well when your running with only 6 people in gw 1 person screwing up is enough to wipe. With 25 people you can still make it with only 20 alive and without mistakes.
WoW isn't really that challenging. The only real challenge is finding people to that are skilled... And dual specs now? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of specializing? They might as well just make one spec that is the "Good at everything spec."
Making vague, blanketed statements about what you believe WoW is in general shows your lack of detail and focus, which leads into your other shallow point about....
Dual spec is the same as the ability to switch on the fly with jobs in FFXI or D&D Online's dual spec ability. Something shared by MMOs as old as EQ and countless P2P and F2P mmos. The point is, it allows players to cater their playing styles to the moment: Soloing with a druid? Switch to feral spec and go at it. Now yo're called to raid and your role is healing. No problem switch to resto and in one button push you are respec'd and gear switched to get summoned.
If you cannot wrap your head around the simple genius of allowing players the convience of not having to head back to town to...............oh hell why did I even bother explaining details to you........I forgot about your need for vagueness and simpleness....
Dual spec gooood!
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
My guild spends around 10 hours a week inside of 25 man instances, and the average raider plays around 15 hours playing a week. We have a lot of people that during the work week only log in on raid nights, and log out shortly after the raid is finished. I admit that we haven't progressed far in hard modes, but we have cleared Ulduar heroic as a casual guild full of people who lead normal lives.
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
I guess that depends on your point of view. 2 hours a night is nothing big, or is playing 5 hours two days out of a week. I consider that casual play. He also said they haven't completed hard mode. So throw that part out the window.
As far as how hard the instance is, or which instance is in question, I don't think that has anything to do with this set of quotes. It is about what you consider casual play style. The person I quoted nor myself mentioned anything about Uldar.
As for as the topic top this thread. Sure new fights might take a little time to learn, but after the first or second kill it gets fairly easy to kill them. The general problem I see is finding people who know how to pay attention. The fights themselves are not all that hard as long people understand whats going on.
90% of wipes in raids are caused by someone not doing what they should be doing, not because of boss difficulty.
WoW isn't really that challenging. The only real challenge is finding people to that are skilled... And dual specs now? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of specializing? They might as well just make one spec that is the "Good at everything spec."
Making vague, blanketed statements about what you believe WoW is in general shows your lack of detail and focus, which leads into your other shallow point about....
Dual spec is the same as the ability to switch on the fly with jobs in FFXI or D&D Online's dual spec ability. Something shared by MMOs as old as EQ and countless P2P and F2P mmos. The point is, it allows players to cater their playing styles to the moment: Soloing with a druid? Switch to feral spec and go at it. Now yo're called to raid and your role is healing. No problem switch to resto and in one button push you are respec'd and gear switched to get summoned.
If you cannot wrap your head around the simple genius of allowing players the convience of not having to head back to town to...............oh hell why did I even bother explaining details to you........I forgot about your need for vagueness and simpleness....
Dual spec gooood!
My vague, blanketed statements show a lack of detail and focus? Thanks for clearing that up. Vague, blanketed comments get responses. If I didn't leave questions to be answered, there wouldn't be anything to reply to, no?
As far as I'm concerned there is a difference between letting characters cater their playing style to the moment, and just letting them be able to be good at different things whenever they want.
I haven't played since shortly after BC came out, and WoW has probably changed, but dual spec just shows a further lack of player skill. If a player isn't good enough at their class that they can't play a certain part of their game because of their spec, then they need to learn how to play. Obviously certain specs are better at different things in the game, I certainly won't deny that fact, but you shouldn't need to spec into each one of those to play the game.
Edit: Unless classes have drastically changed since I played, a feral druid could keep up healing with a resto druid, or even do better with some gear and some *gasp* skill and tactics, like conserving mana :O!
My guild spends around 10 hours a week inside of 25 man instances, and the average raider plays around 15 hours playing a week. We have a lot of people that during the work week only log in on raid nights, and log out shortly after the raid is finished. I admit that we haven't progressed far in hard modes, but we have cleared Ulduar heroic as a casual guild full of people who lead normal lives.
