Cataclysm

[Merusk]

I think it's time for me to unsub and give my reason as "You killed the fun, dumbasses.  When you nerf heroics to the point they're not huge pains in the ass for all parties involved I might return."

I've resorted to griefing people by queuing as a tank and sitting there watching the timer tick down because I find that to be more fun than waiting 45 mins in a queue to find I'm in a group with 3 guildmates who don't like the look of the tank so they DC and ruin my hour of waiting.

[Hawkbit]

There are people that likely spend more time working the AH than actually playing the game.

I've played with a few people who spend more time playing the AH than anything else.  I don't quite get it myself, but they don't understand why I'm rep grinding either.  But hey, WoW does seem to have a little something for everyone.

I started down that path in BC... and I quickly realized that if I can spend that much time buying low, selling high for 1s and 0s, then I should really, really set aside a grand and do it in real life.  That never quite panned out, though. 

Regarding the quote above

"You killed the fun, dumbasses."

, I think there's a lot of people unsubbing right now.  My "guild" consists of my dad, brother and myself; we've all unsubbed.  It's just simply not fun anymore. 

Too many core changes to the classes we play is what is really hurting us.  My dad plays a balance druid and hates the new eclipse mechanic.  I play a hunter, pally and mage, of which the first two went through major class mechanics changes and are no longer fun to play.  So I'm playing my mage, waiting 35min for a heroic.  Sure, I could gear my pally for prot and go tank, but i just don't want to.  It's a bummer, really.

[Khaldun]

Look, I'm usually topping the charts in guild and PUG heroics. So this is not a noob whine. But honestly, there's a happy place between mind-numbing boredom and Wrath you-can't-lose. This is not the happy place. Unless all the factors align, heroics are a long haul and not much fun. I don't expect raiding to be much different.

There has got to be another paradigm for "difficult" that is not "long and boring" or "complex ten-minute-long choreography so exacting that you could go onto being in a Broadway show after getting boss fights down".

[kildorn]

My judgement of difficulty in Cata is essentially "how many members of your group cannot mess up or you wipe"

Mostly due to stupid shit, like the warlock in H-GB's fire elementals. In theory, an easy mechanic! In reality, if even one person flubs for a few seconds, you can wipe.

[koro]

I find Cataclysm raiding quite enjoyable, provided that your raid is stacked with the proper class composition for each encounter, whereby they become challenging but doable. Otherwise? Brick wall.

[Evildrider]

My guild groups are at the point where we can pretty much one-shot bosses all through heroics.  PUGs are a different story, it's either two extremes for me.... awesome or fail, fail, fail. 

I kind of like the difficulty of the new stuff.  I mean I only started playing WoW steadily just over a year ago.  Wrath was way too easy for my liking, you shouldn't be able to zerg through a heroic in 15 minutes.  Mind you, once the gear starts flowing, that's exactly what all these dungeons are gonna end up as.

It is surprising though the amount of people that still play heroics like it was Wrath.  Some people just don't get it.

[Simond]

I strongly suspect that Ghostcrawler's "It's fine, lern too plae" blog will disappear slightly before 4.1 (eventually) hits the PTR. 4.0.6 is going to go live, people are going to see that pugged heroics are still a crapshoot, and start cancelling. Then Blizzard is going to cave.

(Especially if Rift/SWTOR/etc. are not terrible).

[Tannhauser]

It's so strange, I like some of the new themepark zones but I have a hard time logging in.  Wrath had me obsessed, Cats has me bored.  In Wrath I did all the normal 5-mans, in Cats I've done a couple of them and have no urge to keep going.   I can't really explain why.  The game is just not compelling anymore.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, that's about my place. It's down to the pure social glue keeping me, really.

[Paelos]

It's so strange, I like some of the new themepark zones but I have a hard time logging in.  Wrath had me obsessed, Cats has me bored.  In Wrath I did all the normal 5-mans, in Cats I've done a couple of them and have no urge to keep going.   I can't really explain why.  The game is just not compelling anymore.

