Cataclysm

[Nevermore]

I don't believe your friends are really that bad at the game. I believe if you asked your 'bad' friends why they weren't having fun with Cata, they'd probably also say "well the content isn't too hard for me, but it's too hard for the people i'm playing with".

As one of Ingmar's bad friends, let me assure you that:  Yes, I'm really that bad and the parts of Cata I'm not having fun with are the end-game dungeons and it's because they're too hard.  So much so that on this current stint I'm just leveling various alts and seeing all the stuff that changed in the old world.  Guess what will likely happen when I run out of that content if Blizzard doesn't change course with their end game?

And Sjofn, I'd do random heroics with you but you disappeared off onto some other mystery server. 

[kildorn]

The issue really is "so even if they fix things, how the fuck do they get people to come BACK"

I got my email about a 7 day reactivation. And I looked at mmo-champ for 15 minutes, longed to play with the people I like again.. and remembered that it wasn't just "my friends that I want to play with may suck at heroics", it was "and pugs may suck at them" and "half my characters can't get anything from rep due to shit itemization on the rep vendors, so grinding heroics for rep is useless" and a lot of this stacking concept that the game was just built around tedium now, and the only thing that kept it from sucking are my friends.

And you know what? I can chat with them in IRC, or play other games with them.


And tanking is tedious in heroics to me because I'm pressing the same two buttons over and over again, with very little engaging gameplay unless someone screws up. Marking targets takes like, two seconds. The problem isn't marking. The problem is trash heavy instances where you are going to sleep through 80% of the run until you get to something interesting. Cata didn't make trash engaging, it made bosses engaging. And sadly, it did that (at least on release, haven't played in months now) by making a large number of "Do this or DIE" mechanics so we couldn't just Wrath it up and power heal through the interesting mechanics.

I think I'm just ranting now. I'm mostly annoyed that there's a guild of people I love to play with.. but I really don't love the game they're playing anymore. I usually play a lot/burn out and leave/come back for major patches.. but this patch just doesn't interest me. They made the old heroics suck a little less, put carrots in front of my tank and healer to pug it up, and brought back the trolls for no real reason.

[Sjofn]

And Sjofn, I'd do random heroics with you but you disappeared off onto some other mystery server. 

Hey, I told people I'd run off to the Horde in Cataclysm!    Didn't really expect it to be on a BE paladin though.

[Fordel]

Sjofn is shallow and wanted to play a HUNK.

[Sjofn]

Awwww yeeeeeah.

[Simond]

Rokal, you're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about how we dealt or tried to deal with the situation, that's all I'll say on that part of your response about constructive help vs. calling people 'bad'.

And yes, it probably is much closer to fine now but the challenge becomes talking the people who all left into coming back. (Including me!) Our guild went from regularly having 20+ people on to typically more like 5, and that didn't happen until after people hit 85 and started hitting the dungeon content. People seemed pretty happy with the other Cataclysm content (barring my utter loathing of the guild rep system.)

Personally I don't find having to CC trash packs either especially difficult or particularly engaging, mostly it is just dull. Almost all of the actual problems I've seen come with executing mechanics on boss fights (in terms of failure) and just the sheer amount of time it takes (in terms of feeling rewarded).

That was more directed at other people in this thread (who seem to think their guild mates are functionally retarded and could never learn to move out of fire) and Paelos whose guild fell apart after a few nights of trying Mag'maw, rather than trying one of the many alternate options that existed like "finish more than 5 heroics so people have better gear" or "try a different strategy" or "try a different fight". Meanwhile, burnout or shitty attitudes couldn't possibly have been a factor. The content was just too hard for his guild which was perfectly capable of doing the harder ICC content, and they didn't try any other fights/options because... well... "Blizzard betrayed their core playerbase, this is an outrage!" Or maybe they were actually just tired of WoW/the raiding grind, and even if they did succeed one one of the other fights, WoW was still WoW and raiding was still raiding.

