f13.net

Risen - a Alliance guild on the Alleria Server
Posted on 03.11.08 by Failure

To start off, I am making this post to hopefully clear up a number of misconceptions spreading around. That being said, I am fully aware that the same people who are so hopelessly lost now will stay lost, due to their inability to understand simple English.

1. Those of us that quit, did so because we were no longer having fun with the game.
2. Games are meant to be fun, in their entirety.
3. When a person who primarily raids in the game is no longer having fun, it is very likely related to raiding. In no way does this mean this is the only part of the game. It means this was the part of the game the individual speaking was interested in.
4. Nowhere, anywhere, was it said "casual" was a bad thing. Nowhere was the line between casual and hardcore drawn. Nowhere was it said that I cared one fucking bit about the WoW community, what they thought, or that I even cared if they read my post. Now, I do care. My post was aimed at people that cared why we quit. If you don't care about why we quit, then fucking stop reading our fucking website. No Risen member posted this -anywhere- except in response to others who either a) cared or b) pretended they cared.

Ok, now that those points are out of the way, I will continue. Elaborating on (1): If you are doing something for fun, and it is no longer fun, you should quit. If you are doing something to make money, and you are no longer making money, you should quit. If you are doing something to break your toe, and you are unable to break your toe, you should quit. Make sense? We were playing for fun. It was no longer fun. We quit.

Moving on to (2): We all agree we play this game for fun, right? If you don't, well, stop there and reevaluate what you are doing in the game. And before someone starts to try to say that Risen raided 40 hrs a week and it was a job, I'll clear that up for you too. We've been raiding something like 6-8 hours a week. Since TBC came out, we raided 7 days in 1 week roughly 2-3 total times (In 60-70+ weeks). We do not raid anywhere near what would be required of a full-time job. Furthermore, there are actually people out there that enjoy their jobs very much. So even if you want to compare the time investment to a part-time job, so what. If it's fun, power to you. If it's not, find a new hobby. It was fun to us, back in the day.

In any decision, there is some amount of weighing to be done to come up with the decision. To people saying we are behind the times, no, we aren't. We weigh the positives vs the negatives, and make a decision on what we feel is in our best interest. In this case, having fun was the main interest. Up to this point, we were still having fun, and perhaps ignored the future a little bit, because again, this is entertainment. At some point, those scales got tipped, and the "not fun" won out. At that point, it was an amalgam of reasons as to why it was no longer worth playing. Some of these reasons may be old; some of them may be new. It takes a lot more than 1 piece of straw to offset a balance that has a brick on the other end. It is pointless to pick out 1 piece of straw from the stack and ignore the rest. If nothing else, understand this fact.

I bring up (3) because yes, when I made my post, it was from a raider's perspective. It was why Risen, a raiding guild, was no longer raiding. Nowhere was it stated that these were the only problems with WoW. Nowhere was it stated that these were problems everyone had with WoW. It was merely stated that these were some of the things that contributed to the end of a PvE raiding guild.

Do you want the truth? Blizzard is giving nobody that pays for a subscription to WoW what they deserve. With the amount of money they are making, they should be putting out at least 4 5-mans and 1 10-man per month and 1 25-man every-other month. Not to mention they should probably be adding 1 new battleground each month, and 1 special tournament every other month. I even PvPed too, ended S1 on a Gladiator 5s and 2s team. Was in a top3 5s team for the first 1/3rd of S2. I got annoyed with PvP for the same reasons I stated in my initial post with raiding. Seasons dragged on too long, it meant nothing to be at the top, and farming honor for gear was far worse than the 8th month of Black Temple (and just as meaningless). I also have a character on a different server I played casually. I got the best badge gear I could back in the day, I got some Kara gear. I never got a 25-man raid item ever. To be honest, I'm more irritated with this badge loot bullshit on that character than I am on my main. No, I really really don't want to do more Kara, more of the same heroics, or anything else that gives badges. That is OLD CONTENT, regardless of the rewards.

