Cataclysm Raiding

[Paelos]

Except this wasn't Ensidia? Did they also do something this time?

They got the 8 day ban too.

[Rendakor]

Most of the hardcore guilds got the ban: Paragon, Ensidia, vodka, Blood Legion, etc.

[Ingmar]

Gotcha. I would probably have given specific accounts (not guilds) that had prior bans for raid exploit shenanigans a longer ban, yes.

[Wolf]

the ban is on single people I think. Most guilds will have the manpower to still do heroics today. Also from what I understood both Vodka and Blood Legion didn't exploit.

The race is a pretty big deal, that they did something as drastic as this is pretty surprising to me. Paragon have consistently gotten kills 1 reset before Method, and Method at least a couple before everyone else. We'll see how it goes, I certainly hope some lower end guild like Envy or For the Horde didn't exploit and can snatch the kill with an extra reset of gear. Certainly makes it interesting :)

[Wolf]

apparently dimitri got recruited in Blood Legion 

[Fordel]

So what are they actually talking about in that video, I've seen it a few times now and I'm curious.

[Outlawedprod]

So what are they actually talking about in that video, I've seen it a few times now and I'm curious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xZkl9pznIc

[Wolf]

Koreans (the 25m ones) got Madness. General consensus is the fight wasn't ready in some way and blizzard weren't fast enough on the trigger to hotfix 30% health onto everything untill they get it done.

[Miasma]

Don't they also have a 3day lockout or is that not the case for heroic?

[Wolf]

that's firelands and before, so yeah they had a bit of an advantage in that they had double resets since october. They did field 10 or so dragonwraths for their spine kill and have 17 total, but any guild in the top 10 can do that.

[Rendakor]

Right Click > Report Spam

[Wolf]

Dragon Soul is getting an ICC treatment nerf. 5% Dmg and health on everything, stacking over time. I'm personally happy with that.

[Fabricated]

I really wonder if they secretly fired Ghostcrawler or something because the CM's are flat out smashing the grognards now.

Bashiok: I don't know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they're sick and tired of wiping?

Your solution is "Well then they should get better or quit." and that's just not reasonable for a video game comprised of millions of people looking to just have some fun. It's still a computer game.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3932904229?page=6

This puts a smile in my heart. This is about as close as a "we're so fucking sorry for Cataclysm" as we're likely going to get. A few more CMs telling the shitsockers to shut up and I may make myself a hypocrite and resub when I grow bored of SWTOR.

[Merusk]

Holy crap.  His responses in that entire thread are something they should have done YEARS ago.  Even when I was a hardcore raider I still felt that way and hated the way other raiders thought it made them better than the rest of the player base.  Most it was simply because they were dragged-through by better players or had time to play the wipe fest until they lucked out and won. (And those were usually the first to sling the "you have to EARN IT" argument.)

Now that it's a month out from TOR's release they must not be seeing the usual uptick in subs to begin bashing their 3% like this.

[Fabricated]

The reaction to LFR is really unexpected to me. I was expecting there to basically be ONLY rage about loot ninjas or bad players. I mean, there's a lot of that still but my friends who still play WoW all love LFR, and the ones that didn't raid before are now organizing 10-man normal raids in their more-casual-than-casual guilds so they can hit the content with just their friends and guildmates.

Of course, a couple of my better friends actually ninja loot and trade it to the raid members they like (people who're nice, patient, seem to actually be trying) in LFR for the purpose of pissing off asshole players.

[Wolf]

The funny thing is that the only people railing against this are the herpderp vanilla & BC was the BESTEST  crowd. Everyone with a brain realises it's a very ellegant design to solve what is obviously a problem for them. People like me and my guild get to do the legitimately hard content, without having the rug pulled under our feet with a 20% NERF TO ALL THE THINGS TOMORROW, and people that are not interested in doing the fight just right but still get bored running normals and want a bit of a challenge get shit gradually nerfed by gear aquisition and the stacking buff. At the same time the encounter design team gets to do heroics right and give a challenge to the paragon level and all the different tiers below that. All three fights we've done so far in Dragon Soul are pretty much the best fights they've done ever. Both of the harder ones have pretty steep comp requirments, but let's say they're going to be fighting that with the new talents if they do them right.

Now wouldn't it be nice if they itterated a tiny bit and gave unique titles/tier armor hues to the people that chose to turn off the buff so I have a legitimate case to turning it off in my raids? I'd be the happiest 

[luckton]

The way they took to handling loot in LFR, by assigning the loot to be rolled on by particular classes...had they done that with LFD when that came out, we would have had some great times before I kicked this game to the curb.

I still may come back someday...but TOR still has me enthralled for now.

[Rokal]

I'd be completely satisfied with an achievement for doing the fights without the buff. As it is, it seems a little too soon. My guild just finally beat normal Deathwing and we haven't gotten a chance to start heroics yet. True, we can turn the buff off, and I appreciate that, but turning it off would probably create conflict in our raid group. Some people reach that 'wall' faster than others where they feel like they aren't progressing, and that frustration would be turned on other players if we refused to use the buff.

