f13.net

Discuss.

Fast decision (they JUST added scrolls to attune people from Vashj/Kaelthas) prompted by crossreferencing overall raid progression with what has to be a firmer and firmer internal expansion release date is my bet.

It's long been my contention that the Blizz design team doesn't want to bring casuals to raiding but raiding to casuals. They fucked it up massively in TBC and this is their attempt to rectify it.

Holy crap.. That's huge.

If their intent is to bring raiding to casuals, however, they need to remove some of the random shitty shit shit I've been reading about.  Already I hear bitching enough about the infernals on Prince in Kara, and that's just an exercise in relocating if you're not a group of dumbasses. (Unlike the group I ran with last night.. "wahh it keeps dropping them on us")

It's SERIOUSLY not hard to do the Prince. There's some luck where sometimes you just get boxed in and can't do anything. That sucks. But eight times out of ten it's just a gear check for the tank and a retard check for everyone else.

What was bad about the attunement procedure for them?

I have not kept abreast of the whole keys etc crap since I quit before the expansion.

I always thought keying/attunement was dumb, especially after I had to live through the horde Onyxia chain before they nerfed LBRS and made the docs easier to get. For being such a god awful instance, AQ had the attunment part right imo. Big rush for everyone on the realm to open the place then anyone can enter that meets the level requirements.

TK?  That's Tempest Keep?  I wasn't aware that there was an attunement quest for that, aside from just being able to get there.  Or did they remove the attunement prereqs from EVERY instance in Tempest Keep?  'Cause I'm still struggling getting keyed for Arcatraz...

I know.. that's why I was so  :roll: last night.  5 attempts until we got "lucky" and none of them spawned on top of the group. At least I got a new bow out of the deal.

Ed: And now I just got into an argument about it.  "IT's all luck! There's no skill it's just a tank and spank fight..we shouldn't have to move1!" "Dude, moving as a group is a skill." "No, and what are we supposd to do if 4 infernals spawn in the middle? Then one is on top of us. "

.....

Yarg.

TK stands for Tempest Keep, yep, but they're actually referring to The Eye or some such, were Kael hangs out and kicks puppies or whatever.


It's a cool thing to do, but it won't be affecting me for awhile.  I'm still working on getting all the factions set up for Heroic dungeon runs after getting my first character to 70.  Mainly just so I can run instances with guild members instead of random people. 

To get attuned for SSC you had to kill Nightbane (which required two Heroic runs to be able to do) and a Gruul kill. The quest came from Heroic Slave Pens

To get attuned for TK... ho boy. Heroics of every faction including a brutal timed Shatterd Halls Heroic and THEN you had to kill Magtheridon.

The basic complaint wasn't so much that all of this was too hard but that it destroyed all but the most homogenous guilds. Suddenly a person like my wife had no chance to get keyed since just getting Revered with even a couple factions for the Heroic keys was arduous for someone with limited playtime. It was the ultimate in the time>skill paradigm.

Now, in reading and hearing some interviews with Tigole recently it's become apparent that he's one of the guys who was most unhappy with how it all turned out. I know he gets a bad rap but I really do think he wants to bring raiding to the casuals. The top flight stuff, Hyjal and BT, will still be there for the catasses but this reinstates the casual raid game of vanilla WoW with the more solid 2.0 mechanics.

Disregarding whether one likes raids or not it's an objectively good decision for the type of game WoW's evolved to be.

Karazhan was a fantastic start (doable by casuals if you keep pounding at it and fix some buggy/luck-based bosses, great loot, cool content), but I don't know if I want to really try the other raids. Gruul and especially Magtheridon require stupid amounts of coordination that you just can't get an average casual guild to give a shit about.

I like the attunement change, because personally I can't stand the way Karazhan was designed. "Casuals" can't put in the time needed to learn that place top to bottom because it's such a timesink for a small group of people to complete.

Karazhan has moments of brilliance wrapped around a horribly flawed middle. For all the rest of the time you are going to raid in TBC you need 25 people, but for the beginning you have to seperate out into groups of 10, all who won't be doing things at the same pace, and it will vary heavily on who has the most time to dump into an extremely long and at times very frustrating place. There should never be a raid where a small group of people have to face 10 bosses and a metric fuckton of respawning trash in the middle if you fail. Sure, that's fine if it was a faster option than heroics in getting to the 25 man level, but you simply can't skip it and hope to make up your gear in 5 mans so you can move along.

