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WoW raiding... how it's changed, where it's going.
Danrax
Member Posts: 11
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Danrax
Member Posts: 11
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His analysis is pretty off. He complains about challenge but refuses to do "hard modes". If you want a challenge do the hard modes and get your drake / title. Personally, I am happy with my two drakes from WoTLK. Scrubs whined both times they took them away from the achievement.
Blizz has always nerfed raids so that peeps like him could see the results. The only difference is now Blizz is leaving the original "hard" design in the game.
Nah .. just some hardcore raiders QQing because now more people have access to raids.
If you look at wow-heroes.com .. plenty of more casual raids are not doing 25 TOC yet, many are not even clearing Ulduar. Clearing TOC on the first day only applies to the really hardcore guilds and they are so few and far between that design choices should NOT cater to them.
And as it stand now, there is a shot that PUG can do TOC raids (as starting with Naxx) and that is a good thing. VoA should not be the only puggable raid.
the scale of the raid being reduced killed alot of the epic feeling for me.
i dont care if everyone on the server is able to down the bosses, i just miss my big teams.
The problem. . . which I think is part of the author's point . . . is that Blizz forgot how to give players a challenging, mind-blowing epic encounter that you walk away from thinking, boy that was fun . . . with or without gear in hand.
IMO there's not a single 'omg' boss encounter in WotLK, sans perhaps algalon, which I never saw first hand. Nothing feels epic, and 99% of people are there farming gear, or DKP to spend. Everything's a version of Kara. Run it 40 times, get your loot, move on to the next instance, rinse, repeat.
Once MMOs get less gear dependent, developers will have far greater flexibility in how they design epic encounters, both the progression leading therein, as well as alternatives to gear checks. Otherwise, Blizz will keep bolting on hard modes (which I agree feel superficial and uncreative), and pushing out progression bosses that are nothing more than loot pinata that guilds rush to put on 'farm' status.
Great, so five guilds are capable of defeating a hard mode boss that most can't. I'm not talking about hard modes. Read my post again. I'm not a fan of them, some people are, obviously you, ITG. I think they lack creativity and are simply difficulty sliders for bored hard core guilds. That was the point of the main article . . . ya know, the one the OP asked us to respond to.
But I guess you ARE up there, eh ITG?
I agree with the article pretty much. I stopped playing WoW for this reason (well, one of the main reasons).
Progressing by having to learn a fight is prefered method for me and to many of my friends. And I have been in pretty decent guilds that were capable. My guild even did some server firsts, like Kael'Thas, back in the day. Fights like Kael'Thas truly felt like achievements. The same thing when you managed to complete your attunement quest for Mount Hyjal. Never did I get that feeling in WoTLK.
I did not like the idea of Nightmare and Hell difficulties in Diablo and I dislike that design even more in MMORPG. It is a prime example of lazy game design. It might be addictive. And it is a feature that no doubt came from famous arcade games, but it still does not negate that fact that I do not like it in MMORPG or even PC RPGs. Some people do, otherwise Diablo II would not have been so popular. Each of it's own.
Ulduar hardmodes simply could not keep me awake. I simply do not like repeating same content while forced to whistle and do handstands. It is very lazy design. I would prefer that the only way to progress is by doing the hardmode like it used to be. Naturally, if the easy mode is available, you are kinda forced to go through that first in order to get the gear. And it would be retarded not to. So, seeing the last boss in the instance no longer felt like an achievement because you knew that the real tedious chore is still ahead...
I have to admit that hardmode in a fight like Sartharion worked pretty well. It actually made sense there. Or even if they had implemented it to one encounter in Ulduar, like Freya.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
BC:
Karazhan-12 bosses
Zul'Aman-7 bosses
Gruul's Lair-2 bosses
Magtheridon's Lair-1 boss
Serpentshrine Cavern-6 bosses
The Eye-4 bosses
Battle for Mount Hyjal-5 bosses
Black Temple-9 bosses
Sunwell Plateau-6 bosses
WOTLK
Naxxramas(mostly recycled from original WoW, so all they had to do is remake their abilities...not too much effort)-19 bosses
Ulduar-14 bosses
ToTC-5 bosses
Icecrown-10 bosses
At a first look, BC had just a few more bosses. Now the actual problem comes, Karazhan alone pre-nerfs was harder than Naxxramas, Ulduar normal pre-nerfs, ToTC and probably Icecrown normal as well. Yes, a 10 man instance was harder than a 25 man instance(I remember Nightbane being ugh...well, I also remember when I killed him and we were "FUCK YEAH").
