f13.net

So now that any Jimmy and Susie can clear all the content in a pug while doing 1500 DPS so that they can win a roll on best in slot gear and then fail to enchant it, we've come full circle from from Vanilla WoW where if you had more than MC BoE epix, you were "hardcore" (yes, even then shitty guilds that never got past BWL/Prophet Skerram raided enough to be hardcore, they just had a revolving roster of people who were bad at this game). 

Now, EVERYONE has seen all the content. No really. Everyone. If you haven't its pretty much because you explicitly do not want to. I know people who only log on for 20 minutes a night that have (incrementally) cleared all of Naxx25. The opinion on these boards, especially around TBC when raiding was accessible to many, but progression was not, was that 'hardcore' raiding took poopsocking, spreadsheeting and whatever the hell else, and sure as hell wasn't fun. Now that it isn't this way, are you happy?

This is mostly my attempt to figure out how much differentiation people want to see between the hardcore and the casual. Too much, and casuals feel perpetually left behind. Too little, and there's no challenge to this game for anyone with half a braincell. We 20 manned 25+3 the other night because someone needed both achievements. I'm not saying this to /epeen because this is hardly difficult. Hell, most guilds have 5 idiots who either do zero DPS from moving too much for walls, or die in voids. All we did was just not take the extra 5 in the first place. Is this what you wanted to see when you said that T6 content was too hard and inaccessible to the casual gamer?

Please, feel free to flame the living shit out of me. But do try to answer the question.

Yep!  This is exactly what I wanted to see.  And this is from someone that was running in a group that could do timed bear runs, and could have done Hyjal if we only had enough people.  (Probably couldn't have done KT, like, ever, because getting 25 people together that could be coordinated to the extent needed for that place is HARD.)

I'm pleased as punch that everyone can see the content, even if I'm pissed that some fucking dipshit doing 1100 dps wins a roll on a best-in-slot piece that I really wanted.  Loot isn't everything, as I was outdpsing him nearly 3 to 1.

It seems to be a relatively nice place for the game to be. It's addressing a larger part of it's playerbase, and seems to just need slight tweaking from here.

Far better than Vanilla WoW, and better from a design and development standpoint than TBC (making seperate 10 and 25 man raids was a waste of time and tiered off content, making it a normal/heroic flag is a perfect fix with just a bit more development time spent making sure they're balanced)

I guess I'm 'hardcore' or something but I am glad everyone can see the content. Besides to me at least there's plenty of things to brag about beyond loot or simply killing a boss.  I have a plagued proto-drake and probably only one of a handfull on my server who will(until ulduar epics make old content easier) and that's fine with me because when that next hard to get foozle shows up, I can try and get that too.

I think people are just using the same expectations of hardcore they used to. Wow was crafty in adding achievements as the true 'hardcore' game while allowing everyone with half a brain to be able to enjoy the hard work the devs put in programming stuff. It's really simplistic and brilliant at the same time.

Not everyone... Everyone in a guild, maybe.  But I still haven't seen half the 5-mans, and the only raid I ever set foot in was a 10-man Vault.  As a DPS, finding a group still takes an hour or more, and as someone who hasn't done a lot of content, I'm at the top of the list to be booted as soon as someone with better gear comes along. 

So, from my point of view, it's pretty much the same as it was in BC (or, at least, midway through BC, once they started adding dailies and things to do solo).  Get in a guild and see the content, or deal with PUGs and wipe over and over until you give up at 3 AM.

I'm pretty happy with it yeah. I can get content done with people I like rather than people I don't.

Happy for sure. :heart:

While I haven't experienced the new content yet (still on the trial), anything that reduces gear requirements and allows more people to see the content is a good thing.  However, as you said, there is the risk in that the hardcore raiders are depleting content, and might lose interest in the game.  I see it in terms of quality versus quantity.  With attunements, factions, and gear checks, the game relied mainly on quantity to keep busy.  The developers must now shift gear and come up with quality content: namely, making the boss fights more challenging so that teamwork and strategy are needed.   

You certainly seem to be in one hell of a guild. My guild is mainly casual, and we have yet to do Sarth+1 or Malygos. Mind you, this is on 10 man, we don't do 25s, and it seems significantly harder there to manage things (its the adds getting us). From my understanding, Sarth+3 is supposed to be rather challenging, to the point that it ranks up with some of the more difficult bosses from TBC. That you're doing it that undermanned, with someone who has never seen the fight before, seems rather impressive to me.

My guild can, in theory, do Sarth+1 on 10 man, we don't have the people the (quality) manpower to clear 25 man content.  We've cleared all other 10 man content other than Sarth+N though!

I've been in a Malygos 25 PUG, that went disastrously.  Mostly due to slow slow DPS in phase 2.   :oh_i_see:  Still, I'm happy with sticking to 10 mans for the most part, and I figure Sarth+N is either a matter of being picky with DPS, or just waiting til Ulduar gears people a bit higher.  I was talking to a guildmate, she said that their last Sarth+1 try wasn't going very well, they were unable to kill Tenebron before a third wave of hatchlings.  I was on a very rough night of tries on Sarth+2, we were unable to kill Tenebron before the third drake landed (although my understanding is this is actually expected, and ok), but did have enough dps to avoid three waves of hatchlings.

The thing is, for the hardcore guilds, once we learned our classes in something approaching their current iteration (mid-way through TBC and then maybe the first week of WOTLK), there isn't much they can do to challenge us mechanics wise. The hardest part about sunwell was recruitment; you needed resto shammies beyond what most guilds had of resto shammies. Once they changed the healing around a bit and unified group buffs, all you started to need were 25 players who were good at this game. Once you have that and eliminate 95% of personal error (no one is perfect, not even the uber 1337 kiddies) you start to hit the line between trivial and mathematically impossible. C'Thun v1.0: not possible with that gear. M'uru with the right raid set up, no server lag, no DCs, etc? Not that bad. The hard part was getting those conditions down.

The current content though, seems to remove even the reward from just playing the game adequately, not to speak of playing it very well. I'm all for letting people see content, but PUGs shouldn't steamroll the place with ease by brute forcing the mechanics. That removes the sense of accomplishment from the average gamer (who can play at a level above that). Should EVERYONE be able to beat EVERY game on hardmode because they paid for it? Or should hard mode be tuned so that it's, you know, hard?

@ Kali: I understand that unguilded and straight pugging might still be rough on some servers. Not the bigger ones though; Korgath, Arthas, etc. the only requirement seems to be having a pulse.

10 man sarth is harder than 25 man.

It's mostly about personal responsibility: not dying to void zones, lava walls, etc. while maintaining DPS. You do need intelligent group synergy and co-ordiantion, but you can survive even a 3rd wave of whelps if you control the encounter correctly. You can have all 3drakes up and still eventually win, though any group that manages to do that, probably will never see that scenario.

I am happy with the difficulty level of content, but (huge but here) I really think they should have shipped with a new unique raid dungeon, not just the 2 (3 if you couldnt Vaults) Onyxia style fights. Na is cool and everything, but it IS a recycled dungeon, and with how easy it is, it feels like all the content is to easy to finish.

I know Ulduar is coming soon, but how soon is soon? My group recently started raiding, and we can finish all content in almost one day. Usually OS 3D takes like 1 hour or less on the second day. That leaves raiders with no content to do for a whole week. Now, im not asking for super cockblock fights. I just think that they should have shipped with at least one more decent sized dungeon.

You need to pug around a bit.
Your notions. They are flawed.

I haven't seen all of the content.  I've seen 3 BC dungeons and 5 WotLK 5-man dungeons (all non-heroic).  And only done Vault and Obsidian Sanctuary for raids, beyond the old-world Ony\MC\etc that I did way back when.

I for one am glad that the poopsocking required back when getting to 60 supposedly meant something to see all of the endgame content is gone.  I don't have time to dedicate 30 hours a week to raiding and grouping for gear.

edit:

Seriously.  PUGs are not steamrolling content by any stretch of the imagination.  If we are missing 1-2 people and have to PUG them for OS, we usually end up wiping like crazy over the entire run.  All guild members?  No problems.  Sure, some PUGs have overgeared and good players in them, but that is very far from even approaching the norm.

By brute force? No.  But an average group with a healer, tank, and some dps with decent teamwrok and coordination? Yes.

Pugs don't steamroll content with ease.

Pugs have a solid two tanks, a solid group of healers (or two good ones and some idiots), and a mess of DPS that may or may not qualify as intelligent life.

The healers and tanks are working their asses off, know the mechanics of the fight, and learn it. The DPS CAN do this as well, but except for very technical fights and shorter enrage timers, they don't even have to break 1200 dps, really.

Dunno.  I haven't seen any of the new content.  My Druid is 24.  My Death Knight is 59.  (On a new server, though I never made it past 61 with my old one.)  Currently I can't even see any of the old content, as far as instances go, because everyone's 80 and I have this weird notion about if I'm going to play I'd like to play rather than sit back while someone else slaughters everything.

The thought of my guild not being horrified at my presence once I get that high because I'm not in Uber-gear and thus dooming the raid to failure s nice though.  So yes.

Agreed and stating it otherwise is nerdcoreQQ. I'll be polite since everyone else is already calling you on it.  But frankly the cool-kid whining about the dumbing-down-of-the-game is just old. 

The reality of WoW is now 70 levels of grey content that people don't even bother with.  Subsequently, there are many people who have never ever seen BWL let alone BC raid content.  By the time their casual guild or PUG is able to manage an old tier zone its valueless, and I mean valueless on normal mode.

I like it.

I like that I can do 10man or 25man VOA and lose rolls on stuff that may or may not be a decent upgrade for me.  I can do this in a span of 30 minutes after a victorious WG (organization times vary).

I just did 25 man OS with my guild for the first time.  I liked it.  I managed to die near the end because I wasn't familiar with the flame wall mechanic.  Ohh well, we still won with 20 people (most DPS including me was north of 2K).

Naxx is fine.  My guild hasn't cleared it yet, but I've only been a few times.

I do heroics.  I also do decent DPS and manage to carry my own weight (still haven't done all of them).  I just got 50 badges, so I haven't done many at all.  I like that I won't get a "sorry, we need 2 more CC." when I offer to DPS.  I also like that they're short.  I mainly only did heroics in TBC on my resto shaman because no one wanted my fucking moonkin around except for guildies.  Only time I get annoyed here is when someone's pulling south of 1k DPS.  Seriously, go buy some crafted gear, because I can do more than that tanking.

I like that there aren't a million fucking mechanics with each fight.  If I see another Letheras the Blind, I'll start making up excuses on why I can't go.  Seriously, you haven't felt pain until you've seen a bunch of bad tanks and bad healers try to learn that shit.

Honestly, if I get gated from content because Blizz needs to make stuff incredibly difficult through gear checks, fights with a billion fucking different mechanics, or god-save-us resist checks to keep a fringe, vocal minority of poopsockers  busy; I'll be unhappy.  I do not want to commit a lot of time to this game in order to experience the content.  I don't have a lot of time to play this game and I put time with my family above attending raids.  If I had the time or prioritized my life different, I might be sitting a raid guild with everything cleared and itching for more content (I've been in a server first guild before, so yah, whatever). 

What I don't like is that I haven't won a fucking contested roll in the entire expansion on something I wanted.  It's starting to get annoying. My dice are broken.

I had never done c'thun but when they added achievements in 3.0 my guild went back and did it and I still had a lot of fun personally, as I had never seen the fight.

Anyways as to this ridiculous notion that pugs get the same rewards as 'teh hardcore' well it's just that, ridiculous.

Server first titles.
Extra loot on 1-2-3drake sarth
Special mounts.
Immortal/Undying titles.
Achievement titles.

Bragging rights abound in wotlk, it's just that many oldschool raiders are measuring their epeen in boss kills when the whole epeen ratio has switched to the metric system.  Some sites still only rate guilds on boss kills but many are starting to factor the hard modes and achievements into the equation properly.

Nothing has really changed, there's still things that only <%5 of the population will ever do, it's just now everyone gets to actually see the bosses. Any belief of entitlement to actually seeing content can go suck a donkey, let people play the game and have fun, if you're good you still have proof via other things.

Now, go start up any console game notice where it says Easy/Normal/Hard ? Wow is just taking the MMO genre and adding the same things mainstream gamers have grown accustomed to. If anything this doesn't cheapen accomplishments, it intensifies them because through an achievement system the level of difficulty can have no theoretical upper limit.

I think the current tier was well done and I enjoyed it, but in terms of hours of entertainment it falls flat compared to older content.  I haven’t logged in beyond saying hello to some buddies since Christmas and I’ll be canceling next cycle.  It felt more like a guided tour then anything.

The fact that none of the content requires much organization or coordination beyond filing slots means that that part of the game, which I enjoyed for a while (Gasp!) just disappeared.  The kinds of players that take the game seriously but themselves not-so-much can’t really get motivated enough for bragging rights. 

I want to see content, not see how hard I can make it by handicapping myself.  I did, it was good.  WoW beaten.  Peace out.  Once new content comes I’ll probably check it out, it’s still cheap entertainment.

WoTLK has it's flaws, but the means in which they have made content accessible has been most welcome. I look forward to being given stricter challenges in Ulduar.

In all, myself and the majority of my guild are very happy.

I abandoned WoW after 2 60's (abandoned first to re-roll on PvP in a desperate, but vain, attempt to find that aspect of the game) when it finally dawned on me that the game at 60 was... what's the technical term I'm looking for here?... fucked?

Having returned for WoTLK, I burned through TBC (and didn't feel like I missed a thing) and have actually enjoyed more content than I have seen in 3 years - and in PUGs - as I've long since lost touch with my guild.

From what I've read, seen and heard over the years, I think there's a lot more of us than there are of you.

I'm happy, although I haven't seen all of the instances yet.

I enjoy leveling up and reading the quests far more than the "let's raid _______ over and over until my gear's all purple" thing that many people enjoy.

If the poopsockers think it's too easy now, awww.  Wear greens and do instances.  They can always make it harder on themselves if they want to.  If they're too lazy to provide themselves with challenges, then maybe it's time for them to find a new game.  I doubt they'll be missed.

This.


Once again, you are taking your experiences as a hardcore raider and applying them to a populace that doesn't exist. I always take a look at Wowjutsu to get an approximate feel for how many folks are heading through the content. Only about half the people have done some boss kills in Naxx 25, and only about a third have actually cleared the place. 25% of people have actually beaten Malygos 25.

To me, those are solid numbers. It indicates that the content had a low barrier to entry, but that the top levels were still hard enough that total completion is not a given. Compare those numbers to the 5-10% who had beaten Black Temple pre-expansion patch, and that ~4% who had cleared Sunwell. Those numbers suck. Hard means that a great majority of your players may not accomplish this task. Hard doesn't mean only a miniscule dedicated few will even want to attempt and survive this task.