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
I guess that depends on your point of view. 2 hours a night is nothing big, or is playing 5 hours two days out of a week. I consider that casual play. He also said they haven't completed hard mode. So throw that part out the window.
As far as how hard the instance is, or which instance is in question, I don't think that has anything to do with this set of quotes. It is about what you consider casual play style. The person I quoted nor myself mentioned anything about Uldar.
As for as the topic top this thread. Sure new fights might take a little time to learn, but after the first or second kill it gets fairly easy to kill them. The general problem I see is finding people who know how to pay attention. The fights themselves are not all that hard as long people understand whats going on.
90% of wipes in raids are caused by someone not doing what they should be doing, not because of boss difficulty.
I think most raid wipes start out as tanking or sometimes healing issues. Then you have coordination of movement, proper positioning and transitions between phases, and improving your dps if you hit enrage timers. It really shouldn't take that long if you are not bringing new people in all that time that have to learn the fight.
Pugs usually fall apart after the 3rd or 4th wipe, and its always the same encounters with stupid checks that people constantly fail at. People just want to enter instances, stand in one spot, press buttons 1 - 2 - 3, and get loot. Blizzard does nothing to encourage people to become better players, instead they are going to close the gear gap for bad players and bad guilds by giving them top tier badges for running under tuned heroics. Oh its ok, they are casuals.
'Casual' does not mean bad, but people use the word casual like a crutch. If you spend less than 20 hours a week gaming, and gaming is not a top 3 priority.. then you are a casual gamer. If you can schedule 10 hours a week to raid inside a video game, it doesn't make you hardcore, or any less casual than the bad player who can't pass the stupid checks.
Casuals do raid, and they do it well if it matter to them. Three hours, two or three nights a week, and a guild that's willing to work with you to help you become a better player is all it takes.
My guild spends around 10 hours a week inside of 25 man instances, and the average raider plays around 15 hours playing a week. We have a lot of people that during the work week only log in on raid nights, and log out shortly after the raid is finished. I admit that we haven't progressed far in hard modes, but we have cleared Ulduar heroic as a casual guild full of people who lead normal lives.
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
You got what I was alluding too. It is about how you spend your time. If all you do is log-on and raid and that is it, then it is hardcore about raiding. The same can be said for running heroics, crafting, PVP or whatever. Casual or hardcore has little to do with the amount of time played in game, but hat you do with that time.
Just because they only log in only for raids doesn't mean they are hardcore for raids. Maybe they have a life outside of WoW and only feel like raiding a couple hours a week. My last year in game all I logged in for was raids, not because I was hardcore, hell I didn't even like raiding. I only logged in for them for something to do.
You got what I was alluding too. It is about how you spend your time. If all you do is log-on and raid and that is it, then it is hardcore about raiding. The same can be said for running heroics, crafting, PVP or whatever. Casual or hardcore has little to do with the amount of time played in game, but hat you do with that time.
There is a big difference between hardcore and casual raiding guilds, and you really can't deny it when compairing the two. When you start looking at the best guilds in the world having 200+ attempts on some of the hard mode encounters; you'd realize that there is a difference betwen that kind of guild and a guild that goes bare bones because of time contraints just to clear the instance without attempting hard modes.
My guild ended up being ranked around 3400 when we downed Yogg.. where as the bottom rung of the top end guilds were finishing up Heroic Glory of Ulduar Raider around that time. WoW is about the amount of time you put in, and everything comes down to time. Could my guild do Mimiron hard mode if we could afford the time for 200+ attempts.. yeah I think we could.