Do people that enjoy 5-mans and heroics not enjoy seeing different encounters in different instances? Do they not enjoy seeing new things and seeing things slightly more challenging than what they did before? If nothing else, can people that are not raiders understand this basic desire? Don't apply it to raids and say they shouldn't be designing content just for raiders. Do you not like to be challenged, and to overcome that challenge? Do you not just get a nice feeling inside yourself for succeeding at something that you believed was a challenge? Some of the most fun times in this and many other games is when something goes terribly wrong, and yet you still manage to recover and pull it through. The challenge there is what made it fun. As was said earlier, -everyone- should be getting content. Yes, there are enough raiders who have seen Illidan to make it worth Blizzard's time to continue to create content for them. No, nowhere was it said that 5mans, 10mans, and even solo content should be excluded. It is all being put out in this game slower than it is in AC1, and AC1 has been out for what, 9-10 years, and has less than 1% of the player-base of WoW.

Finally on this topic, as I said, my post had to deal with raiding, and only raiding. I neglected other aspects of WoW in the first post because well, they had little to do with the guild as a whole ceasing to raid. I am sorry if you think something I said was not a problem from your perspective. Sadly, your perspective didn't matter to Risen, nor does it matter to other raiding guilds. And no, that doesn't say your opinion doesn't matter. I'm merely saying your opinion has nothing to do with whether or not Risen continues to raid. Your opinion also has nothing to do with whether any other guild continues to raid. Also, our guild had stopped raiding 2 full weeks before that post was made. The post was -not- made to get attention from Blizzard. The post was not made to try to get anything changed. Many of our members had canceled their account, found a new guild, and/or transferred just to play casually with friends when that post was made. So please, don't think there was any intent there to screw up the game for you.

This brings us to (4). I incorrectly assumed people would be intelligent enough to realize that I didn't type "I hate all casuals and everyone who can't kill Illidan." My bad guys. Well, I hate you if that's what you got out of my post. Casual is great, it's a fucking game. Playing more and trying to do well is also great, IF that is fun for you. It was fun for me, and I would go ahead and say it was fun for most all of the other members in Risen. I will even go out on a limb and say the people in DnT and Nihilum that still do that find it fun too. I'm sorry that it offends you so that we find other things fun that you don't find fun. For the record, I also don't find baseball or football fun, if you'd like to flame me for that, go for it. Soccer and basketball I enjoy, however. Oh wait, was that opinions I posted? Gee, my bad, forgot I'm not allowed to have those. Everything in life is obviously clear-cut black and white.

So in conclusion, the game wasn't fun. I'm not even going to try to type up a list of all the things I found not fun. I put a small handful of them in the last post, and people decided they thought we didn't have the right to quit (the only point of the post was that we were quitting raiding) because they disagreed with 1 or 2 of the points. They disagreed that something small was able to detract from the amount of fun we were having with a game. If you truly care about my reasons, feel free to talk to me, but they are opinions; and they only point to why it's not worth it for me to be in an end-game guild and raid in the current incarnation of WoW.


World of Casualcraft
Posted on 03.07.08 by Failure

Ok, so it's a shitty title, sue me. The idea is there, and everyone knows it's true. Blizzard no longer cares about the hardcore gamers, be that the raiders or the pvpers. Well, we're done with it. It wasn't just one thing really. While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there's a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances...for nothing.

About 2 weeks ago it became official. No, Risen is not a dead guild. We are a group of gamers that likes being the best we can be. Well, WoW isn't about that anymore, so we are taking WoW for what it is - casual. Some of us may be around running their casual content as they release it, others of us are taking an even more casual approach and deactivating until Wrath. It's kinda funny really. Shortly after making this decision, it was announced that Karazhan would now drop TEN epic gems per clear. Wow, that's more than we get in Hyjal half the time (not to mention that can be 10 spinels, not 9 emeralds and a lionseye!). I was just about to get pissed off when I read that, then I remembered it didn't affect me anymore and a wave of calm relief passed over me.

Not having been back in Black Temple for 2 weeks was kind of nice as well. As much as I loved still trying to complete our first warglaive set (along with Nihilum, DnT, and Vodka I believe?), it's nice not having to worry about it anymore. No longer have to worry that the 200th US guild to kill Illidan has 4x the warglaives that we have (3rd US?). And looking to the future, damn am I glad we won't have to farm Sunwell like we did Naxx. Not that we have anything to show for Naxx or BT. I'm sure Sunwell will be different, right?