We'll see how things go, but I don't think Blizzard anticipated exactly how little patience their playerbase has with getting no-where in "harder" content. They thought by removing the 25 man blocks that people would be appeased if they made heroics harder, and equalized raids. The problem is that people who enjoy the harder content of heroics and are functionally able to create their own groups and complete them are already well into the raiding game. They don't need heroics, they don't even want that as their content. It's simply in the way, they crush it and move on.

The people that like five mans aren't raiders. They liked going through things at their own pace and getting gear that was decent while doing it. They liked socializing with different people and not worrying about class-balancing. Also, why would you force crowd controlling on a population of people that are casually enjoying your content, yet you NEVER use crowd control in the raiding game? It seems ridiculous to me to make the 5 man game more complicated.

[Ashamanchill]

In my opinion they have just been listening to the wrong people. Yeah, no one said they liked faceroll heroics, and actually getting to see the raids on the forums, that's not the type of people who post there. It almost seems to me like Ghostcrawler has been lurking on the forums of AoC, or Aion, or any of those other games whose members pat themselves on the back for not playing WoW, and got all butt hurt.

[Paelos]

I would tell him not to put major challenges in the stepping stone phase of your content. Heroics are meant to be the mid-point where you garner JP to afford that "almost there" get-raid-ready stuff.

I agree with you that people didn't quit the game when heroics were easy. They will quit the game when they are long, not fun, and a 33% success rate in a random group. I've told that to people and they always say the same shit: "They are easy, you just have to have good X."

X could be composition, healer, dps, CC, awareness, etc. I've heard them all. My response was, do you really think an average group, pulled together at random can accomplish X with regularity. They always laugh and say no, but that's because they suck, and you shouldn't design difficulty around who sucks.

In a raid setting, I agree with that philosophy. Design harder raids, and nerf them over time, or add buffs over time. People can ignore the raids in the beginning and focus on other stuff to be happy (LIKE HEROICS). When you take even the heroics away as a fun way to easily spend time with an average group, you know what you are left with? Three dungeons and pvp.

[Ingmar]

I do think if there were 85 normal versions of all the dungeons, the problem would largely be solved (although 3 versions of a dungeon is probably too many.)

[Sheepherder]

The JP from the heroic daily is also an issue.

[Setanta]

It's not lilke asking someone to go from tank to healer here. Every class have a good dps spec for heroic, no reason not to use it.

My Shaman main (since late vanilla) still hasn't gone dual-spec - I'm enhance4lyfe. I keep toying with dual-speccing elemental but then someone might suggest I go heal - fuck that, I leveled resto in TBC up to and including Kara and I never want to heal again (unless the healer dies in which case I pop heals on the tank and myself when maelstrom procs or the tank is hurting). I dps as hard as (or harder than) an ele shaman and can CC as well and have a better chance of wind-shearing.

Having said that my Hunter is BM for questing and never for heroics. Survival is top DPS so unless we need a core-hound Blood Lust, I only run Survival. It makes sense and while I can't match the 12K dps the shamy puts out yet (gear), I can be in the top 2 DPS while CCing (trap/wyvern sting) and usually produce 7-9K dps.

Not listening to other players and being obstinate is silly if you aren't performing.

[Ironwood]

Last night was ok.  We romped through ToT and got the Guild Heroic achievement.  Then I decided that we should go kill Squidhead, since - for SOME REASON - all Pugs skipped him.

OMG.

That corridor is such utter bullshit it's not even real.  We wiped more on that than we did all week.  What a fucking stupid, stupid bunch of mechanics that is.

Then went on to Vortex and mashed first boss, tried Dragon 3 times and aced him on the third go.  At that point we get to Baron Von WindyBum and find the 'sticky' mechanic, which, much like Ozruks slow, is also utter bullshit.  We slog through it until Midnight trying different things and then cave in.

