Cataclysm

[Ashamanchill]

I think he means that when a bosses mechanics are too difficult for most of these tards to grasp, it doesn't matter what number Blizzard buffs them up to, dummies are still going to wipe to them.

Until almost the end of ICC's life, I never got to see past Professor Putricide. Even when we were buffed by 20%. It was the guilds I was in; they always had one dummy who couldnt do the spores on Rotface(?), and beating that boss that kept puking puddles around the room was hell.

[Lakov_Sanite]

15% in many dungeons still wont help you get past those "group killer" bosses.

15% more HP is not going to save the people who keep standing outside of the grounding field on Asaad, or the tanks who simply can not get the Ozruk dance mechanic down.
15% more DPS is not going to save your group when it is full of people pushing 4k in a heroic on a single target tank n spank fight, or who simply can not manage to change targets to the adds on the Erudax fight.

Yes.  It will improve quality of life in a decent number of complete pugs, but it wont completely protect you from the vast amounts of epic fail that still lurk in the shadows of the LFD tool.

Actually yeah, it will.

[SurfD]

That is like saying that being level 70 made full clearing old school 40 man Naxx a walk in the park.

KT was still a bitch and a half even with 30 people at level 70.  More HP and More DPS will not allow you to "muscle through" many types of WoW boss mechanics (wether 5 man or 40 man).  15% more HP will not prevent a boss that can one shot you from one shotting you when you dont avoid the heavily telegraphed oneshot mechanic.  15% more dps will not help you kill shit if people are too stupid to apply that dps where it is needed at the correct time.  And you WILL find those stupid people when you do enough random pugs.

[Rendakor]

The 15% isn't intended to make up for stupid. But it will help the fact that the ilvl to /lfd for heroics is lower than what you need to be successful (as they've openly admitted).

[Ironwood]

Sorry, I understand what he MEANS.  I just don't get his point :  how would you like us to remove the stupid from lfg ?

Or are you just moaning about retards ?

[Simond]

Plus the thing is, it's not the boss fights that are causing all the grief. Boss fight, you get there, go "Oh, it's this one with gimmicks x/y/s"/DBM pings, ask "Everyone know this one?" and either do it or wipe. Everyone expects boss fights to be tricksie.

It's the sodding trash that's the hassle - there's too much of it, it does too much damage, takes too long to kill, and still requires a modicum of skill to deal with ("CC that one, kill that one first, interrupt that one spell or the tank then everyone else dies, etc). For trash mobs. A 15% bonus on ploughing through all that crap that is a real quality-of-life improvement.

[Koyasha]

It's the sodding trash that's the hassle - there's too much of it, it does too much damage, takes too long to kill, and still requires a modicum of skill to deal with ("CC that one, kill that one first, interrupt that one spell or the tank then everyone else dies, etc). For trash mobs. A 15% bonus on ploughing through all that crap that is a real quality-of-life improvement.

I think that if a fight isn't going to be a threat, it shouldn't be there at all.  So trash mobs that require a modicum of skill to kill are exactly what I want.  I don't want packs that I can just blitz through.  Now, too much of it may be an issue, but complaining because it requires some skill and organization seems ridiculous.

[Sheepherder]

Agreed, they should remove the boss fights.

[Simond]

It's the sodding trash that's the hassle - there's too much of it, it does too much damage, takes too long to kill, and still requires a modicum of skill to deal with ("CC that one, kill that one first, interrupt that one spell or the tank then everyone else dies, etc). For trash mobs. A 15% bonus on ploughing through all that crap that is a real quality-of-life improvement.

I think that if a fight isn't going to be a threat, it shouldn't be there at all.  So trash mobs that require a modicum of skill to kill are exactly what I want.  I don't want packs that I can just blitz through.  Now, too much of it may be an issue, but complaining because it requires some skill and organization seems ridiculous.

You want hour-long queues and two hour heroics? Really?

[Shrike]

I think that if a fight isn't going to be a threat, it shouldn't be there at all.  So trash mobs that require a modicum of skill to kill are exactly what I want.  I don't want packs that I can just blitz through.  Now, too much of it may be an issue, but complaining because it requires some skill and organization seems ridiculous.

If they're that much of a threat then they're no longer trash. They're "events" or sub-bosses. Needs less of that. The time issue is one of the biggest problems I'm having with this expansion.

[Pennilenko]

Right now the problem with heroics in cataclysm is when somebody asks me to run some with them, my response is that I do not have three hours to run a dungeon with.

[Koyasha]

I don't think any of the dungeon should be there for the sole purpose of making it take more time by requiring you to do something which has almost no chance of failure, but requires a minimum amount of time in order to get past.  That's what mindless trash does - if I don't have to pay any attention as I clear through it, all it's doing is making the dungeon take longer without actually providing any challenge at all.