This is WoW, not the fucking Marines.

Does it (wowjutsuwhatever) Track the 3 Drake encounter? I'm guessing 3 Drakes is probably in that 10-5% only range still, and will be for a long, long time.

Yes it does. 7.6% have completed it in 25 man,  and only 1.6% have done it on 10 man. All the Drake Achievements are done in higher numbers on 25 man than 10 man. All the achievements that involve nobody dying are higher in 10 mans than 25 mans, logically.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Arthas&n=sdgdfshfhdfhjdfjggdfjgf

Please note the lack of a guild.

"Everyone in a guild has done it" != "Everyone who has done it is in a guild"

This isn't "coolkid > you". If you feel like that, stop getting butthurt about being told that heroics and raids now are easier than they were before. I see no reason to be upset that you're being called out on the fact that current content is clearable with everyone doing 2k DPS. F13 has a pretty casual WoW population, but you're also (largely) not retards, so I wanted your opinion: are you pleased with this situation?

As for myself, I'm glad I have an extra 4 nights a week to do more RL stuff. So are my friends, my family and my significant other.  What I'm not so happy about is the fact that the barrier to entry is non-existent. The reason that the old world raids were so 'hard' to get into is because they required stiff group synergy, complicated strats (not really, but people QQ'd) consumables, speccing, etc. Only at the really high end required amazing personal player skill. Now that most of that first list is gone (thankfully) from this game, the only thing holding people back should be a basic knowledge of their class and ability to press the right buttons at the right time.

It seems though, that this whole 'skill' requirement is also set too low. You can be a very good casual, play 20 minutes a night and always contribute meaningfully. You can also be a terribad hardcore and wipe the raid 5x a night. What bothers me isn't so much that everyone can do it, but mostly the fact that the minimum level of output is so low. What surprises me is that all of you get butthurt at the suggestion that it makes sense to have to play the game properly to be able to do content. You have to time jumps over platforms in Mario. There's no way to skip over that part. I sometimes missed the jumps. So I went back and tried again until I learned how to. That was required to beat the game. Shouldn't being able to play your class properly be required to 'beat' (see endgame) in WoW? And in anticipation of your objection; yes there is a 'right' way to play the game. Warriors do not use caster swords. That is the WRONG way to play. Just like you have to avoid the Chomps in Super Mario. That was the right way to  play.

It is entirely possible for the end game to be as accessible as it is now and still require basic player skill. You can do 2.5k DPS in leveling greens. If content was tuned to require at least that from everyone you could still do it the moment you hit 80, the only difference is that you'd have to press the right buttons more often than you do now. You'd still have to press the same amount of keystrokes, but you might need to think about which ones. What is so wrong with this?

I still haven't seen Kel'thuzad on either difficulty. :(

My brother is in a 25 man raiding guild, and he and I have somehow convinced his guild I am competent, so I'm often a filler for them. They HAVE killed KT, I just haven't been along on those nights. MY guild is a 10 man guild, and we've killed up to Sapphiron but haven't actually tried to kill him yet. And from my one-person perspective, 25 mans seem like they have way more leeway than 10's. I don't like it as much though, too damn crowded. I have no idea how people could deal with 40 people raids.  :ye_gods:


EDIT: And it's not that my brother's guild has a higher quality of player than mine. If nothing else, our tanks and healers are definitely on-par or better. Their MT actually sort of sucks, they usually beat encounters by him dying early and their offtank (who is a far better tank) take over.  :awesome_for_real:

wowjutsu's numbers are useless for determining what percentage of players have completed the content.  The numbers it lists are only for guilds in their database.  You only get into their database by having done a certain amount of content and I THINK you have to add yourself to their search list.  So the data is useful for stuff like "What percentage of naxx-clearing guilds have Undying?", but not "What percentage of people, period, have been able to raid naxx?"  That they give an entire guild credit if one person has gear also screws with the data.  Finally, for some retarded legacy reason they still use gear instead of achievements for bosses.  So if you buy your 10-man chest with heroic emblems, you instantly give your guild credit for four horsemen and gluth.

Someone will eventually come up with a really good armory index thingy and we'll all abandon the horrible, horrible wowjutsu for it.

Wowjutsu's not absolute, but it does track achievements if you are in the system. What it tells you is of the people that DO raid, how much have they seen in a ballpark figure. It's a pretty large sample size as well, even if it isn't random. Is it exactly 25% that have finished Malygos 25? No, but it's certainly a good benchmark even if it's 5% off.


The only people who enjoy barriers to entry are those already involved in the system. As a hardcore raider, you in a smaller subsect of people who would enjoy keeping out "the stupids" but you do this already through your recruiting objectives and gameplay criteria. In essence, you don't need Blizzard to do more of what you already do. So seriously, at that point you're trying to get the gamemaker to piss on people's fun, which they aren't going to do if they like money at all.

Also, this is the first set of instances and there IS a barrier to entry. You can't go rolling into Malygos without killing Sapph. That's a reasonable one because it's the hardest boss, but you wouldn't want a barrier on just walking into Naxx. That's the TBC way of thinking, and it's dead.


It doesn't surprise me that it surpises you. I'm wondering why you are butthurt over the fact that other people, retards or not are succeeding. Frankly, I'm not even sure how you know these people who are semi-functional are even doing well. Does it somehow diminish the fact you beat a computer? Do you have to trod on others doing well in order to know that you are successful? Do you run around Dalaran checking people's specs and gear, then smacking your forehead and cursing when you find out they have the same thing as you? I'm hoping not.

In any case, let's get to the real reason you're asking this. You're fucking bored, and the content didn't hold your interest because there wasn't enough challenge. So now, you're going to ask the majority of the WoW populace who's not 3 Draking Sarth, and not even done yet with most of the content if we're happy? Yes, of course we're happy with it. You're not happy. Most of us would say, get over it.

The only drawback to this whole situation is that Blizzard is taking forever to come out with the next level of content. But then yall will burn through that and wonder how in the fuck anyone can deal with this game.

I am quite happy. I went to weekend warrior status due to work schedule just before my guild beat Malygos on 10 and then 25 man. I might have a shot at Mally tonight.  :grin: I'm kind of on standby mode too, I'm playing AO and Tabula Rasa during the weekdays, and only log in for raids in WoW now, and I do just damn fine. I'll probably get back to WoW fulltime in a bit, just cutting back due to having spent the whole summer grinding at it.

I wish Blizzard would explore other "elder game" content besides raids and PvP, but I'm relativley happy with the pace of raiding nowadays.

But past a certain level of competency, raids aren't about playing your class well, as much as having big enough numbers and memorizing the boss gimmicks like memorizing multiplication tables. I found most boss fights in TBC and Wrath boring due to just that.

I'd personally like it a lot if they lowered the numbers and made boss fights more unpredictable.

I think it's too tough to say without having Ulduar as a basis for comparison. In a vacuum, this tier of content is probably a little too easy (note: easy, not accessible) but if it really is a stepping stone to a decent challenge in Ulduar it's all good. Which is my standard reply to people bitching about it being too easy: give it a little time because it's meant to be post-nerf Karazhan level.

I like the lesser time required, for sure, with a baby on the way and just being in a different place in general than I was four years ago. But I've made the argument that the smartest, least dwelt on thing Blizzard does is grow up with their player base. I'm 31, not 27... even a kid who picked it up in college at 19 with time to burn is 23 or 24 now with a whole different set of time constraints.

Now, with that said I think the lack of time requirements sort of makes it feel less like a world. It's a little hard to describe but WoW isn't a terribly compelling world from a fiction standpoint so not being in it except on raid nights (and pretty much only on raid nights) sort of makes the whole thing feel a little more disconnected than it did when I was catassing it. That opens up a whole different argument about how much of a virtual world's verisimilitude relies on time commitment; that's one which is going to be mighty subjective but I figure there's at least one line graph in there.

To answer the question. Overall I think the current content tier is ok. Achievments add enough spice to keep some stuff more fresh than it could be, and there is more variety than there was for close to a year after the original release for max level characters.

The raid that MOST feels hugely disconnected from the world to me is Obsidian Sanctum. Why am I killing those dragons? Why? I mean yes, I'm doing it for the loots, but there's like ... NOTHING in the game that I've found that even mentions why I would want to do what I'm doing in there. Yes, the black dragons are iffy, but they're not the current dragon flight being assholes.

It's supposed to tie into a Novel no one will read.

Just beat Kel'Thuzad  10man today.  I subbed in on my guild's first clear for the last 2 attempts at KT.  Death's Bite dropped and it went to the main tank (DK).  I still haven't gotten a single purple main spec drop yet. 

I have yet to see half the fights in that place.  However, it was fun and felt appropriately challenging.  I didn't do great DPS(~1800), but there were mitigating factors for that (newness, kinda OTing, dying/ghouling/b'rezzed  :awesome_for_real: ). Luckily the same tank/healer group had been banging away at that encounter for a couple nights and they did a really good job (keeping me up while tanking wasn't a breeze).  4 melee made it a pain, but that also meant we had 4 interupts (dk tank, me, rogue, rogue).

It was cool that I got to see that encounter, try it, and beat it.   Under the same circumstances in pre-TBC/TBC, I don't think that would have been the case.

No I don't walk around Dalaran QQing about how this one guy has BoH he got from a pug. I didn't much care about people pugging Sunwell trash for best in slot ranged weapons. Loot doesn't motivate the hardcore raiders like the middlecore raiders think it does. We all get what we want eventually (even with all the RNG gripes).

I know that people who are barely doing anything are doing well because I have alts. And I play them during time I'd otherwise be raiding on my main (if there was content to raid). That means a lot of pug runs because we only have one alt content clear a week and this is my 2nd alt. I have DK/War/Druid, so I'm either tanking or healing 99% of the time (almost never DPS, since that's less useful, relatively). I don't require that everyone else bash their heads in frustration while I clear content with a well oiled machine of people who probably spend more time doing research for this game than they would getting to know their future spouse. I get zero validation from being better than others (videogames as personal validation is a lousy path to go down) but I do enjoy beating the challenge. Currently, that means playing against the computer, since PvP in WoW is terrible ATM. Though to be fair, I ran rogue/rogue at 70, and that wasn't exactly rocket science either.

What bothers me a bit is the fact that a lot of people who play now feel entitled to clearing the content. I don't so much care that it's easy but that this seems to a shift in philosophy. I'm wondering what they'll do when people expect to be able to pug Ulduar. I mean the vehicle boss at the start seems to be a bit of a cockblock for people who can't play very well, but if it's anything like maly (you can do it it with 30-40% non-retards) then people will get carried past it. How much satisfaction do you experience when you clear content that offers almost no resistance. You mentioned Saph as the hardest fight in Naxx. This is true, but mostly because no one does it in resist gear like it's intended.  If you wear the crafted set and run the aura (we did on the first kill in November) it's a joke. The fact that you can avoid this entirely and bruteforce heal (like almost every group does) actually means that you're powering through the 'hardmode' fight. When the hardmode is default and people aren't even aware that there's an 'easy' mode, what does that say about the easy mode difficulty?

Clearly.  You save your QQing for here.

How dare those fuckers FEEL something without my permission?   :uhrr:

That you want resist gear to be mandatory again is... disturbing.

Retarded thread is retarded.

I run a large guild.  I've not seen all the content.  Just like this point, the rest of your argument is so flawed it's giggleable.

Stop polishing your armor with my tears.

 :uhrr:

Wasn't Onyxia part of the back dragonflight?  People might still be kind of pissed off at the black dragons because of her.

We forgave her because she was nice enough to drop shitloads of gold <3

How dare those assholes! Just because they pay the same $15 I am, they think they're entitled to see the same content?  Fuckers need to know their place!

"Deep down are all you terribads really happy with this easy content?"
"Actually yes, we're quite pleased."
"FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU---"

Anyway, I don't care if PVP is supposed to be unbalanced right now, I'll do it and dailies until I quit. I'm never doing another instance run again. That shit is just not fun.

I like them the first time I do them.  Over and over again? Nope.

People complained and left the game when they introduced 20man instances like Zul'gurub.
People complained and left the game when burning crusade lowered all raids to 25man.
People complained and may leave the game in wotlk because of 10man content and easier non-achievement raiding.

The only constant? Subscriptions went up.

I'm so sorry for you and all the other people that are  :heartbreak: over this but I can't be arsed to care and nor will blizzard.

To be fair, the ZG whining was because at the time, it was some of the best loot in the game, and fit poorly into raid schedules and groups. It caused a lot of drama as to who got in which ZG group and such.

Any other whining was unmitigated bullshit, because ZG was amazingly technical for it's time, and flattened a lot of raiding guilds who were used to brute forcing content, whereas a DM blue'd guild who could actively not stand in fires was pretty solid. ZG was a great instance.

And yeah, no matter how hard the 5%ers think Blizzard's alienating them, it's overall good for the game as a whole in that it brings content to more people, who tell their friends how cool it is, and gets more new players. Alienating casual players is the path of horrible income.

Your counter-argument is so eloquent that I can find no flaw in its substance-less void to critique.

No really, I totally accept that my position isn't going to appeal to a lot of people. I expected it to be critiqued, but ideally via some semblance of a well marshaled argument. If I wanted responses using ad absurdo arguments, I'd have posted on WoW general.

In regards to the responses about  entitlement and content, do you feel entitled to play against a chess grandmaster because you picked up a copy of Chessmaster 4000 one day? If you can't master the jumping in Super Mario, are you still entitled to beat Bowser?

The "I pay money I deserve" argument, in addition to being logically flawed, is (actually) reducible to the absurd. You pay money to be able to access the content. You are not entitled to anything beyond that. I am not suggesting that the vast majority of the playerbase be relegated to dailies and 5 mans again, I think that's a bad design philosophy. Similarly, I was  not suggesting that resist fights need to come back anymore than the rest of you, I was merely pointing out that Saphirron *is* a resist fight that is trivialized by being undertuned (if you assume that adequate tuning for a resist fight is that you have to wear resist gear to be successful).

You need to stop reducing this to stereotypes. Am I suggesting that no one but the most hardcore ever see the entry level content? No. I am, however, proposing the idea that it might be wise to tune content such that it requires a bit more execution and adequate (not exceptional) playing skills.  For the vast majority of you, that means you'd still clear it, but maybe not in the first couple of weeks, and you might wipe a couple times a night. On the flipside, you at least get some sense of accomplishment in knowing that the stuff didn't fall over dead for you after you looked at it the wrong way. Is this so terribly undesirable?

Were casuals really alienated in Vanilla and TBC? I mean yes, they did something wrong in both expansions that they're doing better now. But if the argument is that 1. Alienating (true) casuals loses money and 2. Vanilla and TBC alienated casuals, then why did subscription and revenue levels continue to rise unabated during both content tiers?

