is something that makes me  : how has a cooperative experience, i.e. running a dungeon with a group of people, turned into a competitive exercise? And not even within the same sub-group (dps competing to be top of the charts) but tanks, healers and DPS all apparently fighting against each other!

Competition fucks everything up. It's stupid.

[Malakili]

But if the DPS hold back to manage aggro, the tank and/or healer start bitching about 'fail deeps'.

Pugs... lose/lose! 

See this is something that makes me  : how has a cooperative experience, i.e. running a dungeon with a group of people, turned into a competitive exercise? And not even within the same sub-group (dps competing to be top of the charts) but tanks, healers and DPS all apparently fighting against each other!

Competition fucks everything up. It's stupid.

People don't view it as a cooperative experience, they view it as suffering through randoms for loot points.  Anyone who slows it down is lowering their bottom line. 

[Rendakor]

It's because of the nature of heroics as farm content; this has only been exacerbated by the de facto removal of lockouts through the random system, so now you can run an unlimited number of them in a day. Queuing with random people from other servers also removes the old social pressure to not be a douchebag, since you'll probably never see these 4 people again.

[luckton]

Queuing with random people from other servers also removes the old social pressure to not be a douchebag, since you'll probably never see these 4 people again.

Esp. after they end up on my ignore list 

[Lakov_Sanite]

That's because heroics ARE suffering through randoms to get loot points, simple fact is the dungeons themselves are NOT fun.

[Merusk]

That's because heroics ARE suffering through randoms to get loot points, simple fact is the dungeons themselves are NOT fun.

This certainly doesn't help matters, but the problem was there in WOTLK when there were some fun dungeons*.    Now that they're such shit-eating slogs it's only made it worse.  Particularly since some have glimmers of fun that then get eaten by shitty mechanics or too-long sections of AOE groups that can't be AOE'd efficiently due to mechanics changes. (I'm looking at you, VP and Stonecore)

*Not that all of them were fun, but some were. TOK, UP and CoS were fun, imo.  They still pale in comparison to my all-time favorites of Strath Dead side & Upper Blackrock, though.

[Ingmar]

I find most of the current dungeons (incl. both troll ones) pretty fun, personally.

[Merusk]

Yes, but we all know you're broken on that metric. 

[Sjofn]

But if the DPS hold back to manage aggro, the tank and/or healer start bitching about 'fail deeps'.

You can still put out decent DPS and not pull aggro. You have to be pretty shitty to actually get called "fail deeps" (like I've said, my PUGs have all been quite nice attitude-wise about that sort of shit, TOO NICE some of the time), and if you're that shitty, you don't need to worry about pulling aggro. 

The only heroic I flat out loathe is Blackrock Whatever (Caverns?) because of that stupid beam boss. I have made it to the final boss in that dungeon three times, once with a Slap group, and the other two because I joined an already-in-progress one that was on said boss.

[Ingmar]

BRC is probably my least favorite yeah, although I'm not a tremendous fan of new Shadowfang Keep or Stonecore.

[Dren]

I find most of the current dungeons (incl. both troll ones) pretty fun, personally.

When I state the Cata dungeons aren't fun, I think it is more from the standpoint of time.  They made them much longer and it took forever to get through.  Wrath had just about the right balance.  I could easily get through one a night and many times 2-3.  It got out of hand after all the nerfs so it became a boring race to the end everytime, but starting off it was good.

By having the dungeons long to begin with, it doesn't even matter if nerfs come later.  Then it becomes a relatively longer boring race.

I went from playing 1.5-3 hours a night in Wrath and getting tons of things done from PvE randoms, to PvP BGs, to a bit of farming rep/crafting resources, to just socializing.  In Cata that immediately jumped to rarely having time to even do one random dungeon (regular or heroic.)  It became a time check for me.  "Do I have 3 hours to spend actually getting anywhere tonight?  Nope?  No login."

The amount of trash in Cata dungeons is not acceptable either.  Having a group of 4-5 MOBs with different abilities so you have to CC just right, etc. is great!  Doing that same encounter 10 times until you get to the boss is bad design.  In general, the Cata dungeons took a huge leap backward from the direction they made in Wrath.  IMO.

[Ingmar]

When was the last time you ran one? I haven't had one of the regular ones take more than about 45 min (that was a Grim Batol with a couple wipes) in a while, barring the occasional LFG clusterfuck where people are dropping and we have to reform etc (those happened in Wrath too). Troll ones can occasionally take longer when the group isn't really quite up to it.

I totally agree that at release they were in a terrible state - 2 hour Deadmines etc.

EDIT: I'm not 100% sure because there was a pretty long gap between me doing them now and when I was doing them at release, but I would swear that they've cut the trash down a lot in some of them. It certainly feels like less.