Patch 4.3 - On a Deathwing and a prayer

[Merusk]

Some of the 1-60 stuff is really pretty good. Presumably Metzen wasn't deeply involved.

They went into that at Blizzcon on the Lore panel but only in a tangential way.  Some guy was bitching about some forgotten, trivial bit of lore that was actually really "important" to the whole pictures and Metzen blanked.  (IIRC it was just after the whole "Hey, where's Menethil's crown and why not offer Bolvar's sword for alliance since Horde can pick up Doomhammer?")   He spit something about there being 9 folks working on quests and he didn't know everything they put in.

[Fordel]

Blizzard lore isn't controlled or planned? WHO KNEW 

[Sjofn]

It was a Dalaran related thing, the Forsaken plague or kill or something a bunch of Kirin Tor dudes because they're working with/for/whatever the Alliance (it's just a reworking of some older version of those quests, I believe), I think. And of course the Kirin Tor are neutral omg.

[Ingmar]

Yeah none of that 'band together to fight the greater evil' shit would happen FOR REALS. Spend 1-60 with the Horde deathbombing baby druids, but hey we get to Hyjal and Malfurion is all SUP BUDS.

[Sjofn]

Deathbombing baby druids, cutting down a gazillion sacred trees, the whole "we sort of killed Cenarious" thing ... but whatever! Water under the bridge, right?

[Fordel]

No it's not even that, he scolds his own people for being UNREASONABLE towards the Horde. 

[Merusk]

Oh you silly Alliance and your imaginary Horde Bias.  AV should prove there's no bias! 

[Rendakor]

Alliance are closer to the Stable in AB than Horde to the Farm, years of starting on offense in SOTA, etc. Horde might win the LOLORE, but you lighties have always had the edge in PVP.

[Fordel]

The horde has the better trio of controls points in LM/Farm/Smith though 

[Rendakor]

Back in my vanilla PVP days, our favorite strat was LM/Farm/Stabs, because all the noobs always zerged BS.

[Fordel]

It's too far between Stables and Farm, where if you hold BS/Farm/LM, you can float in the middle there near the bridge and reinforce any of the three.

[Miasma]

I haven't tried the raid but the new heroics cleary show they have changed their minds about dungeons being hard.  As already mentioned they are much easier than the troll dungeons and probably easier than some of the older cata heroics that had difficult mechanics.  I watched the videos but probably didn't need to, queued up solo for a pug, wound up with four others who hadn't done them yet and we ran all three one after the other with only one wipe.  They are short and sweet, got a 378 headpiece as a quest reward too.

Only thing I would note is that if you do them one after the other (you don't have to queue, there is an npc at the end that ports you right into the next dungeon end time -> well of eternity -> hour of twilight) you don't get the valor points for the sequels as it were.  You would have to drop group and requeue it seems.

I'll probably try the LFR on the weekend.

[Wolf]

from what I can tell even the BH boss is easier than occulthar. Just stay spread and you don't take any damage, then run away from marrowgar's whirlwind, without the fires. Also it seems Deathwing is dropping faster even than Ragnaros did. And the big US guilds aren't killing it so I guess there's a rep to farm?

[SurfD]

from what I can tell even the BH boss is easier than occulthar. Just stay spread and you don't take any damage, then run away from marrowgar's whirlwind, without the fires. Also it seems Deathwing is dropping faster even than Ragnaros did. And the big US guilds aren't killing it so I guess there's a rep to farm?

Wait, the BH boss is in? Or is this just from test?  Cause I thought BH bosses didnt go live untill the new PVP season started.

[Ingmar]

There is a lot of CHATTY CHAT CHAT from the NPCs in the new 5s. People who hated that in ToC/ICC 5s will not be pleased.

[Wolf]

from what I can tell even the BH boss is easier than occulthar. Just stay spread and you don't take any damage, then run away from marrowgar's whirlwind, without the fires. Also it seems Deathwing is dropping faster even than Ragnaros did. And the big US guilds aren't killing it so I guess there's a rep to farm?