I'm sure you're aware of how shitty your analogy is.

Yes. About on par with the average level of overhyperbole here.

Vanilla alienated casuals in the endgame until the nerfing of MC and addition of ZG and addition of tier 0.5, all of which were aimed at making content more accessible. ZG was a hit and showed that half the issue with casual players was getting 40 fuckers together to do shit, even after MC was easy enough for greens to do it, it wasn't hugely run due to the org issues.

TBC was better, but fell down with kara being difficult at it's start, and not being enough content for casual players. One casual raid wasn't cutting it for variety and lockout timers. ZA helped a ton, and was a hard-ish casual raid. The issue they found was that they'd locked in to what casual players wanted, but it's wasteful to make content for two different groups of players all the time.

Wrath did the normal/heroic thing to stop that: exposing everyone to the SAME amount and quality of content.

edit: I can clearly show here that WoW rapidly started trying to figure out how to make an epic feeling game that everyone could access, and took multiple expansions to learn all their lessons. That's why subs kept rising: they were working to fix the issues and improve it for the majority of players. If they'd said fuck it and just released expansions of nothing but BWL/AQ40, I can theorycraft that they'd be nowhere near as successful in expanding the MMO market as much as they have.

What proof do you have (honest question, not rhetorical device) do you have the casuals were ever unhappy with content in Vanilla/TBC? Is it the forum QQ from the 1% of people who even know that WoW has offical forums? Personal anecdote? Something else?

I mean the argument exists that it is possible to reverse engineer a problem based on the fact that Blizzard put out the solutions you described, but this seems to be a bit weak. Maybe they anticipated a future problem? I mean everyone keeps talking about how like 20% of the entire population even raids to begin with. Does adding more accessible raid content really do anything for them?

What's the difference between that and regular hyperbole?


Oh, I see, you're a troll.

In vanilla, absolutely for sure. Practically my entire guild ended up leaving the game, partly because we got precisely one bone tossed to us after release - Dire Maul. All the other development time appeared to be going into bigger and harder 40 man raids that smaller and smaller percentages of the population were going to be able to see. They did eventually come out with the 20 person stuff, which was in some ways even harder and also still out of our reach as a small guild (which I would guess the majority of guilds are/were.) I would bet good money that the decision to casual-ize the game for TBC was driven in part by their own internal numbers on what was happening with subscriptions, and that there was a trend there that was being hidden by the huge numbers they were getting by launching in other countries.

They fixed it for TBC, we came back, and we're REALLY happy that it is even more fixed for Wrath.

 After restarting from scratch after WoTLK, I'm amazed at how quickly you can get geared up to a good standard with WoTLK. I'm on a medium-high pop server where we generally hold winter grasp (it might flip once or twice depending on lag). VoA is insane for its drops long as your one of the lesser class/specs(and not DK number 14 on the raid). You can quickly gear up in the blue season 5 set (getting roughly 10-12k honor a night just doing daily's and WG). Then just gem for PvE if need be.

 H VH is the silliest way to farm badges daily even if you only have 20-30mins.

1. Overhyperbole is like regular hyperbole but TO THE MAX. Take Schild, mix with some WUA and distill over a medium flame.

2. No really, I've never been casual, so I have no idea. Just because everyone SAYS that casuals were emoqq in vanilla and TBC doesn't make it true. Ingmar's first hand account is a much better indicator of what happened than "people whine on forums it must be true".

At the time, they actively discussed being dismayed by the percentage of players who had ever zoned in or downed a boss in the various raid encounters. Essentially, they saw early on that they were churning out new content that nobody would see. At the time I WAS a hardcore raider (BWLish era is when all this went down, and the MC nerf) and it was entirely due to casuals not having jack shit to do and it would be easy to see everyone leaving if your options are: A) quit, B) run Strath again.

If you look back, you can see their various attempts at fixing the issue, and they seem to have found the solution of this expansion learned from prior expansion tests. The tried adding more 5 mans, it's okay but lacks staying power (DM, Sunwell), they added slightly smaller raids (ZG), they reduced overall raid sizes (all of TBC) and picked that as a solid development number, then found a way to streamline development and not block content from parts of the playerbase.

The ideal goal is to not wind up with 5% of your playerbase using 60% of your endgame. That's blatantly a business model begging someone else to come be the next big thing.

:uhrr:

Stop, please.

I remember the next big thing.

Whatever happened to MJ's game again? I remember playing WAR for a bit then quitting b/c tier3 and 4 was made of pure suck. Did they ever fix that?


Your eloquence and articulation convinces me oh so well.

Perhaps you'll appreciate my eloquence then.

Dear OP,

Fuck off

Thanks,

Everyone.

If you care about Ingmar's anecdote: I played with Ingmar from day 1 in WoW.

I eventually quit and rerolled to another server, and started my hardcore raider career out of complete Boredom with WoW's endgame as a small guild. As in, there wasn't shit to do but 5 man instances.

Anyways, do you have any evidence that WoW hasn't been sliding towards the casual since the MC nerf patch? Because I can't see a single data point that shows WoW's design direction heading for hardcore-ville, population You after ZG's release.

edit: And we've had a LOT of Next Big Things during WoW's life. WAR was the most recent, but not the one that started the drive to keep the casuals, which was Vanilla-era.

These aren't meant to be counter examples, but original TK+SSC attunements, as well as pre-3.0 Sunwell were pretty hardcore. I mean these were eventually later rectified but it shows that at least someone in development though that people wanted to see more hardcore content. What was the next big thing around ZG anyways? LotRO? Because I hated that game so fucking much. Most grindy leveling ever. It almost felt like you weren't supposed to level.

@Musashi:

Clever.  Why so butthurt though?

You're starting to get annoying. 

If you want another personal example, both times I quit pre TBC was due to raiding taking up too much of my time.  I wanted to see and experience all of the content and the only real way to do that was through a competent raiding guild as there wasn't a very competitive scene horde side on the server I played on.   In TBC, there was a similar experience with all of the stupid keys and the lack of casual guilds having any raiding success.  When raiding was off the table, there just wasn't enough for me to do and WoW lost my subscription for a time.

Then Kara got the nerf bat, and I came back and had fun progressing in a more casual setting. 25 mans were less fun and the strife they caused within the guild was regrettable. Once you start segmenting your own playerbase due to very stringent requirements on time investment, gear, and number of people involved; you start causing a of conflicts that wouldn't be there if there were alternate paths.

Now with WOLK, the 25 man material is really not causing a lot of problems except for a few folks that still have it in their mindset that it's the pinnacle of their personal advancement.  A good deal of this is because the exact same materal is available in a more casual 10 man format.  There's no "this content is only for the uber, get back in your heroics, chump".  This will delay the inevitable guild breakup until Uldar starts frustrating the less time constrained in our guild.

If I absolutely had to jack up the difficulty for the poopsock, bank prancers; I'd just crank it up for the 25 man versions while leaving the 10 man more accessible.  But then you'd get crying that some uber guild's little clique doesn't have something that tests their refined skills.

edit: I'm going to say this only once, stop the damn trolling. This isn't WoW general forum.

LOTRO was supposed to be a HUGE casualsink. When was DDO anywho, I thought it was mid-WoW.

TK and SSC's attunements were pretty well mauled, and the whole attunement system tossed out on it's ass, which is more evidence that every time something hardcore winds up in the WoW design docs, it gets an axe to the face shortly thereafter.

Someone in design did want to appease the hardcore, but Management didn't seem to agree, every time it got done, it got reversed. I've never seen an entire raid instance get tuned Upwards.

Going to focus in on this quote. I'm inclined to agree, since I don't think any of the serious raiding guilds ever considered 10 mans parallel progression. I have absolutely no idea why people argue that you need to have 10 mans as difficult as 25 man raids (or the 5man/solo instance crowd). The only reason this is the case atm is because 10+3 is more demanding in terms of DPS relative to 25+3 since you tend to have the same amount of tanks in both, and maybe 3-4 more healers in 25, and then 10 more DPS. I'd imagine that no one would have an issue with easy 10 mans to 'see content' and harder 25 mans to 'get owned if not HARDCORE (tm)'. If that were the case, I'm sure I'd be somewhere losing sleep instead of inciting WoWGeneral-esque hatred of my playstyle.

In terms of the uber clique thing; I don't know of any 10man only guilds (as in, no 25 man gear) to have cleared 10+3. I'm sure they exist somewhere but they are the vast minority even within the tiny minority of people who've cleared 10+3 anyways. I'd imagine if they wanted to get Perreto optimality in terms of minimizing QQ, they'd make 25 mans a bit harder and keep 10 man difficulty the same (minus 10+3, which is totally out of tune).

10 man wasn't really a "you suck" parallel progression as much as removing a lot of the org overhead needed to raid. Running a large raid guild is not fun, and is a royal bitch to get everyone's schedules right and such.

That said, if 25s want to crank up the difficulty, that seems to be the route they're going (optional encounters like 3 drakes up gives better loot for a harder fight, or you can do the easier method for less loot)

Another little anecdotal bit of evidence that something needed to change, I used to zone into a AV to see half the raid wearing valor shoulders.  :ye_gods:

So really they needed to open things up just to spread the fugly around a bit.

What about the paladins with Ice Barbed Spears and rogues with Glacial Blades and Lobotomizers?  :awesome_for_real:

Your examples are of single player games.  WoW is a multiplayer game which is why your analogies simply don't apply.  The 'skill' involved in the old vanilla game raids was that of coordination between yourself and 39 of your closest friends for hours upon hours at a time.  That was the block to the end game content.  It isn't about 'deserve', it's about just what you said in the follow-up sentence: to be able to access the content.  If you could not get into (or didn't have the time to do) 40 man raids, you could not access the content.  This is a marked difference to what we see today, where the end game consists much more of shorter 10 man instances, with the option of 25 man if you really like to herd cats.

And to answer your other question about casuals in vanilla WoW, my experience back then was much the same as Ingmar's.  The small guild I was in consisted of old guildies from DAoC (first server).  We had great fun playing from 1-59, but once the we realized the endgame consisted of A) 40 man BS and/or B) endless factions grinds and attunements ever single one of us quit within a few months.  Now that the end game is more casual friendly, the one's I've stayed in touch with are back.  Since pretty much everyone in this thread but you seems happy with the way the end game is now, how much more anecdotal evidence do you need?

Man, fuck them for making that a quest instead of a HUGE GODDAMNED KILL THE NPC DISTRACTION EVERY FUCKING AV

Though I sort of miss the 16 hour AVs.

Fuck me, you're lucky I didn't just dismiss you with 'You mispelled Tier.'

By the way, you mispelled tier.

And your argument is flawed and retarded.

I miss herding my cats :(

I guess I'm not thinking as far back as Vanilla (I took it for granted that endgame needed 39 other people. I mean that's how it was and I never thought about it. I've become more aware of things since). But if you look back at the nerf whining in TBC from the 4/5, 4/9 guilds (post attunement drop) they COULD herd 25 cats. They just had lousy, flea ridden cats. It seemed that the issue they were having wasn't people in terms of numbers by people in terms of quality.

Now that you can do the exact same content on 10 man, would you really complain that 25 man should penalize or at least discourage corpse cannon approaches?

I'd since corrected the typo (before you made this post).

EDIT: Apparently I hadn't. Fixed now. Win?

God that was annoying. "Good job guys, we've pushed them back into their base, let's win this thing!"

Korrak the Bloodrager spawns, raid erupts with "OMG I NEED QUEST" and they all zerg north.  :uhrr:

Then one asshole who was not in the raid would tag him and everyone would mass flee in order to reset him.

Lifting attunements wasn't casual accessible in the sense of meaning everyone can BEAT the content and continue on.

It was casual accessible in that it removed what was essentially an organizational block on the content. You had to herd cats into getting keyed to shit, it was an obnoxious waste of everyone's time in all cases. It was an especially shitty burden on casual guilds who were not used to/prepared to/willing to crack the whip on people to get everyone they needed attuned before even getting online to raid for the night.

40 man raids were nothing if not herding what amounted to a frat party into trying to shut the fuck up and kill the goddamned raid targets. It's still that, but with less constant desire to kill them all. Just join General in any raid zone and you can still experience the shit I'd gkick fuckers for spamming in raid. <3

I haven't had any non guild channels shown since MC. Apparently bad shit goes down there. Confirm/deny?

Well, now you've configured to my standards of English :



That's some paragraph.  I don't even know what you're saying.  Who cares if they don't enchant it ?  Who cares if they win it ?  Who, in fact, are Jimmy and Susie ?  Further, MC BoE epix were hardcore ?  Maybe.  Not to me or the guild.  They were just a bunch of people who were more organised and, frankly, pitied.  Sure, we went to MC.  But it was, in fact, shit boring.  Like, really, really boring.  It wasn't even fun.  It was a cave.  A really, really long fucking cave.  No wonder no-one progressed, since the shit in there was needed to progress and, frankly, it was, as mentioned, shit and boring.


Nope, not everyone.  I mean, sure you can capitalise it all you want like an enormous douchebag, but it doesn't make it true.  For evidence, just look at my FOURTEEN FOOT LONG PENIS.  I want to see all the content.  I want to clear it !  Haven't yet.  There's this wee kiddie thing in the way.  God, that bitch is demanding.  I should probably let her starve while festering in her own shit.  That'll teach her when I'm all purpled up AND ENCHANTED !!!  I am happy with the game.  Strangely.


You have no understanding of the distinction, never mind the differentiation.  Really.



Right, right.  You realise you just killed your 'half a brain cell' argument ?


How wondrous for you.  Where did you dredge to find such mentally challenged feebles ?  Or is this from the same land of Made up Make Believe as 'ALL THE CONTENT.  ALL THE GI JOES.  ALL THE CONTENT !!!!

 

The game, as is, is just about right where I want it.  Also, a lot of people.  Tell you what, in future, when the sky is falling, can you show us a picture of the sky falling ?  Similarly, when you're dissatisfied with the game, wanna stop pretending that you are the world ?

'Cause you're not.  You're not even clever.  The games you want are over that way.  Dying a fucking sub death.

I'm done now.  Seriously.


Ok.

I have them on randomly for Wintergrasp raid invites.

I forget to turn them off on raid nights. OH DEAR GOD WHY.

I never suggested that MC was the epitome of fun. I, for one, hate the MC nostalgia shit. I'm not sure what exactly you're attacking here, since this seems to be mostly "RAWR ANGRY MOTHERFUCKER". What bothers you so?


Two argument tracks I can take here:

1. If your kid is anything like you, please to be letting her die for the benefit of our gene pool.

Nope, that one seems a bit harsh, and perhaps not wholly warranted. Let's try track number two.