If every pull need a little CC and a kill order to make it go smoothly, that's great.  I don't want the extreme of every pull needing perfect CC in order to be survivable, of course, but I'd like to have to pay attention or else things might get rough.

Essentially, "trash" is something I'd rather not have in my dungeons at all.  I'd rather have enemies.

[Rendakor]

Koyasha, I disagree with what you said.

[Paelos]

I don't want CC in 5 mans. It plays no part in fun and only serves to frustrate the players.

Here are my simple rules: no more than 2 trash groups between bosses. No more than 4 mobs per pack. No more than 2 casters in a pack.

[Ironwood]

Hey, I'm one of the guys saying that heroics need tuned and some are just utter bullshit, but that sounds boring as hell Paelos.

Unless there's 20 or so bosses.  Then it works.

[Paelos]

I prefer about 5 to 7

[Ironwood]

You're a fan of HoO ?

 

[Rendakor]

I thought there were only 3 bosses in HoO. 

[Ironwood]

 

[Sjofn]

I want my dungeons to require thinking (yes, even the trash, sorry guys). I have this luxury, though, because I have enough people I like to play with that I don't have to deal with LFD for said dungeons. So I can understand the desire to make them boring AE-fests like WotLK dungeons were, and I totally get that on the whole that's probably better for the game as a social thing. I don't think that makes a very good dungeon, though.

Something else I think is pretty silly is wanting CC to matter again in five mans and then never needing it in a raid.

[Zetor]

I'm fine with trash and bosses in dungeons being 'difficult' (meaning you gotta do X/Y at the right time) with one caveat... don't depend on all 5 people to HAVE to do the right thing, or there'll be tears. Maybe need 2(3?) people to be 'on the ball' (interrupts, cc, knowing when to do damage bursts, good positioning beyond getting out of static fire on the ground) for each run, tank/healer included. That way, even duo-queuing into a bad PUG would mean that you're almost guaranteed to succeed if you know how to do that stuff.


(I mainly pug heroics on my tank DK and haven't had many problems; then again, DK tanks are pretty lol at the moment with 9k dps + crazy self-healing + interrupts + avoiding some mechanics with AMS and whatnot. It could be that I'm getting lucky -- even on my SFK runs I get at least one person who knows how to interrupt, CCers usually CC, etc.)

[Rendakor]

I'd be all for CC in heroics if the dungeon finder insured that you got appropriate CC for your random dungeon. Make a CC role*, allow players to choose it if they're not fucktarded (with faster queues obviously coming from doing so), and let that qualify them as CC for dungeons their class can reliably CC. Instead, you have something that's de facto required but /LFD can (and does) potentially give you a group that just can't hack it. This is the same complaint I have with the whole "the ilvl required to queue isn't high enough to complete the zone" bullshit; don't give us tools that don't efficiently allow us to complete the zones.

*note: I wouldn't make this a primary role, but a secondary role (like how leader works) that can be paired with either healer or DPS. To the best of my knowledge, there are no tank specs that can reliably CC (I know druids can root then shift into bear but that's not reliable).

[Maledict]

I want my dungeons to require thinking (yes, even the trash, sorry guys). I have this luxury, though, because I have enough people I like to play with that I don't have to deal with LFD for said dungeons. So I can understand the desire to make them boring AE-fests like WotLK dungeons were, and I totally get that on the whole that's probably better for the game as a social thing. I don't think that makes a very good dungeon, though.

Something else I think is pretty silly is wanting CC to matter again in five mans and then never needing it in a raid.

We've been through this - CC is absolutely needed in raids, and if you are clearing BoT without CC then I doff my hat to you because I would think it basically impossible. We have to use extra CC that we don't use in 5 player groups to make the trash controllable and easily managed.

(I partly think that trash was created just to show off Ring of Frost for mages. It's so absurdly powerful it seems silly.)

[Ingmar]

My experiences in heroics are apparently the opposite so far from the rest of you, the trash has been fine but we struggle on the bosses.

[Lantyssa]

Ingmar, you actually communicate with the group, which is usually guildies from what I've seen.  How many have you done in a PUG?

In that situation the bosses are going to be tougher because it relies on people not making any of several potentially fatal mistakes and having the gear to survive.  Trash won't be a problem because it just doesn't take that long to kill if everyone knows what they're doing.

