Full disclosure - having made the terrible mistake of rolling Nightelf, but enjoying the healer priest role, I decided to reroll Draenei for the greatly improved racials and made maximum haste for level 70 after the expansion. Before the expansion, my guild had C`thun on farm status and made significant progress on Naxxramas.
After re-levelling, I joined a raider guild - and discovered that raiding (for me) was no longer fun. This issue has been discussed in miniscule detail on this and other forums and there is little point in re-hashing it. After a month of increasing disinterest in raiding, the guild decided I was not what they were looking for (quite reasonably) and I quit the game.
So far, so personal - and so boring. But, from other threads, not so unusual.
My question is ..... have the recent changes made *raiding* as fun as it was before the expansion? And - secondarily - is the Holy priest anywhere near as valued as it used to be?
I personally don't feel it is nearly as fun as it was before the expansion, but there are noticeable improvements (namely the consumables change).
I haven't gotten a chance at Kael'Thas or anything after that, but the content up to Vashj is reasonably fun and challenging, though some is challenging in a throw your computer out the window sort of way (Magtheridon, Leotheras I am looking at you!).
Kael'thas is my favorite fight in the game so far, keeping in mind that I never got past Sapphiron to see Kel'Thuzad and haven't seen much in BT/Hyjal yet.
have the recent changes made *raiding* as fun as it was before the expansion?
Well I'm not sure a forum is the best avenue for finding out, but obviously Blizzard has done a lot to improve the entertainment value and reduce the stupid crap quotient involved in raiding.
Have things improved? Yes. Easier entry (attunement quest series removed), smoother level of difficulty curve (boss tuning), less out-of-raid effort needed (alchemy nerf), better rewards (item buffs). If you're specifically talking about encounter design, no, TBC certainly doesn't reach Naxx level of cleverness, but I don't doubt we'll get there. The raid design team is still learning, it's largely a different team from the old stuff.
It's still the same game, just better tuned. Will it be more fun for you? It's all subjective, I'd wager you would have to give it a spin.
My issue with this expansion has always been how limited and linear the raiding progression is.
I'm not in a hardcore raiding guild, but being far from what i would call "true casual" I feel that I probably represent the median player. At lvl 60, there was a large number of instances still worth running, not to mention the raiding of ZG, AQ, MC. For most non-hardcore guilds you almost had to decide each week which ones you were going to run. This is even without counting the BWL, AQ40, Nax. There was just a lot of options.
After the expansion it's Kara, Kara, Kara till your eyes bleed and you finally have enough people with enough gear to start trying Gruul's Liar. Add this to the frustration of restrictive class selection in raids and now pointless "heroic" mode dungeons that no one wants to run. I would definately say that if it wasn't for the fact that I love the people in my guild and the comradery with them that I took would call it a day.
I think a lot of the problem lies with the increased level cap and the general lack of level 70 alts repped up and capable of raiding, and the general lack of will for most people to even do so. ZG, AQ, MC and even BWL were still viable instances in which you could drag some alts through and get them geared up and have some fun that way, but you just don't see that much with places like heroics, Kara and Gruul's Lair. Maybe this will change in the future, but I don't foresee too many people willing to roll serious alts all the way through 70 levels and then go through the level 70 progression of repping/keying/gearing all over again.
I believe this has been touched on partly in other threads, and basically it boils down to this.
Blizzard can only make so many unique fights or throw so many things at us at once. We're experienced raiders now, and we learn and adapt to new encounters much quicker and easier.
Things have improved, I still enjoy raiding as much as I ever did. My biggest problem was trying to get attuned to raid zones months after TBC was released because I took a break from WoW, but the latest changes have fixed that.
I would think that if someone didn't play vanilla WoW (or didn't raid) they would find the new zones just as fun and exciting as we did when we first entered them.
To answer your second question, I rerolled to a warlock after a year of playing a holy priest and having to sit out on raids for paladins, druids, and shaman.
I would think that if someone didn't play vanilla WoW (or didn't raid) they would find the new zones just as fun and exciting as we did when we first entered them.