Going further, Ulduar hardmodes pre-nerfs are on pair wih SSR/Eye I'd say, with harder hardmodes like Mirmiron and Freya(both pre-nerfs) being on par with Ilidan, Algalon on par with Kil'jeaden.
Now, we must all agree that Yogg-Saron 25 0K pre-nerfs was and will be probably the hardest boss in WOTLK, his brother in BC being M'uru or Kael pre-nerfs.
Those being said, if you say that BC didn't have the perfect raiding model, then you didn't play WoW(And this is not a matter of opinion). Casuals could go as high as middle Hyjal, prehaps even middle BT and 3/4 Eye/SSR. For me, that's enough of seeing "the art", a flawed reason of GC in my eyes. Also, casuals got(in 2.4) items on par with BT, but they were 2 times as hard as current farming since they cost a lot of Badges of Justice, so there was still a "challenge"(overgearing the hyper-nerfed Karazhan vs having fun in Sunwell, hmmm?).
It was probably rushed, what can I say...but still, this isn't an excuse for a company like Blizzard.
Oh and btw, Zorn, back then, even in Naxx, doing Immortal was a matter of RNG being with you. A few seconds of lagging at Thaddius or Gluth, a retarded move of melee at Patch or an unfortunate player triggering a large Ice Block on KT or staying in KT's Void Zone aren't my definition of skill. It's the same thing about Conqueror of Ulduar, not to mention there were a few other things that made it extremely hard(like YG's RNG).
Edit: WOTLK also removed something that was pretty big in my eyes: the necesity of tanks having skills on certain bosses. In BC, a large amount of bosses couldn't be taunted but still required OTs so you had to properly build threat(as high as 2-3 off-tanks!) while still not outthreating the tank. Not to mention, you could spot a noob tank on Brutallus from miles...oh well...
Edit2: Oh and I agree with that dude, there should be a proper progression even for normal modes. Ulduar had a decent difficulty before normal modes were nerfed like hell, and hardmodes were buffed a lil bit. This didn't make a lot of sense because people who would do hardmodes could take 1000 more Frost Damage anyway, but you made normal modes A LOT more easier for unprepared guilds. And then, they nerfed everything ^_^
They need to lower raid difficulty. Everyone in NA who is good has quit or is quitting. (Maybe back for Cataclysm?) I just think that the general population(not to say there aren't people who are competent) is just losing common sense if they had any. Is it so hard to jump away from a Shadow Crash(General Vezax), Switch sides on Thaddius when charges switch, or even DODGE THE MISSLES that go extremely slow and do 1 million damage on mimiron. Just get out of the beams, people. Ice blocks aren't so hard to dodge on Hodir either.
Not to say everything is easy... but... almost everything is. Maybe if Blizz made raids mad hard again and stop nerfing, all the WoW fanboy problems will go away. Except many fanboys are noobs...
You're spot on mate, as well as the blogger (or w/e). If you put the "casuals must see everything in the game or fkin mary will unbirth jesus"-kind of metality aside, I'd have to think that for a raider, it feels somewhat odd to kill/finish the greatest raid boss in game without much challenge and then have to redo it, for it to really matter. It's like taking content away from raiders and giving it to random casual players.
It is also like telling Usain Bolt: "Oh wow not bad there fella, server first across the finish line.... but could you do it if you took off your shoe!?" ...........
RIP challenging raiding. ;(
You're spot on mate, as well as the blogger (or w/e). If you put the "casuals must see everything in the game or fkin mary will unbirth jesus"-kind of metality aside, I'd have to think that for a raider, it feels somewhat odd to kill/finish the greatest raid boss in game without much challenge and then have to redo it, for it to really matter. It's like taking content away from raiders and giving it to random casual players.
It is also like telling Usain Bolt: "Oh wow not bad there fella, server first across the finish line.... but could you do it if you took off your shoe!?" ...........