Wait, the BH boss is in? Or is this just from test?  Cause I thought BH bosses didnt go live untill the new PVP season started.

From PTR, I think it'll be live next week.

[Rokal]

Not a fan of the new 5-mans. They feel way over-scripted, and much too easy/fast. End Time is like 2-3 trash pulls>a boss>teleport>repeat x 2. They barely resemble dungeons. Some of the boss fights have a few neat ideas, but it's definitely not the sort of dungeon content I want to play. This is what I'm afraid MoP content will be like. An ilvl debuff and a time leaderboard would not make the 4.3 dungeons compelling.

[Wolf]

  Honestly? Why would you want challenge in 5mans? Also, didn't we already prove that's the way most of us want them?

[Ingmar]

I was in a PUG that wiped 6 times on the Echo of Tyrande until we got a new healer. Difficulty seems just fine. 

[Rokal]

Honestly? Why would you want challenge in 5mans? Also, didn't we already prove that's the way most of us want them?

I enjoy challenging solo/5-man/raid content. Thats not really a hard answer to grasp. I thought the dungeons were great at launch, and I enjoyed doing them. My goal when I run a dungeon is 'have fun' not 'get my gear/VP as fast as possible'. Fun dungeons for me mean dungeons where there is a risk of failing that keeps me from falling alseep. Dungeons that actually feel like an adventure into some nefarious villain's lair, not just a quick detour for loot. We're re-treading old water at this point though, the Cata thread was full of discussion about it and I was in the minority.

It seems likely that most players just want to shamelessly participate in a loot treadmill, so that's the direction Blizzard is going. Anything that inhibits your ability to gain ilvl upgrades every few hours is a liability. It doesn't mean I can't be disappointed about it, or lament that the game is getting worse as a result of it.

A better question is "why did they implement only heroic mode, but tune it like normal mode?" Couldn't they have just called it normal mode and let it drop the same exact shit? Why even have a heroic mode if there is nothing heroic about it?

[Zetor]

There's one thing that's challenging in the new 5-mans: the eyes in the second instance that can murder careless tanks and melee dps in about 2 seconds. My resto shaman was doing 19k HPS and scrambling to triage the group (all of our dps was melee).

Azshara can also be pretty nasty... not really because of the HUGE TELEGRAPHED "INTERRUPT ME OR THE GROUP WIPES" 10-second cast ability, but some DPSer getting MC'd and stunning the healer under an arcane bomb. I think we used about 3 different battlerezes on the healer + his Improved Death holy priest ability in the pug run I did in that fight... but we still didn't wipe.

Overall the instances are fairly easy and more forgiving than even the starter cata heroics. I don't really have a problem with this... doing the dungeons at a locked itemlevel sounds like they could be fun, though.

[Wolf]

Don't lump in raids and dungeons in the same place. I want challenge in my raids, none of the 5 mans were ever a challenge, they were hard because pugies were getting one shot, or not interrupting, or killing the mobs in the wrong order. I have no control over them and I don't want to have to explain fights and trash pulls over and over again and again. I want to sign up on any of my 2 alts that I keep raid ready and be sure I'll finish the instance.

I caped 2.5 characters in amani for 2 months. I don't want to do that ever again. That's an avarage of 17-18 dungeons a week. I have explained exactly why Axe Throwers should be prioritized and why they can wipe you to possibly 50 different people. That is the exact opposite of fun.

[Sjofn]

Five mans were always sort of a palate cleanser for me in WotLK. I did all my thinking and challenge-getting herding my guild's cats when we raided. In the heroics, I essentially wanted brain off, faceroll on. In Cataclysm I don't care quite as much, as I do not raid so I'm just doing PUGs for the hell of it, essentially. But I am not at all surprised most people want the five mans to err on the side of "easy."

[Wolf]

a couple of translalala PSAs

make sure you repair when you go from the bank to void storage, it won't take items that are not fully repaired. I'm a retard so I had to go back to a repair vendor on both of my void storage runs.

make sure you translalala before you put the items you want to change to in void storage. They have to be on you, you can't transmorg from the void storage. I'm out like 500g. 

