Elitist Jerks - View Single Post - Progressive Nerfs - suiting instances for competion among raiders and casual friendly

Hypatia · 02/22/08, 3:41 AM

It's worth noting that the place where serious serious nerfage is starting to hit is the waaaay earliest part of the 25-man raid game. Certainly, SSC and TK have seen their share of nerfs already, but I think most people would say that they're still reasonably challenging. Not bleeding edge, for sure, but challenging. Likewise the Magtheridon encounter, up until this nerf that will be going live in 2.4—that change trivializes what was the key coordination challenge of the fight.

If anything, I'd say that this change (along with the Ony bag and gems) is intended to turn Maggie into the PUG 25-man raid of choice. Something to let people who would not ordinarily have any chance of seeing 25-man content at all get their feet wet. Have you got a solid tank, a couple of solid healers, and five people who can click on command? Then you can scrape bottom of the General channel and get some people together to go out and take him down.

And the key thing here is that these are people who have now seen at least a *little* bit of what it's like to raid in a 25-man, and maybe they'll start getting together with the same people regularly and start reading up on how to improve their performance and... what do you know, they're raiding!

When BC launched, I'm not sure there was really room for a "training wheels" raid, which would let people get used to the idea of working with 24 other folks and 25-man style encounters, without making them go all the way and form a guild or alliance with the intent to be raiders. Now that pretty much anybody who's seriously pursuing raiding is in T5 content, though, this encounter makes a great deal of sense as a gentle introduction. The people who experience it now probably won't be hitting T6 or T6+ content before WotLK, no matter what they do—but they will go into WotLK having some idea what 25-man raiding is about.

As for whether WotLK's major raids should assume higher level skills, rather than base-level raiding skills? It's hard to say. On the one hand, Blizzard does need to preserve an entry path to new raiding guilds forming from the aether—and old-world and BC raids really don't fit the bill, unless they backport some of the older raids as they're doing with Naxx to act as introductory raids. On the other hand, there's not going to be the sort of reorganization and re-learning that the transition from 40-man to 25-man raids produced (breaking and re-forming raid guilds, etc.), and that means people are going to come in chomping at the bit to face encounters that are technically challenging right off the bat.

If you make the new raiders jump right in to highly scripted encounters requiring a lot of coordination, they're going to be totally lost. But if you make the old raiders jump through hoops before they're allowed to sit at the big kids table, they're going to be a bit peeved. If anything, I think that having a set of introductory 25-man raids which can act as casual/pug raids in the future is a reasonable way to go—as long as those raids can also be more or less skipped by the serious raiders. Basically, if you're hard-core enough to dive right in without gearing up, you'll get a bit of additional challenge, but still be able to make progress. The gear from the intro raids might help, but could be farmed by the hardcore raiders on a quick one-night sort of basis. The newbie raiders, on the other hand, can face the intro raids that introduce them slowly to increasing levels of coordination, so that when they arrive where the hardcore raiders started, they're not as skilled, but they are better geared than the hardcore folks were when they jumped in, which will let them keep progressing and learning through the more difficult encounters.

In short, arrange the "hardcore entry level" raids to be challenging and doable with good skills without having to gear up from the "training level" raids first. And aim so that by the time the "newbie raiders" make it through the "hardcore entry level" raids, they're at approximately the same gear and skill level as the hardcore raiders, but some months later.

(Note to self: Don't write messages in the wee hours of the morning. Even more likely to turn into a wall of text than normal.)

02/22/08, 3:41 AM	#109 (permalink)
Hypatia Von Kaiser Hypatia Human Warrior <The Inner Light> Lightbringer	It's worth noting that the place where serious serious nerfage is starting to hit is the waaaay earliest part of the 25-man raid game. Certainly, SSC and TK have seen their share of nerfs already, but I think most people would say that they're still reasonably challenging. Not bleeding edge, for sure, but challenging. Likewise the Magtheridon encounter, up until this nerf that will be going live in 2.4—that change trivializes what was the key coordination challenge of the fight. If anything, I'd say that this change (along with the Ony bag and gems) is intended to turn Maggie into the PUG 25-man raid of choice. Something to let people who would not ordinarily have any chance of seeing 25-man content at all get their feet wet. Have you got a solid tank, a couple of solid healers, and five people who can click on command? Then you can scrape bottom of the General channel and get some people together to go out and take him down. And the key thing here is that these are people who have now seen at least a little bit of what it's like to raid in a 25-man, and maybe they'll start getting together with the same people regularly and start reading up on how to improve their performance and... what do you know, they're raiding! When BC launched, I'm not sure there was really room for a "training wheels" raid, which would let people get used to the idea of working with 24 other folks and 25-man style encounters, without making them go all the way and form a guild or alliance with the intent to be raiders. Now that pretty much anybody who's seriously pursuing raiding is in T5 content, though, this encounter makes a great deal of sense as a gentle introduction. The people who experience it now probably won't be hitting T6 or T6+ content before WotLK, no matter what they do—but they will go into WotLK having some idea what 25-man raiding is about. As for whether WotLK's major raids should assume higher level skills, rather than base-level raiding skills? It's hard to say. On the one hand, Blizzard does need to preserve an entry path to new raiding guilds forming from the aether—and old-world and BC raids really don't fit the bill, unless they backport some of the older raids as they're doing with Naxx to act as introductory raids. On the other hand, there's not going to be the sort of reorganization and re-learning that the transition from 40-man to 25-man raids produced (breaking and re-forming raid guilds, etc.), and that means people are going to come in chomping at the bit to face encounters that are technically challenging right off the bat. If you make the new raiders jump right in to highly scripted encounters requiring a lot of coordination, they're going to be totally lost. But if you make the old raiders jump through hoops before they're allowed to sit at the big kids table, they're going to be a bit peeved. If anything, I think that having a set of introductory 25-man raids which can act as casual/pug raids in the future is a reasonable way to go—as long as those raids can also be more or less skipped by the serious raiders. Basically, if you're hard-core enough to dive right in without gearing up, you'll get a bit of additional challenge, but still be able to make progress. The gear from the intro raids might help, but could be farmed by the hardcore raiders on a quick one-night sort of basis. The newbie raiders, on the other hand, can face the intro raids that introduce them slowly to increasing levels of coordination, so that when they arrive where the hardcore raiders started, they're not as skilled, but they are better geared than the hardcore folks were when they jumped in, which will let them keep progressing and learning through the more difficult encounters. In short, arrange the "hardcore entry level" raids to be challenging and doable with good skills without having to gear up from the "training level" raids first. And aim so that by the time the "newbie raiders" make it through the "hardcore entry level" raids, they're at approximately the same gear and skill level as the hardcore raiders, but some months later. (Note to self: Don't write messages in the wee hours of the morning. Even more likely to turn into a wall of text than normal.)