WoW is not hard. It wasn't hard in Wrath, it isn't hard now. There is very little actual skill in any fight or class. I do believe that 95%+ of the WoW community is capable of learning not to stand in the fire for a fight, they just might take a few more attempts to learn that. They certainly won't learn how to play the game if everyone treats them like they are retarded, as the cesspool of a WoW community seems to prefer doing rather than using constructive criticism or having patience.

Being adaptive or not is precisely what made the "bad" players in our guild bad, for the most part. And no amount of repeatedly banging one's head against the wall (and fuck, I did a LOT of that in WotLK, even) or being a supportive person who tries to not let the desperate anguish about wiping on this simple thing for the thousandth time get into their voice (I don't think I was good at that, sadly) will be able to teach it to people. People are either quick enough to realize they need to get out of the fire after the first five tries, or they're not.

Being adaptive does not mean being adaptive on the fly. Being adaptive on the fly is one of the only real 'skills' in WoW, and I don't think it's something you can teach. I'm talking about your guild or dungeon group as a whole. Being adaptive as a guild means that if you are failing on a fight like Mag'maw, instead of banging your head against a wall because your guild can't execute the same strategy as another guild, you think about another way to do the fight. Ranged dps can't kill adds quick enough? Have one of the tanks tank them instead. Healing too hard on the fight? Check to see if there is any avoidable damage you're missing, or maybe have one of your players bring another healer instead. There are so many bizarre hybrid classes at this point, and alts, that even 10man guilds with a small raid roster should be able to make tweaks like that. I'm not talking about booting the warlock from your group and bringing a holy paladin necessarily, I'm talking about having your dps DK try tanking, or your prot paladin switch to holy for the fight and let someone else tank.

I understand that maybe there is one person in your guild who will never learn to get out of the fire. Having them along would not prevent you from succeeding in any of the 5-man heroics of normal raids. There is nothing in Cata as binary or restrictive as Thaddius where one player not getting out of the fire (or noticing polarity) is probably going to wipe your raid. There are certainly fights where it doesn't help (Dragha in GB, Cho'gal), but (so far) in Cata, having one or two players with bad reaction times isn't going to be a deal-breaker like it would have been in a lot of the older raid and dungeon content. This could easily change in later content or heroic-raids though.

Rokal, if half of that shit that you spew out was true about WoW doing what it's doing, it would never have come into existence. We'd all still be playing EQ and lapping it up. They went down this road as well, although not on as big a scale.

At the end of it lies irrelevance. But EQ's still going, right? It must not have fucked up, right?

Let me summarize your reply to any post I ever made in this thread.

"You don't get it, Blizzard betrayed their core playerbase and it's just a bunch of asshole devs in their ivory tower trying to resurrect EQ1"

You have contributed the same tired answer to any conversation topic I tried to bring up.

I don't want vanilla back. I don't want TBC back. I want the game to be progressive and continue to innovate on problems in the MMO genre. I like that I don't have to farm for hours in order to prepare for a raid. I like that there is more variety in dungeons, and that CC isn't restricted to two classes. I like that people have dual-talent specs and groups are so flexible. I don't want content to be restrictive, I want it to be fun and engaging, and I want it to be balanced in a way that anyone feels like they can succeed. I feel like Cata, right now, hits that mark.

I am certainly not encouraging Blizzard to make this game more like EQ1, because EQ1 sucked in some of the same ways that Vanilla sucked. What I am saying is that Blizzard does not (and should not) design all of the content in this game around the absolute lowest common denominator. Blizzard should strive to make the game better and more fun, and (again) having more engaging content is a good thing. Blizzard shouldn't ignore criticism about the game, but they should ignore criticism that would lead to making a much shittier game like "tanking is too hard. tanks should only have to use thuderclap and have no risk of dying".

I'm trying to tell you why CC is a good thing for dungeons, and why aoe tanking is a bad thing. Or why trash is more than just a time-sink in a dungeon. The reason is not, and never has been "Hard content is fun, fuck y'all". In that example it was "CC lets you have more engaging and unique enemies to fight, aoe tanking doesn't!". Your response to this, again, was "You don't get it, Blizzard betrayed their core playerbase and it's just a bunch of asshole devs in their ivory tower trying to resurrect EQ1"

You are not interested in actually having a conversation about WoW, you are just stifling the conversations I'm trying to have with your same tired complaint. I get it, you think Blizzard is going to lose money because they betrayed their core customer. What the fuck does that have to do with whether CC is a good or bad thing for dungeons?