I never saw past baron geddon in MC, and participated in a couple ony kills in wow 1.0. I'm having a blast in TBC. Part of it is a guld more in line with my personal goals (See all that the game has to offer, clear it before the next expansion, and have fun). We're getting into the T5 zones, commiting a couple horde firsts, and keeping pace with most of the high end guilds on our server (which is slow relative to most) with only 2-3 nights a week raiding. For a lot of hardcode raiders, I can see how its "just another day at the office"...but I'm digging it.
To your first question--I haven't raided as extensively as most of the posters here, but I find that when I do, I still enjoy it for the things I enjoy most about this game, that being spending time with my guild. I do find that I miss vanilla WoW's feeling of being part of something huge, but the shift from 40- to 25-mans may explain some of this.
Overall, though, I would say I'm very happy with TBC raiding. Being dramatically behind in terms of content progression means that I haven't seen any of buggy encounters that have frustrated so many around here.
To the second question, while Holy Priests are not bad healers, they certainly don't seem to hold the position of power they had prior to the expansion's release. The guilds that I've raided with tend to bring only one or two, typically replacing them with Paladins (as Druids and Shamans seem to have slightly different healing roles).
Some fights in Black Temple, Kael'Thas, Vashj are all good encounters. The rest are significantly worse than stuff before the expansion - in my opinion. The halving of raid size, and the razer's edge of encounters that don't need it - combined with a metric ton of trash is pretty stupid. You'll quickly forget the days when people cheered for kills - a good guild will kill a lot of these encounters in 3-4 hours (cmon thaddius in 3 hours? more like 2-3 weeks). Its just not the same.
Black temple shows there is some hope for improvement. But if you raided in Naxx you're going to be disappointed no matter how optimistic you are about it. That being said - if you're a raider, what other choice do you have? Its still the best game out there for raiding at the moment. I'm not sure why it is so difficult for other games spending millions on development to figure out what makes these games fun...
You'll quickly forget the days when people cheered for kills - a good guild will kill a lot of these encounters in 3-4 hours (cmon thaddius in 3 hours? more like 2-3 weeks). Its just not the same.
The only reason why Thaddius could possibly take so long was due to Blizzard's servers sucking so much. Had their servers been up to par when Naxxramas was released you would have seen progress at a similar speed that you are seeing in Black Temple.
TBC has improved dramatically from the start. Black Temple has been a success, the end of the zone is very difficult.
But is any part of TBC as good as Naxx?
We spent over a week on a lot of encounters I guess. Most of the naxx fights are a lot more epic than say, anatheron or gorefiend, which imo are both very good TBC fights.
I don't think servers would've changed what was about a 6 month zone clear for the best guilds, into a 2-3 week clear.
Edit: All I'm saying is I know people are going to paint this rosy picture of TBC raiding because its what we have to deal with today - but being as realistic and honest as I can be about it - even though I raid in it 4-5 hours a night... it just isn't as good, in my opinion. They have come a long ways - but pre 2.1 had raiders leaving the game in a mass exodus because it was so poor... so it went from intolerable to tolerable. Yes, BT is good - but I still consider Naxx significantly better.
The only bad thing in regards to a handful of encounters is the sheer amount of random luck that can simply strike you down, no matter how much you prepare for it.
Stupid things like Tidewalkers Earthquake + Tombs take some incredibly skill to counter act. Hydross' double "transition" is a guaranteed wipe. Leotheras' threat list being flakey as hell after a whirlwind. Kerethress spiteifire totems + shadow bolts lead to straight up one shots on casters. Lady Vashj being able to root melee and then static charge one of them. yea, that's fun to heal through. Solarian? Hah. Alar's charge mechanic is always fun to deal with. Kaelthas is great fun, but is such a delicate balet, I just wish the dps requirement wasn't so insane. Even rage winterchill can 1 shot casters if you arn't in full hp gear, and don't have a fleet of healers who can twitch faster than an epileptic monkey to get that heal off before you die to ice bolt.
It's just little things that lead to "insta gib" situations that seem like god himself decends from the sky and says "One of you is going to die, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it".
On the flip side, it can definitly be argued that just about all of those are "counterable" by "smart" players. And for many, playing at that level means being bleeding edge, and having a great deal of skill over the average player. I wouldn't mind some of these mechanics if you could outgear them, to farm them later. But even after you are fully geared up, the 1 shotting of random people is still something that happens far too frequently.
