Cataclysm

[Ironwood]

It really pumps the rage and, frankly, it's funny.

[Paelos]

Since I didn't play much in Wrath. I spent ~4 years playing a healing priest when healing emphasized mana conservation and then played about 2 month of Wrath where it had changed. I've actually met quite a few nice people in LFD, but I know I'll never see them again. The bad experiences stick out much more too.

I remember when I first started Wrath, I was actually trying to use CC in the dungeons, and was interrupting casters. Tanks seemed annoyed that I was trying to use CC and would just damage the mob I CC'd anyway, and whether I interrupt a caster or not didn't seem to matter. Why bother?

Yes, exactly. Why bother? The world seemed to turn just fine when it was like that. Numbers were up, devs were happy, people were happy. Life was good. Then, apparently you didn't like it and left. Perhaps WoW isn't for you?

[Ironwood]

Yeah, I'm not sure you'd like WoW if you tried it, Rokal.

[WindupAtheist]

I just wanted to push butan and see numbar and get lewtz. I was never going to set foot in a raid, they could have done whatever they wanted with those. I just want my old ret paladin back and another Heroic Azjol Nerub to faceroll in 15 minutes.

[Rokal]

Yes, exactly. Why bother? The world seemed to turn just fine when it was like that. Numbers were up, devs were happy, people were happy. Life was good. Then, apparently you didn't like it and left. Perhaps WoW isn't for you?

"Numbers were up, devs were happy, people were happy. Life was good." I could say the same thing about TBC, and the end-game content in each of those expansions couldn't have been more different.

People always say Wrath content was more popular, as in more people ran it. If people ran the Wrath heroics constantly, does that mean most subscribers would have preferred it to be that exact difficulty? More difficult? Less difficult? If it was more popular, it would suggest that people liked it more, but I wonder if the popularity was not at least partially due to path-of-least-resistance, as opposed to "this is fun is exactly how engaging/demanding I want content in the game to be". For example, I did the Skyguard dailies almost every day for gold. It wasn't because I liked doing those dailies more than say, crafting stuff to make money, or playing the AH, or running dungeons and raids for gold: it was because it was the easiest way to get gold. I'm sure a ton of people ran the Skyguard dailies, but I'm not sure that means people actually liked that content or didn't wish for it to be better. Were Wrath dungeons popular because they were an easy and guaranteed way to get big rewards throughout the entire expansion, or were they popular because they were exactly what people wanted their dungeons to be? It's not just "I want to run easy dungeons with my friends", because if it was, people like you would have bothered to run all of the 85 normal dungeons.

I really can't say. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle (lots of people liked how easy the Wrath dungeons were, lots of people ran the dungeons a lot (for rewards) even if they would have preferred slightly less brain-dead content).

I still can't fathom why people want content that is less exciting and less engaging. Like I said before, would you want to play an FPS with godmode turned on? If not, why would you want more boring faceroll dungeons? Why would you want content that asked less of you, where healers spammed one spell for the entire dungeon and tanks rotated the same 2-3 abilities without any thought for what they were fighting? Would you have preferred tanking in Wrath if you only needed to use one ability? Would you have thought the content was better if each class had one button (let's say thunderclap, flash heal, and shadow bolt) and they just pressed it every 5 seconds and won? That sounds awful to me. My interest in WoW as a player is ultimately "playing a good game that I think is fun". I don't think one-button gaming is fun. I don't really understand why people want boring mindless content for the same reason I don't understand why you'd play an FPS with godmode on for more than a couple minutes. I do at least know that it's not what I want out of the game.

You might say "Well, I don't want mindless content, but my guild-mates/friends are bad players and I want to run dungeons with them". But I think that's what everyone would say, even the people that you personally felt were bad players. You clearly blame Cata for your guild imploding, but why did it implode after it had only tried 1/3 'intro raid bosses' a few times, and you hadn't even run half the heroic 5-man dungeons? People are too quick to get bruised egos, and rather than admit "yeah, maybe my dps isn't high enough to take down the Magmaw worms yet as half our or raid's ranged dps, maybe we should try a different strategy" they either blame someone else or quit. I don't want to play a game designed around keeping the group of players subscribed to the game who wiped a few times to Mag'maw and threw in the towel rather than try a different strategy or trying the other 2/3 of the 'intro' bosses. I want to play the game where i'm encouraged to use a lot of my character's abilities, and where content is challenging but anyone can make progress on the content and defeat it as long as they don't give up the first few times they fail.