The game isn't heading to irrelevance as a result of Cata, and it's not even all that difficult or inaccessible. Understand that there is a middle ground between pandering to every whine on the WoW forums, and making this game inaccessible to the majority of subscribers.

Psycho.


Also: Explain why 4.1 was full of heroic nerfs then, and why 4.2 is going to trivialise CC (and will probably have even more heroic and some serious 4.0/4,1-tier raid nerfs)? Hint: Someone at Blizzard is trying very hard to quietly fix all the L85 Cata release content without making Ghostcrawler publicly renounce his "Heroics R fine lern 2 plae" blog. In other words, you are wrong and part of a tiny, irrelevant minority and even Blizzard is (slowly) realising that listening to you and yours was a bloody retarded idea espoused by poopsocking cretins about on a par with SOE's release of Gates of Discord.

[apocrypha]

Can you guys all stop fucking bitching and moaning over and over and over again about how terribly hard Cataclysm is?

WE KNOW YOU THINK THAT. Your friends and guildmates are crap, we get it. You've told us that ONE BILLION TIMES in the last 6 months. We're really sorry for you and how butthurt you all are about Cata, it's tragic, lots of sympathy, ahh there there, etc.

If you've stopped playing, your friends have stopped playing, your guildmates have stopped playing, your entire server have stopped playing, well, that's awful. We feel really bad for you. Now go shit up some other game thread for a change. Jesus. Move on already.

[Lantyssa]

WE KNOW YOU THINK THAT. Your friends and guildmates are crap, we get it. You've told us that ONE BILLION TIMES in the last 6 months. We're really sorry for you and how butthurt you all are about Cata, it's tragic, lots of sympathy, ahh there there, etc.

You get it.  A certain someone else doesn't.  People won't shut up until he understands.

Also I think a whole bunch of people would like to play, because they don't really have anything else they can get all their friends to agree upon.  As Kildorn said, we had a great group and we miss them.  There are seven people in this thread I used to talk with on a daily basis in game.  Coming in here and reminiscing about WoW, shite or not, brings back the nostalgia.

[apocrypha]

Fair enough, I get that, but let's be realistic - if the extent to which Cata has already been nerfed (both by direct nerfs in dungeons and by gear inflation) isn't enough to bring back the people you miss then maybe it's time to move on?

Whether that means new guild, new recruits or what I don't know, but just reminiscing about the good old days doesn't do anything to improve your enjoyment of the game at the moment, if you're still playing.

I say this because me and the few remaining active members of my guild went and joined another old guild that was struggling to put a raiding team together every week. They were similar to us - an old, friends & family guild that was just short of numbers - and we were all a bit unsure about it at first. But now we're having a great time, on both sides, raiding again, doing the new troll dungeons, hanging out, getting to know each other and just having a laugh. I can highly recommend it :)

[Rendakor]

While future nerfs might not bring back those who quit in the first two weeks, they might stop the more people from quitting. We've been stuck 9/12 because every week we have to teach 2-3 people the entire zone (either PUGs or new recruits) and can never get to Cho'gall or Nef within a reasonable amount of time. People are literally quitting faster than I can recruit them; we're down to 7 or so core raiders, while in LK we had 2 steady 10m groups (8/12 and 5/12 H ICC) and a third that included some PUGs.

[WindupAtheist]

If you've stopped playing, your friends have stopped playing, your guildmates have stopped playing, your entire server have stopped playing, well, that's awful. We feel really bad for you. Now go shit up some other game thread for a change. Jesus. Move on already.

There was a period after Cata came out where this forum sat without a single new post for... I don't remember how long. More than a week. As a community I think f13 is pretty much post-WoW. It's no longer the game "everyone" plays, and is now the game everyone "used to play" and likes hearing themselves bitch about.