RIP challenging raiding. ;(
This is pretty spot on! It just isnt the same thing doing the hardmodes, people can go around the hardmode argument as much as they like, but it just isnt the same thing, and thats because you will kill it on easy mode first, and everyone will kill it on easy mode, and so will you, you will try a couple of times the hard mode, if its not working you will just kill him the easy mode and move on, like the blogger mentioned Kaelthas and Vashj were simply epic, when you went 5 days or so to wipe at kael and suddently at that perfect try he just fell down, the adrenaline pumping when you see your work rewarded its priceless, my guild wasnt hardcore but we werent exactly casual we just did like to do our own thing in our own timeframe, we were a group of people who enjoyed the number crunching and the challenge, and it simply killed raiding for us, its fine to take a bit longer to reach Archimonde and Illidan because it felt epic all the way.
Great, so five guilds are capable of defeating a hard mode boss that most can't. I'm not talking about hard modes. Read my post again. I'm not a fan of them, some people are, obviously you, ITG. I think they lack creativity and are simply difficulty sliders for bored hard core guilds. That was the point of the main article . . . ya know, the one the OP asked us to respond to.
But I guess you ARE up there, eh ITG?
If you don't want to talk about WOW's hard modes, then what are you even talking about....
So you didn't see the final boss of Ulduar and still want to discuss things.
It is like wanting to talk about professional baseball, but you only want a local softball competition.
The scaling in difficulty within the dungeons is terrific. It allows a lot of players to see some content and it allows the hardcore and very good players to distinguish them from the people who ... fail.
And apperently you fail if you can't do the hard modes.
Actually, I've done quite a few Uld hard modes up through IC. I never said I didn't or couldn't do them, I just said they're a stupid concept that lacks creativity.
You, on the other hand, argue it's a good idea to let everyone in the game see nearly all end game content, regardless of skill level or dedication. That's why WoW doesn't feel epic . . . because any warm body can /faceroll easy modes and see essentially the same encounter, if not the same loot (and sans Algalon).
BTW, because those encounters become so famliiar, you have high-end servers like Mal'Ganis and Kel'thuzad running wild on hard modes, where even green-geared toons get pulled through in PUGs, much less guild runs. That ties largely back to my complaints about handing out gear like candy . . .
But what I find really funny, and completely representative of the WoW community as a whole, is that you've now responded twice, and both times felt required to attack me personally as 'pathetic' and 'fail' because I disagree with you.
EDIT: I just read some of your recent posts. You're the most blind/biased WoW fanboi I've read in a long time. You're incapable of having an open minded debate about end game raiding.
Personally I really like the challenge hardmodes and achievements provide to the fights. You beat the boss and learn the fight and challenge is replaced by repetition. However, if you go for a hardmode you crank up the difficulty and you are now testing yourself in areas the fight never really tested you in before. Your timing has to be better, you have to pay better attention to all the details and you need to support your teammates better. Learning the fights is a nice introductory challenge but the real fun is in mastering them no matter what is thrown at you.
How about: you have to learn and master the "hard" fight before you beat the encounter in the first place?
You're spot on mate, as well as the blogger (or w/e). If you put the "casuals must see everything in the game or fkin mary will unbirth jesus"-kind of metality aside, I'd have to think that for a raider, it feels somewhat odd to kill/finish the greatest raid boss in game without much challenge and then have to redo it, for it to really matter. It's like taking content away from raiders and giving it to random casual players.
It is also like telling Usain Bolt: "Oh wow not bad there fella, server first across the finish line.... but could you do it if you took off your shoe!?" ...........
RIP challenging raiding. ;(
Who cares about the hardcore raider. They consist of a few percentage point of the player population at most. Blizzard is wise NOT to cater to them.
So what? Take the content from a few people and give it to many .. it counts as a WIN in my books. Content is expensive to make. There is no point of not giving it to more players who can have fun with it.
Challenging raiding reserving for 1% of the players is fail and should be eliminated.
Have you seen another OTHER game (like an FPS) that only a few percentage of the players can finish the game and see all the bosses? This raider mentality just has to go.
Actually, I've done quite a few Uld hard modes up through IC. I never said I didn't or couldn't do them, I just said they're a stupid concept that lacks creativity.
You, on the other hand, argue it's a good idea to let everyone in the game see nearly all end game content, regardless of skill level or dedication. That's why WoW doesn't feel epic . . . because any warm body can /faceroll easy modes and see essentially the same encounter, if not the same loot (and sans Algalon).