2. I was probably a bit over zealous when I said that EVERYONE had done. Sorry, that should be everyone. How about most people? A sizable portion? More than ever had at any previous point in the game? Still not good enough? What about 'just myself and my friends and my neighbor's daughter who I'm having an affair with and that prev who keeps peeking through the curtains?'. Is that sufficiently self-centered for you? I mean I may or may not have been suggesting that this content was about as accessible as it was going to get, barring stuff like newly procreated offspring, crack addiction or hot new girlfriend with insatiable sex-drive. But that's too fine a distinction.

Hmm. I don't much like argument line 2 either. Can I just go back to yelling REALLY LOUDLY BECAUSE CAPS ARE SRS? That seemed to work better for me.


Well that sucks. Care to enlighten me all knowing guru? I mean if we're going to have two categories of loosely defined opposites which we further subdivide into any number of distinctions which we conveniently abbreviate as a linguistic shorthand, I'd better be sure I'm getting them right. Is casual under 2 hours a week or is it no more than 2 instances a night or what? Please tell me, I'm dying to know.



That's a shame.


I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, because your 'argument' seems to have devolved into ANGRYMAN again. And I haven't even suggested anything negative about your playstyle or life choices yet. Imagine what'll happen when I do that. If you missed it (and you did) I was making a point that doing the hardmode with 80% of the requisite raid team suggests that even the HARDCOARZ ONLY!111!! shit is too easy. Since you are, presumably, not hardcore, why would you get upset that I find this undesirable? Any changes to this would have no effect on you.


The whole stuck up hardcore hates us all thing is really getting old. You seem to get so FUCKING ANGRY that some people find content too easy. And then (absurd I know!) they ask if other people find content too easy. Then they suggest that maybe some content can be easy and some can be hard so that everyone gets to see the difficulty mode they want to get out of this game. I mean this is obviously going to detract from your personal satisfaction.  I'm also glad that you switched from ad absurdo to ad hominem. Moving up in the logical fallacy world!

Pve sure, fine, i like that it is accessible, did a 10 man naxx finally, and walked away with the conclusion that I had more fun when it was a 40 man raid.

the thing that prevents me from logging on to Wow is the "you must be this tall to buy nice pvp gear" schtick they are using.  I would rather play a reskinned mmo by Frogster and craft away than play pvp with the "My gear is 10x better than yours, heh and you can't even buy this gear because your arena score is too low"

-yes I am bitter.  I have known it for sometime, but liking pvp and actually being good at it are two very different things  :heartbreak:

I think we should just turn this thread into proposed grief titles for this loony.

I propose the following:

"is not to be taken seriously."

or

"likes 14 ft penis."

or really that should be, "LIKES 14 FT PENIS!!11!"

14 inches sure. That'd fill me up nicely.

14 feet? That might start to hurt.

I think this thread has pretty well run its course, but I do want to raise a tangential issue that is skirted, but never quite openly adressed in the WoW raider milieu:

The assumption that what separates the "hardcore" from the "casual" is *skill*

My consistent experience in all MMO's is that 80% of the hardcore "skill" comes from augmented abilities/spells/stats that are the result of time (i.e. loot) and definitely not the skill of the individual player.  Extra marks of course go for organization and teamwork... but that is a matter of good leadership and following orders - not what I would precisely call, skill.  If I could screen for leadership and following abilities I could rule the MMO world.

Another way to put it is this: If I could substitute a good skilled "follower" in greens and have success, then I say ratchet-the-fuck-up.

But since Skill does not really exist, or, better put, skill is trumped by gear... and gear is only accessible via progression... and progression is only available via time commitments... then I'm only really looking at gear and pretending it is skill.

I've been healing in MMO's for almost a decade... give my Druid Tier XX gear, one night to acclimate to pace and my new output, and I'll heal your ass through any content you want.

I know this is near heresy in a PvE game, and it begs the question of why raid if not for loot that makes content accessible... but I might suggest that the first game to provide meaningful advancement and content that can fulfill the "bring the person not the toon" mantra will be The Next Big Thing (tm).

<and this goes double for PvP>

As far as the whole raider v. casual thing in WoTLK... another way to look at it from the hardcore point of view is that you might actually have a larger pool of "skilled" players from which to chose since the gear differential is less radically segmented (at the earlier stages) than at any other point in WoW's development.

Optimistic thought courtesy of Jack Handey.

How can two red pandas be at such extremes?  The world may never know.

If you play in a top 25 guild, you have the fortunate combination of playing with people who both have skill and gear. This makes the game about 50x more fun than anything else; I get great satisfaction from pulls where we execute perfectly. You can overskill a lot more content than you can outgear, even now. I totally agree that making skill and not gear based progression would satisfy all of my complaints. Sadly however, people like you are the minority. The majority of players are neither time rich nor skilled. As such, the next big thing will be the game that combines skill based progression with something to do for the not so skilled (iie counterstrike),

Get over yourself. 

I have to agree with the people that liked old AV. While it was impossible to get anything done, it was about the only PvP I ever have done in WoW that actually felt like an epic battle. What it has been watered down to is beyond a pale comparison. If they were to bring back one thing from vanilla, for me this would be it.

The difference between hardcore and casual has always been pretty simple to define in my mind.

Did you fill out an application to join your guild? Congrats, you're not casual.

But I like filling out web forms! :(

I agree. This thread is getting ridiculous about the epeen, and it's verging into the horrible territory of the "Is there skill involved in MMOs" debate that's been done about 99,999,999 times.

We answered the question. We're happy. Move on.

Do you want to show the world how skilled you are?  Have your entire raid decked out in greens.  Instant challenge.  Brag about it and maybe they'll turn it into an achievement.

That would be a pretty awesome achievement, like, for serious and stuff.

"We didn't want those epics anyways"

Overrated cleared BWL in greens a few times after the C'thun ban. They also raped DnT in AB while sporting greens. Not even that stopped the guild from crashing and burning. One of their guildies even became a porn actress  :awesome_for_real:

Old AV was trash. Fucking horrible honor per hour. Also got boring as fuck after Lokholar was summoned. Rose tinted glasses.

I think we should all be thankful that Phunked has deemed to talk to us.

Of course, his name is close to this guys.  Coincidence? 

(http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/article-illustrations/titan_grunk.jpg)

(hope this works, tentonhammer is blocked at work)

I've mentioned to Sly before that I think WoW's endgame is a huge achillies heel. Blizz is closing the window slowly, though.

But I wonder how well a game that was as fun as WoW, but killed the raidgame and replaced it with soloing and 5 man content, would do. Yeah, I'm talking about purple quest rewards and tier gear for 5 man dungeons.

OK, just to be absolutely SURE, I've done over all the posts in question.

Phunked, this game is no longer for you.

Quit it.

Seriously.  Quit it.  Move on.

And then we won't have to be subjected to threads where you use the most insane and fucked up logic to justify a position that has little or not grounding in reality.


As for this little nugget of gem-like turd :


Seriously, if the gear is a problem and makes the whole game so very tiringly easy for your precious little noggin, then do what people have suggested.  Run the fucking instance in Twill Gear.  Seriously.  Give it a shot.  MAKE THE GAME FUN FOR YOURSELF RATHER THAN COMING HERE AND PISSING ON US.

That's what really gets me.  You didn't come here to ask a question (since you clearly can't actually handle the answer), you came here to show off.  Frankly, your drama zomg I'm so cool nonsense is boring.  What makes it worse is that every time someone calls you on it, you're all 'No, it's Not about me, why do you make it about me, it's not about me, but anyway, I can't enjoy this instance when I raid it with my 24 other chaps who are made of solid gold and titanium.  Also, they don't ever speak on Vent but use the POWER OF OUR MINDS to talk to each long distance.'

Also, what Rasix Said. Times around a thousand.

Finally;  Skill.  In WoW ?  Lol.  Lol times around a fucking thousand.  This is not a game of skill.  It's not even remotely a game of skill.

But we've done that argument.  A thousand times.  And, when we do it again, Schild Comes.

You don't want that.

Which one was that?

I loved visiting Overrated when they were leveling up.  They were fun to grief and good sports about it.

Bucwild  :awesome_for_real:

Can't remember, happened after they moved to korgath, so i'd already stopped tracking them. Think mot had also quit by then.

I don't raid much.  My favorite part of the game is 5-man dungeons.  Heroic WotLK 5-mans are way, way too easy.  Just with quest gear from levelling my group ripped through all the heroics right after hitting 80.  The people I run 5-mans with weren't geared either.  I'm not particularly skilled (hell, I keyboard turn almost all the time in PvE).  We run with both a prot warrior and a prot pally because we're too lazy to respec.  We don't use vent.  But we beat them all, easily.  You can basically hit random keys and come out OK.

I'd love to see a harder mode of 5-man. 

Do it yourself.  Wear greens.  Go with 4 instead of 5.  Try to get the achievements.

There's plenty of ways to make it harder on yourself, but if it's too hard, it's impossible to make it easier.

Hardcores get bored trying to make their own entertainment. Mindless farming and grinding have killed what little imagination they started with.

We should change the title to, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?!"

Entertained ? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3DHdIMMa9g&feature=channel)

Oxhorn does the best Wow Machinema.  Now to listen to the 12 days of winter's veil again.

Onyxia is/was a black dragon, yeah, but like I said, they're not the CURRENT asshole dragon flight, the blues are. It just feels totally random to me. It would probably feel less dumb if there was at least a quest to go in there, but there isn't. The voice acting sort of indicates we're interupting SOMEthing, but I have no idea what. There's also stuff like I WILL GUARD THESE EGGS WITH MY LIFE. Well, of course you will! But why are we disturbing you and your eggs in the first place?!

Basically, considering how even the stupidest instances have SOMEthing leading up to it so you know why you're there or they're there or SOMEthing, OS exists in a vaccuum, which is totally different from how Blizzard usually does it. The Wintergrasp raid too, but that bugs me less for some reason.


EDIT: I keyboard turn too, El Gallo! We should start a club.

It's that Sarth is a dragon and Archavon's just this rude golem that farts, spits, and jumps around like a retard.  There were these same complaints about netherspite: WTF is this dragon doing here?  Yet you didn't hear people questioning "wtf is an eredar doing here?" anywhere near as much.  In both real life and WoW, dragons have a ton of lore and mythological weight.  Slaying the dragon is supposed to be an epic thing you do at the end of the novel.  Meanwhile, golems are well established as 'trash' mob in stories; e.g. zomg the statues are alive we must kill them now!

Netherspite was quite obviously studying the planar convergence in the tower.




The thing with Sarth, is there IS actual lore for him and the Eggs and those other purple drakes in the place. It's just all inside some novel, most of the WoW populace will never see.

WoW lore is a carwreck anyway. It either happens in game, or it gets smashed together randomly in the hopes that we can make some sense out of it.

My guild has progressed onto Sarth 10 +1 tonight. Decided to go with Shadron, and managed to kill the drake on the 2nd attempt, but we all forgot about the portal, and then when we finally remembered organisation went to hell and we wiped. After that we had a few more wipes with various boss positioning issues and called it after a while as our MT had to log. Still, we all know we can do it, and this is possibly the most fun boss fight I've done in wow in a long-long time. The damage is generally very manageable, I understand now how the difficulty is in the execution.

If there are any guilds out there that have cleared all 10-man content, but haven't tried this you're missing out on a lot of fun.

You'll save yourself a lot of frustration (although you had fun so I can't knock it  :awesome_for_real:) if you go for tenebron. He comes soonest and his whelps can be ignored until you finish him off, and his aura isn't particularly deadly. Shadron is generally regarded as the most dangerous because of the +100% fire damage aura active until he dies. If you go for two drakes Vesperon doesn't land until a good clip after Tenebron so you have enough time to at least bring him down before you have multiple drakes up.

I am hoping to run +1 tomorrow night. I need to remember to remind people to run dailies for repair money tonight...

We did think about Tenebron, but our OT is one of our reserve guys, and not someone who we had 100% confidence in, so I was worried about the whelp spawns. Shadron wasn't too bad as almost all our guys are pro wall-dodgers now, and our tank had enough HP to live through a breath. Our main problem was getting overwhelmed with elementals I think, and leaving the acolyte alive (still kicking myself about that).

How tough is Vesperon? I hear twilight torment is a real pain, but we have had no way to test it yet, as this has been our first week.

Also, which way do you guys face Sarth, to the right or to the left?

The tank pulls Sarth back toward the spot you pull him from and the raid runs past him so that the tank is ideally positioned to avoid waves and the raid has plenty of room. We tank Sarth facing left (from the point of view of the entrance), and we tank the drakes on the right part of the platform while the ranged stands on the left. We originally had our prot paladin doing the add tanking but later realized that it's very difficult on the paladin and that a prot warrior or death knight is better suited because of their mobility in regards to the unpredictability of elemental spawns (random location, random frequency).

Vesperon comes last so you'll have to wait a bit if you're only pulling him, torment isn't too bad (although I raid with a warlock who has Siphon Life/Haunt/Shadow Ward so it barely tickles me) if your healers are conscious of it. You should also be packing 3 tanks for any multi-drake kill (even on 10 man), the elementals/whelps have to be contained and it's impossible for someone to pick up both the drakes and the adds, and you still need someone on Sartharion.

Something that's come up among the raiders I know is that a lot of people are taking it really easy now. We've crashed through Wrath raid content and there's not a few people who log in just for raid night, and maybe once or twice a week to do dailies, farm mats, etc...

I think this is a good thing. WoW endgame is becoming a lot less catass.

That's me. But it... I don't know. It's a little hard to describe. WoW's always been self-consciously a game but with only logging in twice a week all the crappy lore comes crashing down. There's no real immersion. I'd hate what it says about me and other MMO players if immersion only equals obsessive time investment but there you go.

I love to see the scripting in the raids and stuff. They're the best in the business. But there's a palpable sense of detachment from the "world" that probably shouldn't be in a medium ostensibly trying to create a world.

As someone who loves sandboxes and RP and immersion...

I'm enjoying WoW now that I view and play it as a game and social experience.  I want to login to chat with my friends and the game is just to occupy my time or give us a common task to work towards.  I'm so much happier with it.

I very casually log in, but I don't really want that much immersion. It IS a game. I have emotional attachments to my friends and our experiences together, but not their characters or the various characters in the world. Heck, half the world notable NPCs you have to interact with are total douche bags <3

Let me play a little Devil's Advocate here: if you're self-consciously a game, with little to no verisimilitude or immersion, aren't you ceding the entire point of the MMO medium in the first place?

No, you're ceding the entire point of an RPG.

Having a shitload of players does not require immersion, simply a server structure that can handle the communication.

What I'm saying is that in an MMORPG, the first three letters entertain me more than the last three.

I assume you mean MMORPG, "MMO" alone just means 'a bunch of people are playing something'.