[Malakili]

If you've stopped playing, your friends have stopped playing, your guildmates have stopped playing, your entire server have stopped playing, well, that's awful. We feel really bad for you. Now go shit up some other game thread for a change. Jesus. Move on already.

There was a period after Cata came out where this forum sat without a single new post for... I don't remember how long. More than a week. As a community I think f13 is pretty much post-WoW. It's no longer the game "everyone" plays, and is now the game everyone "used to play" and likes hearing themselves bitch about.

I was kind of under the impression f13 was like this about every game these days.

[sinij]

I think at this point Rokal more than earned a grief title. Dude is dedicated to his stupidity, like he is getting paid for doing it or something... 

[WindupAtheist]

I was kind of under the impression f13 was like this about every game these days.

I dunno, I think WoW was sort of the exception to that rule for a long time. I bitched about some of their technical fuckups last year, and there are always people willing to go "Argh diku!" over anything, but generally it was everything else that got slagged for not being as good as WoW.

[sinij]

If you've stopped playing, your friends have stopped playing, your guildmates have stopped playing, your entire server have stopped playing, well, that's awful. We feel really bad for you. Now go shit up some other game thread for a change. Jesus. Move on already.

There was a period after Cata came out where this forum sat without a single new post for... I don't remember how long. More than a week. As a community I think f13 is pretty much post-WoW. It's no longer the game "everyone" plays, and is now the game everyone "used to play" and likes hearing themselves bitch about.

Just like with Trammel, expect Cata flame wars (with graphs!) to endure for at least a decade. I fully expect we will celebrate 2021 in this thread. Unless Bliz get their act together, and I doubt that since that would be admitting they were wrong.

[pxib]

I bitched about some of their technical fuckups last year, and there are always people willing to go "Argh diku!" over anything, but generally it was everything else that got slagged for not being as good as WoW.

I think Blizzard won World of Warcraft. Arthas was the end boss, and WotLK was perfectly streamlined money-making DIKU for the mass market. Over the year or so that it was optimized, almost everybody was happy, and everybody played it until they were sick of it. There is no further to go along that path, and if the bar had gotten any lower they'd have had to start excavating. That Blizzard realized this is why they tried to change WoW entirely for Cataclysm. New class dynamics, new gameplay, new leveling content, new everything. A new MMORPG with the same branding and the same player base: WoW2!

It didn't fail, but it didn't really work either. The game has massive momentum, but the wheels have come off and it's just grinding into the ground. This isn't really bad news for Blizzard -- though shareholders may be frustrated with the failure to expand further, WoW will continue to be a cash cow for at least a decade -- but it is bad news for everybody else. There will be no lasting WoW-killer. DIKU isn't dead, but there is no further innovation available there. Anything produced on that model will be no more engaging than WotLK, and will have less than a tenth the history and social cohesion. It'll pick a few people up for a few months and then they'll get bored and leave.

That game is already played, and Blizzard won. May God have mercy on their souls.

[WindupAtheist]

I think at this point Rokal more than earned a grief title. Dude is dedicated to his stupidity, like he is getting paid for doing it or something... 

I like how you said this about someone else, and then posted about Trammel like 9 minutes later.

[sinij]

I think you are underestimating momentum and human stupidity. DIKU cloning days are far from over.

[Sjofn]

It didn't fail, but it didn't really work either. The game has massive momentum, but the wheels have come off and it's just grinding into the ground.

OK, you know, I do think they made a mistake by making the heroics too hard and stuff, but saying the wheels came off is just ... goofy. That implies to me the game is horrible and ROONED FOREVAR, and that's simply not true. It's not as accessable as it used to be, and they should be (and are) rolling back a bit on that front. This is the closest they've had to a ToA, but it is definitely not an actual ToA.

EDIT: Also, diku4life, bitches!

[pxib]

I'm not saying WoW2 was a mistake, nor that DIKU clones are done forever... I'm just saying they cannot be (financially) better than or even as (financially) good as WotLK. The number of people playing DIKU clones during WotLK will be the peak from which everything DIKU recedes and ultimately levels out when the number of new people finding balances the number of disappointed people leaving. WoW2 (and maybe even WoW3) will continue to be the #1 DIKU in that regard for perpetuity. Rather than anybody else taking that place, the market will expand and a number of newer, lower budget DIKUs will rise and fall in popularity beside it.