[Azuredream]

I still can't fathom why people want content that is less exciting and less engaging. Like I said before, would you want to play an FPS with godmode turned on? If not, why would you want more boring faceroll dungeons?

These two things aren't the same, faceroll is a few steps down from godmode. I did do the WotLK heroics a LOT, gearing out 5 different characters in the emblem of frost stuff; 2 tanks, a healer, and 2 DPS. The dungeon itself wasn't exciting, but I loved getting new shinies for my characters. I still had to put in a lot of time, but it was almost never frustrating like it was in Cataclysm.

[Paelos]

Here's a hint as to why they gave up. They ran into a wall for 2 solid months on Vael. Nobody wants to go back to that. They've done that. It's not worth it to relearn everything you know just so you can do the same thing you've always done except it's "moar harder!"

Here's what you don't get, and probably never will get. In any business, if you don't realize who you're trying to sell to, you will fail. You need a solid base product that appeals to the large majority of your subscriber base, and then you need innovative secondary products that shift with the demand to certain niche groups. The key is that you never ever EVER fuck with your baseline customer.

Blizzard forgot what they were about. They wanted to make things matter. They wanted to make you feel like you accomplished something. They designed an expansion with overhauls and changes and guild rep and hurdles and challenges. They made what they believed to be vast improvements in the game.

Now here's the point I want to drill into you. If you never get anything else anybody says about this game, know this one part about why WoW is shooting itself in the foot:

THEY FORGOT THAT THEIR BASE IS DUMBASSES PLAYING WITH THEIR DUMBASS FRIENDS IN A RELAXED SETTING THAT DIDN'T TAKE ITSELF SERIOUSLY.

[Merusk]

I still can't fathom why people want content that is less exciting and less engaging. Like I said before, would you want to play an FPS with godmode turned on? If not, why would you want more boring faceroll dungeons?

These two things aren't the same, faceroll is a few steps down from godmode. I did do the WotLK heroics a LOT, gearing out 5 different characters in the emblem of frost stuff; 2 tanks, a healer, and 2 DPS. The dungeon itself wasn't exciting, but I loved getting new shinies for my characters. I still had to put in a lot of time, but it was almost never frustrating like it was in Cataclysm.

In other words, you don't run through an FPS 3-5 times from start to finish the way a MMO player does with alts.  However, when faced with yet another long ass grind to "gear up" so after the first character you can do the next level of Dungeon Content when it's released, you're more likely to decide it's not fucking worth it and just unsub until the next x-pac.   Particularly if you're not into the raiding game on your primary character.  That should concern Blizzard because it's a long fucking time between x-pacs.

When it's easier, you don't mind the long ass grind.  You can do your daily dungeon on your 3-4 alts in a few hours and merrily be on your way.  When it takes those few hours to do one dungeon and there's very little gain from it?  Fuck it, I can spend that $15 on more entertaining softwares.

[Ingmar]

Here's a hint as to why they gave up. They ran into a wall for 2 solid months on Vael. Nobody wants to go back to that. They've done that. It's not worth it to relearn everything you know just so you can do the same thing you've always done except it's "moar harder!"

Here's what you don't get, and probably never will get. In any business, if you don't realize who you're trying to sell to, you will fail. You need a solid base product that appeals to the large majority of your subscriber base, and then you need innovative secondary products that shift with the demand to certain niche groups. The key is that you never ever EVER fuck with your baseline customer.

Blizzard forgot what they were about. They wanted to make things matter. They wanted to make you feel like you accomplished something. They designed an expansion with overhauls and changes and guild rep and hurdles and challenges. They made what they believed to be vast improvements in the game.

Now here's the point I want to drill into you. If you never get anything else anybody says about this game, know this one part about why WoW is shooting itself in the foot:

THEY FORGOT THAT THEIR BASE IS DUMBASSES PLAYING WITH THEIR DUMBASS FRIENDS IN A RELAXED SETTING THAT DIDN'T TAKE ITSELF SERIOUSLY.