Until any of you so called hardcore old time witf pwnage mmo players actually beat Alaglon and yogg, on hardmore then you can shut ur pie holes abot no challenge, I bet hafl the so called hardcore players havnt even got the hardest achievments from Naxx or srath 3d let alone killing algalon or yogg on hardmode. hell i will bet 99% of the whining so called hardcore players here havnt even got the hard achiev,ments from the 5 man dungeons or the arnea achievments. untill any of u whining bitches can get them dont even talk about challenge.
hard mode achievments in 5mans? I'll give you Chaos theory was hard, but killing 100 zombies in culling wasn't hard, it was just annoying. most hard mode achievements don't make the encounder harder, they just make people grab a group that is built around it. and half the hard mode achievments in 5mans you get accidenly for not being an idiot.
a few people on the forums have the mantra of "you do so-and-so so you can't say the game is easy". of course not. I'll be the first to admit I havn't done everything in WoW. I only have 4 70+ chars, and 2 80s. I hate arenas so I only have the 100 wins achievement from when i was playing around in 2v2 with a friend. I can't stand AB so I don't have battlemaster (though I would, if it counted all my Pre-BC faction grinding in there) I haven't gone near Alaglon or yogg because I think Ulduar and Naxx are incredibly boring (in fact, I don't even have KT/Sapph down in 10man, only 25).
I doubt you have most of the achievements you've listed, because they aren't a measure of challange, they are a measure of time invested. they are a measure of if you can sit through your guilds 25man runs over and over till they get it right. (or in my case, hop into an already good guild and breeze through content and get bored of it).
WoW is easy. Thats not a bad thing, thats what the devs want. It is easy for the same reason the system specs are so low, they want as many people as possible to enjoy the content. if you want a hard game, go grab your NES or Sega and try some of those older games, where you get 3 lives and then you start the whole game over.
Game makers learned LONG ago that hard and unforgiving games have a small market they draw from. games that are easy, rewarding, and never give you a game over screen sell very well (See: The Sims). WoW is selling well because they did a good job of making an easy game millions could enjoy.
Don't lie to yourself and say you're leet because you killed Alaglon, there are hundreds of thousands who could have done it in your place, but chose not to because they would rather PvP, craft, or stand around dalaran laughing at trade chat, and just don't feel like finding another 24 people to raid with for hours on end. they COULD do it, they just chose not to.
You want hard mode? get an arena team of 4 warlocks and yourself. take off all your gear except your weapon, and have the 4 locks hellfire themselves to death. now 1v5 with only a weapon equiped. and don't come back here and say WoW is hard untill you have the achievement for doing that... and it has to be 2200+ rated match.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
My vague, blanketed statements show a lack of detail and focus? Thanks for clearing that up. Vague, blanketed comments get responses. If I didn't leave questions to be answered, there wouldn't be anything to reply to, no? As far as I'm concerned there is a difference between letting characters cater their playing style to the moment, and just letting them be able to be good at different things whenever they want. I haven't played since shortly after BC came out, and WoW has probably changed, but dual spec just shows a further lack of player skill. If a player isn't good enough at their class that they can't play a certain part of their game because of their spec, then they need to learn how to play. Obviously certain specs are better at different things in the game, I certainly won't deny that fact, but you shouldn't need to spec into each one of those to play the game. Edit: Unless classes have drastically changed since I played, a feral druid could keep up healing with a resto druid, or even do better with some gear and some *gasp* skill and tactics, like conserving mana :O!
The whole game has drastically changed since you last played it. And even when you did play it, I'm pretty certain you didn't play at any sort of high level.
Sure - it's possible to go quite a long way in 5-mans with decent gear and the "wrong" spec, but you will fail miserably at anything remotely demanding, such as raid healing or healing in the arena.
You should also bare in mind, that each new talent point further specialises a character. So with each new expansion bringing 10 new levels and hence 10 points more of specialization. Different specs become further and further apart, and it becomes harder and harder to work against your spec.
Even as a hunter, I run two specs - both using the survival tree, but one specialised for PvE raiding, the other for PvP. Should I accidentally do either activity with the "wrong" spec, my performance drops quite noticeably. Without the extra DPS talents, I lose hundreds of points of DPS, which could easily make the difference between downing a boss and a 5% wipe. And if I PvP without PvP talents, such as scatter shot, then I lack the tools to maintain range, and die far more often in those "close" situations where every second counts.