Compare this to Gruul's Lair. In Gruul's we had Mulgar down with 25 people, half of which hadn't even seen Karazhan yet, and we did it by working on it 2 hours a week. Gruul, we got down this week after about 6 weeks of the same treatment. It's your classic 25 man raiding style like Onyxia, and it's got the same amount of T4 in it.

Believe me, I'm not hating on the boss fights in Karazhan, or the skill involved in getting them down, or anything like that. I'm hating on the fact that there are certain ridiculous time sinks into the place even if you have it on farm. You're not doing it in one night unless you are just hunting down the top tier shit and going for long hours. You're not going to get the Aran fight down without having to slog through respawns making you want to pull your hair out. It's just not very forgiving to your time, and that's what keeps the casuals involved.

It still amazes me that you shitheads play this game.  Kinda funny, actually.

EQ2 is better? I'm done with both.

Coming from the guy with multiple stints in Lineage 2.  I need a Voltron sized eye-roll smiley for this.

Canceled WoW last week.  Likely going to cancel EQ2 before the free month is up.  Feh, burnt out.

(http://forums.prowrestlingfans.com/images/smilies/Laughing%20Dog.gif)

~cough~ DATH'REMAR ~cough~

Personally I think we should all hold out for a game where you can physically shock your partymates at the touch of a button.

lol, Immersion Corp won't licence it out.

You know, instead of making these huge changes to allow casuals more access to all this content you created, maybe you should fucking fire the guy who keeps bringing all this elitism bullshit into play.

~cough~ TIGOLE ~cough~

This is exactly why flagging for access to content should always be combined with some sort of sidekicking system for people to fill out groups and allow guilds to play together.

It astounds me that developers continue to fail to understand this.

Didn't SOE allow that sort of think in some of the EQ/PoP raids? You only had to have a certain number of people flagged for the zone to get in?

Hehehe, for that matter, don't I recall you needing a Wizard with the appropriate teleports to get to Plane of Air? But other than level limits (52? why do I remember these things???) that was all you needed to get in, ya?

The thing is, that's what attunements are all about. Gear and retard checks to save yourself the repair bill. If you have a problem with the attunement requirements for a place, I'm not even sure what you should be doing there at all. People complain about having to do Heroic SH for the Nightbane urn (and I'm still the only person in my guild with it) and... I dunno. I wouldn't imagine that Heroic SH would be difficult if you a) had the appropriate gear for TK and b) the appropriate brain for TK.

I can understand the frustration of getting Revered with a place, but really, how else are you going to get gear to move to the T4 stuff? Unless you have the best luck in the world or an instance drops absolutely nothing for you in the first place... you're not going to need more then a few runs to hit Revered.

With something past that, sure, make it easier to get in to. Removing attunements from T5 makes sense in the same way that lowering the prince on Season 1 arena gear does. It's been mudflated to obsolescence.

Yeah, get rid of those Elitist Jerks....


 :|

The problem is smaller guilds.  You need to run 25+ people in 9 classes through heroics and normal instances enough to get them attuned.   That's a lot of burnt-out tanks and healers.. never mind those of us who have tanks whose schedule is such that they can only login rarely other than raid times (which is why that IS the raid time), so that's when we attuned/ keyed them in the first place.

It's a bullshit cock block for no good reason.  "Saving you the repair bills" is such a cop out I can't even fathom where you came up with it.   Kara is doable in quest blues and greens as most classes.  Gearing up in Kara is also pitifully easy once you get the hang of the fights.  Then, once you're there and you've got the fights down.. whee more faction grinding for those who weren't revered somewhere yet. Blah.

And before you say it,  "grow your guild" is another buillshit answer.  So we should invite hordes of WoW Gen-Disc members to come post their drivel on F13 because the post counts are light in the middle of the week?   Your guild should go around IF and just randomly invite masses of people?   No, small is good, but cockblocks for the small isn't.

I thought that the problem was that the tank/healer/dps composition of a 25-person raid isn't the same as adding together 5 separate groups, each with a tank, a healer, and then DPS in it (a lot fewer tanks required in the 25-person, different types of healers (less priests, for example, more druids/pallies), and so on).  So, technically, the heroics aren't really the path to the final raid size, but rather a diversion.  Yet the rep and gear grind suggests that that is the progression, even though the final class composition doesn't match.