That the wheels have come off just means it's no longer effortlessly coasting. And that there will be no WoW killer because WoW died with Arthas.

[Rokal]

You get it.  A certain someone else doesn't.  People won't shut up until he understands.

I get it. You think the game is too hard for most players and that it's going to be a huge misstep for Blizzard. I disagree. See: the last 30 pages or so of this thread.

I was ready to move on and talk about something else related to the game, as you might expect people to do on a gaming forum, but a bunch of people that haven't played the game in three months+ (or don't play at all, such as yourself) keep wanting to drag every conversation about the game into the same stupid shit.

Also: Explain why 4.1 was full of heroic nerfs then, and why 4.2 is going to trivialise CC (and will probably have even more heroic and some serious 4.0/4,1-tier raid nerfs)? Hint: Someone at Blizzard is trying very hard to quietly fix all the L85 Cata release content without making Ghostcrawler publicly renounce his "Heroics R fine lern 2 plae" blog.

The few heroic nerfs in 4.1? Content always gets slowly nerfed as the life cycle of an expansion goes on. Welcome to WoW. It's not abnormal at all that they made a few tweaks to make the 'hardest' heroics a little easier in the same patch that new heroics were being introduced. It won't be surprising if BoT/BWD/To4W gets nerfed in 4.2 when Firelands comes out either.

The biggest nerf to heroics in the recent patches was the Luck of the Draw buffs, which as far as I can tell was 100% a reaction to complaints about heroics being too hard in LFD pugs. Not too hard in general, just too hard when you are thrown into a group with 4 random idiots that you will never see again, and would sooner quit a dungeon than explain a fight to someone who was new. Heroics were almost the same for pre-made groups, though a few fights did receive small nerfs (and a few other received buffs). As for trivializing CC, I don't think the 4.2 changes will do that. It'll bring every CC in line to the functionality of Sap, which isn't breaking the game or making people form groups with 3 rogues right now. It's only trivializing CC if you thought the pull was hard, and frankly, I don't give a fuck if CC is trivial: I like CC because of what it allows developers to do with the enemies in trash packs, not because the act of CCing is omgsofun. What is fun about CC: allowing players to feel like the battle is under control but that they are facing enemies who are legitimately dangerous and diverse. Two shadow lancers feels dangerous, 2 swift stalkers feel dangerous, with CC I can fight a group of 4 like that where enemies are dangerous individually but the battle feels loosely controlled.

Blizzard also fixed tuning on Sinestra and some of the other heroic raids in 4.1 and the patches before it, does this mean they were shitting a brick and worrying that the hardcore community was quitting in droves, or that the game was dying? No, it means they listen to feedback. Buffing luck of the draw so pug heroics were easier does not instantly mean Blizzard was worried that too many people were quitting, or that heroic content was too hard. I means people said "heroic content is too hard for LFD pugs" and they said "yeah, I think you're right, let's fix that". It's possible that it was a reaction to fast sinking sub numbers, but I doubt it (and since it's something neither of us can prove at the moment, and it's already been discussed 80 times in this thread, let's leave it at that). If they were really worried that heroics were too hard for their average player in general, they'd have extended Luck of the Draw to pre-made groups, or just nerfed the content severely enough to have the same effect in that same patch.

That said, I have as little interest in rehashing this same tired shit with you as I have in rehashing it with anyone else in this thread. There is another thread on this forum devoted to obsessing about how the sky is falling, if you really can't contribute anything else to the conversation.

[Lt.Dan]

Just like the 3 major content patches in wotlk, 4.2 will make heroics easier by allowing current raid tier gear to be purchased with JP. Just like wotlk the unwashed masses, myself included, will be face rolling dungeons soon enough.

[Ashamanchill]

It didn't fail, but it didn't really work either. The game has massive momentum, but the wheels have come off and it's just grinding into the ground.