The Yogg Saron lights out fight requires nearly perfect execution. WoW's arenas contain some of the best players in the world. Skill does have meaning in WoW.
My problems with WoW are the out dated graphics engine and the fact that I have played the game for five years.
But there is PLENTY of challenge at level 80 for those who want it. Go ahead, say its easy.... you havent tried to do OS with three drakes up (without being over-geared). Got that done? Lets not even talk about trying to do a full clear of Ulduar25!
Find me a group for OS + drakes and I will tank it. Sorry, but on my realm, I could spend most of the day tyring to find a group for this with it only falling apart once we get there. Its not even worth my time.
Parts of Ulduar are very easy, but it does offer some challenging fights. Ignis requires skill for OT'ing.
One of the reasons I quit is that I was getting bored with the end game. I could run Nax with my guild, and get my VoA and OS runs in fairly quickly. Even grouping for EoE, could be time consuming, as with Ulduar. Of course, I could find a more progressive guild, but there is some serious elitism in this game along with some anal folks. I don't care how good you are and I don't want to hear about how awesome you are over vent for a half hour. One guild was going to have pop-quizzes and if you didn't answer correctly, you wouldn't go. I do read up on the fights at maintankadin, but I can't stand the level of anality of some people from a video game.
I did get bored because of the lack of challenges available, even though there were still some left for me. I feel that I have to spend more time looking for challenges than I do actually being challenged. I hope that makes sense.
In my personal opinion, PvE content is never "HARD", It is either you need better gear, or need to learn how the boss fight goes. Being a hard fight would probably be where the Boss actually does random scripted events rather than just the normal 50% health Enrage or etc, while the gear having no effect on the boss fight whatsoever. I believe in MMOs, Hard should not equal, Who spent the most time on getting gear or who got the most lucky. Heres an analogy I have seen somewhere, 'PvE is like playing chess with an opponent that uses the same moves every game while PvP is like playing chess" Its a bit biased on the PvP part, but I'm trying to make a point that PvE content's difficulty level goes far as spending your time getting yourself geared. Hence, the reason people in WoW demand you to be geared for going on a "Hard" raid encounter. While I'm sure that figuring the boss's behavior pattern on the first fight ever may be a challenge, but you have to be honest that after the first guild that downs it, all the other guild probably follows.
The problem today with Ulduar Raids is that the Raids are too hard for casual raiders. The target public of Nax Raiding.
It is shown by the simple fact that ONE guild - a Chinese one - did the final 25 men encounter on the most difficult step.
This achievement was done on July 7th - a full 104 days after Ulduar went live, only one guild worldwide did it.
------
While I agree with you the PvP part is hard, simply dismissing the PVE part by stating it is "always" the same strategy,.... isn't exactly true.
The problem is ... you play with a group and absolutely NO ONE can afford to make big mistakes or you'll have a whipe on these difficutlies.
That means training ... a lot of training ... with the same group. It is like a dance contest.
Everyone knows the steps, everyone knows the dancing technique and you all dance ... with no one out of synch.
So in this respect, if well designed, PVE Raid content can be VERY challeging, because one small step outside of the dance and the boss tactics ... change and suddenly you find yourselves in another corner of the dance competition.
I like to Raid once in a while, while other people like to do the PVE contest every day. It's a choice one makes, but I wouldn't call PVE players who can achieve the most difficult encounters pussies either (as I did once myself).
------ > Only players who talk about "easy" without even doing the hard Raid modes are the real pussies these days. It is like saying Championship League soccer is easy, I am too good at it while playing with friends in an amateur club.
lucky Aion is around the corner. A game with meaningful open world PvP, not some shoe box style arena. Its also graphically more superior, id recommend waiting for Aion if your after a challenging game.
Comments
well when your running with only 6 people in gw 1 person screwing up is enough to wipe. With 25 people you can still make it with only 20 alive and without mistakes.