The achievement seems like a perfect solution, but it would require a real patch from Blizzard so it probably won't happen.

[Ironwood]

What's wrong with that system ?

To be frank, if they put in a check as to if they already had the item, it'd be a godsend.  As it is, I quite like it.

[Paelos]

I really wonder if they secretly fired Ghostcrawler or something because the CM's are flat out smashing the grognards now.

Bashiok: I don't know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they're sick and tired of wiping?

Your solution is "Well then they should get better or quit." and that's just not reasonable for a video game comprised of millions of people looking to just have some fun. It's still a computer game.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3932904229?page=6

This puts a smile in my heart. This is about as close as a "we're so fucking sorry for Cataclysm" as we're likely going to get. A few more CMs telling the shitsockers to shut up and I may make myself a hypocrite and resub when I grow bored of SWTOR.

Wow, you're right. That is about as close to my dream of a public apology that we're going to get. Good for them on recognzing it now. I may resub for Pandatown now if they keep heading down that path and recognizing how they fucked us over in favor of the shitshow raider crews.

[Ironwood]

Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches.

 

[Paelos]

Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches.

 

Time is money, friend!

[Ironwood]

heh.

[Fabricated]

Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches.

 

Funny how that works.

[Simond]

Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches.

 

I wouldn't call STO going f2p serious competition, and GW2 doesn't launch until later. 

[caladein]

I don't understand some of your responses.  Were you not expecting Dragon Soul to get a scaling raid buff, especially after they said there wasn't going to be another raid pre-MoP build-up?

[Rokal]

I wasn't sure whether it would. As many have already said, I thought LFR would possibly be a replacement for nerfing content. People that want to do easy raid content have easy raid content, etc. Dragon Soul felt pretty under-tuned so it also didn't seem like it needed a nerf. It has pretty much always felt on-par with post-nerf Firelands.

[Wolf]

only because you started it in 391s. With a legendary in the raid, probably. People had shit gear at the start of firelands, they had pretty much bis when they started dragon soul.

Anyway, I expected the retarded sweeping 20% nerfs, that's why I'm much happier with the stacking nerf.

[Ironwood]

I just like content.  I like seeing content.  My wife likes killing internet dragons and shiny purples get her wet. 

As far as I'm concerned, the Dev comments are in line with my thinking and should have been done AGES ago.  The Cataclysm Hardness was a huge fucking mistake.

That said, I'm still not sure what would be difficult about ramping up everything by 200% and saying to the 1% :  go for it chaps.

[Wolf]

that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them.

[caladein]

I wasn't sure whether it would. As many have already said, I thought LFR would possibly be a replacement for nerfing content. People that want to do easy raid content have easy raid content, etc. Dragon Soul felt pretty under-tuned so it also didn't seem like it needed a nerf. It has pretty much always felt on-par with post-nerf Firelands.

LFR addressed an entirely different issue, that up until it came out Cata didn't have an easy mode for fresh content like Wrath had with non-strict 10s.

They still had to deal with the usual problem that the last instance of an expansion doesn't get nerfed organically until the new expansion comes out.

[Ironwood]

that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them.

Eh ?

[Rokal]

only because you started it in 391s. With a legendary in the raid, probably. People had shit gear at the start of firelands, they had pretty much bis when they started dragon soul.

Anyway, I expected the retarded sweeping 20% nerfs, that's why I'm much happier with the stacking nerf.

We started with most people in half 391 gear, if not less. We only managed to go 6/7H Firelands ~2 weeks before 4.3. We also had attendance problems and took a 3 week break for the holidays. When we came back, we were filling out raids with PuGs or non-raider guild members that were either awful or poorly geared. We are about 2 months from getting our first legendary staff, which we're really only bothering with for the guild-wide pet, because our mage quit the game right after beginning step 3. The raid still felt way too easy up until the last two bosses, of which only madness really gave us any trouble. Unlike T11 or T12, there is only one fight were people really have strict individual accountability (Ultraxion), otherwise players can be carried.

It's an easy raid zone.

[Wolf]

that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them.

Eh ?

Directly commenting on the point about ramping up everything by 200% and saying go for it. That's not the point, the point is for an encounter to be balanced and doable, while still requiring very tight execution.

Rokal - how many 372 weapons did you have at the start of firelands? We were fairly succesful in t11 and we had zero. I'm not saying Dragon Soul is especially hard, but gear plays quite a big role in it being as easy as it is. We're pretty bad as far as srsbzns guilds go and we cleared it on week 1, without having to schedule extra raids (so in less than 7 hours) and especially preparing for fights - and that was mainly because we had a legendary in the raid and everyone was in close to bis gear.

[Ironwood]

Directly commenting on the point about ramping up everything by 200% and saying go for it. That's not the point, the point is for an encounter to be balanced and doable, while still requiring very tight execution.

For whom ?  You're not going to please all the people all of the time.

Which is the central argument and, in fact, THE point.