[Koyasha]

Once a person knows the zone, the only communication really necessary is for the group leader to say what they want done with each mark at the beginning of the run, then take a second or two to mark before each pull.  Everyone does their job, pull goes smoothly.  This doesn't require a lot of time, effort, etc, and will work fine even with pug people.  It's how I ran dungeons in Burning Crusade, and I ran lots of pugs then.  I didn't run into that many people that couldn't follow directions then, simply by taking the first people I could get from trade or LFG channel.  Announce at the start something along the lines of 'Kill order: Skull, X, Triangle, sheep moon, trap square.'  If I could regularly clear Shattered Halls, Shadow Labyrinth, the Tempest Keep dungeons, and even Magister's Terrace with groups put together from LFG, without an inordinate number of wipes, then the much shorter and faster Cataclysm dungeons should be a cinch even for LFD people.

If people can't do that much, I'm sorry, but they shouldn't be able to get through the dungeons.  They should fail.

[Rendakor]

My experiences in heroics are apparently the opposite so far from the rest of you, the trash has been fine but we struggle on the bosses.

I don't have a problem with most of it, but there are a few trash packs that are just absurdly difficult or annoying. The goblins in Throne of the Tides and the guys standing in the stupid grounding fields in VP come immediately to mind. HoO is guilty of the "too many casters" problem, where it's a chore getting some mobs CC'd and the rest away from the CC targets; the large spam-fireball guys always end up chilling in the back nuking the healer.

Some of the bosses are hard too, but I don't mind hard bosses. They're bosses, they drop loot, etc. Those grounding field guys in VP are harder than two of the bosses in the fucking zone, and that's retarded.

[caladein]

The grounding field pulls in VP are probably my favorites on my Hunter.

In general, I don't mind difficult trash as it presents a different challenge to bosses and a more varied one between groups.  (I also don't see the loot/no-loot distinction as terribly important.  It's all on the same route.)

[pxib]

Why buff players when they could just nerf the mobs? From the sound of it, all they need to do is generally drop hitpoints and the the damage of a couple abilities. Seems less risky than mudflation creep on the players themselves.

[Koyasha]

I can't help but, for the most part, agree with Gevlon's post on his blog about the reasons why players are being buffed rather than mobs nerfed.

Ghostcrawler wrote "in general, Heroic dungeons are of appropriate difficulty for organized groups, but just brutal on Dungeon Finder groups. ". He isn't talking about Method and Paragon guildruns. The organized groups of casual guilds were successful. I haven't seen wipes outside of autorunning into 3 packs when I ran HCs, despite some of our guildies were fresh 85s who tricked the LFD with high level useless reputation gear. I've been with tank who dinged that day and had 3 blues, rest green. Heroics are not hard for casuals, now it's accepted officially (as most guilds are by definition casual). Heroics are ony too hard for plain M&S.

...

In light of this obvious proof, I repeat what I wrote: the key to a successful MMO is "boosting", making good players carry bad ones without them noticing that they are being carried.

[Merusk]

Not to mention that after the big DM-Tantrum that Ghostcrawler's post was, a nerf to the mobs leaves him with egg all over his face.  Buffing players has the same effect but lets them stand 'firm' on the difficulty of the dungeons because nothing was changed there.

[caladein]

Why buff players when they could just nerf the mobs? From the sound of it, all they need to do is generally drop hitpoints and the the damage of a couple abilities. Seems less risky than mudflation creep on the players themselves.

Same reason that the ICC buff is better than the ye olde method of nerfing raid bosses: once you've trivialized a previously core mechanic of the fight, it's gone forever.  This method effectively allows a full PUG to "overgear" a place which can help make up for some poor play while still requiring them to avoid and punch the right things.

[Setanta]

I love the VP grounding pulls on my hunter. Trap in front of an adept, MD to the tank, autoshot a mob and sting (sleep) another mob. Pop my explosive proc and FD as the tank picks up anything that hasn't been CCd.

Only time it fucks up is if the group decides they want to run to the mobs after I pull, thereby screwing up a perfect LoS/MD pull.

[Simond]

I can't help but, for the most part, agree with Gevlon's post on his blog about the reasons why players are being buffed rather than mobs nerfed.

Ghostcrawler wrote "in general, Heroic dungeons are of appropriate difficulty for organized groups, but just brutal on Dungeon Finder groups. ". He isn't talking about Method and Paragon guildruns. The organized groups of casual guilds were successful. I haven't seen wipes outside of autorunning into 3 packs when I ran HCs, despite some of our guildies were fresh 85s who tricked the LFD with high level useless reputation gear. I've been with tank who dinged that day and had 3 blues, rest green. Heroics are not hard for casuals, now it's accepted officially (as most guilds are by definition casual). Heroics are ony too hard for plain M&S.

...

In light of this obvious proof, I repeat what I wrote: the key to a successful MMO is "boosting", making good players carry bad ones without them noticing that they are being carried.

OTOH, that bloke is genuinely insane (and hilariously so).

[Ironwood]

Yeah.  The first page of articles was enough to give me hives...