[Rokal]

Don't lump in raids and dungeons in the same place. I want challenge in my raids, none of the 5 mans were ever a challenge, they were hard because pugies were getting one shot, or not interrupting, or killing the mobs in the wrong order. I have no control over them and I don't want to have to explain fights and trash pulls over and over again and again. I want to sign up on any of my 2 alts that I keep raid ready and be sure I'll finish the instance.

Or, alternatively, don't lump your ideal content in with mine. I raid for 2 days a week, 6.5 hours total. I like having other compelling content to do outside of that window. I think the 5-mans at launch were reasonably difficult. Throngus was really demanding on everyone in the party, and Drahga would kill your group fast if people didn't have situational awareness and switch/slow targets fast enough. Commander Springvale was also a pretty tight fight, and Baron Ashbury asked for excellent timing on 3 different interrupts (one of which you didn't want to interrupt immediately) and was also pretty tight for healing the last 30% before people geared up. Ozruk really kept everyone on their toes initially. The challenges you faced in launch 5-mans weren't really any different than what we faced in raids. That's not to say 5-mans were as hard as T11 raids, just that the type of things the content asked from you was the same (coordination, awareness, timing). It's cool if you thought they were easy, difficulty is subjective. I thought the difficulty was just right. Most people seemed to think they were too hard. For me, the 4.3 5-mans aren't hard enough. They feel boring, insubstantial, and transparent to me.

Again, re-treading old water, but I don't PuG much. Back in the old Cataclysm thread that was one of the major reasons why my Cata-launch 5-man experience was better than most. I want the option of challenging 5-man content for my composed groups. I'm not going to do a PuG with 4 idiots I don't know just for valor points/gear. That doesn't match my goals in the game, and it isn't fun. You say you got bored of running ZG/ZA for 2 months on 2.5 characters. The obvious question is: why the fuck would you run ZG/ZA for 2 months if you weren't having fun running ZG/ZA?

Most of the impressions I'm reading about 4.3 seem positive, and the general theme I'm hearing is that "these dungeons are great because they have big upgrades that are easy to get". I think that's pretty shitty criteria to judge content by, and it's sad that people are still playing WoW if they're just repeating a gear-cycle every 6 months and not even enjoying what they're doing to get the gear.

Challenge Mode content should be exactly what I want out of 5-man content (a consistent high challenge that is still as challenging 6 months later), but it's totally possible that challenge mode dungeons will lean more towards time-trials of extremely short/easy dungeons like End Time rather than than dungeons that feel substantial. If I only feel like I'm fighting the clock, the feature doesn't work for me. I was optimistic and thought that Challenge Mode might mean that Blizzard would be able to make (almost) everyone happy, but I thought the same thing about LFR. I thought "maybe the firelands nerfs wouldn't have happened if an easier LFR difficulty existed." However, general consensus seems to be that normal Dragon Soul is tuned much easier than T11/12, so it doesn't look like LFR actually had any effect on how they tuned normal mode.

[Merusk]

Honestly? Why would you want challenge in 5mans? Also, didn't we already prove that's the way most of us want them?

He's the remaining 1% rep here, don't argue with him you'll only get bored of it.  The rest of us who raided regularly before life caught us never had his entitlement problem.

[Wolf]

I raid on a 3 day/7 hour schedule, so that's not that different. I'm sorry but the dungeons were never challenging in a guild group. I never turn off my brain, and my raiders don't either, but the "hard" dungeons created tensions between raiders and casuals in my guild and it was on me to deal with that. Also I could not carry the way I could in wotlk or later on with gear in baby heroics. So I ended up pugging, instead of getting stuck with a guild group full of casuals that did not want to learn and I couldn't drop right away.

I kind of get where you're coming from, I can respect that to an extent, but I still don't agree that there should be a serious level of challenge outside of heroic raids. Normal raids should be around the level of amani, not easier like they are at the moment. Heroic raids should be brutal and what we had in firelands is not fun for me.