At that point, I read that the chain lightning does the same damage spread out or bunched up (which is different to every other fucking Chain Lightning boss mechanic out there) and the wife pipes up 'Well, if we can bunch up, mass dispel would make it trivial'.

Awesome.

No, Sir, I don't like this new 'It's going to be hard and stupid and you all need to FRAPS your attempts to figure it all out' Bullshit.

The only positive is that we all really felt good that we'd achieved the first Guild Heroic award.

Edited to Add :  The loot is just stupid too;  The Blue stuff is barely different to the Heroic stuff which is barely different to the JP stuff.  It's all so samey and pointless and never makes you feel like 'WoW, I Got Something There'.

[K9]

Then went on to Vortex and mashed first boss, tried Dragon 3 times and aced him on the third go.  At that point we get to Baron Von WindyBum and find the 'sticky' mechanic, which, much like Ozruks slow, is also utter bullshit.  We slog through it until Midnight trying different things and then cave in.

At that point, I read that the chain lightning does the same damage spread out or bunched up (which is different to every other fucking Chain Lightning boss mechanic out there) and the wife pipes up 'Well, if we can bunch up, mass dispel would make it trivial'.

The root is a dispel priority, but you have so much time inside the grounding fields during that fight that healing everyone to full is really a non-issue. You can also jump to avoid the root. If you had a priest healer and you could make it through Altarius and the trash before Asaad, then I'm astonished that you had so much difficulty on the fight itself.

The best way to handle the Giblin packs in Throne of the Tides is to use your priest to MC one of them at the start of each pull so the MC'd mob eats the alpha from the other hunters, then drop the MC and the packs are a joke. The other guys are just a run-out-of-the-aoe type fight.

[Sparky]

I've resorted to griefing people by queuing as a tank and sitting there watching the timer tick down because I find that to be more fun than waiting 45 mins in a queue to find I'm in a group with 3 guildmates who don't like the look of the tank so they DC and ruin my hour of waiting.

It's you, you're the reason pugging sucks.

[SurfD]

Then went on to Vortex and mashed first boss, tried Dragon 3 times and aced him on the third go.  At that point we get to Baron Von WindyBum and find the 'sticky' mechanic, which, much like Ozruks slow, is also utter bullshit.  We slog through it until Midnight trying different things and then cave in.

At that point, I read that the chain lightning does the same damage spread out or bunched up (which is different to every other fucking Chain Lightning boss mechanic out there) and the wife pipes up 'Well, if we can bunch up, mass dispel would make it trivial'.

The root is a dispel priority, but you have so much time inside the grounding fields during that fight that healing everyone to full is really a non-issue. You can also jump to avoid the root. If you had a priest healer and you could make it through Altarius and the trash before Asaad, then I'm astonished that you had so much difficulty on the fight itself.

The best way to handle the Giblin packs in Throne of the Tides is to use your priest to MC one of them at the start of each pull so the MC'd mob eats the alpha from the other hunters, then drop the MC and the packs are a joke. The other guys are just a run-out-of-the-aoe type fight.

yeah, the alpha damage on those Gilblin packs is disgusting.

[Ironwood]

You know, I actually stopped myself from writing, in detail, all the stuff we tried simply to avoid the situation where someone breezes in and says 'Oh, this is what you should have done to avoid this, you noob.'

Honestly, K9, there's nothing new in your post.  Nothing.

We were jumping like the Jews of Jerusalem.  We tried the MC the Goblin, We sent a pet in first, we used intervene, we shapeshifted and Lock Ported to avoid it.

It's just not-fun hard.  The jumping in particular makes me laugh - Jump to avoid the static cling from a spell with a one second cast on an online game with latency.

Ok.  Tell it to the corpses.

Even funnier is the 'You have time to heal up in the shield'.  Not if you can't fucking get there.  I suspect a great deal of our problem was MY belief that you need to space out for the lightning.  That turns out not to be the case, despite all the other fights in the game where it was.