That said, I don't think it is accurate to say WoW has little to no versimilitude/immersion. It is sloppy at times, but even 10 minutes browsing through WoWWiki will show you there's craploads of lore floating around, and the Wrathgate event seems to show they're making a better effort to get that out to people who don't read quest text.

Which is what I think Blizzard did on day one when they started designing WoW. It's not a very good RPG, and clearly wasn't designed to be one.

Do you mean Schild shows up.. or...?


My casual-problem with WoW is that with the much lower barrier to entering raids, PUG raiding is pretty much mandatory if you're unguilded or in a shitty useless guild. And you can't generally get into much that's better than that if you only want to get on a couple of times a week, and don't like the whole "5-hour session" thing...

Which is why I recently quit. Not enough time to fit WoW in with things I need to do IRL.

That, the phasing, and the forced interaction with events (think the UC raid and such) were very much hitting the visual players over the head with lore that was usually hidden in quest text.

I got a lot more immersion out of Wrath than the prior expansions, simply because I skim quest text for targets. blah blah murlocs blah blah six eyes blah.

I think I mentioned this on another thread, but I still like the lore in WoW.  I just don't take it seriously at all.  It's there for flavor, not Shakespearean storytelling.  It's more Venture Bros. than Lord of the Rings.

Venture Brothers is actually so well written it pains me to see you compare it to WoW.  :why_so_serious:

Given that the prior choice was to run kara over and over and over again or do fuck all, I'd say that's a much better scenario.

Oh, it's better in a lot of ways. I just don't have the time right now, (or I'm not willing to spend the WoW-time) so I'm not playing. Also those seasonal achievements fucked me right off.

What separates the "hardcore" from the "casual", at least in my observation and definition of the terms, is that the "hardcore" walk into a place prepared, ready, interested, and with all their focus on the task at hand, with a "let's get this DONE" attitude.  When mistakes are made they are called on them, people aren't allowed to suck ass simply because they're nice people, and so on.  Things get done, mistakes get corrected and people don't bitch and complain when the going gets a little rough.

"Casuals," on the other hand, putter along playing randomly without focus. Then they go "I want to raid!".  They immediately gather a bunch of other people together, maybe do a little research but don't really look into things deeply, they don't properly prepare themselves and their characters, and they're afraid of failure.  They walk in distracted, usually an hour or more after the scheduled start time (since nobody was actually ready when they were supposed to be), and kind of interested but not focused, and their attitude is more along the lines of "let's try this".  When someone makes a mistake, usually they're not called on it.  If they are, justifications are made.  Rarely do they own up and go 'yeah, I fucked up, I'll do better'.  Usually half the raid says something like "there's no point in assigning blame."  Of course, since blame isn't assigned, nobody cares to improve and not do the same fuckup again, next try.  And they almost never tell someone "you suck and you're not improving.  You're outta here."  And they blame a percieved lack of gear for their failure, rather than realizing their own tactics and strategy needs improvement, or they simply aren't executing as well as they should.

The "skill" of MMOG's mostly boils down to doing a little research, following the plan, and most importantly, identifying mistakes in yourself and your teammates and correcting them the next time around.

That gear issue?  It's about 90% false.  The hardcore?  They go in, often with less gear than the casuals when they're starting out, and they win.  Because they learn quickly from their screwups and don't rely on overgearing things.  The people that did world firsts on the Lich King content?  They went in WAY undergeared as compared to what most of the "casuals" go in with, which tends to be high level quest blues.  They didn't have time to outfit themselves in full quest blues and all that, they had to GO and do the raids.  And they won.  With gear 10 levels below them.  Yes, there are times when a good player is held back by their lack of gear.  But it's not as often as people like to think.

 :awesome_for_real:

The difference IS skill. They put more time in, of course they're going to be better than you. Someone who treats this as a game and not a commitment doesn't want to spend hours poring over DPS spreadsheets and gear lists and raid compositions and cranking out perfect rotations, and so on, and I agree with them. The game is so much more fun when you can play it as you want to and not because you feel like it's an obligation.

It doesn't really matter either way, most people aren't putting in 30+ hour weeks on a video game and Blizzard finally decided to design content with that in mind.

To summarize for those who don't want to read it all:


I concur. 

/thread

Did that post imply that if you actually zone into a raid instance with a goal of downing raid bosses, you're hardcore?

And casual can't cope with wipes?

Because, uh, I've never seen a casual guild splinter due to chain wiping on a boss in BWL, but I've seen TONS of hardcore guilds bleed members due to banging their head on progression content.

Unless, you know, I'm secretly in a hardcore raiding guild and we just Pretend.

Isn't it the people who pour over DPS spreadsheets and gear lists and raid compositions who are now complaining that WotLK is too easy?

Yep, they are bored now. They don't have to endlessly prepare to be successful, or hit themselves in the nuts over and over on 2% margin of error fights, so they don't know what to do with themselves. Blizzard took most of the ridiculous preperation and theorycrafting bricks out of the briefcase, and reduced it into the simple skills the game actually requires you to master to be successful.

Turns out those skills weren't that substantial.

1 - Don't stand in that shit.
2 - Be ready to move to a different place in the room.
3 - Cleanse things.
4 - Hit these 4 buttons in a row until things are dead.
5 - Switch targets and focus fire.
6 - Spread out and/or gather up.

In my infinite wisdom and awesomeness, I usually put raiders into 3 tiers.

Casual: OMG! let's run Naxx 10 tonight! Do we need a tank for that?  :awesome_for_real:

Serious: Naxx 25 is wednesday. Everyone be on time and ready to raid.

Hardcore: (http://wow.incgamers.com/gallery/data/500/southpark.jpg)

Most of them, yes.

I've done insane shit like build my own spreadsheets to try and optimize things for my own character or our particular raid but I don't find myself bored.

Than again, I've never dedicated more than a few hours of time to the above, and I enjoy playing alts. I also don't care enough about "TEH PURPLEZ" to endlessly run every heroic I can every day after hitting 80 before moving into raiding and grinding bosses week after week.  I'm probably an outlier.. too hardcore to be casual, too casual to be hardcore.

Or rather.. I'm Ratman's definition of "Serious"

I'm also between "Serious" and "Hardcore". I like my raiding and I like helping others achieve and downing new content. I have no patience for pug shit and I don't run heroics endlessly. I have a 80 priest and rogue and am working on a mage. I do level up alts when bored. I surf EJ every patch to see what's up. I am an addons addict. My fishing is at 430. I'm working on getting fish fests for the raid :)

That said, I only raid mon, wed, and sometimes tues. I tend to log in before work to do the cooking daily every day.

I'm happy with the content pace; we've only got sarth+2 and sarth+3 left and will probably complete at least sarth+2 before uldar.

Not entirely, I mean, I do that stuff, and I am finding things plenty entertaining and/or challenging. But the difference may be that I play with people who mostly *don't* do that, and it doesn't bother me.

In other news, where did Phunked go?   :why_so_serious:

*respecs elemental again*

Most all casual guilds I've seen die slow deaths as the people that want to succeed and give a damn are slowly picked off by larger raiding guilds.  Every time they start to have some success, a few more members leave.  A few dedicated officers live a miserable existence trying to get these people ready for raiding only to have their best members leave because the rest of the people just aren't getting with the program and taking it seriously, which starts the cycle all over again.  Eventually they get burnt out on the game and quit entirely.

I think the problem people have understanding my definition is that Hardcore = Serious to me, and the image describing Ratman's definition of Hardcore is where I place the people who play ridiculous amounts of time, but suck, therefore causing them to spend even more time trying to beat the content, bitching and moaning all the way.  They're the ones that spend two or three hours on each wing of Naxx, extending the entire dungeon over four days, then take another day at Malygos and another day at Obsidian Sanctum, beating it only because they spend ridiculous amounts of time on it.

I probably define these terms differently than most, since many see "hardcore" as a negative term.  It sounds as though Bhodi, Merusk, Paelos, and probably Kildorn fit with my definition of hardcore.

Edit: Definitions aside, my point that time invested isn't (and rarely has been) what separates the raiders that get shit done and blow through new content from the scrubs that struggle through even the simplest of raids still stands.  Whether "hardcore" or "serious," the people who go in prepared and intending to get shit done get it done, even if they're undergeared compared to the people who don't put any focus or effort into it.  Skill is learning from your mistakes and not repeating them, and it will make up for deficits in sheer equipment, to a degree.

I guess that explains why the pretty casual guild I'm in, which has been around for 4+ years, is now larger than ever and thriving.  It also explains why our GM is living such a miserable existence.  I should mail him a box of cookies, to cheer the poor boy up.

Any guild will lose members if their primary focus in the game isn't being fulfilled.

Hardcore raid guild: if you keep wiping on a boss for a month, you will lose players, either to a splinter guild or people hopping. Guild hopping to progress isn't a casual phenomenon, it's really really common in the world that is top of the server guild progression. If you have a top 5 player in a top 20 guild, he's probably going to jump unless he's stuck trying to sleep with That One Girl Who Talks On Vent(tm)

If a casual guild is trying to be a progression guild or recruited progression oriented people (and not enough to progress) they may leave. But for the most part what makes the guild casual is that it really as a whole doesn't give a fuck. The goal of the guild was to have people to hang out and do shit with, not be the best at the game. So if that shit is wiping on a boss, they'll either do it, or go do something they know they can beat.

Failure to progress isn't the death knell of a casual guild. It is the death knell of the hardcore guild that isn't already top 5.

It doesn't, unfortunately, explain why people take generalizations that tend to hold true overall, and apply them to specific exceptions as though such exceptions invalidate a statement that is, overall, relatively accurate.

Most casual guilds that attempt to do a little light raiding will have varying levels of the problems I described, depending on how many of their members want to go in and get things done once in a while, even if they don't do it every week or that often, and how many want to see the raids and get the loot without really focusing.  Generally the latter outweighs the former.  The former grows dissatisfied and 'moves up' to a bigger guild, where they're also usually dissatisfied because at that point they're raiding more than they'd like to.  Rare is the guild in which the larger number of members want to raid only occasionally from time to time, while taking it seriously enough to do well when they do it.

Casual guilds that truly don't give a shit, but just raid for kicks usually don't get very far, but don't suffer for it either.  These tend to also be pretty rare though, because most people want the shiney that comes with winning.

Oddly, I find those all the time, and I also find formed to be hardcore raid guild ones where:

"grows dissatisfied and 'moves up' to a bigger guild, where they're also usually dissatisfied"

Describes their constant churn of players.

But here's what it all boils down to: Confirmation Bias. Do you join raid guilds or casual guilds? Which segment of players do you spend most of your time befriending? That's probably the crew you most see the beliefs of.

My old job in an actual *gasp* 40 man hardcore raiding guild was the effective morale officer. Anyone has a complaint, I'll listen and talk you through it. I knew every player's drama, knew who was going to quit, who didn't like who and for what reasons, and had to motivate people to focus or try another guild. Hardcore guilds have a ton of player churn. Because the top 5% of your players want people who are playing at their level, and will likely get fed up and leave, even if the other 95% aren't even remotely casual or unfocused. Because they can get Better shiny objects by switching up to another guild.

What I'm saying is that your generalization doesn't tend to hold true overall, and isn't overall relatively accurate. Player churn is a little bell curve. The most casual of guilds will have low churn, they don't give a flying fuck about epics. The most hardcore will have little churn, because they HAVE all the epics. That big mess of casual and hardcore guilds in the middle? They'll have a lot of churn as people move around trying to find a bunch of like minded people at the same performance level as themselves or with the same goals as themselves.

I'm very curious to see the methodology you used to come to your conclusion.  Because from where I'm sitting, your generalizations look as anecdotal as mine.

Certainly finding people with similar goals will make a huge difference on your overall raiding experience.

My example was that I led a Black Temple raid with people who fancied themselves to be hardcore. They annoyed me to no end with the loot bickering, the rule complaints, and group composition slap fights. It made raiding a fucking chore, and the sad part was that I knew for a fact many of them sucked and couldn't get the job done even with their high-and-mighty attitude.

So, I backed off that run, and let them reform in TBC. I waited two weeks and opened up a new run of my own with a bunch of people from the raiding alliance that I didn't know anywhere near as well. They were behind the leveling curve, they didn't give as much of a crap over loot stuff, and they just wanted to see the content. Shockingly, it's the most fun I've ever had in a run, and we've cleared out everything but Malygos 25. This has to do some with the entry-level ease of the content, but a lot to do with the fact that I'm running a group of 40 casual folks in 25 slots. We do rotations when we need to, but it all works out running 4 days a week. People take breaks, they enjoy the time they are there, and they play well. It's been very refreshing from the old style of "25 static people who must be there every raid, and oh fuck where's our healer today, FUCK"

A lot of this has to do with how guilds form in the first place. A *lot* of casual guilds are groups of people who already know each other and have social ties keeping them together beyond just 'we play WoW together'. These guilds simply do not break up over progression issues for the most part, and frankly I would wager that more guilds than not are of this type.

Casual guilds that I've been in and see die have died from internal personal conflicts.  Casual guilds are not raiding guilds, and when the start to define themselves as raiding guilds or when one officer sees them as a raiding guild and another does not; bad things happen.  Casual guilds have turnover when a personal relationship becomes less important than advancement.  This happens in raiding guilds also.  You can develop the same type of bonds anywhere, but a casual guild may hold on to a serious raider a lot longer than if that raider was in a lower tier guild looking to go to a higher tier one.

Casual guilds that die due to raiding, die because they simply cannot field the numbers to do it and the majority of what's left sees it as a priority.  And they got to this point  because officer Tim called officer Jenny a fat whore and Jenny left with half the guild.


It is. A serious raiding guild gets a consistent time commitment and investment from everyone even if it's only a few hours for few nights a week.  You can do a lot when someone's ability to be in a guild is closely tied to their ability to be online and ready to go at 7pm on the nights you want them to be.  Largely casual guilds cannot do this.  People take weeks off. People join that cannot even attend the normal raid times. People just some times log in without their priority being raiding and often may end up raiding when they had no expectation to that night.  People get called into a fight they've never done often with gear/spec that is probably insufficient for the fight, because the goal of the person running the raid is merely to keep the raid going even when they'd rather not. 

I've seen my guild go into advancement mode a few times this expansion.  The obvious bads sit, the group composition stays the same, and they actually tend to pick and choose the group composition.  It's usually knocked out within a session or two.  The guild would not survive in this environment.

My guild is based off a message board comunity. We have just about every type of player in the guild, and a sizeable group that makes up the core raider segment. We've beaten Malygos and are working on Sarth+2 now.

It's been pretty refreshing to be in a guild that doesn't require attendance for raids, and yet we have the co-ordination and 'skill' to get the bosses down. The vast majority of our raiders are totally cool, low drama, high energy/fun people.

And we have a tabard!  :grin:

It was already covered but if a social guild is dying from lack of advancement it's because there's mixed goals in the leadership. Guilds that raid for fun are not rare, I don't know where you got that impression.