It's like, build your guild to do heroics in 5 parallel teams, then /gremove some people and add others, hopefully already-geared, to have an optimal 25-man raid.

What it really sounds like to me (as an outsider who was once all too involved in this kind of crap with WoW) is the same thing that happened with Z'G and the 20 man AQ to an extent. They lowered the number of people you need to make things "easier for small guilds" but made the content so cockblocked with factions to get stuff and the fights so complex and gear dependant that only people who were in the "raiding" guilds had any chance of fun/success in there.

It is obvious Blizzard has a disconnect somewhere in their design team that allows them to continually make the same mistakes in slightly different ways.

Kara is doable in level 70 blues and a few quest greens, yes. (Then again, you don't need any Heroics to get in to Kara.) If you're able to get past Attunmen, then yeah, your gear is okay until Curator, and then he's another checkpoint. The thing is, the people that are going in there pitifully undergeared simply aren't getting gear from Kara. There's a metric ton of bracers, boots, and gloves off the first few bosses, outside of that, that's the majority of their drop table. When you get in Kara and you're only downing the first handful of bosses you aren't getting upgrades to your big budget pieces.

Lastly, I'm in a small guild. We run one team and rotate maybe 2-3 people in depending on the night/bosses. Small is good, I'm a very firm believer of that.

It isn't a cock block simply because it really shouldn't be an issue if you're to have any success in the place. (People who complained about needing Arc for their Kara key really have no business in Kara for example.) A timed Heroic Shattered Halls is a retard check. It's a check that isolates your raid in groups of five to see if you're actually worth a damn or if you're just going to be dead weight come raid time.

I agree with the issue of disproportionate strain on your top tanks and healers (then again, when isn't there?), but they aren't asking for Underbog that requires some specialized CC. No, the TK attunements are all tank-and-spank instances with humanoids or no CC at all for the most part (Arc/BM). I don't even know why people had an issue with the SSC attunement, Nightbane and Gruul, bosses you should be able to kill before going there in the first place!

Ugh. It's probably elitism talking... but I've seen or had friends tell me about their guild that simply can't do this or that boss. I'll ask them for an Armory link of whatever we think might be the problem. Eight times out of ten... I wonder how that person is able to walk upright much less tank/heal/DPS effectively.

Retard checks, fine, call them fucking cock blocks if you want, would save a lot of headaches in my eyes.

Yep, I agree with Caladein.  9 times out of 10, removing the "attunement" cockblocks from places like SSC / The Eye is not going to magically open up new raid content to the casuals. If your typical group of "casual" raiders was unable to progress (at whatever pace) through the heroics / raids required to attune themselves to a given higher difficulty raid instance, the simple act of granting instant access to SSC is not going to suddenly result in dozens of new guilds per server suddenly killing Lady V or Kael.

Instead, its going to result in loads of people screaming bloody murder when they zone in, die repeatedly to trash, and wipe on every single boss they can possibly reach in the instance (likely only 1) simply because they dont have the gear / skill that would have come with actually progressing through said attunement cockblocks.

But it's not about 25 short bus specials heading into SSC and getting smeared. It's about that 5-10 out of every raid team who simply don't have the time to do the Revered with everyone bullshit. You can get geared in Karazhan so gearing in five mans is NOT the issue post KZ nerf. You can get equipped with most of the skills you need in the new raiding paradigm there as well. So we've eliminated gear and skill from the equation... what's the point of keying cockblocks again?

The only thing I'll agree with there is that people need to kill Gruul before heading in there. Absolutely, one hundred percent.

Re: backflagging. They added it in 2.1. Vashj and Kael thas dropped a certain number of scrolls which you could use on someone to attune them to either SSC or TK respectively. That's what leads me to believe this was a very fast decision. From backflagging to no flagging in... a month and a half?

WoW already caters to several different kinds of retards (those who want to gank and those who want to be ganked). Opening a server for people who can't raid to save their lives would not be out of character. Mark it with [NoPVP][Carebear][ShitCock] so I can't miss it and I'd so be there, kthxbye.

I really don't see the need for a double block.  I'm in the camp of getting gear, but not necessarily spending a lot of time doing it.  Some of the excercises they require for getting keyed/attuned are pure and simple timesinks. 