But ya know, forget all that. What happened to the competition? What happened to the encounters that took time to learn? In BT PTR I said this, and people told me it would be different on live. It sure didn't seem that way to me. Nihilum praised the Souls encounter and Illidan both. Neither of those seemed even remotely challenging. Well, Sunwell PTR seems even worse. Granted, we quit before some of the later encounters...but if that instance is what we've been farming BT for 8 months waiting for then well, this post speaks for itself.

Well Blizzard, it was a fun 3 years. You want a casual game, we're playing your game casually. See you again in the expac. We'll give it another try most likely, see if anything has changed. In the meanwhile, if anyone has any suggestions for us, feel free to let us know (or if any devs from other games want a top guild to help with beta-testing! ^.^)! In the meanwhile, can look us up in other games (TF2, DotA, FFXI, and more).

About 2 weeks ago it became official. No, Risen is not a dead guild.

Do you want the truth? Blizzard is giving nobody that pays for a subscription to WoW what they deserve. With the amount of money they are making, they should be...

Heh....this cracked my guild up when it was posted last week.

One of our Pallies (guild I am in raided 5 nights a week back in the times o progression) ninja apped to Risen and got accepted so transfered off to Alleria in the dead of night because he "wanted to raid everyday" about 3 weeks before our guild's first Illidan kill back in November.

Funny thing is, Risen had been clearing BT and Hyjal for long enough even then that alts were getting in for Hyjal and Black Temple and even if they did SSC/TK/Gruul/Mag every week, they were not going to be raiding more nights than we were. Unless you are only raiding for 2 hours a night, you can't possibly milk all the BC raid content over 7 days.

The first thing our guild leader (a pally) says when he hears this about Risen is: "Oh poor Al, I guess he won't be raiding more nights a week than we do now."

And getting all worked up about everyone who goes to Kara getting enough badges for an epic gem is pretty dumb. Our raid leader is ecstatic that he is going to have a use for his 350 badges he has had for 6 months and will be able to finally catch up on the number of Crimson Spinels the guild owes members for tier6 gear.

Not to rain on the lolraiderz parade you guys are having, but i thought he did have one good point. Blizzard needs(needed?) to create a great deal more 5 and 10-man content. I know for a fact i'd still be playing if there were more 5-mans to level-up with.

I thought that part was pretty apt though. They are making ludicrous amounts of money, and can't seem to be bothered to really put it back into the game in any meaningful, consistent way.

Having unlimited amounts of money doesn't really help them make more content, there are only so many people they can manage and still put out a high quality experience.  And besides, Blizzard probably is making a new zone and a new instance every month, for their next MMO.

What's up with everyone wanting Crimson Spinels instead of anything else again?

Yes, that stood out to me as well.  To me, it looks like this Cash Cow is on cruise control.

Oh mathematically it's possible sure, but in the real world that means you have to find fifty new artists/designers/programmers/testers/managers who are just as good as the ones you already have, that's the problem.  You can't double your team and expect to put out the same excellent product, it's a quality versus quantity problem.  I'm sure blizzard is hiring as many people as it can but it won't let down its standards to fill those positions.

They've also lost a lot of people leaving to join/form other companies and of course they are working on an expansion.

I'd love to have more quanitity and more diverse 5-mans/10-mans.  That makes sense.  Give us variety.

Having more BG's can be an issue though.  Right now, the queue times are very nice.  I can PvP my heart out all night solid.  If you start dividing the same playerbase that is running 4 BG's now into 10?  Not so hot.

One or two more probably wouldn't be a big deal, but there will be a breakpoint that starts to affect queue times substantially.  Plus, they'll then have that many more BG's for people to bitch about how "unfair" they are for their side as opposed to the other.  Will having 2-3 more AV's make your gaming experience better?

Maybe they'll come out with some BG that has a really neat twist to it for some additional fun, but my limited mind can't come up with it right now.  If all they add is another AB or EoTS with different looks and more or less flags, my PvP experience won't be improved.  Maybe this promise of long ranged comabt and destructible buildings will be the bee's knees?

Blizzard no longer cares about the hardcore gamers, be that the raiders or the pvpers. Well, we're done with it. It wasn't just one thing really. While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there's a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances...for nothing.

I disagree with most people in this thread.  I think the first post was about as well reasoned correctly spelled as you can get, and he nicely kept his head from exploding like a lot of intarnet pundits.  He even used the word "amalgam" correctly.