[Rokal]

Here's a hint as to why they gave up. They ran into a wall for 2 solid months on Vael. Nobody wants to go back to that. They've done that. It's not worth it to relearn everything you know just so you can do the same thing you've always done except it's "moar harder!"

Here's what you don't get, and probably never will get. In any business, if you don't realize who you're trying to sell to, you will fail. You need a solid base product that appeals to the large majority of your subscriber base, and then you need innovative secondary products that shift with the demand to certain niche groups. The key is that you never ever EVER fuck with your baseline customer.

Blizzard forgot what they were about. They wanted to make things matter. They wanted to make you feel like you accomplished something. They designed an expansion with overhauls and changes and guild rep and hurdles and challenges. They made what they believed to be vast improvements in the game.

Vael was literally a wall to the rest of content. Your guild gave up on Cata raiding after trying one of three available intro bosses a few times, widely considered to be much harder than the other two options you had. That's not even close to what Vael represented in BWL, and it's much easier content than what your guild dealt with in ICC.

As a player, I ultimately don't care whether Blizzard "really successful" or "incredibly successful". Even if the Cata difficulty did scare off a bunch of players like yourself, they're still going to be successful and the game will still continue. As a player, my primary concern is whether the game is fun for me, not whether the game is the most financially successful it can be. For me, and plenty of other people, Cata is fun and a vast improvement over Wrath.

That should be the primary topic among gamers and within this forum. "Is this expansion fun?" not "Will Blizzard make more money with this expansion than the last one?"

In other words, you don't run through an FPS 3-5 times from start to finish the way a MMO player does with alts.  However, when faced with yet another long ass grind to "gear up" so after the first character you can do the next level of Dungeon Content when it's released, you're more likely to decide it's not fucking worth it and just unsub until the next x-pac.   Particularly if you're not into the raiding game on your primary character.  That should concern Blizzard because it's a long fucking time between x-pacs.

When it's easier, you don't mind the long ass grind.  You can do your daily dungeon on your 3-4 alts in a few hours and merrily be on your way.  When it takes those few hours to do one dungeon and there's very little gain from it?  Fuck it, I can spend that $15 on more entertaining softwares.

This is not people calling for nerfs to content the 3rd or 4th time they've done it. This is people asking for nerfs to content the first time they've done it.

I don't even know what game you're playing. Weeks to gear up an alt? Multiple hours to do one dungeon? After you have learned the dungeons they all take less than one hour. It literally took my priest maybe 6-8 dungeon runs total to gear up completely from heroics, and those certainly weren't agonizing multi-hour runs. Most of them were even 100% pugs.

[Ingmar]

"Is this expansion fun?" and Blizzard's ability to make money with it are directly correlated.

[Rokal]

"Is this expansion fun?" and Blizzard's ability to make money with it are directly correlated.

Let me clarify then. "Is this expansion fun TO ME?" You shouldn't really care more about how you heard so and so's guild fell apart than whether the 5-man heroic content was too challenging for you as an individual. Half of the conversion in this thread has been people complaining that Blizzard betrayed their core customer ("dumbasses who are bad at this game", as it was described), all the while not considering themselves part of that group.

If one-button gaming sounds fun to you, you are part of that group and you probably don't like Cata for what it is. Some of the people posting have honestly said that they just want to faceroll content, that is what they want out of the game. Maybe they'd even like the game more if tanking was just pressing thunderclap every 5 seconds. That's fine, it's not a game I want to play but it's at least an honest opinion.

The rest of the posts have been people saying "this content isn't too hard for me, but it's too hard for the rest of WoW's population". It shouldn't be your primary concern as a player, and you shouldn't assume that 90% of the game's population is incapable of doing the content.

Is Cata going to reduce Blizzard's bottom line a little? Maybe (we don't even know if it will!), but as a player I care more that the content is actually fun and engaging again.

[Ingmar]

But, what other people think about the game is completely relevant. It doesn't help me much if the guild is fun for me if my friends all moved on to something else because it wasn't fun for them. Their core customer of dumbasses are my friends! What you're missing is apparently that all of us arguing that it is too hard for the majority of people are arguing this becase we saw it happen with our own eyes.

The 'one button' gaming thing is hyperbole and not helping your point, IMO. The question is not binary, there is a wide continuum of possible difficulties they could employ.