You'll always have the gear-check block.  There isn't a need for the attunement block too.  Let people learn by taking 5 dirtnaps in a row that they just aren't ready for "that" content.  Or as somebody else said, let the poopsocks band together and open the instances for the entire server.  That worked well enough.

I really do hate anything ingame that forces me to play one specific way like attunments do.  Give me a goal and let me figure out how I want to achieve it.

Removing attunements is a good thing in my book.  After saying that, I still doubt I'll ever be in those instances, but hey, one can dream.

I guess my guild fall in the last 1 out of 10. We are a fairly skilled guild, with a lot of "older" members. IE, out of college and working. We had Kara on farm for months, Gruul for a few months, and recently Mag. We have been working on SSC, but never with quite the optimal raid, and we hadnt set foot in the Eye. A lot of our players have time for rep runs and constant instance farming, but a lot didnt. Hell, I hadnt had time to complete any of the heroic quests for the Eye yet. But last night we went in there as a guild, and we did really good. We didnt kill a boss, but we learned a bunch of trash, and only wiped once on the trash.

For us it is a god send. Since we have the gear and the skill, but not the time to get all our members attuned.

Removing the attunement has nothing to do with casuals, its actually about lessening the load for hardcores.  My guild just killed mag last week so we were starting to see the problems with attunement already.  A raiding guild cant simply be split up into groups of 5, your main tanks, your main healers end up having to run the same heroics over and over again to get everyone keyed, then when they burn out the guild is over.  You won't see casual guilds go from kara to TK, what you will see is hardcores not having to spend all their free time backflagging new members and casuals.

Actually, no.  I was reading a thread on the elitist jerks forum (best guild name ever btw) not long ago where all the ubers were complaining about how easy all the raid content in BC was and how they wanted more shit like the four horsemen in naxx that took the best of the best guilds months to get through and he basically told them to STFU, that encounters like four horsemen requiring EIGHT geared main tanks was simply not going to be acceptable to a casual raiding audience and the only reason they ever made something like it in the first place was because naxx was so close to BC release that they didnt expect anyone but the hardcores to get that far in the first place.

Exactly. I know Tigole's become synonymous with hardcore but I've slowly come around to the idea that he may be the guy pushing for casual raiding and five man content. This is based on a post (short but insightful) on EJ from a guy who knows him and alot of recent interviews. The only people who are going to be pissed off right now are the Nihilums and Death and Taxes(es). Christ, Nihilum's "beaten" the expansion with the Illidan kill only six months in with no new top flight raid content in sight and we're saying that the game's catering to the hardcore above all else?

It's a raiding game. Whether one likes it or not is completely irrelevant. The niche that they've cemented for themselves is as a game trying to bring the hardcore to the casual and I think that's an interesting tack. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the next expansion will have just as much raid content but be extremely accessible to those casual-raiders that make up a reasonably sizable portion of the max level playerbase. Whether the hardest core of the hardcore finally object to that and split is anyone's guess.

wts heroic raids

Damn you.  Coffee straight into the monitor.  :rofl:

One thing I don't get is the waste of content.

Would it really be that hard to lets say...cap BWL, AQ40, and NAX at 25 players, do some gear tweaking, kick up the mobs by X percent...and let some of the non-hardcore from back then play it...for lets say less than T4 but better than 5 man and similar to Kara loot?

That seems like a cheap way to get a lot of 'new' content to people.

EDIT: Or hell, make a ridiculous version of NAX called Hell Nax ... make it so fuckin impossible that the leet dudes will live in there until their heads explode. Dangle a "Each Boss kill drops an Orange" over their heads.  Enjoy it uberdoods.

Well that's one of the big, lingering questions. I'd have to think that they looked back at that content and weren't happy with it for one reason or another. My completely unsubstantiated guess is that nothing would be more hardcore than going the EQ route of running old content to access the new and they didn't want to go there.

Id love to see the HARDCORE raid instance have like some 50 mil HP boss, that does a random nasty thing to each player every 10 sec and yells out shit like "YOU CALL YOURSELF HARDCORE?" and "YOU AIN'T LEET, BITCH" just as a joke. Or for real.

It's also time taken away from Blizzard's incredibly slow content production to tweak old stuff instead of develop new.  I understand and agree with their viewpoint here. I'd rather see new stuff than rehashing old stuff, as that always piqued me in EQ.