I guess the first instinct is to just say 'lolraiders' and move on, and I agree he probably spent too much time playing the game, but the post in itself was well-written.  And like he says, I don't see how it can be whining if he says up front: if you don't care about what I'm about to write, don't read it.

I guess the first instinct is to just say 'lolraiders' and move on, and I agree he probably spent too much time playing the game, but the post in itself was well-written.  And like he says, I don't see how it can be whining if he says up front: if you don't care about what I'm about to write, don't read it.

Well as a whole they "quit" raiding. It wasnt fun for them any more, so they stopped doing it.

Dammit, my post got ate.

In short: Blizzard have gotten very complacent with that US $10 m per week in profit that comes in throught their doors. They could (and probably should) be burying their competitors with new content for WoW.

Our crew is on RoS in BT and I'm having a helluvha lot of fun with the game right now. We'll be finishing up BT in the next few weeks, just in time for the Sunwell to kick off.

But give me a fucking break. When you raid 7 nights a week of course you're going to burn through content faster than they create it. You did power raiding to shine your epeen. Once that glow wore off, you found out that you burned right past any and all fun you could have been having with the game in the process.

Bravo douchebags, bravo.

EDIT: I'll expand on this a bit

If you don't find raiding inherently fun, you're doing it for all the wrong reasons. Granted, raiding sure as hell isn't for everyone. But for me personally, I love the challenge of taking down "big shit" with guys I've been gaming with for years. The cheers on vent when you finally knock over a guy you've been working on for a few nights makes it well worth it.

Enjoy raiding for what it is, challenging encounters designed for large groups of people. If you base your raiding on anything other than that you are, as Schild said earlier, doing it really fucking wrong.

Isn't this from their guild front page?

If you're a high-end progression raiding guild, and you quit raiding, isn't that pretty newsy for your guild website?

EverQuest has always had a reasonable pace of releasing content, and they didn't throw it out there to be tested, either.  They did in-house testing, and when things came up when the actual players got a hold of it, they tweaked it on live.  With most expansions, top end guilds took somewhere around 2-4 months - sometimes more - to reach the 'end' of the expansion, by which time another expansion was just around the corner.  They farmed the content for a couple months, then had a new expansion worth of shiny to play with and be challenged by.  Blizzard has enough money to release raider content at that pace as well as releasing casual and small-raid content at an excellent rate as well, but they're not doing it.  How long was it between the release of Planes of Power and when Fires of Heaven finally reached the Plane of Time?  I think it was well over six months, but I don't feel like looking it up - I do know it was quite some time.  When Shadows of Luclin was released, the Avatar of War had just been beaten a matter of weeks prior.  Nobody had months after these encounters had been beaten and they were no longer challenging with nothing else to do; new challenges constantly awaited them.  There are many flaws in EQ, but keeping players supplied with challenge has never been one of them.

(according to Wow-jutsu only 11-12% of players have been IN BT/MHJ)

11-12% of guilds, even.  That's not considering the full membership of the guild, or unguilded players, if I'm correct in how wowjutsu works.

But if, for instance, you raid with another guild and get a drop from BT, your guild is marked as having killed that boss when actually it's just you.

If somebody transfers from a guild and has a drop from a raid, it will count the guild they transfer to as a raiding guild that has experienced that raid. The true statistic is that 11% of guilds in the ranking tables (which ranks only around a third of guilds that the site knows about) has had at some time one or more player character that has equipped an item from BT. Even with people who have changed guilds or who fill spots in other guilds raids that comes to only 3% of guilds that the site even knows about having at one time had BT loot on a character in their guild. I would imagine that considerably less than 1% of players have a character that has been through the BT instance portal. Hell, I'll bet that considerably less than 1% have a character that could.

Anybody who thinks fondly of raiding in Everquest is one of those people who remembers the good times but forgets about all this bullshit that surrounded it.

I was pretty sure that WoWJutsu had some kind of mechanism in it to prevent transfer / guild hoppers from inflating a guilds potential progression rank.  Pretty sure you have to be IN the guild before you get a new tier item for it to count you as having downed X boss. Simply transferring your T5 equipped character into a t4 guild does not bump them up to T5 status.