OK, you know, I do think they made a mistake by making the heroics too hard and stuff, but saying the wheels came off is just ... goofy. That implies to me the game is horrible and ROONED FOREVAR, and that's simply not true. It's not as accessable as it used to be, and they should be (and are) rolling back a bit on that front. This is the closest they've had to a ToA, but it is definitely not an actual ToA.

EDIT: Also, diku4life, bitches!

When I went back about a month ago I was facerolling heroics easy enough in my half pvp gear build, as a tank. And that's having not seen much of the dungeons before hand. Doesn't matter though, all my friends had already quit. Friends that signed up a month before the xpac, ran and to heroics and said 'fuck this, I'm outta here'. You know, because of burn out of course.

Cataclysm had it's chance, and it dropped the ball. Like pxib put it so well, WoW will contract now, instead of expanding.

[apocrypha]

I know, I'm just going to ignore the discussion that bores me. It's a forum! I can totally do that :)

So, anyway. Enjoying ZA/ZG so far. They're a bit too long really, I don't like the trend towards 1 hour+ heroics, but groups where everybody knows the mechanics certainly go a LOT faster then ones where people don't know them. Also very pleasantly surprised at the amount of politeness going on - people all rolling greed on BoE epics, asking if they can roll for off-spec loot, patiently explaining tactics and not getting bitchy when wipes happen. The queues are long though (25 mins or more for DPS) which I think helps.

Talking of queues, looks like the Call to Arms has reduced non-troll heroic queues considerably. Mostly under 10 mins as DPS now, sometimes 3 or 4 mins. Maybe the gear inflation has contributed to that with people feeling more confident about tanking/healing. The CTA certainly hasn't made the troll queues short, that's for sure.

And bugger me, the troll loot is ugly.  

[Shrike]

Queues are definately down for the 4.0 heroics. I'm generally seeing about 8-10 minutes in the off hours and about 12-14 in primetime. Too bad this wasn't the case when I really NEEDED those VP, but whatever.

ZA/ZG is fun in a guild group. They're also too long. Too much trash, even as thinned down as they are from the 10/20 mans. I've never run them in a PuG and am very hesitant to do so. PuGs are still pretty shaky in the old heroics; my imagination gets the better of me in these new ones. I'm still seeing amazing assholery in the old ones, even if it's not nearly as commonplace as it was.

[Sjofn]

The troll loot is ugly. Unless you are an actual troll. THEN it looks pretty sweet. However, I am playing a blood elf, so he will look extra stupid in theory.

I'm so sick of the regular dungeons I'm just straight up doing BGs and converting the honor to JP now for my PvE suits. We've been winning a lot more than we've been losing, so it's more fun and feels a lot faster.  

[caladein]

I like the look of it generally, but it's really out-of-place with the current looks.  (And those shoulders that every random Holy Paladin seems to be wearing are truly hideous.)

[Rokal]

I like the look of the troll stuff, but half of that is probably nostalgia. Some armor looks better than others (mail>cloth), and all of the armor looks stupid depending on what race you are playing. I like the weapon models without any real exceptions though.

I think the troll dungeons are only too long if you're doing optional stuff or wiping a ton. Like thinking about ZA, there is a lot of trash in it, but a huge part of it is skip-able. There is optional trash on the way to every boss (1 pack on the way to eagle, 2 on the way to bear, 4+ on the way to dragonhawk, 10+ on the way to lynx, that entire trash pack in the 'island' in the middle that you can just skip, etc.). Depending on whether your group was familiar with ZA, you may have killed 6 trash packs on the way to lynx, or you may have killed 16+.

ZG also has a lot of trash you can just ride around. We usually skip the berserker outside of panther, all of the trash on top of the panther pyramid, the 'fire' pack to the left of Zanzil's ramp, etc. You can also speed up the dungeon considerably once you're familiar with it by using things like the frost cauldron on every enemy in any pack near one, etc. I've seen groups who grab the frost cauldron after killing Zanzil, and ride to Gub (the mini-boss) while the buff is still active. It instantly removes like 70% of his health, and almost outright kills just about anything else.