[Rokal]

But, what other people think about the game is completely relevant. It doesn't help me much if the guild is fun for me if my friends all moved on to something else because it wasn't fun for them. Their core customer of dumbasses are my friends! What you're missing is apparently that all of us arguing that it is too hard for the majority of people are arguing this becase we saw it happen with our own eyes.

The 'one button' gaming thing is hyperbole and not helping your point, IMO. The question is not binary, there is a wide continuum of possible difficulties they could employ.

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". I have plenty of average players in my guild that aren't great players, but we can complete the content. Why? Because we try to help them and be constructive instead of being assholes or calling them bad. Again, succeeding in Cata is not about being an awesome player, it is about being adaptive and not giving up quickly or being an asshole when you fail.

I keep emphasizing 'one button gaming' because I know most people in this thread wouldn't think that only needing to use Thunderclap would make tanking more fun or engaging. Just spamming shadowbolt or starfire wouldn't make warlocks or balance druids more fun. Having multiple abilities to use, and having a noticeable result when you use those abilities is fun. It goes back to the aoe tanking vs. CC conversation that got us to this point. Having content use CC and de-emphasize aoe tanking makes the content more fun and engaging. You get to use more abilities. You get good incentives to use those abilities ("if I interrupt this spell, the boss won't leap across the room and make us chase him like an asshole! yay!". You feel like you are playing your class well and improving. We shouldn't say that it makes the content too hard or too tedious, because the alternative (aoe tanking with one button) is a much less fun and engaging game.

[Paelos]

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?

Those people that quit just gave up, they couldn't fucking adapt. Do you hear yourself when you speak? You want to tell the millions of people who play the game that they need to just fucking deal? See how well that works out. If you want references, look at every single MMO before WoW that decided that was a fucking rad idea.

I pity whatever you do for a living for whomever you do it for. God help you if you ever do anything in customer service beyond shine your own knob while the phone rings off the hook.

[Ingmar]

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).

[Selby]

Luckily at least with the new rewards the queue system seems to be less painful.  I get DPS queues in 5-10m these days.  Granted I still get mouth breathers from time to time but at least if I get a group of 333-346 geared people who remotely know what they are doing the dungeons get finished with relative ease.  My all purpz'd out main tends to carry a bunch of people, but hey, that's more gear for me and them, so we both win provided they don't go full on retard on every pull.

[Ingmar]

They could pay me cash for every run and I still wouldn't tank for the random heroic finder, I just hate it too much.

Mind you that's not a new thing, I hated it in Wrath too. 

I can enjoy it as a solo experience in leveling content, because that's pretty quick and fun and easy, but I won't go into a random heroic without at least 2 other people I know, and one of them better be my healer. 

[Sjofn]

I don't believe your friends are really that bad at the game.

Again, succeeding in Cata is not about being an awesome player, it is about being adaptive and not giving up quickly or being an asshole when you fail.

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.



EDIT: Also, Ingmar is a gigantic pussy about doing random heroics. Man up, bitch!

[Rokal]

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.

[Pennilenko]

 

[Sjofn]

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.

My guild was the undisputed champion of doing shit the wrong way. Although frankly, it gets pretty exhausting having to come up with a special snowflake way of doing things after a while. Sometimes you just want to do the fucking thing right instead of taking into account the fact your guild never, ever has a priest in the raid or that your two best-attendance DPSers are also the worst at it. But you could muscle through it in WotLK. After wanting to commit ritual suicide just in heroics, seems a lot of people in my guild were not feeling optimistic about muscling through any raids like that in Cataclysm.

Seriously, dude. My guild was like the fucking posterchild for "Casual, Endearingly Inept Raiders." My guild was pretty big in WotLK. It is not very big right now.

[Tannhauser]

That's because WoW is a game for attractive, successful hardcore raiders not CANDYASSES like your casual guild.  Frankly, it makes me sick that casuals dare to raid.  Raiding is for the top 1% of the playerbase, heroic players of practically Olympian proportions.  Not you disgusting, feces-flinging casuals who want to play with your friends and family. 

You don't know what the hardcore have sacrificed to be at the pinnacle of WoW, nay humanity itself.  They study guides, they tweak their builds, they memorize the strats, they go without showers.  Look at them while you squat beside the AH in Ironforge, smeared in your own filth.  Admire their epic gear, look but don't touch!  Know that Blizzard makes this game for them, not you with your "life" in the "RL" whatever that is.