Also, EQ content had a certain measure of re-usability. I remember doing things like ToV when our low end 'casual' raiding guild didn't have a PoP or SoL target to take, and people enjoyed it and it was worthwhile for the most part. Blizzard has a lot of dead content now, and when wrath launches it will have alot more, IMO there philosophy of 'bringing everyones gear level' up to a point ( I think the original post referenced t6 gear being available from badges) is incorrect because it invalidates content that people would otherwise do to "gear up" a raid force.

Progression in Everquest took so long because everyone on the server had to share the same damn Bosses.  Can you even imagine such a terrible idea nowadays?  Yeah sorry but we killed Illidan two days ago, he'll be up in another fourteen hours but our server has an ordered list for who gets to take the next shot at him, you might get a chance to wipe on him in another four weeks, see you then.

Plus Everquest was the game that pioneered intentionally breaking bosses so that you couldn't progress because the later content wasn't actually finished yet.  Anybody who thinks fondly of raiding in Everquest is one of those people who remembers the good times but forgets about all this bullshit that surrounded it.

On a related note, it was predicted by someone (or maybe a few someones) when woW first started-up that  Blizzard's content pace would doom them.  It looks like the cracks on that might finally be showing.. 4 years later.  :uhrr:  I guess the catalyst would be 2 new MMOs coming out relatively soon that actually have captured the player's imaginations, unlike Vanguard and TR.  Odd, that.

While he said it with a bit more drama than perhaps needed the main point is true when you are no longer having fun playing a game stop. Most of my guild is currently in hiatus mode because frankly we have not had any new content that is really doable for us since freaking drake quests were put in around 6 or 7 months ago. ZA looked on paper to be great as we do enjoy kharazan but frankly even though we have killed the prince he is by no means on farm status and our secondary tank just is not up to taking the wooping that the first ZA boss dishes out.

Thus we have had jack all to do that is new since shortly after BC was released. I do not hate wow I have mostly been playing eq2 lately with doing pvp stuff on the side in wow and arena stuff.

Blizzards content production pace smacks of really horrible management and or abysmal dev tools. If EQ2 with a much smaller cash flow can put out good quality releases every 8 or 9 months and blizzard is looking like its going to be at least year and a half between expansions something is wrong.

If they could hit the 12 months between expansion marks while slow it would probably be fine. We still had enough to do at around the 12 month point after bc came out but we all decided that since there is no real hope in sight of the expansion coming out any time soon to take a break to prevent burn out.

I give blizzard props for their quality but the pace they make things makes baby jeebus cry.

Killing Arthas after 10 phases and 30 minutes isn't worth it to me.

Quit now.  I guarantee you at least 20 minutes and 5 phases to that battle at the very, very least.  Hell, the group I ran with would be disappointed with less, and we were about as casual as decent 25 mans can get.

There is a common opinion out there that none of the "big" bosses should have been killable anyway.  I kind of subscribe to that.  Where is the lore supposed to go now that all of the worst bosses evaar are now dead?  I suppose they could use the old soap opera come-backs, but that is pretty lame.

"You didn't really kill boss xxyyzz.  That was his clooooone!!!!"

It would have made more sense to just allow certain events to take place that either took those bosses out or at least "banished" them.  For instance:  Clear a path to allow evil boss A to get after evil boss B.  Once done, watch the fireworks fly!  Hey look, evil guy B lost and left this big chest of goodies behind.

Another example:  Set up the right conditions so good guy A can banish/trap bad guy B.  Oops, bad guy B left behind a lot of items in his footlocker!

There is a common opinion out there that none of the "big" bosses should have been killable anyway.  I kind of subscribe to that.  Where is the lore supposed to go now that all of the worst bosses evaar are now dead?  I suppose they could use the old soap opera come-backs, but that is pretty lame.

"You didn't really kill boss xxyyzz.  That was his clooooone!!!!"

I polish my shitty quest greens with his tears.

If I was Blizzard I'd just design Arthas in a way that he was literally impossible to kill but so it looks like he is totally killable if you would just play perfect enough. The uber-guilds would happily beat their heads against him for months until you decided enough time has passed and made some subtle adjustments to make him killable.

You will never make the nerd-rage hardcores happy, regardless of how you tune stuff. They complain about everything for the sake of complaining about it and showing how much smarter they are than the people whose game they pay to play.

*tears*

You don't have to try to make them happy, you just have to keep taking their money.