BTW, because those encounters become so famliiar, you have high-end servers like Mal'Ganis and Kel'thuzad running wild on hard modes, where even green-geared toons get pulled through in PUGs, much less guild runs. That ties largely back to my complaints about handing out gear like candy . . .
But what I find really funny, and completely representative of the WoW community as a whole, is that you've now responded twice, and both times felt required to attack me personally as 'pathetic' and 'fail' because I disagree with you.
EDIT: I just read some of your recent posts. You're the most blind/biased WoW fanboi I've read in a long time. You're incapable of having an open minded debate about end game raiding.
That is just jealousy talking. You can't stand other people getting the same gear as you.
There is nothing wrong handing out candies. It makes people happy.
No matter how well you guys raid in WoW (or any other MMO), it won't get you paid or laid.
It's a game. No one cares about your 'achievements'. Get over yourselves.
If you want to show you're a man, take up boxing. Something that requires courage and hard work.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
How about: you have to learn and master the "hard" fight before you beat the encounter in the first place?
Why? The normal mode encounter serves as very good practice for the hardmode encounter. When you try to learn a complicated process, you start with the basic parts and then teach yourself the finer points as you master it.
Also, what does it matter if there are multiple difficulties of a fight? IF you feel you are good enough to start with the harmode right away then you can go right ahead. If you feel you need practice on an easier difficulty first then that' good as well.
Hardly any of the playerbase got to see BT and Sunwell before the nerf. So Blizzard implemented ezmode into their raid design to up that %. Personally, I think it ruined raiding in WoW, just my opinion.
"Why?" Read above. "Also, what does it matter if there are multiple difficulties of a fight?" Read above.
"IF you feel you are good enough to start with the harmode right away then you can go right ahead." No, doesn't work in reality. IF you feel you can beat the whole black temple in tier3 gear, you can go right ahead.
To summarize: The whole concept of hardmodes is assisted breathing: it reduces epic feeling and reduces immersiveness. Also not to mention that the hardmodes eliminates the fun and challenges from the elite mobs (trash) in the instance and make them an AOE farm fest to the "hard mode" boss fights. The trash can actually be dynamic and fun if they weren't faceroll victims.
I agree.
Just want to fill in that in these discussions of "only X % got to see that" you have to consider the time span Blizzard gives for the hardest instances in the game. Vanilla naxx was cleared world first by Nihilum some 2.5 months after its release. Then normal raiding guilds only had about 2 more months before news of the lootgiveaway Before The Storm patch was announced and the raiding community died. That's incredibly short lifespan for THE end game instance.
The above is also valid for Sunwell. And tbh, BT was accessible for quite a long time, no requirement needed, for everyone to at least conquer a couple of bosses.
A last thing to note is that a quite large percentege of an MMO population will never ever raid, or will only raid in short PUGable raids, or perhaps at most once per week. Could probably be 50% or more that won't ever consider raiding even if the loot dropped from the rooftops in all raids.
That's the most unintelligent post I've read for months here. Congratulations son.
I don't want for someone to care about my achievements in WoW, but I want the games I play to have a decent difficulty.
I probably got trolled, but that was one of the most retarded comments I've ever seen, totally pointless and out of place.
I quit playing WoW a few months ago. It was a very enjoyable game but after i go to level 80, i just thought of the constant raiding as more of a chore rather than being fun, but not because of the difficulty. After a certain point in the game, players begin to take things way to seriously and its just not fun anymore.
You forget a thing Zorn, about 75% of them(yes I pulled this number out of my ass, but looking at the 3 realms I play on, it's kinda true) just grind welfares in battlegrounds 24/7 and never touched Ulduar(maybe with a twist of fate, in a /2 pug, but otherwise no).
Algalon isn't my definiton of excellent game design: just like M'uru, it's a boss that deals a shitload of damage, almost like an AoE Patchwerk. They are very hard indeed, but they are based on high numbers, not on amazing individual skill.
The hardest boss in WOTLK was Yogg Saron 0 Heroic pre-nerfs. It was done by far less people than Algalon 25 and it needed amazing skills from everyone, plus certain luck from a RNG gods. But the amount of timing, reaction and class knowledge(hunters needed to do a perfect kite for example) needed for YG025 beat Algalon 25 by far.
/yawn
isnt this topic getting old? fanbois blindly defending blizzard even if they nuke a country & haters trying to make their points to deaf sheep?