I was going to type a reply in your vein, but yours is much better. Bravo, sir!

You're underestimating the number of guilds that don't raid at all [except for maybe pug archavon etc], even with the WOTLK barrier-of-entry to raiding as low as it is. They're easy to miss though, since people in those guilds tend to only log in a couple times a week / are still leveling to 80 / are leveling alts / play battlegrounds all day / etc...

Not raiding != scrub guild either.


-- Z.

Oh no, I haven't been missing the ones that don't try to raid at all, I just didn't consider them part of the discussion since it was pretty much focused on raiding.  There's definitely a huge number of guilds that don't try to raid, perhaps equal or greater to the number that do.

I think Rasix hit a key point I wasn't really thinking about and that being that my thoughts of time invested went only along the lines of quantity of time, not considering that term might also cover consistency.  Consistency is definitely a big thing in a guild that doesn't have 2.5 to 3 times the number of members as needed for a raid, since if a person is missing, that means a big hole in the standard raid lineup.  It's still not usually what people mean in general when they say that hardcore raiders' main advantage is time invested.

With that in mind, I'd say that probably makes as much difference as any of the other things I mentioned, probably the most.  Simple consistency, showing up and getting things done at an appointed time, as well as recognizing and correcting errors.  So, in order what makes the difference would be, consistency, recognizing and correcting errors, and focusing entirelyon the task at hand.  It's still a far cry from the general concept of 'they can do it because they spend 4x the amount of time at it' that seems to prevail when the topic is initially considered, and which is the main thing I wanted to argue against.

Does anyone here think the 'hardcore' players suck but only win through time invested? Whose general concept is this?

Yes, apparently someone does.


While he goes on to admit there is organization and teamwork involved, he attributes "80%" of the difference between hardcore and casual to gear, when this is simply not the case.

He didn't say hardcore players suck. He said casual players don't suck. There's a difference.

Exactly, his main point is that Organization (leadership/followship) is the key to the MMO world (note his overblown rhetorical flourish of "ruling the MMO world") -- what Rasix above noted as Consistency.

That content is gated by loot (in the form of statistical enhancements to the character) is sometimes miss-represented (or overstated) as Skill.

As Azure notes, it is not a rehash of skill vs. no-skill or that raiders suck, just that the new expansion has a much more accessible phasing of content that seems to benefit all - and exposes more of the "scrubs" as viable players.

At least, that's what I think he's saying, his posts are very muddled.

I never really thought you were saying the hardcore suck (I was being a little snarky when I replied yes up there), but maintaining that most of the difference is in the gear is still wrong in my opinion.

Having had it pointed out to me, I'm going to say most of the difference is in the consistency of their raiding, as well as in the group organization and better recognition of mistakes, and fixing them quickly. 

It's easy to think it's gear because they usually do have better gear, since they gear up quickly because they don't spend much of any time failing.  But in the cases where they don't have better gear, it's clearly noticeable.  I'll say it again, the quest blues and such that casuals go into raids with these days are superior to the stuff the really hardcore raiders used when they powerleveled to 80 and cleared all the Lich King raid content within 2 days of expansion release.  A lot of people spend time at 80 once they get there looking up quests on wowhead and the like to find the gear upgrades, doing those quests, and end up better outfitted than the early raiders that got the world firsts in the opening days of the expansion.  They succeeded immediately because they knew what they were doing, and they executed perfectly, which made up for the gear difference.

You can take a level 80 that just got there, with whatever quest gear they managed to gather while leveling, put them in a raid, and have them succeed.  But that person and everyone in that raid needs to be really good, and be capable of adjusting for the lower level of gear in order for that to work.  The margin of error, basically, is nearly nonexistent.  When someone misses a heal and the tank doesn't die, that's gear providing a margin of error, and when someone fails to decurse/dispel/get out of the fire instantly, that's gear providing a margin of error when they survive.  But if nobody misses a heal and everyone does react precisely right, the extra margin of error that gear provides isn't needed.  That's the level of execution and skill that's needed in order to take down content without better gear.

Thott said years ago in reference to Luclin-era raids that they are exercises in error control.  That's still true these days.  If nobody makes a mistake, you will succeed.  If somebody makes a mistake, you might still succeed, if your gear is good enough to give you a margin of error.

He's only so miserable because he's married to me, and my obsession with vault cleanliness gets him down.  :why_so_serious:


EDIT: As an aside, our guild is totally weird about when we suck and when we don't. Three wipes on motherfuckin' Gothik when we've NEVER WIPED ON HIM BEFORE? Sure! Same group one shots 4H? Indeedy! People failing to an amazing degree on Heigan? Yep. One try to get Sapphiron down the first time we see him as a raid? SURE THING.

Your weird success rate just matches the nature of the guild's personalities.

uh... how can you wipe on Gothik? He's up there with Noth and Loatheb in the category of bosses that I've never seen a wipe on, can't even remember anyone dying on them even really Oo

Lag, keyboard turners, people who don't know what the fucking cleanse button is, DPS is split too unevenly, clueless DPS who nukes the wrong shit.

There's all kinds of ways. I've done almost all of them in one 25-man PUG or another.

We've got a keyboard turning druid tank.  I fake diarrhea whenever I get invite to a run he's tanking. I think the dude might be slow in general though, he's the only tank I know where people are constantly thread capped on him.

Ohh, and bad tanks can cause wipes on Gothik.  Failing to aggro spawns before they rip through a cloth wearer can make things dicey. 

I wanted my first post in the wow subpost to be cool but Paelos, and a few other guys are saying what i was about to say for me, so i'm grabbing popcorn.  :drill:

The main issue was finding a good dps split, pretty much my fault as the raid leader.

Keyboard turning is really not that big a fucking deal in PvE. I'm one of the keyboard turners in our guild. I'm also never, EVER dead at the end of Heigan.


EDIT: PvP is different, I fully cop to it hurting me there, but PvE? Keyboard turning is fine!

I bet you click too, dirty clicker!  :oh_i_see:

Anything past 5 on my quickbar, I totally click.  :drillf:

Imagine how awesome I would be if I wasn't a scrub!

I click. I only have a handful of keybinds.  I can't break the habit.  Also doesn't help that I never really could get the number keys down when I learned touch typing.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't get keyboard turning unless you never really played FPS games.

I use the arrow keys.  The number pad is my main action keys, and delete/end/page down are battle stance/defensive stance/berserker stance plus the appropriate charge ability for each stance (on the second key press) and victory rush for the stances that can use it.


Yes, it is terribly convoluted.  I could never get over the little offset to the left that the "W" key had though.

Yeah, I never really played FPS games. My sister is a giant fan of them, she makes fun of my keyboard turning too. :(

We killed Kel'thuzad tonight! My job was totally boring. Stupid offtanking. :(

Keyboard turning? Ah yes. I remember doing that in Doom and Dark Forces.

Halcyon days.

I mostly click. But I mouse turn.

I have to admit, I keyboard turn. Its not my fault though. I play on a laptop, in an armchair-type chair with arms that aren't big enough to use a mouse on. using the little touch pad is just too hard to turn with. I have gotten pretty good at it, and can play a FPS decently well using the touchpad now. I certainly won't be winning any kind of free-for-alls, but I will sit middle of the pack most of the time.

Also, any tips from the clickers? I want to get into playing at work, but the hallway by my office is fairly busy, and I know having my hands on WASD will be a tell-tale sign I'm not doing anything even close to what I'm supposed to be.

I remember dying to Grobbulous and one of my guildies asked if I was keyturning. I told him what actually happened was that I couldn't find a good spot to drop a fart, and just stood in a cloud until I died.  Total brainlock. :awesome_for_real:

You don;t think having WoW on your pc screen would be a bigger giveaway?

Monitor is angled away from the door, keyboard is well within view. That's the way most of the offices are set up, and it makes it fairly obvious who's playing WoW (although the guy who left the WotLK box on his desk the day after launch probably made it a little too obvious).

Sounds like IS is doing some playing themselves, or they'd have locked that IP out of the network a while ago.

Man, I don't know why you'd chance something like that in this economic environment.  I can see maybe something that doesn't cause any network traffic..  :|

Just think of all the time he'll have to play once he's fired, though.

Working in IT, with a large coverage area, leads to quite a bit of spikes in the support we do. Some days are almost dead, others I'm staying late just to stay on top of things. Some game playing is assumed, so as long as you get your job done, they don't care. My biggest concern isn't getting caught playing a game, but getting caught playing WoW. I really don't want to deal with that, since I know it would lead to me having to talk about WoW with some of these people. I overhear enough people debating the best way to distribute loots, I certainly don't want to be included in the discussions.

As long as you're not doing arena, it is possible to function as a keyboard turner in at least most of the PVE stuff. We have keyboard turners who live through Heigan dancing (and some that don't, but I don't think the keyboard turning is the problem.)

I keyboard turn and I've never died on that fight. In fact I'm the one with the lucky charm on my head that tells people where to stand.

Most of the wipes I've seen on Gothik have been due to dead side having problems.

Almost every wipe I've seen can be chalked up to a bad division of groups between the two sides, or DCs at very bad times.

Apparently the other group Naxx group in my guild was chain wiping on Gothik yesterday (I subbed in for the better group and we one shotted everything we tried).  A friend in that group said it was due to the tanks (both warriors) being pretty bad.  I've yet to see it where group division has been a big issue.   Dead side can get pretty hectic and I know when my group did it, I always have to be prepared to go into frost presence and drop down a death and decay.  I've had to do it both times I've done Gothik (both dead side) and both times a warrior has been the primary tank.  Of course, my sample size isn't very large.  :awesome_for_real:

Lack of good tanks ends up killing one run every week.  We've got 3 good tanks and one of them doesn't really raid (guy gets on even later than I do).  If either of the mediocre tanks get matched up with a bad one, it ends up being a wipe fest.

Guild seems to be trying to push itself toward getting all of the current content (minus Sarth + drakes) down before Ulduar.  This may be a mistake. It'll be interesting to watch.

I wonder why they don't let you change the sensitivity of keyboard turning, so you can turn almost as fast as you can with a mouse. I mouse turn in PvP, but it kills my the tendon in my forearm if I do too much of it. To be honest, I've never liked mouse-turning in MMOs, because it looks so incredibly stupid to have the characters move like that.  WoW's addition of vehicles has raised that stupid quotient a millionfold.

I'd slow down the mouse turning to be no faster than keyboard turning, but the FPSkiddies would flip the fuck out no doubt.

Natural movement for me is usually the QWE keys with some mouselooking if I need to. Strafing was the only way I could do the winterspring demon, I could never get the hang of jump shotting (and strafing is so much easier) and since then I use strafe almost exclusively, and don't even touch A, S, or D.

To combat these two, what we usually do is stick 2 healers (if we have 3, otherwise it will just be the better of the two), the other tank, and the 3 lowest dps on the living side. The dead side gets me (Paladin tank), either 1 healer (The best if we ran with 3, otherwise the less good if we have two), and the top 2/3 dps. This tends to balance things out fairly well, since it leaves the living side with numbers to deal with most stuff, and the dead side having the more skilled/geared players who are better equipped for when things go badly. It usually means that things will get ugly at some point on the dead side, and we end up with a horseman and two knights at the same time, but we are generally able to blow through it without too much of a problem (As long as the healer has done it before. If they haven't I don't know what happens, but the prioritize healing differently and people end up dying on the dead side. By the second try everything works fine).

My main gripe over mouse turning is that I have to hold down the button. I'm fine playing a FPS, but having to hold the button down for 5 hours during a raid starts to cause hand cramps.

Why didn't you bind them to something useful, then?

I'm still here. Watching from the sidelines, since I just ended fucking up the discussion by turning it into a "let's bash him, he's too arrogant for us" thing.

Also, you can keyboard turn as much as you like, in any aspect of this game. People who suggest that you lost in pvp because your reaction time was 0.01 sec slower than someone else, as opposed to not making the right choice are not only elitist assholes (as I'm sure you think I also am), but also not actually good enough at this game to make that type of attitude justifiable (as I know I'm not).

He's still here. LET'S BURN HIM!  :mob:


No, I kid, I kid.

right on!  stick with it.  At worst you'll get a cool grief title. 

Keyboard turning will get you killed (a lot) in PvP. Actually, that's a poor way of putting it. Keyboard turning will put you at a significant disadvantage against those who mouseturn.

Back when I still played in BGs (you know, when you got stuff there...), there were a couple of players types I was always on the lookout for. One was keyboard turners. I'd run into 3-4 every night I was in the BGs. You could always tell and I'd usually mop the floor with them (yes, my shaman was a spastic, twitchy draenai). As they'd turn, oh, so slowly, I'd just keep running behind them. I killed so many warriors and not a few rogues this way.

The other things that I always ran into and always wondered why people do this is hunters that insist on meleeing enhance shaman, and other enhance shaman (TBC era) that insisted on using 2handers. I always enjoyed these encounters since they were free HKs, but I always did wonder "why"?

WTF is keyboard turning? Using "a" and "d"?

Using your keyboard to turn instead of your mouse.  Doesn't matter the keys.  Hold down a left key, turn left.

My experience has been (as a hunter) that hunters are free hks for enhance shaman anyway.

It's always possible that I'm playing wrong, of course.

Yeah, it's called, "Fuck I can't get out of melee, and I can't shoot my bow so I'd better hope to hell a wingclip sticks long enough for me to try and get away."

Here's how you do Gothik:

1. Everyone stays on Live. Everyone. Stand in the corner on your left when you enter the room.
2. Start the fight.
3. Kill Adds.
4. About 2:45 or so into the fight the gate will open and the dead side adds will come. You'll still have maybe a 2-3 waves on live left as well so watch for those.
5. AoE
6. Kill Gothik.

What exactly are you doing when an enhancement shaman gets into melee with you?  Given that a shaman's only gap closers are frost shock(matched by frost trap/wing clip etc), ghost wolf(tranq shot/scare beast), and maybe Earthen Power, I have difficulty believing you can't get away from any shaman ever.  Unless you really don't do anything except spam wing clip, have your relevant pet abilities on autocast, and don't use totem stomping macros, then I guess it makes sense.

He's probably being eaten by these fucking things (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=51533). It only takes like, 3-6 seconds of melee time for anything that isn't in plate armor or has serious defensive cool downs to die these days.


Of course, the shaman should never get that close to begin with, with how bullshit Survival/explosive shot is currently.  :oh_i_see:

Completely forgot about Spirit Walk even though I use it all the time on my baby shaman when I'm hunting DKs.  That, Bash, and Hex would probably go far to explain a perception of enhancement shaman as unkiteable.  Deterrence still totally counts as a serious defensive cooldown in this instance as do the various talented cooldowns.

You all almost make want to start PvPing again. Almost.