[K9]

I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to call you a noob, I'm just a bit surprised because your experiences vary so differently from my own. From my experience Asaad was pretty much the easiest heroic boss in Cataclysm; I haven't ever been in a group that has wiped on him. I'll buy that there are heroics that are overtuned (Stonecore most of all), but most of the others are pretty much down to a single mechanic that if you cope with it, makes the fight easy.

[Simond]

The current problem with heroics is that if you've got a halfway-decently geared social group (most guilds, or bunch of friends, or what have you) and once you've figured out the gimmicks after a couple of runs - heroics aren't difficult, just a tedious slog. If you're in a pug, you are going to wipe. If you're a raider in a raiding guild, they're a half-hour zerg rush for guild xp and some JP that you have no actual use for.

So it's hardly surprising that even the people who can run them constantly...aren't.

(Also add to that the fact that most DPS haven't figured out yet that blaming the tank/healer for their own screw-ups means that tanks/healers are less likely to pug, and the queues just keep getting longer   )

[Ironwood]

Yeah, as I say, it was probably my mistake.  (omg, noob, lern2readwowhead).  There's a hunter video out there soloing him on heroic, so clearly we sucked !  

To get away from me, my point, which wasn't very clear, is threefold :

1 - Somethings DO need toned down, in my opinion, though the challenge can be fun.
2 - The Gear rewards need a closer look.  I should not be sitting looking at my normal blue and my heroic blue and thinking 'Wait, this just swaps dodge for parry.'
3 - PUGS.  Thinking on all I did last night and (honestly) how rewarding it felt at the end, I'm left thinking  - What would have happened in a PUG ?  *shiver*

EDIT  :  Yeah.  What Simond said.

[koro]

Oh man, I just remembered you can shut off XP gains in Stormwind/Orgrimmar. Now I can actually see the low-level content without outleveling it in the blink of an eye.

I just wish it were a toggle slash command rather than a "fly to Stormwind, pay 10g" thing.

[Rendakor]

The loot from heroics really does suck; the lack of purples from end bosses really hurts the need to run them repeatedly. Generally, I don't like grinding through tiers of blues (first regular dungeons, then Heroics/JP) before getting purples.

A few of them are getting nerfed in 4.0.6 Ironwood, including the giblin packs. Interestingly, I see they've already nerfed the trash in H DM, in every place except where I thought it was needed. They made it less tedious, but the left the 4-5 packs of Defias (Blood Wizards, Enforcers, and Cant-CC-Me-On-Pull Rogues) alone. 

The best way to handle the Giblin packs in Throne of the Tides is to skip that wing entirely.

Fixed.

[Merusk]

I've resorted to griefing people by queuing as a tank and sitting there watching the timer tick down because I find that to be more fun than waiting 45 mins in a queue to find I'm in a group with 3 guildmates who don't like the look of the tank so they DC and ruin my hour of waiting.

It's you, you're the reason pugging sucks.

Know what? At this point I don't give a flying fuck. Perhaps it'll piss enough people off that they quit or write enough angry forum posts that Blizz changes something.  Meanwhile I'll be giggling as I'm surveying or mining at the ease and success of my petulant-12-year-old stunt.

[Khaldun]

Also agree on the gear rewards of Heroics. Tired of seeing shit drop that is the exact same as the revered gear from the factions that I bought three weeks ago. I mean, with one stat different on it, that's all, so I guess if want to collect six identical necklaces so I can swap in hit and expertise and haste as need be, I could but...or, yeah, I could reforge, right. The heroic gear should be ever so slightly better than the rep reward gear. There should be some weird asymmetries in stats on different gear--the standardization of gear makes things so very boring.