Making vague, blanketed statements about what you believe WoW is in general shows your lack of detail and focus, which leads into your other shallow point about....
Dual spec is the same as the ability to switch on the fly with jobs in FFXI or D&D Online's dual spec ability. Something shared by MMOs as old as EQ and countless P2P and F2P mmos. The point is, it allows players to cater their playing styles to the moment: Soloing with a druid? Switch to feral spec and go at it. Now yo're called to raid and your role is healing. No problem switch to resto and in one button push you are respec'd and gear switched to get summoned.
If you cannot wrap your head around the simple genius of allowing players the convience of not having to head back to town to...............oh hell why did I even bother explaining details to you........I forgot about your need for vagueness and simpleness....
Dual spec gooood!
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
I guess that depends on your point of view. 2 hours a night is nothing big, or is playing 5 hours two days out of a week. I consider that casual play. He also said they haven't completed hard mode. So throw that part out the window.
As far as how hard the instance is, or which instance is in question, I don't think that has anything to do with this set of quotes. It is about what you consider casual play style. The person I quoted nor myself mentioned anything about Uldar.
As for as the topic top this thread. Sure new fights might take a little time to learn, but after the first or second kill it gets fairly easy to kill them. The general problem I see is finding people who know how to pay attention. The fights themselves are not all that hard as long people understand whats going on.
90% of wipes in raids are caused by someone not doing what they should be doing, not because of boss difficulty.
Making vague, blanketed statements about what you believe WoW is in general shows your lack of detail and focus, which leads into your other shallow point about....
Dual spec is the same as the ability to switch on the fly with jobs in FFXI or D&D Online's dual spec ability. Something shared by MMOs as old as EQ and countless P2P and F2P mmos. The point is, it allows players to cater their playing styles to the moment: Soloing with a druid? Switch to feral spec and go at it. Now yo're called to raid and your role is healing. No problem switch to resto and in one button push you are respec'd and gear switched to get summoned.
If you cannot wrap your head around the simple genius of allowing players the convience of not having to head back to town to...............oh hell why did I even bother explaining details to you........I forgot about your need for vagueness and simpleness....
Dual spec gooood!
My vague, blanketed statements show a lack of detail and focus? Thanks for clearing that up. Vague, blanketed comments get responses. If I didn't leave questions to be answered, there wouldn't be anything to reply to, no?
As far as I'm concerned there is a difference between letting characters cater their playing style to the moment, and just letting them be able to be good at different things whenever they want.
I haven't played since shortly after BC came out, and WoW has probably changed, but dual spec just shows a further lack of player skill. If a player isn't good enough at their class that they can't play a certain part of their game because of their spec, then they need to learn how to play. Obviously certain specs are better at different things in the game, I certainly won't deny that fact, but you shouldn't need to spec into each one of those to play the game.
Edit: Unless classes have drastically changed since I played, a feral druid could keep up healing with a resto druid, or even do better with some gear and some *gasp* skill and tactics, like conserving mana :O!
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
I guess that depends on your point of view. 2 hours a night is nothing big, or is playing 5 hours two days out of a week. I consider that casual play. He also said they haven't completed hard mode. So throw that part out the window.
As far as how hard the instance is, or which instance is in question, I don't think that has anything to do with this set of quotes. It is about what you consider casual play style. The person I quoted nor myself mentioned anything about Uldar.
As for as the topic top this thread. Sure new fights might take a little time to learn, but after the first or second kill it gets fairly easy to kill them. The general problem I see is finding people who know how to pay attention. The fights themselves are not all that hard as long people understand whats going on.
90% of wipes in raids are caused by someone not doing what they should be doing, not because of boss difficulty.
I think most raid wipes start out as tanking or sometimes healing issues. Then you have coordination of movement, proper positioning and transitions between phases, and improving your dps if you hit enrage timers. It really shouldn't take that long if you are not bringing new people in all that time that have to learn the fight.