Apparently it is that second part that is letting them down here.

Personally, I'm pissed we can't get our shit together for bear mounts in ZA, stuck at 3/4.  I like badge loot, because N drops for M guys (M>>N) is just not very fun at all.  If you are going to give me a 'challenge' that is: designed to be beaten and easily beaten, don't waste my time making me come back an arbitrarily large number of times for the shiny because I won't do it.  Most players cannot perform to within 85% of their gear limit anyway so gratz epix is pretty hollow when you know it won't help the chaff you bring along not stand in fire any better.  I think every raid encounter in WoW just comes down to getting enough idiots to not stand in fire for 10 minutes at a time.  That's pretty depressing and why I'm pretty much only interested in timed ZA runs anymore since that sustained focus is still something that any chimp with a keyboard can't manage.  Oh, and I don't expect WotLK to be any different because one doesn't need to fix a cash cow... 

Today's nerd rage brought to you by the letter P and the number 9.

They do have a point. If you play this game competitively, you run out content way too fast. Seriously, it's been 10 months since Black Temple hit and the new raid is up today. It'll be finished within 2 weeks and be old within 2 months. They really should put out more content, because otherwise people just bored as fuck.

But a lot of people (many more than you'd think) are hitting the content cap.

There are a LOT of people who have done less than me, many more than you think.

I don't even have one level 70 character.  :ye_gods:

I disagree.  Designing games for the hardcore is poor resource management.  Churning out content that only a small portion of the playerbase will see isn't a sound economic decision.  I hope that more game companies will adopt this strategy and develop their games with the casual player in mind.  I'm quite happy to see the hardcore players get bored and leave.  It means less e-peen waving and board trolling for the 95% of us that play the game for fun.   

There would have to be areas with no mobs, unless they can save state so you can log off without respawning.  Then you can spread out your crawl over time.   Also I assume the reduced versions do not have 'tricky parts', again, those are saved for the uber versions.

If I was Blizzard I'd just design Arthas in a way that he was literally impossible to kill but so it looks like he is totally killable if you would just play perfect enough. The uber-guilds would happily beat their heads against him for months until you decided enough time has passed and made some subtle adjustments to make him killable.

I don't understand why they don't set these instances up so they can 'have their cake and eat it too'.   Duh - they are instances - different copies could have different rules based on who enters them.  If you enter it solo, it scales to that, including lowering the uber loot.  Even have the boss not home that day - he's out raiding, and have the boss's son there for you to kill.

The lack of people running Zul'gurub tells me your idea would be a waste of time and effort that would be better spent making new content.

I like challenging 5-man content. Me and my guildmates play a lot and are really good at 5-manning dungeons. We used to have a lot of fun playing WoW. But Blizzard is just not putting out nearly enough new 5-man content to keep us interested (or any other content, for that matter). Moreover, what 5-man content they are putting out is just not hard enough to challenge us. Therefore, we are not going to focus our play on WoW anymore. I am posting this on my website that lots of people (for whatever reason) visit for updates on 5-mans we've finished, strategies we've tried and loot we've gotten so those readers know not to expect to see any of that stuff anymore.

And it's not just a matter of non-instanced content and competition, either, because much later, in the ages of Gates of Discord, Omens of War, and the newer EQ expansions where all this raid stuff was instanced and on a timer just like WoW's, things still played out like this, with top guilds taking several months to complete an expansion, not finishing until the next one is just around the corner, and 'average' raiding guilds being an expansion or two behind on content with much to look forward to at all times.

Seems sensible enough to me.  On f13, that post would get something between "meh" and a furious circle-jerk about how much Blizzard sucks. But drop in the word "raid" and the place immediately turns into the Vault.

Show me on the doll where Furor touched you.

I disagree.  Designing games for the hardcore is poor resource management.  Churning out content that only a small portion of the playerbase will see isn't a sound economic decision.  I hope that more game companies will adopt this strategy and develop their games with the casual player in mind.  I'm quite happy to see the hardcore players get bored and leave.  It means less e-peen waving and board trolling for the 95% of us that play the game for fun.   

Also, LOTRO is adding 3 man instances. Someone knows what they are doing.

That is very cool and something I'd love to have in WoW.  Unfortunately LOTRO didn't really click with me beyond the first couple weeks playing it.