And I did amani for 2 months because we had attendance issues over the summer and people quitting, and I value being able to get a raid up more than my own fun. I don't see that changing in the futre and I always have my healing spec up-to-date, a ready to do heroics tank and a DPS that compliments my own ready to step in at any time. So I'm rather happy I can easily pug dungeons without having to worry about dying on trash because of puggies.

But you're right, no need to revisit that. I'm just bummed I didn't get to argue in the cracks thread  

ps: I'm plenty 1% thank you, I'm making my guys have raid ready boomkins 

[Merusk]

No, 1% is a mindset, not a progression indicator.  That you care about casuals at all sets you apart from that mindset, no matter how many raid kills you rank up.

[Paelos]

No, 1% is a mindset, not a progression indicator.  That you care about casuals at all sets you apart from that mindset, no matter how many raid kills you rank up.

From what I understand, Rokal is also that type of guy who completes the normal raid content, can't hack the heroic content, and then complains about challenges in 5 mans.

[Fabricated]

I was expecting the 4.3 5-mans to be a loot cannon regardless of Blizzard's seeming change of heart on accessibility just because it makes sense for people gearing alts and people coming back to be able to quickly gear to get into the raids.

[Wolf]

of course god dammit. We get one good tier and my horns clip straight through the fucking head piece. 

[Rendakor]

I was expecting the 4.3 5-mans to be a loot cannon regardless of Blizzard's seeming change of heart on accessibility just because it makes sense for people gearing alts and people coming back to be able to quickly gear to get into the raids.

Right but that made sense of the ZA ones too back in 4.1, despite it not actually being the case.

[Rokal]

From what I understand, Rokal is also that type of guy who completes the normal raid content, can't hack the heroic content, and then complains about challenges in 5 mans.

Not really. My complaints about 5-mans would exist if I was 7/7 H last tier pre-nerf or 0/7 N the day before 4.3 dropped. I didn't raid at all in Wrath, so 5-mans were my 'end-game' for the brief amount of time I played and I didn't like them. I don't think raiding should be the only end-game that offers any sort of challenge for players that want it.

I would also say the "1%" analogy is bad because I'm arguing for better distribution of content difficulty for more of the game, and you're asking for all of the 5-man content to be tailored to your needs. I think there should have been a lot more normal mode 5-man content in Cata, probably with better gear offered (when compared to heroics), but I also think heroics should have stayed heroic. 4.3 dungeons are normal dungeons with a different name and the entire concept of a heroic dungeon has been lost.

I think Blizzard could have achieved a successful heroic model by making the rewards less tempting, so that people who just wanted VP/easy gear could run normal mode. Quick examples: normal 5-mans could have offered the same loot, but the heroic version could have offered one extra piece of loot (same table) from the last boss. Or something cosmetic. Or just a small amount of extra VP so that people had some motivation to run heroics, but not a huge enough one that people felt they had to (i.e. 100 VP from normal mode, 110 from heroic). Blizzard could have done this in 4.3 as well, but they took the cheap route (with pretty much everything related to this patch)

[Ingmar]

That's what MoP challenge modes are for. There's no way they were going to change the design for an end-of-expansion content patch.

[Paelos]

From what I understand, Rokal is also that type of guy who completes the normal raid content, can't hack the heroic content, and then complains about challenges in 5 mans.

I'm arguing for better distribution of content difficulty for more of the game, and you're asking for all of the 5-man content to be tailored to your needs.

I'm arguing for someone to tak the bricks out of the briefcase so you don't feel like you're doing a job when you run a dungeon. Blizzard's design of 5 mans has been as precursors to raid content. People need a way to play where they can be successful and get stuff without reading things outside of the game to win. They need something where they can show up, get useable rewards, and walk away pleased.

I am also in favor of a better distrubtion of content diffculty, but not at the 5 man level. That way has created a sticking point that caused the game to walk the dark path.