Pugs usually fall apart after the 3rd or 4th wipe, and its always the same encounters with stupid checks that people constantly fail at. People just want to enter instances, stand in one spot, press buttons 1 - 2 - 3, and get loot. Blizzard does nothing to encourage people to become better players, instead they are going to close the gear gap for bad players and bad guilds by giving them top tier badges for running under tuned heroics. Oh its ok, they are casuals.
'Casual' does not mean bad, but people use the word casual like a crutch. If you spend less than 20 hours a week gaming, and gaming is not a top 3 priority.. then you are a casual gamer. If you can schedule 10 hours a week to raid inside a video game, it doesn't make you hardcore, or any less casual than the bad player who can't pass the stupid checks.
Casuals do raid, and they do it well if it matter to them. Three hours, two or three nights a week, and a guild that's willing to work with you to help you become a better player is all it takes.
10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?
That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.
Just my opinion.
10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?
You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.
Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.
It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....
You got what I was alluding too. It is about how you spend your time. If all you do is log-on and raid and that is it, then it is hardcore about raiding. The same can be said for running heroics, crafting, PVP or whatever. Casual or hardcore has little to do with the amount of time played in game, but hat you do with that time.
Just because they only log in only for raids doesn't mean they are hardcore for raids. Maybe they have a life outside of WoW and only feel like raiding a couple hours a week. My last year in game all I logged in for was raids, not because I was hardcore, hell I didn't even like raiding. I only logged in for them for something to do.
There is a big difference between hardcore and casual raiding guilds, and you really can't deny it when compairing the two. When you start looking at the best guilds in the world having 200+ attempts on some of the hard mode encounters; you'd realize that there is a difference betwen that kind of guild and a guild that goes bare bones because of time contraints just to clear the instance without attempting hard modes.
My guild ended up being ranked around 3400 when we downed Yogg.. where as the bottom rung of the top end guilds were finishing up Heroic Glory of Ulduar Raider around that time. WoW is about the amount of time you put in, and everything comes down to time. Could my guild do Mimiron hard mode if we could afford the time for 200+ attempts.. yeah I think we could.
hard mode achievments in 5mans? I'll give you Chaos theory was hard, but killing 100 zombies in culling wasn't hard, it was just annoying. most hard mode achievements don't make the encounder harder, they just make people grab a group that is built around it. and half the hard mode achievments in 5mans you get accidenly for not being an idiot.
a few people on the forums have the mantra of "you do so-and-so so you can't say the game is easy". of course not. I'll be the first to admit I havn't done everything in WoW. I only have 4 70+ chars, and 2 80s. I hate arenas so I only have the 100 wins achievement from when i was playing around in 2v2 with a friend. I can't stand AB so I don't have battlemaster (though I would, if it counted all my Pre-BC faction grinding in there) I haven't gone near Alaglon or yogg because I think Ulduar and Naxx are incredibly boring (in fact, I don't even have KT/Sapph down in 10man, only 25).
I doubt you have most of the achievements you've listed, because they aren't a measure of challange, they are a measure of time invested. they are a measure of if you can sit through your guilds 25man runs over and over till they get it right. (or in my case, hop into an already good guild and breeze through content and get bored of it).
WoW is easy. Thats not a bad thing, thats what the devs want. It is easy for the same reason the system specs are so low, they want as many people as possible to enjoy the content. if you want a hard game, go grab your NES or Sega and try some of those older games, where you get 3 lives and then you start the whole game over.
Game makers learned LONG ago that hard and unforgiving games have a small market they draw from. games that are easy, rewarding, and never give you a game over screen sell very well (See: The Sims). WoW is selling well because they did a good job of making an easy game millions could enjoy.
Don't lie to yourself and say you're leet because you killed Alaglon, there are hundreds of thousands who could have done it in your place, but chose not to because they would rather PvP, craft, or stand around dalaran laughing at trade chat, and just don't feel like finding another 24 people to raid with for hours on end. they COULD do it, they just chose not to.