That is very cool and something I'd love to have in WoW.  Unfortunately LOTRO didn't really click with me beyond the first couple weeks playing it.

I really think you should give it another go.

Is it much better?  I've been tempted for a while now to go back to LOTRO for a bit, but I seem to recall that as I got higher in level the areas seemed less and less "finished".

PS. The invisible wall on the entry balcony? totally should drop once the 3rd boss is dead!

There's like 4 amazingly great drops for fury/arms warriors in there but NO reason to bring one.

This is about the only WoW forum I've seen where people are nerdraging over MrT (other than "Second boss in heroic  :ye_gods:" which is everywhere) What gives?

Paelos nerdrages about everything that is not totally filled to the gills with what he considers good warrior tank loot, has more than one trash pull in the whole zone, and doesn't look exactly as he thinks it should aesthetically.

Paelos nerdrages about everything that is not totally filled to the gills with what he considers good warrior tank loot, has more than one trash pull in the whole zone, and doesn't look exactly as he thinks it should aesthetically.

They already do with Heroics. Most of them just aren't doable with the gear you'd get from Rep and normal dungeons. Not without an 'ideal' group setup.

The leap from even a kara/badge tank back down to a Rep/Dungeon blue tank is somewhere between laughable and demoralizing.

Yeah, we'll see how easy it is to get tanks involved in the place over time. It's already tough enough trying to find the CC classes for it in our raiding alliance. As far as filled to the gills with tank loot, you're nuts. When you put 13 items on an end boss, you'd expect one to be tanking. Instead, for example, 2 of them are leather dps shoulders. WTF?

Ah yes, MMOGs, where hard means unbalanced and more hitpoints.

God bless you, diku-landscape, you always deliver.

That isn't what they're talking about.  These things don't hit harder and don't have more hitpoints.  But they're mostly casters, so that requires different tactics, and there are a lot of them, so you have to be coordinated or else they'll overwhelm you.

Strategy and coordination, like real multiplayer games.

You obviously did not read and understand what my post said. Nowhere did I say anything about the loot of any specific zone, or even that it was filled to the gills.

Step away from the game if you hate it so much, seriously. Every post you make about the game is bitching about how anything new added doesn't fit what you consider to be the direction the game should take.

My point exactly.  I was trying to express the point that it's not so hard because they do X more damage and have Y more hit points.  There's real strategy involved in dealing with all that craziness.

Oh it gets better, blizzard couldn't figure a way to make the new raidbosses innately harder without giving them the ability to 1-shot tanks, so they just made this. (http://www.wowdb.com/spell.aspx?id=45769)

Basically stepping into the zone reduces all tank's avoidance by 25%.

Oh it gets better, blizzard couldn't figure a way to make the new raidbosses innately harder without giving them the ability to 1-shot tanks, so they just made this. (http://www.wowdb.com/spell.aspx?id=45769)

Basically stepping into the zone reduces all tank's avoidance by 25%.

There's strategy to a point. Then somebody posts how to min/max it with the right classes, and that's that. For example, I'd never walk into the place without a warlock, period. That sort of starts to limit your class choices on that alone.

Oh man, that's awesome.

Oh man, that's awesome.

I hate to break it to you, but the real powergamers don't run around clearing the place with prot pally holy priest mage*3. They take what they have at the moment and make it work.

I haven't played a tank for a while, so it's been a while since I remember what the numbers are, but doesn't a 20% drop in avoidance also make you vulnerable to crushing blows from heroic bosses?

People wouldn't stack avoidance so much if it wasn't for the crushing blow mechanic that NEEDS 104% or so avoidance to prevent instagibs from hard-hitting raid bosses.

True.

Goes away after phase 3 of the invasion is my understanding.

People wouldn't stack avoidance so much if it wasn't for the crushing blow mechanic that NEEDS 104% or so avoidance to prevent instagibs from hard-hitting raid bosses.

Got a link for that? I'm just wondering because at the current rate phase three is going to be over within the next two resets, which makes it seem like an even more pointless mechanic.

Cockblock. I guess its slightly more elegant than overtuning the boss to hell and then nerfing it next patch.

That's what Brutalis is for from what I've read. The general vibe seems to be "You haven't been farming BT for six months? Well have fun!"