It's there if you want to run it, and some folks do.  They should remove the attunement stuff from it, but most of  pre-nax is painless anyway -particulary at 70.


Bloodlord Mandokir yells "DING"
Jin'do the Hexxer yells "GRATS!"

Also reminds me of the guy in Plane of Mischef who'd one shot you if you asked him for phat lootz.

Yeah I remember those :)

The educational power of the dirtnap is vastly underestimated.

Especially since the people who need to learn from it are the least likely to.

--GF

Heh. We had that happen one saturday afternoon with people wearing oodles of t2 gear. Ran out of shades and had 4 people left at the end.

Was one of the most embarassing yet funny at the same time moments I ever had in wow. Though wiping on Lucifron when we were all in T2 or better (even the alts in the raid) was definitely moreso.

"Oh grandmother, what phat lewtz you have."
"RAWR. The better to own you with!

Meh, the cockblocks are gone, and I'm happy I don't have to listen to a bunch of whiney bitches complain about never finding enough tanks for heroics and then looking at me. I'm also happy I don't have to wait on people to get to the Nightbane stage of Karazhan, because that would take us forever.

Rend Blackhand yells: "Kill the one in the Dress!"
Rend Blackhand yells: "Woot!"

Our guild is small with 2 Kara teams operating in parallel.  One just downed Prince - the other - my team - are on Shade of Aran so we still have some distance to go (odd politics having 2 kara teams compete against each other in the same guild - too bad there is not more 10 man content).  We have been doing this for awhile - so it has been great gearing for all the guys involved.

When we are done Karazhan - what is the recommendation in terms of the next best instance to progress to?  Does this change with the removal of attunment requirements?

Gruul's lair is the next step.  I seem to recall reading some kind of weird back-and-forth order.. like Prince, then King Mulgar(sp) then Magtheridon(sp) then Gruul himself but that was back at release when Gruul was a lot tougher.  Now I think it's Prince, King, Gruul, Mag then SSC.


  With odd politics like that though you can expect several of your A-team to quit before you get the additional 5 folks geared out, since they'll be bored with Kara and want to move-on.   They should start mixing the groups up a bit. good luck.

You can also kill Void Reaver before moving into SSC (or even Mag), I hear. A guild on my server downed both Gruul and VR last week. Tier 5 shoulders for everyone! [until they buff the boss]

Tangent: I wonder when/if they are going to add more 'raid-level' 5/10-man content. Heroics are 'ok' (some badge rewards are nice), but my guild's cleared Karazhan and has pretty much nothing else to do. We don't have the numbers to do 25-man dungeons, don't feel like mass recruiting and only 2-3 people pvp seriously enough to get involved in arenas more than the weekly 10 games 'for the points'.


-- Z.

I remember a dev mentioning the next raid being "small-group", but I can't cite it. this seems a good bet (http://www.wowwiki.com/Zul'Aman) if true (there is a big green portal behind the gate there). yay trolls!

There is still SOOO much potential raid content they could add.  Lots of which is probably just right for the 10 man range.

I vaguely remember someone saying Zul-aman was going to be a 20 or 25 man raid, but i'm not sure.

They do, however, have Grim Batol (more black dragonflight / orc lore),  the Titan Vault in southern Tanaris (Uldum or Uldurn, cant remember which one it is, basicly the sequel to Uldaman), and potentially any number of things they could throw into Caverns of time for shits and giggles.

So there is at least 3 or more potential new instances they could release without needing to release an entire new continent / zone, such as Northrend, Undermine or the Emerald dream (and MAN, the Emerald Dream is shaping up to be ALL SORTS of fucked up)

Most rumblings and rumors I've seen about Zul'Aman seem to indicate that it will be a 10-man. I think Tigole himself said that Blizzard was really happy with the popularity and gameplay of the 10-man stuff and I think he mentioned Zul'Aman specifically.

I really hope Uldum is a 10-man myself.

 :thumbs_up: Add every possible annoyance mechanic that you could think of - from de-agro teleporting, to random MC, to AOE manaburns, stuns and stacking enrages on timer. Require weird group set-ups for attune(like 3 tanks, 1 healer as A MUST in 5 man) and make them clear wads of trash on impossible respawn timer.

If I understand this correctly majority of player base will not see most of that 'old' content and once expansion hits catasses that can get there move on to new shiny. It also makes no sense to go there as part of getting to max-level.