I don't think servers would've changed what was about a 6 month zone clear for the best guilds, into a 2-3 week clear.
Pretty sure multiple people have said it multiple times but 4H was the stumbling block in Naxx. Guilds that plowed through Hyjal and BT very likely plowed through Naxx up till 4H in a similar amount of time. Naxx was a great zone, with a giant step up in raid coordination/gearing/class requirements at the end.
Pretty sure multiple people have said it multiple times but 4H was the stumbling block in Naxx. Guilds that plowed through Hyjal and BT very likely plowed through Naxx up till 4H in a similar amount of time. Naxx was a great zone, with a giant step up in raid coordination/gearing/class requirements at the end.
It took a very long while before guilds were attempting 4H. I believe it was 1-2 months to kill him for the first few guilds. We got him in around 2 weeks ourselves - benefiting from knowledge about the fight. The entire zone had a lot of difficult fights.
I remember gothik took us a while for instance... as did thaddius. I don't think there is much more to it other than most guilds on average spent way longer on naxx kills than TBC kills. Archimonde in 2-4 hours? I'm not sure we killed Anub'rhekan that fast.
I mean I know this sounds like I'm complaining things aren't hard enough. Strangely they seem about as hard, but are at the same time more frustrating. I'm not sure how to describe it beyond that. Taking a long time isn't a testament to a great encounter - but I'm saying that stuff in Naxx felt a hell of a lot more epic than stuff in BC. And perhaps part of that was the sheer amount of time invested in each encounter.
We could keep searching for reasons why Naxx took so much longer I guess. Maybe its because we're better at the game! Or because horde have paladins. It seems to me that a some of the difficulty added to these fights are in the chance of being instagibbed rather than difficulty through execution. Maybe that does in fact mean we're better now... But it seems like a poor way to add difficulty. I mean who liked sapphiron more than 4h?
The lack of an alternate 10-man raiding zone is a big hole right now, but otherwise it seems like the raiding game is pretty solid. Probably more or less what Blizzard initially intended, with SSC/TK being plowed through by top guilds and gradually out-geared by middle-tier guilds. I would be shocked if there wasn't a conscious decision by Blizzard to stump raiders at SSC/TK for a long time. They still haven't figured out mana potions, but they've alleviated consumables otherwise and have at least tried to trivialize the acquisition of mana potions.
The major issue I see is that the game environment/atmosphere feels boring and kinda claustrophobic compared to pre-TBC. Azeroth still "feels" like it has stuff going on, whereas Outland feels like it's been completely conquered. I mean, you've basically seen every square inch of real estate that Outland has to offer by the time you've finished Black Temple. This probably isn't particularly relevant to most hardcore raiders, but it is an issue for the common player.
I have to agree with Quigon fully on this one, there are a lot of pretty cool encounters in TBC, Kael'thas is pretty well designed, Teron Gorefiend is fun, I even like Gurtogg Bloodboil. However, compared to Naxx, it's just not even close. The less fun encounters in Naxx were on par with some of the better ones in TBC in my opinion. Even Anub'rekan was on par with a lot of TBC encounters in terms of complexity.
The thing that makes TBC raiding difficult is the level of individual responsibility and how damaging it can be to the raid to lose one person. A new encounter in TBC you lose 2 dps and you're very likely to not hit the enrage timer. We get some dps cleaved on Gurtogg, or one person screws up ghosts on Gorefiend, it could very well be a wipe. On the other side, the difficulty of individual tasks seem easier to me. Most fights yes, you can get screwed by one death, but that one death is very easy to avoid.
As Quigon said, look at the pace of clearing in TBC, I think the fights that took us the longest took a few days of raiding at most, and a lot of times the only reason it took that long was because some people decided to play like retards for a bit and had the same stupid stuff wipe us for way longer than it should have. Now it's still possible I'll be surprised by the end of BT, since we've still got some stuff to kill there, but even just judging from the generic progression I don't think we'll see anything on the level of some of the harder fights. I know of course this is skewed by the fact the horsemen took months, but it's still true that even Kel'thuzad, Sapphiron, and Thaddius took more than a day for most guilds, Patchwerk blocked people for a long time without being bugged, but I don't see much like that in TBC, and if there is, everything is limited to the end of BT, and having at most 4 actually difficult bosses in an entire expansion kind of bothers me.