[Kail]

ITT: Arguments proving that either every raid boss in WoW must be beatable by a retarded penguin randomly nudging buttons, or must be so difficult that only genetically perfect supergamers can attempt it after years of meditation away from the distractions of the material world and showers.

[Lantyssa]

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". I have plenty of average players in my guild that aren't great players, but we can complete the content. Why? Because we try to help them and be constructive instead of being assholes or calling them bad. Again, succeeding in Cata is not about being an awesome player, it is about being adaptive and not giving up quickly or being an asshole when you fail.

Hi, I'm one of Ingmar's friends.  Nice to meet you.

The content was too fucking hard.  Oh, I could do it, but it wasn't fun. Not fun at all..

THEY FORGOT THAT THEIR BASE IS DUMBASSES PLAYING WITH THEIR DUMBASS FRIENDS IN A RELAXED SETTING THAT DIDN'T TAKE ITSELF SERIOUSLY.

For emphasis.

[Paelos]

EDIT: Forget it, that tirade shouldn't be matched with another tirade.

Rokal, know that Jesus loves you, but I think you're a douchebag.

[Soulflame]

THEY FORGOT THAT THEIR BASE IS DUMBASSES PLAYING WITH THEIR DUMBASS FRIENDS IN A RELAXED SETTING THAT DIDN'T TAKE ITSELF SERIOUSLY.

This.  So much this.

I was a decent raider in Wrath, but my friends and I just wanted to be casual raiders in Cata.  You know.  Like it was possible to be in Wrath.

Except that it wasn't possible in Cata.

So.  We all quit.

The End.

[Rokal]

EDIT: Forget it, that tirade shouldn't be matched with another tirade.

Rokal, know that Jesus loves you, but I think you're a douchebag.

The feeling is mutual :p I feel bad that your guild imploded when I think you otherwise might have enjoyed the content, but you keep dragging every conversation about the game here to the same place and it's starting to get annoying.

[Paelos]

But you keep dragging every conversation about the game here to the same place and it's starting to get annoying.

 

[Rokal]

I know! I feel like I've made these same points 20 times in this stupid thread, so I'm sure you're tired of hearing from me too.

That said, there was no reason a discussion about CC or trash mobs had to turn into another "Is Cata too hard? Is Cata balanced for the majority of their playerbase?" discussion

I mean if someone actually wants to talk about why they find aoe trash more fun than smaller-scale but CC-able trash even though it means they are using less abilities, or if they really want to imagine a dungeon without trash and tell us why they think it would be a good thing, those are the types of topics I wanted to talk about. Not the same tired Cata shit that has been on the forums for months.

These aren't even topics that are specific to WoW, this is the entire MMO genre. What other solutions are there to make tanking more attractive in MMOs? etc.

[Paelos]

Then, my thoughts are pretty simple.

CC is fine if it's done as a varied part of an instance. I don't mind marking targets occasionally. I do mind marking them every pull for 20 pulls in one dungeon.

Trash is fine if it's done in a manner that is not overly long and similar. Some AE would be nice, but it's not like AE was all that easy.

The key is balance and not over reliance on one aspect. Also, if you vary your length of 5 mans by too much, a subset of them become very unpopular since the end result is that you're going to be running them for points not loot at some point in the near future after their release.

[caladein]

5 - I want the game to be progressive...more variety in dungeons...CC isn't restricted to two classes...dual-talent specs...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 -

Here's the really hilarious thing about what you just told us. Everything you listed there was implemented in Wrath or before, which you didn't play or like for some reason.

Each expansion has added or overhauled important systems that resulted in the game being better (or less subjectively: less demanding on logistics, grinding/farming, or dumb luck).  The difference with Wrath was that, completely unrelated to those systems, the underlying game got really dull for me.

I'd like to think it's because there was no progression among tiers (which is untenable in a modern game for a variety of reasons) and Wrath content was designed for only two audiences: the top decile of raiders and "dumbasses and their dumbass friends".  Those two never really met with the exception of doing old heroics and achievements, but the only incentive there was a mount.  By contrast, the current tier has a relatively smooth progression between introductory content and the super high-end stuff so, my guild at least, can find a sweet spot where we're not facing a giant wall or spending nights on trivial stuff.