[Maledict]

Making the final bos drop an eipc item wouldn't change the stats at all. The itemisation formula changed in Cata so that epic items have exactly the same ibudget as a blue or green item. The only way to improve the loot dropped would be to make it ilevel 359, which would of course immediately invalidate the entirety of raiding for the game. Unless you bump raiding up another tier, in which case you have the same problem all over again.

In Wrath Heroics dropped an epic that was of the same ilevel as the first 10 player raid instance. They can't do that anymore because now 10 player stuff drops the same as 25.

(also seriously are people that bothered about the *colour* of their item? I thought that sort of stuff was purely for the WoW forums. I care how it looks on my character, and the stats it has, but whether the icon is blue, green or purple doesn't matter at all?).

[Ironwood]

Um, for my part, I think people are heading down a red herring road.  I don't give a fuck if it's purple, blue, green or Hyacinth.

What I care about is that I can't tell which one to use because the 'better' part of 'better items' is utterly fucking marginal.

[Selby]

What I care about is that I can't tell which one to use because the 'better' part of 'better items' is utterly fucking marginal.

This exactly.  If I have to get on Rawr or another similar spreadsheet calculator to determine if item X is worth Y more DPS on fights A, B, and D, but not on E and F-H, that is way too much fucking work for heroics or even non-cutting edge raiding.

My strategy as a caster is "Does it have more int?  Does it have hit and am I above the cap yet?"  Anything more complicated than that is asking for trouble for the average player.

[Merusk]

To be totally frank, I don't think the average player even knows the purpose or value of Hit unless they've spent some time listening to people bitch in general or researched it themselves.   The game does a terrible job of explaining stats to anyone below our level of discussion of things.

[caladein]

What I care about is that I can't tell which one to use because the 'better' part of 'better items' is utterly fucking marginal.

Did you feel the same way with Wrath?  Because the steps between normals, heroics, and raids are exactly the same as they were two years ago, just without the extra end-boss drop.

[Maledict]

What I care about is that I can't tell which one to use because the 'better' part of 'better items' is utterly fucking marginal.

This exactly.  If I have to get on Rawr or another similar spreadsheet calculator to determine if item X is worth Y more DPS on fights A, B, and D, but not on E and F-H, that is way too much fucking work for heroics or even non-cutting edge raiding.

My strategy as a caster is "Does it have more int?  Does it have hit and am I above the cap yet?"  Anything more complicated than that is asking for trouble for the average player.

That's exactly what they are going for. They have said they want your prime stat to obviously be your main focus, then after that hit --> the other 3 stats. That's why the upcoming patch has a lot of adjustments to mastery in it, because currently it's too weak for several classes. Blizzards aim is that  crit / haste / mastery all provide roughly the same benefit on items, and it's persoanl choice / availability which determines whoch ones you grab.

To be fair, unless you are raiding, the difference is completely meaningless for any sort of heroics. It's far, far harder to bugger up your characters stats than it used to be in previous expansions, and even having all your gear carrying the "weakest" stat at the moment will still leave you more than able to do any heroic fight in the game. Now if you're a deathknight wearing cloth spirit gear it's a different matter...

[Minvaren]

If Blizzard wants the three stats to all "mean the same thing," why are they separate stats to begin with?   

I also can't help but wonder if the shortened leveling curve in Cata is part of the reason we're seeing apathy creep in so soon.  BC and LK had 10 levels and several zones before the dungeon and raid content got attacked in earnest, while people were trying heroics the day after release in Cata.

[Ashamanchill]

I really don't think it's that. I think the inaccessibility of heroics means that, guess what? they're out, which means that raiding is out of the question, which means that it's pvp, or gtfo according to Blizzard.

I stayed subbed for much of Wrath because of that carrot of raiding: it let me see the content. Did I get to clear it immediately? no. Did I get to the end boss on all the raids? no. But at least I got to step into the content and take part. Now it's back to TBC days where raids were just not to be done by my friends and I. And guess what? I stayed subbed for a fraction of that expansion's life span.