You want hard mode? get an arena team of 4 warlocks and yourself. take off all your gear except your weapon, and have the 4 locks hellfire themselves to death. now 1v5 with only a weapon equiped. and don't come back here and say WoW is hard untill you have the achievement for doing that... and it has to be 2200+ rated match.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
The whole game has drastically changed since you last played it. And even when you did play it, I'm pretty certain you didn't play at any sort of high level.
Sure - it's possible to go quite a long way in 5-mans with decent gear and the "wrong" spec, but you will fail miserably at anything remotely demanding, such as raid healing or healing in the arena.
You should also bare in mind, that each new talent point further specialises a character. So with each new expansion bringing 10 new levels and hence 10 points more of specialization. Different specs become further and further apart, and it becomes harder and harder to work against your spec.
Even as a hunter, I run two specs - both using the survival tree, but one specialised for PvE raiding, the other for PvP. Should I accidentally do either activity with the "wrong" spec, my performance drops quite noticeably. Without the extra DPS talents, I lose hundreds of points of DPS, which could easily make the difference between downing a boss and a 5% wipe. And if I PvP without PvP talents, such as scatter shot, then I lack the tools to maintain range, and die far more often in those "close" situations where every second counts.
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The Yogg Saron lights out fight requires nearly perfect execution. WoW's arenas contain some of the best players in the world. Skill does have meaning in WoW.
My problems with WoW are the out dated graphics engine and the fact that I have played the game for five years.
That picture is from beta. It never looked like that in release.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Find me a group for OS + drakes and I will tank it. Sorry, but on my realm, I could spend most of the day tyring to find a group for this with it only falling apart once we get there. Its not even worth my time.
Parts of Ulduar are very easy, but it does offer some challenging fights. Ignis requires skill for OT'ing.
One of the reasons I quit is that I was getting bored with the end game. I could run Nax with my guild, and get my VoA and OS runs in fairly quickly. Even grouping for EoE, could be time consuming, as with Ulduar. Of course, I could find a more progressive guild, but there is some serious elitism in this game along with some anal folks. I don't care how good you are and I don't want to hear about how awesome you are over vent for a half hour. One guild was going to have pop-quizzes and if you didn't answer correctly, you wouldn't go. I do read up on the fights at maintankadin, but I can't stand the level of anality of some people from a video game.
I did get bored because of the lack of challenges available, even though there were still some left for me. I feel that I have to spend more time looking for challenges than I do actually being challenged. I hope that makes sense.
The problem today with Ulduar Raids is that the Raids are too hard for casual raiders. The target public of Nax Raiding.
It is shown by the simple fact that ONE guild - a Chinese one - did the final 25 men encounter on the most difficult step.
http://www.wow.com/2009/07/07/stars-snag-world-first-legitimate-alone-in-the-darkness/
This achievement was done on July 7th - a full 104 days after Ulduar went live, only one guild worldwide did it.
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While I agree with you the PvP part is hard, simply dismissing the PVE part by stating it is "always" the same strategy,.... isn't exactly true.
The problem is ... you play with a group and absolutely NO ONE can afford to make big mistakes or you'll have a whipe on these difficutlies.
That means training ... a lot of training ... with the same group. It is like a dance contest.
Everyone knows the steps, everyone knows the dancing technique and you all dance ... with no one out of synch.
So in this respect, if well designed, PVE Raid content can be VERY challeging, because one small step outside of the dance and the boss tactics ... change and suddenly you find yourselves in another corner of the dance competition.
I like to Raid once in a while, while other people like to do the PVE contest every day. It's a choice one makes, but I wouldn't call PVE players who can achieve the most difficult encounters pussies either (as I did once myself).
------ > Only players who talk about "easy" without even doing the hard Raid modes are the real pussies these days. It is like saying Championship League soccer is easy, I am too good at it while playing with friends in an amateur club.
Wow, very well said. I have to agree 100%.
lucky Aion is around the corner. A game with meaningful open world PvP, not some shoe box style arena. Its also graphically more superior, id recommend waiting for Aion if your after a challenging game.
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