We're unlikely to get half-way through a heroic clear of this tier while it's current, but if all we had were increasingly trivial Nef and Al'Akir kills to look forward to, I'd have probably quit by now.

Now do the Goldilocks-types like me even approach those that have been dropped off the bottom?  No, not even close.  But like I said before, I'm having a blast with this expansion when I was subscribed during the last one for less than half of its lifespan.  My guild is active with three 10-man raid teams when we used to have to scramble just for warm bodies to fill out a 25-man.  And, most importantly, more of my pre/non-WoW friends are playing than at any point I can remember, both weekend casuals who I run the odd dungeons with and the ones in my raid team.

[Azuredream]

I wish they kept that stacking buff thing they did for ICC with every raid they release.

[Kail]

I mean if someone actually wants to talk about why they find aoe trash more fun than smaller-scale but CC-able trash even though it means they are using less abilities

I don't  know that they are using less abilities.  You start throwing in CC and you can't throw AoE around as much as you used to (especially AoE with kind of vague borders, like Holy Wrath), so to me it looks like more of a tradeoff between using CC abilities and using AoE abilities.

Mostly, though, I think it comes down to the feel of the combat.  AoE fests feel like "kick in the door and spray the room with machinegun fire" fights.  CC battles feel like they lose that in favor of a more tactical kind of fight, except that it's not really tactical because you do it over and over again until it becomes rote.  Not that AoE is more intellectually engaging, but at least there you've got the testosterone rush "I just killed ten guys at once" feeling going.

If we were trading adrenaline for something like tactics or strategy that would be one thing, but CC isn't really that interesting strategically.  Target healer or caster and click your CC skill, done.  It's easy to use, but also easy to fuck up, if that makes sense, which makes it seem like a net loss to me, since you're losing (via frustration of fucked up pulls) more than you gain (via the rush of a really well executed CC, if such a thing exists).

[Rokal]

It's already been established that a lot of the reason people find tanking tedious is because they are responsible for stuff like marking targets. I think Blizzard tried to fix this by letting people queue as the 'group leader', but in practice people just use this for a slightly faster queue, and the tank still does all of the work like marking targets and explaining fights. Blizzard could do a few things to fix this.

They could lock 'group leader' so that only the group leader was capable of marking targets. This means that someone really needs to mean it when they check "group leader" when queuing or else it is likely their group will fail (and that player won't get any loot/VP/whatever), but has fairly large draw-backs. If you get a group leader that sucks, you're pretty much screwed unless you want to remove them from the dungeon. At least as it is now, anyone in the group can mark targets if the group leader isn't doing a good job.  I think *maybe* this was how group leader worked before? If so, they obviously didn't like the results.

They could also do the above and implement some sort of really simple 'review' system for group leaders. If you think your group leader was actually helpful, you check the "good job" box or whatever when your group finishes the dungeon or if your group leader actually prevented you from finishing the dungeon, you could right-click their name to vote "not helpful" or whatever. Theoretically this would encourage people to be helpful if they picked 'group leader', and eventually it would gravitate towards making people with high ratings the group leader rather than people that just wanted a faster queue. On the down side, this is open the exploitation (Joethedruid won the loot I wanted, down-voted! or Lets get all of our friends together and zone in to dungeons briefly to up-vote each other so we get faster queues!). Online fighting games with similar voting system have also essentially shown that people tend to use these systems as a way to grief other players. It's the sort of social engineering that might actually encourage people to be decent human beings in LFD pugs though.

I don't think pre-marking targets is the right solution, especially for WoW. Having the game tell you what to kill first by marking it with skull just feels so automated and paint-by-numbers. I think maybe the best solution they could use would be to let players save how they mark targets. You could even have this saved locally on your machine so that they weren't tracking a bunch of additional crap in their databases. This file would record that you marked the second trash pull in Tol'Vir as "epicroguenpc83=x, giantangrycat5=star, obnoxioushealer7=diamond). This way, trash pulls were not automatically marked, but you only had to mark them one time and then after that you just press the "saved marks" button before each pull and it grabs whatever you put up the last time you did the dungeon. I wonder if something like this would be possible with the way addons currently work in WoW, but I honestly have no idea.