My comments were directed at the past in TBC. I'll say it again, though. Frequently, I'd attack a hunter and the first--and about only--thing they'd do is whip out the 2hander (dumb) or whatever they were dual wielding (really dumb) and try to go at it toe to toe with me. It invariably ended badly for them. Yet, I'd see this over and over again every night. Most memorable was killing the same orc hunter three times in about 5 minutes in AV. Every encounter, I'd attack him and he'd try and duke it out in melee--and it never ended well for him. Never any effort to get to range.

I'm firmly convinced that in their innermost secret heart, every hunter feels he's a melee god and hasn't just had a real chance to prove it to the unbelievers. Either that, or a lot of them are just incredibly stupid. Maybe it's the same thing.

As for 2hand shaman, well, I know horde-side there's a lot of nostalgia for the "good ol' days", so you used to see a fair number with 2handers in the BGs. I never lost a fight with a horde shaman that was rocking the 2hander. Yeah, if they got lucky, they could probably one shot most clothies, but I destroyed these guys. Nowadays it'd be even more an exercise in frustration. The only thing I use my 2hander for is beating the bejeezus out of murlocs that hassle me when I'm fishing.

It sounds like they're trying to relive their past lives as Hibernian Rangers.

That'll keep happening until they make raptor strike and mongoose bite unable to crit. "But man, if he comes into melee range, i'll raptor his ass for, like, 3k." You should thank blizzard.

Living a life of sex and danger.

I love these people, they make my time as a newbie warrior seem less retarded in contrast.

You get switched to melee weapon(s) automatically when being attacked in melee range. But I am sure everybody knows that.

I swear the ONLY reason that they gave hunters the jump back on disengage was to solve the enhance vs. hunter problem. Wing Clip/Concussion shot was apparently too hard.

Oh and to stir some shit up again: Ulduar undertuned/too easy/should have massive attunment so no bads can get in.

Discuss.

Your bitter hardcore tears are like wine.

No.

See, it's not about personal best.  Achievements aren't enough for the elite.

They want other people (aka "bads") locked out of content.

If a game were *really* hardcore, it would lock you out of the game itself.

Why clutter servers with people hoping in vain to enjoy your game?

Fortunately we can see how well this will work as a future gaming concept with the release of Darkfall.

edit: oops, did I really say Darkness Falls?

Getting out of melee in general, yes.  Did you mean Scatter Shot? If you're wing-clipping you can't cast Concuss, and SS isn't baseline.  They said several times in beta they didn't want to give hunters any more talents as baseline abilities... sooo 'hey how about this!'


I *was* killing clothies and mages and shit like that.. then they come up behind me and eat me.   Frost Shock is enough to slow you, traps take time to activate and are easy to walk around, totems can be stomped faster than arcane shot's CD and you had to stand still to do any sort of appreciable damage.  All the while the melee guy can be doing white damage and specials ON THE MOVE.  Your average hunter has been free HKs for even mediocre melee types for a long while.  Yes, there were some very skilled players that made the hunter class shine.  If we're going to balance classes by the performance of the upper .01% of the playerbase, then we've reached a retarded impasse.

I don't play the hunter anymore, as it was obvious they didn't know what the hell they were doing with the class and GC inspired so little confidence in his ability I figured I was better off rerolling.  I can't speak for hunters at 80 and their problems, but Xanthippe's continued frustration with the class does lead me to believe they still have some of the same old problems in a new level bracket.

The problem is that ideally the classes or at least most combinations thereof need to be reasonably balanced at the upper 0.01% and at the average player level.

This is an issue because typically if you give the average players of a class a particular tool to help them against other average players, the upper 0.01% players of that class can abuse it to devastating results and unbalance the high level play.  Blizzard has always seemed to have an eye towards the 0.01% when making PvP balance adjustments but unfortunately that balance seems to not always translate well to the average player in many cases.

It's not all doom and gloom for the average hunter in pvp though, at least there's no more dead zone, that's what caused me to gravitate away from my hunter way back when.  Plus now disengage gives them another mele escape option and deterrence finally gives them a nice oh crap defensive button for casters and mele.

Nothing to discuss. The encounters are still being tuned, so nobody knows how hard they will really be, and the attunement ship sailed long ago.

Attunements will be there again on the hardest content. They were on Malygos and they will be on Icecrown, I have no doubt. Still, beyond putting them on the single mob encounters who are the hardest in the game, they have no real place anymore. If you can do the content, you should be able to do it without appeasing NPCs by grinding foozles.

Also, people that need others to be locked out of content in order to enjoy it more themselves weren't hugged enough as children.

Stuff like that hasn't stopped bad players yet.  :awesome_for_real:

What's interesting in the demand to have people locked out of some content is the way in which content itself has become the ultimate status symbol for the people who strongly need to be validated by the game and publically acknowledged as distinct from other players. It's not enough to have achievements or titles or the odd status symbol like a mount that's available only on hard mode. The ability to say, "I've seen X, and you haven't", is the only status symbol that seems to matter to a certain type of achiever-player.

It's because it threatens the structure of how things work right now. Raid guilds only survive through recruitment and one of the biggest reasons people join raid guilds is to see that content. Now that people can easily fight kel thuzad in a pug, why bother applying to a 'serious' guild? If anything this will cause a lot of raid guilds to falter and splinter but I wouldn't so easily discount the allure of achievements and titles either.

Many achiever types have already shifted their focus towards titles and achievements and are doing fine with it. My guild for example has mostly shifted our concerns to server firsts and then server first achievements. Sure there were a lot in my guild that gave the whine about "they are stealin our contents!" but they've mostly quieted down now.

There's always going to be a top %5 but the thing is that top 5% won't always be the same people, as the game changes so do the achievers but if you want to stay on top(as many do) it's adapt or die. No one else has(or will have) a plagued proto drake on my server except my guildmates, that's pretty damned Achievening if you think about it and that's enough for most people.

Now if only KT would stop being an absolute douche with his MC, I may get a black drake tonight.

It’s not about locking other people out so much as its about locking yourself out.  Harder content can provide longevity for its preceding tiers.  It provides motivation for repeating content, improving your character with gear, and building a player network.

No one wants to run out of new stuff.  If you don’t have the time to see everything then your beef tends to become ‘Why can’t I go anywhere I want?’  If you do have the time then the complaint basically turns into ‘Why didn’t you parcel out this new stuff slower so I wouldn’t run out of shit to do?’

What I don’t understand is when someone that isn’t even close to running out of things to do scoffs at a hardcore end zone.  It’s not like the hardest shit in the game is the coolest, it’s just the last.

No, it really is about people wanting to wave their dicks around about how awesome they are.


It's nothing new or surprising and probably  :dead_horse: worthy.


/captain obvious to the rescue!

The amount of insufferable elistist twats has peaked with this expansion.  With "top" raiding guilds taking about anyone that can manage to not stand in fire and show up 3 times a week on time, you've got a whole mess of people that are waiting on 3.1.  In TBC, this was typically only one guild.

Folks that I raided with last expansion (and were bad players then) are now expansion clearing badasses that are too cool for school.  It's really annoying when some jackass is bragging about how absolutely awesome he is, when you remember the time you had to explain to him what spell hit did.

Ahahah, you want funny go google Ensidia and read their front page. What a bunch of fucking chodes.

I like that it's easier to pug content.  I can't find a late night guild for the life of me and everyone I look at makes it more difficult to get into than the mob.  But I can still get my shinies by showing up to PUG raids.  And tbh most of them haven't been too bad.

Why do I hate difficult grinding attunements?  Because of guilds that recruit with the lines "must be T2 geared\Naxx attuned" from the old days and won't even consider looking at you otherwise.  And when you try and get guildmates to help you get attuned, their response is either "fuck you, I PUG'ed that shit and so will you" or "all right!  Let's go see BWL!  Do we need a tank?"  There really is a divide between casual and hardcore, and it's quite wide at times.  Anything Blizzard can do to bring that closer in only helps me.

You can turn that "feature" off.

I know I did the second I found the option as it would fuck up autoshot being toggled on and off.

I ran out of "new stuff" a lot faster when I had nothing but 5 mans to do, and slightly less faster when I had only two ten man raids to do. My casual-ass guild downed Kel'thuzad for the first time last week, and I still have yet to do a successful Eye. The exciting thing for me and lots and lots and lots of players like me is that instead of the OLD way of doing shit, where I would be out of stuff to do already, realistically speaking, and continue to be out of stuff to do until the expansion, there's this NEW way, where I will actually have something new I will (likely) be able to do. It's a huuuuuge difference.

And the whole "You COULD'VE done 25 mans in TBC" or "you COULD'VE done the 40 man stuff" is ... well, most players like me know that they could add new 25's or 40's until the cows came home, that would never ever be "new stuff" for me, because it was not something I would ever, ever, ever do.

Agree with all this. Most guilds (and PUGs) are still having fun with Naxx, and still learning some of the fights. It's really refreshing. You can get in a PUG and most of the time, it's a decent enough experience and people get loot and it's fun and even a little challenging. The reason no one pugged SSC or Hyjal or BT, besides attunements, was that you simply couldn't expect people to get in there and win. The gear-gating was pretty ferocious, even if you got a pug of people who knew what they were doing, and getting a pug with that level of knowledge (and the appropriate classes) was very difficult in any kind of casual way.

Bad groups can still fail and be painful and annoying; people still look for players that they know are halfway decent, and have some appropriate gear for what they're doing. There's still a challenge. It's just not the ferocious "only the small number of guilds willing to regiment themselves for the content are allowed to even try" of pre-TBC and TBC. Which is great. Long live this approach.

I've done everything except 25 man Malygos, but I can't really get myself or my raiding party interested about that fight. I don't really like the mechanics involved, I don't give a damn about any of this loot table, and the raid in general seems very ho-hum on the concept. Basically, we run for fun and that fight is anything but in my view. The 10 man version just made me frustrated in who's stupid idea it was to make vehicles an important part of the last boss. It's not terribly hard, but it's annoying for very little reward.

I agree with everything said here.  Our casual guild is no different now than it was in TBC.  Yet, we have tons of content to work with throughout the week.  We have several days set aside for 10 man and 25 man instances.  We have trouble finishing Naxx not from a standpoint of gear or experience, but for time and lack of huge numbers of members.  We can switch out for a bit, but still run into the late night issue of not enough awake people.

From my perspective, we are flooded with content to work on even this late after release.  It hasn't been so easy that we flew through it, nor so hard that we just got frustrated and quit.  Some instances are more enjoyable than others, but for the most part done well.  We have a small group hitting Malygos now, but I haven't seen it yet so I can't comment on that one.

My feeling is that the big content patch will have very good timing for us.  We won't be able to jump on it right away, but will give us yet more carrots to look forward to.

Nicely put.

You've done Sarth+2/3? If you can pull that off, you should be able to do maly 25 in your sleep. Phase three really isn't all that. It is, in fact, 3 minutes of circle strafing while hitting 1 1 2 1 1 2 over and over again. Not the most fun fight, but there are some okay loots. I've got the healer shoes and pants, which are best-in-slot until uldar.


I pretty much agree with Dren and most others. I've talked in this and other threads about how I'm between semi-hardcore and hardcore depending on the definition. What's really great about the current content and blizzard's move to more casual play is that we have more wiggle room on who we can take. This is especially important in 'family-friendly' guilds like mine - we have several couples and (generally speaking, not trying to be sexist) the wife/girlfriend is generally not a top-notch player. With the reduced barrier to entry, we (as officers) feel more comfortable about 'settling' for someone who has a good personality or is with someone else. We don't have to worry that, as long as they can pick up fights, we don't need to kick them out if they can't break 2500dps or whatever. It's cool, we can still finish the content.

It's not like the "old days" at all, where you had to put up with a bunch of whiny loot-whoring jackasses if you wanted to see end-game content. You can start to take people more based on personality than on skill level. In my opinion, that is a huge step forward. (Now that I've evolved a bit out of my whiny loot-whoring jackass phase back from when the game launched)

I like it. I can be casual and play one day a week, and be competitive. Love being near the top of DPS charts against people in my guild who put in a lot more time than I do.

I basically have given up on the PvP aspect of the game, and play it for PvE. I've cleared everything except 3-drake 25 man Sarth, and 3-drake 10 man Sarth. I'll be getting my 3-drake 10 man out of the way this next coming week.

Like I said, not hard just stupid and not at all amusing. Phase 3 isn't the biggest issue, it's mostly just the timer in combination with the stupid vehicles. I really really hate timed fights the way Blizzard has instituted them. They know we can outlast, so they put in these false doombuttons when you take a while. I can't get interest because I think people know I'm not interested in it as well as them not giving a damn either. 226 items are nice and all, but I know better ones are coming down the line in bulk and with vehicles that aren't odd Z-axis nonsense.

Malygos' timer isnt hard to beat nor are most in the game (thaddius was pretty hard in blue gear) mostly enrage timers are a lazy check that im fine with.  let's be honest, tons of guilds of people that are either spamming one attack button or flat out not paying attention on some fights, the timers just make it so you get penalized for your dps trying to sleep through certain fights.

I don't think it fucks up autoshot's toggle anymore.

Probably the closest truth out there.  We had a mage that was barely breaking 500DPS on 10-man Naxx and OS.  Analyzing the fight logs and damage showed that the mage was casting one spell every 5-6s.  And it was something like Fireblast and waiting for the cooldown or Pyroblast.  Most of the issues we have had with DPS are people seriously just flat out not paying attention or doing really random things that may have gotten them through to 80 soloing without regard for any kind of efficiency.  I don't like riding people or even telling them that they need to do better, but in this case if half the raid is asleep at the wheel or only casting Arcane Missiles at the darkness you aren't going to finish in a remotely timely manner.  If OS-10 and the spider wing of Naxx take any longer than 25-35m for our old main raid group, I know we aren't bringing our A-game.

The big idea behind hard and soft enrage timers is to force the DPS to push themselves too.  Before blizzard got liberal with enrage timers, you could just bring more healers to compensate for however shitty your DPS were.  Realistic enrage timers mean good DPSers are valued just as much as tanks or healers.

Or, how EJ put it, you shouldn't be able to bore a boss to death.

You can on that fucking slime dance one.

I don't mind the occasional DPS race. That's perfectly fine and adds some flavor to some instances. Vael was a great example of a good DPS race fight. However, they seem to be putting more and more enrage timers on bosses, and I think that's simply a crutch. The fights should be demanding in that bosses might actually kill you with abilities. Not that the boss just decides he's done with you after 5 minutes and detonates a nuclear bomb.

Then the boss would punish healers, not dps.

Sure, a fancier idea would be gradually picking dps and saying "k, one of you'll die every 30 sec", but that'd grow old just as quickly. Also, Vael murdered several guilds.