They're shorter than something like Deadmines or SFK if your group does well, but they are still longer than something like ToT. A guildie asked me to tank a PuG heroic last night and we finished ToT in ~21 minutes (skipping Erunak). Hard to compare ZG/ZA to that.

[SurfD]

ZG also has a lot of trash you can just ride around. We usually skip the berserker outside of panther, all of the trash on top of the panther pyramid, the 'fire' pack to the left of Zanzil's ramp, etc. You can also speed up the dungeon considerably once you're familiar with it by using things like the frost cauldron on every enemy in any pack near one, etc. I've seen groups who grab the frost cauldron after killing Zanzil, and ride to Gub (the mini-boss) while the buff is still active. It instantly removes like 70% of his health, and almost outright kills just about anything else.

Yeah, the trick to ZG trash is using the cauldrons effeciently.

I mean, unless you are doing a full clear (all mini bosses dead) run, there really is not that much trash.

- Venoxis has 5 "trash" pulls. 3 of which are 1 Mob, and one is a bunch of AoE able wasps that die in like 10 seconds.  Heck, most of his trash appears to be there just to teach you about abilities that he is going to use during his boss fight.
- Mandokir has 4 trash pulls, 1 being the berzerker who throws rocks, the other 3 you can obliterate with some efficient focus fire and the frost cauldrons in about 20 seconds each.
- One trash pull in the middle of the Zone (the mob of snake priests)
- Kilnara has 3 trash pulls, With one being the only pull in the whole place that might actually require CC.
- Zanzil has 3 trash pulls (4 if you decided to kill the berzerker so you can get the flame cauldron infront of kilnara to aoe the snakes instead of skipping him and just normal aoeing them), and 2 of those can be Frost Cauldroned to death.
- Jindo has 4 trash pulls (5 if you kill all 4 guys on his temple, most groups i have been with only kill 3), and if you grab the frost cauldrons, the first 2 guys can be 2 shot if you are quick about it.

Honestly, ZG SEEMS like a lot of trash, but if you are doing a speed run skipping all optional minibosses, and using the cauldrons, you can pretty much rape the trash mobs so fast it isnt funny.

[Merusk]

We've been winning a lot more than we've been losing, so it's more fun and feels a lot faster.  

You're playing Horde, isn't winning more than losing pretty much a given?

[Sjofn]

Eh, I've certainly had my share of "lol we just got owned" games as Horde. But yeah.

[Sjofn]

Man I log in to do my daily win after posting that and it took me four tries to get a goddamn win. :P

[craan]

On Dentarg we (Horde) were 8-1 for Arathi in the hours I played last night.  The wins were all facerolls with one of them close to a Frostwolf Perfection achievement.  The loss we had was a slow reinforcement grind.  I didn't see any Children's Week orphans running about and the small group fights seemed to be against pretty well geared folks.  Occasionally it seems Horde can't win a battleground and then we'll streak for a few days.

I'm kicking myself for not taking a moment and jotting down the names/servers of some of the players last night.  Myself and another player came to the rescue of a poor priest being ganged up on by 4 alliance and we beat them all down with some really great improvised teamwork.  But since I didn't write their names down (let me just pause for a minute in the middle of a battleground while I jot shit down) I doubt I'll ever run into them again which is frustrating.

[Sjofn]

They seem to have rejiggered LFD (and possibly the BGs) to make you more likely wind up with people from your server more often or something (there was a blue post about LFD somewhere or other, the BG finder is just a personal suspicion). I've been getting a lot of people from the old battlegroup in my BGs, which I am glad, because that battlegroup was terrible (had like 3 RP servers and I think one PvP server), which made the BGs more hilarious. And in LFD groups, I actually meet people from my server, occassionally, which is nice.

[Rokal]

I hate to bring this up again when it seems like we just got off the topic, but we now have some sub numbers:

12 million to 11.4 million

I still chalk the dip up to normal post-expansion cancellations, a smaller focus on end-game in the expansion (new 1-60 at the cost of only 5 new levels and less content), and general fatigue with such an old game, as opposed to the expansion being too hard, but there you go.