The fact is, you're comming across as the real min/maxer. I hate to break it to you, but the real powergamers don't run around clearing the place with prot pally holy priest mage*3. They take what they have at the moment and make it work. It's actually the "casuals" who are so damn rigid about what classes they take because "you NEED A MAGE AND A WARLOCK ZOMG NO WE CAN'T DO IT ANI OTHUAR WAI!!!!@!@!@!!" Also, "omg need t6 to kill kael".

You want to bitch about power gamers and min-maxers, fine. Just don't be a hypocrite and talk about never doing it without a certain class (min-maxing at its finest).  Oh and, learn to LoS and use spell reflect+thunderclap.

Yeah the raid has to do 27,777 DPS. That's at least 1750 DPS per DPS raider. That's totally insane.

Just as a reference, that kind of DPS would take Gruul down in 2 minutes flat, somewhere near the 4th grow.

Well yeah. When you're overgeared, class balance is meaningless.

28k raid DPS really is not that difficult to manage for t6 guilds, but Brutallus's dmg output on 3 tanks requires you to have more healing/tanking than you would on a typical DPS burn fight. Which is somewhat like Patchwerk 2.0.

This DPS discussion brings to mind a question that's been bothering me.  What mods are folks typically using to chart DPS.  I run SWstats, Recount AND Damage meters.  Each one has WILDLY varying stated DPS.   For example, I pull ~700-800 on Recount throughout a full raid, but DM lists me at 1200 or better. (I want more T5, dammit! Drop my pants, Leo!!) SWstats falls somewhere in the middle.

Sometimes I think it's simply due to "in combat" time varying between meters, since I tend to pull aggro and/ or die at least twice a raid (thanks insane trash mob AOEs!) Seems like one counts "any time the raid is in combat" another counts "from the time YOU enter combat, until the last person in the raid exits" and the last "when you enter combat until you exit."   It's true for looking at individual fights as well, though, so it's quite confusing.

A more useful on the fly measurement is simply damage done.

Who are their competitors however?  WAR and AoC are coming along soonish - however they seem to have a slightly different mindset, that being more PVP focussed.  If you want a PvE game to whack foozles - theres noone out there or on the horizon.  I'm sure Blizzard has a war chest if they need it, but for now they have plenty of time to make World of Starcraft or whatever, work on the WoW expansion, and roll in their piles of money.  Which is where most of the money is going - not in investment, but in rolling in piles of money - cause thats what you do if you have a wildly successful product.

Right now it seems (from my outsider point of view) that PvPers and raiders are catered to - the RPers, the casuals, the dollmakers etc aren't.

Ehh... atm the only ones being catered too ARE the casuals.  The pvpers and raiders are all ready to jump ship to the first thing that comes along.

Ehh... atm the only ones being catered too ARE the casuals.  The pvpers and raiders are all ready to jump ship to the first thing that comes along.

I have been wondering if this latest change to the PvP Arenas will sour some of the more wolf/sheep types.  Making it so teams are matched up based on both personal and team rating keeps the well-geared playing the well-geared.  I haven't done many arena matches since the change yet, but the little I have done showed a huge difference.

No it doesn't, personal rating resets when you leave a team.  All the change intended to do was fix the personal rating exploits.  You will still be fighting the same amount of full season three geared folks at the 1500 bracket as before.

Are you SURE it goes by your highest rating in any team? that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be honest.

You have to have both a personal and a team rating over the minimums in whatever bracket said personal ratings are in to buy the shoulders/weaps.

If you're not packing 3 forms of hard CC go home is basically what Magister's Terrace says.

Just to give another datapoint -

I finally dragged a couple guildies through it on heroic.  Enhancement shaman, ele shaman, protection warrior, frost mage, and holy priest.  Everyone's in a mix of blues and purples.  We experimented with mind control on the early pulls, but we were less than pleased with the results, so we just stuck to sheep.  A few times we were able to use the fear to control the pull but most pulls, we didn't.  We had no issues with any pulls or bosses save the third one.  We had the arms warrior, warlock, dagger rogue, and hunter adds.  The dagger rogue was ignorable, but the rest were ridiculous, especially the arms warrior.  We finally gave up and had the enhancement shaman switch to his warlock.  The warlock trinket dropped, so everybody went home happy.  I'm bringing the holy paladin next time because I suspect he'll do much better on the 3rd boss.