Quigon: I honestly think the big difference in Naxx and TBC in difficulty had to do with the fact that TBC difficulty is mostly stuff like one person dies, you miss the enrage timer, tank gets one shot, dps doesn't hit the enrage timer, in Naxx, you could have some people die, but performing on the encounters on an individual level seemed much harder.
The major issue I see is that the game environment/atmosphere feels boring and kinda claustrophobic compared to pre-TBC. Azeroth still "feels" like it has stuff going on, whereas Outland feels like it's been completely conquered. I mean, you've basically seen every square inch of real estate that Outland has to offer by the time you've finished Black Temple. This probably isn't particularly relevant to most hardcore raiders, but it is an issue for the common player.
How many "common players" had finished Black Temple?
How many "common players" had finished Black Temple?
That wasn't really my point; my point was just that it's rather easy to exhaustively cover everything in Outland, whereas Azeroth has tons of land mass that's just roped off and thus unexplorable (but has the potential to be explored at some point in the future). Azeroth feels big, Outland feels tiny. Even the dungeons are short and very linear. Feeling like part of a living, breathing world is important to a lot of people.
To play devil's advocate for a second: on one hand knocking over new bosses regularly in 1 or 2 night sittings might seem less epic, but it does have the advantage of the feel of continuous progress.
There's nothing better to kill guild morale than wiping for weeks on the same encounter.
Given the choice between regular 'brick wall' encounters and a fairly steady progression through a longer list of bosses, I tend to prefer the latter.
Obviously there's a balance to be struck - if the encounters are too easy, the satisfaction of winning is hollow.
Our guild is relatively new though, so I'm sure I have a different perspective, to say Quigon above.
That wasn't really my point; my point was just that it's rather easy to exhaustively cover everything in Outland, whereas Azeroth has tons of land mass that's just roped off and thus unexplorable (but has the potential to be explored at some point in the future). Azeroth feels big, Outland feels tiny. Even the dungeons are short and very linear. Feeling like part of a living, breathing world is important to a lot of people.
Maybe it is because during the course of leveling up (Questing), you had already covered a lot of spaces that outland provides.
To play devil's advocate for a second: on one hand knocking over new bosses regularly in 1 or 2 night sittings might seem less epic, but it does have the advantage of the feel of continuous progress.
I dunno, when we first dropped Patchwerk I thought some of the people in our guild were going to self-combust with excitement. I would take 1 patchwerk kill for 2 gorefiend kills anyday - and I actually love gorefiend as a fight (I think its one of the better ones in TBC).
However, I agree that keeping the carrot and stick moving is important - and what is quick for a high end guild will be a brick wall for others, so perhaps that is how it has to be.
Maybe it is because during the course of leveling up (Questing), you had already covered a lot of spaces that outland provides.
Well, more specifically, you covered all of the spaces that outland provides. Except a couple of dungeons, which aren't particularly deep anyway. This is pretty much off-topic I guess, although it's one of the things that bothers me a bit. I just don't care about Outland.
I dunno, when we first dropped Patchwerk I thought some of the people in our guild were going to self-combust with excitement. I would take 1 patchwerk kill for 2 gorefiend kills anyday - and I actually love gorefiend as a fight (I think its one of the better ones in TBC).
This is exactly what killing Vashj or Leo felt like for us. I really think it is about context. When you were killing Patchwerk your guild probably had a similar amount of kills under their belt compared to where we are now.
As you stand now, you have this massive body of kills as a group, and any new kill is naturally going to be measured vs past experience. Even something of the same 'difficulty' or 'epic quality' will simply be the second time you've experienced it, rather than the first.
Perhaps I'm missing something crucial, but I've not had as much fun in WoW ever.
So ~1 month from start to everything up to 4h dead.
About 3 Weeks ago they got started on BT/Hyjal. Now they are up to Illidan. Sure it is a bit faster but no where near the 6 month -> 2-3 week comparison you threw out.
06/28/07, 5:00 PM
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