I agree it would probably punish healers more, but I think fights need to have more variables beyond the boss having 2 skills and an enrage timer. Some bosses of Naxx do this well, like Kel'Thuzad. He's a fun fight with a lot of different elements that provide a relatively challenging encounter in 25 man.

What I'm worried about is Blizzard's design tactic. Instead of focusing on more engaging encounters to challenge the healers, they seem content to nerf the healers mana regen into the ground in the hopes that makes things more difficult. Instead of adding more interesting abilities that would force the dps to pay attention to things beyond their rotations, they seem content to let enrage timers rule the day.

That's because it *is* lazy design.  The current crew is the B or C team, the A-team moved on to new projects about 2 years ago or earlier this year if they were only going to be trusted with MMOs, I figure.

We need a checkers boss, like the chess event in Kara.  :grin:

What you are seeing is, IMO, a natural consequence of adding the full 10 person progression using the same encounters as 25 (and thus I don't have a big problem with it.) In the 10 person versions of encounters, they can't design specifically to target healers very much because the healing styles/tools are so vastly different from class to class, and they don't know which 2-3 you'll show up with. If they were designing for 25s alone they could be more specific in that area because you can fairly safely assume that the raid will have all types of healers available.

I think they already see the Malygos vortex, for example, as a mistake, and that is definitely a mechanic that was put in specifically to challenge healers. Instead of challenging all healers, though, they just ended up with something that was trivial if you stacked priests and druids (and directly led to the CoH/Wild Growth nerfs) and punishing if you only had paladins and shamans (at least until you could just stack stamina on everyone to the point that they just live through the vortex anyway). On the other hand, it is safe for them to do stuff like the ice blocks on Kel'Thuzad or the hateful strikes on Patchwerk, because all healers have the basic tools you need for those things. I would expect most of the 'healing' challenges to be a lot simpler than the tanking ones, because they're making an effort to homogenize tanks to a large extent but are specifically avoiding doing so with healers.

Naxx bosses were designed 2 years ago.

The kil'jaeden/m'uru fights were very complex and they were designed quite recently actually.  People seem to forget how old naxx actually is now, take a look at three drake sarth or malygos? of course they can only have so many tricks but neither fight I would consider simplistic.  Really I look at multi-boss dungeons like any offline game, you really can't have every minor boss in there be some multi-formed demi-god. Some things need to be patchwerk so designers can pace the game experience.

Not to mention nearly all dps classes like to have at least one strait up tank and spank boss per raid zone that they can go all out on and use as a benchmark, both for tracking their progress as they get new gear and for seeing how they stack up with the other dps in the raid group.

I kind of like those as a tank too.

I like Patchwerk.  It helps me practice my rotations, and I find that for the rest of the night they're really solid.

Complex challenging encounters assures less people are able to access the content. How many people that had access to naxx-40 progressed beyond maybe a single wing?

40man naxx mechanics were not vastly different than they are today. They were simply a gear/manpower check as the fights were much more unforgiving when it came to dmg output/consumables needed/etc

I'm not sure if you're being pro/con barring people from content but I think naxx is just about right on some things. Make most of the bosses easy with a couple tricks, put in a couple gear check(pw/thad) then make the last two bosses complex in comparison so that guilds will have to take some time to learn.

Then for the hardcore you make all those easy bosses have a hard mode so they can ride on their flying epeen for all to see. works for me.

I consider enrage timers a stupid, lazy pain in the ass mechanic that should be removed entirely, and is only needed because Blizzard allowed healer mana regen to get out of control.  The way to put pressure on DPS is to make the boss do enough damage that total healer mana goes down throughout the fight, therefore requiring enough damage that the boss dies before the raid's resources hit 0.  Adding more healers and thus killing things more slowly, but having more total resources shouldn't be an invalid tactic.  There should be a breakpoint at which that doesn't really work anymore, and there's a very simple mechanic to do that, too.  A conservative, in-combat regen rate for bosses.  It should be a low regen rate, essentially just enough that you can't lay siege to the boss, as it were.

This is a problem that also happened way back in EQ, and WoW repeated it.  Thott commented on it during one of his Luclin-Age essays in which he mentioned that it used to be that boss HP goes down, and raid resources (HP and mana and characters still alive) go down, and winning was a matter of which one hit 0 first, but by the Luclin age, raid resources could be seen to fluctuate from 100% to about 98%, never really dropping below that, at which point the only way to lose was through making mistakes of the instant-wipe variety.  The same sort of thing could be seen on WoW fights into the Burning Crusade era, where raid resources didn't seem to go down much, it was just enrage timers and wipe mechanics that caused losses.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks they are completely asinine.

Come be a dwarf lady on doomhammer.  :heart:

Dorf ladies rePRESENT *gangsta sign*

The entire DK wing and Plague Wing are vastly different than they were originally. Razuvious does not have to be LoS'd by your mana users, you don't have to offtank the adds while the "cannot be Mind Controlled" buff wears off, the undead mobs on Gothik not only are no longer immune to magical damage, but they also have the same HP they had at 60 (or less), 4 horsemen is a shadow of it's former self. In Plague Wing, Heigan is missing what made that fight difficult, the random teleport to the fucking eye-tunnel, and the floor blasts are slower and do not insta-gib anyone not a tank (they do more damage than they did, but when everyone has 15k Health, even a 9k blast will not 1 shot you, it used to be about 6k when your tanks were just pushing over 10k), and Loatheb is not anywhere near the DPS, consumable, and coordination fight it was. Spider wing is mechanically about the same, stuff just doesn't hit as hard relatively as it used to at 60.

I am not saying this to be elitist, but the people complaining about fights that require people to be on the ball not being in Naxx beacuse it is almost 3 years old are being somewhat disengenuous. The zone was put back in to be filler for WOTLK launch, and was retuned to be considerably easier than the bleeding edge level of tuning that all previous large raid dungeons in WoW had been. Every raid instance that was released after Molten Core had it's share of over-tuned stuff at some relatively early phase in the zone. BWL had Razorgore and then the 1 hour to try Vael before he despawned for the rest of the week stuff if your guild could kill Razorgore, AQ had Huhuran requiring everyone to farm Mauradon for level 50 green cloth items with Nature resistance, and THEN there was the trash that was harder than any of the 5 previous bosses in the zone, Naxx had 3 bosses that were relatively easy that were then followed by something that was like running your balls over a cheese grater learning. TBC had all of its 25 man zones turned up above 11 when they were launched.

I don't disagree with the idea to "under"tune Naxx, but to say that Naxx is failing to challenge some part of the holy-triangle of Tank-DPS-Healer because it is 3 years old and the devs were not creative enough then is silly.

EDIT-Yes, there are way too many commas in this post but I like run on sentences today!

We killed Maly-10 last night, which represents the first time my guild has ever been "content complete" before the first content patch. So, I continue you to be very happy with the way things are.  :drill:

You'll just have to do it all again soon anyway, once some of the rest of us get to 80.  :wink:

No, no, you're doing it wrong.

JESUS WE DID EVERYTHING WTB NEW CONTENT STOP CATERING TO SCRUBS

Super happy there are so few resist fights so far.

From the way my guild is talking, that may change on fights like Hodir - at least for tanks.

Reports I heard on Hodir are that you need one tank with frost resist gear, nobody else should get hit with much cold damage if they do it "right". HA HA HA.

We stand in the fire, right?

You stand in the fire so healers have something to do.



 :oh_i_see:


The healers still hate you for standing in fire.   :heartbreak:

Ironically, on Hodir, you actually DO stand in fire. I think.

Comedy ensues.

As a side note, is anyone else mildly displeased that a more accurate name for this expansion seems to be "Wrath of the vikings and giants and such, and maybe eventually in a year the Lich King"?  Not that I'd ever see him, but it seems strange that he won't even make an appearance for...what?  Months?  A year? 

The first four months have been "Wrath of crap we did before"

Funny thing is most of us never saw it.

The Lich King has already mocked my efforts to foil him in a dozen quest chains!

Exactly.  No guild on our server ever took down Naxx when it was still available from the original release of it.  Maybe a handful of guilds ever even saw the inside of it.

I have to agree as well.  I've seen him a ton of times telling me that he's sparing me for later as I might be interesting.  And as an example of how he doesn't tolerate failure of his own.  It's quite amusing actually.

I know that MMOG villains are hardly the epitome of clever and effective antagonists, but damn, the Lich King seems content to dance in blackface for the amusement of the player audience.

I mean, his most notable evil act in Wrath so far is to create an army of Death Knights who promptly rebel and join his enemies. GENIUS PLAN THERE, BRANIAC!  :awesome_for_real:

Ya, my first thought to this was, WTF? You can't finish a quest without banging into the Lich King ranting at you about something. He's been around more than any other boss I can think of.

Anyone ever try to go up the steps to Utguard Keep when you have that shadowworld buff on you?

I did better, I Moonfired the prick.  :grin:

I'm not sure what genius you're expecting from Dr. Claw.

Again, the only annoyance I have with Arthas showing up every 10 minutes to kill one of his officers is that he has no alternate text for death knights.

He acts like he doesn't remember your outright betrayal, implies we don't know the power of the scourge, and that some day we will be death knights in his service. <3 All I want is a "YOU? Oh, an extra fuck you to you, bitch!"

Yeah, consider Illidan in contrast. One "You are not prepared" and then the guy just goes and hides out in his temple, mattering about zip and nada to everything in Outland. I couldn't even really tell what it was that he'd done that made him the Badass That I Should Want to Kill Someday: it was that obscurely buried in the lore. The Lich King is Snidely Whiplash by comparison: dude is everywhere, twirling his mustache. (Plus, hilariously, when he's reduced to the size of most player toons, he looks seriously pudgy.)

Yeah in general they did a much better job with it than they did in TBC. Things I would be targeting for improvement if I were them:

1) there is no quest lead-in to Naxx at all at level 80. The closest thing is remembering it hanging around there from when you were doing quests at level 72-73. Not good. This was acutally done better in TBC, even if Kara made very little sense, at least there were quests having you do stuff there for *some* reason.
2) Another thing TBC did slightly better, was provide lead-ins and reasons to go to the one-shot encounters. The Hellfire Peninsula instances built up to Magtheridon in a clear obvious way; likewise there was a LONG series of quests that set up Gruul. Contrast to Malygos, who we largely forget about after we run Violet Hold at 75, and Sartharion who we don't know why we're killing at all unless we read their shitty tie-in fiction. I think this needs to be worked on for future patches/expansions.

There is a major quest chain that explains how KT and goons are back in action in Dragonblight, but it is Alliance only from their quest hub there right next to Naxx.  So it's only a half fail since only Horde has no clue what's going on with Naxx, instead they get to initiate a new variety of cow into the horde and have a ton of quests beating up the Scarlet Onslaught.


The whole point for most of those lead-ins is that they were part of the horrendous cock-block attunement scheme that TBC started out with.  If there's no attunement process a majority of the playerbase won't bother with specific lead in quests and will be just as clueless lore wise as they are now.  I'm not sure if creating special lead in quests in the Wrath era is justifiable in a player use per dev. time sense if they aren't just part of the normal leveling quests in a particular zone.

Those are the level 72-73 quests I am talking about (the ones that eventually lead into Wrathgate.) IMO, not good even for Alliance. There should be at least some lead-in quests at 80 I think. It gives a chance to hand everyone a nice bit of setup loot too, or whatever.


The stuff I am talking about was unrelated to attunement. You didn't need to attune to either of those encounters; they were part of the attunement for others, but the setup content I'm talking about is the whole blood-of-Magtheridon stuff that runs through the 3 Hellfire 5 man instances, and the long chain in Blade's Edge killing Gruul's kids etc. If you do it through 5 mans like they did with Hellfire you don't even have to have quest lead-ins necessarily.

Well the only reason a majority of people did the long quest chain in Blade's Edge killing Gruul's sons was to .... open up daily quests in O'grila.

As for the intro to Magtheridon via the Hellfire instances, you have basically the same thing for Malygos with the Nexus, the Occulus, and the lead in quests in Coldara that introduce you to the whole Red dragonflight trying to stop the Blue dragonflight. 

I guess I don't have a problem with them doing that sparringly since it would get old really fast if they did it for every raid instance, not to mention it's not really feasable to do it in cases like Naxx and OS where there isn't any related 5 man content.

I'd rather there be a cool intro event inside the new instance (like they seem to be doing in Ulduar with the first boss) or a related world event to spice things up when they introduce raid content than just a new generic quest chian that hands out the related lore in paragraph format. 

I think its because after reaching max level, and having leveled so many different characters over my time in WoW, and now doing dailies for money is the norm, I get sick of normal quests by the time I'm ready to raid on a given character.

I do think Ingmar is not giving the Malygos lead up enough credit, although I don't recall being given a REASON to go the Occulus besides the daily quests. Even one feeder quest to go in there (and does it really count as a "regular" quest if it's a dungeon quest? I say no!) would be a nice refresher.

However, the Sarth instance is idiotic for giving not even a tiny whiff of why the hell you would be in there. Again, even one quest to send you in there would be a big improvement. It doesn't have to be a giant quest chain, but someone actually sending you there with a goal would be nice. I do wish Naxx had a Kara-like quest chain (minus any attunement of course), where you need to go in there multiple times for more steps, simply because you are going to be going in there multiple times ANYWAY, and I doubt it really would eat up that much time to write.

Isn't Sarth linked to the black dragon that visits the commander on netherwing ledge?  I recall her coming in there and berating the guy about needing more netherwing eggs, and I believe the twilight drakes are a result of tampering with the netherwing eggs they were grabbing on netherwing ledge.

Sarth is linked to the whole Dragonblight dragon aspect questlines. I think there may even be a random dragon NPC or two that talk about the Chamber of the Aspects and such underneath the temple.

I think if people were to pay more attention to the quests and what the various NPCs say in those chains, it would make more sense. But most of us blasted through them while levelling and did not even realize that they were actually an attunement chain for O.S. (at least one person in the group has to have completed it for people to zone in).

Though overall, I think it is more that they need to get the Black dragons back into the villain business after a long hiatus.

I read every word of those quests and there was not peep #1 about Sarth. There's plenty about Malygos, and oddly a whole chain about the magnataurs, but even the black dragon quest givers don't mention Sartharion. I'd be surprised if there was an attunement involved, but I guess that's easily tested.

You might be right about the random flavor text NPC, though, I will have to check for that.

Sarth is tied to one of the WoW novels I think. Yech.

Playing around on the PTR I'm pretty happy with the 3.1 patch. The Zul'Aman patch had less content IMO and I loved Zul'Aman despite it being yet another troll raid.

Zul'jin was just that awesome.

Yeah, I definitely read my quest text more than (apparently) most, and there really is no mention of Sarth at all. And I ain't reading no shitty-ass WoW novel to find out his deal either.