Copernicus

The idea behind having a world portion of the dungeon (all the elites outside of a dungeon) was that players could wait there in smalls groups while looking for more people to run the dungeon with. It didn't work very well and eventually got replaced by the meeting stones. They were also slightly strange as they counted as being in the dungeon in terms of XP and loot, which made them great for powerleveling or goldfarming.

The big, sprawling dungeons being cool seems to be nostalgia talking. What it mostly came down to was people skipping bosses that they didn't want to fight or didn't have the loot they wanted. Remember having to reclear to Timmy or all the times your group skipped Solakar Flamewreath in UBRS? And most dungeons have trash packs that can be skipped or bypassed- even the straight line dungeon of Shattered Halls has the four gladiator packs that can be ignored and the sewers that can be bypassed. I like the idea of bosses being summoned, such as with Dire Maul and now Sethek Halls. Optional bosses are fun, and it allows for them to be a reward without having to convince people to clear extra trash packs.

 

Deris

I hope they don't homogenize dungeons too much and make them all too similar. Its ok if there is a Dire Maul winged area, a few easy short trip dungeons like the Auch Instances, and a sprawling very hard dungeon like BRD. Just make the loot worthwhile, and people WILL go. I'd love a hard 5 man the pre-tuning Heroics as stupid as they were could be a blast at times.

 

Jebraltar

Remember what it was like when you were doing Wailing Caverns and someone had to drop? Remember waiting for the rest of your group to get there so that you could clear the half-mile of trash so you could start the instance?

I was actually thrilled to see that there were no horrible, horrible sections of trash outside of an instance. Do you really need to fight the trash before you get into the instance? I always felt that there was plenty of trash in dungeons as it is...

Let's not even get into the other horrible ideas associated with that - the quest NPCs outside of those instances that were hard as hell to get groups for, for instance, because no one wanted to clear the stupid trash to get to a boss with no loot.

 

Lithose

YouTube - Blizzcon 2007 - Class Discussion Panel 4/6

Thats really not what was said at all..They said that each spec would never be as good as other specific specs in certain area's (IE prot will never be arms in PvP). They did, however, say that they intend to improve aspects to make them viable.

 

Kokolums

I think the difficulty level in raiding primarily revolves around two issues:

1. server sizes.

If you are on a small server, you essentially have no shot at killing Illidan. My alliance toon is on Anub'arak. I'm in the #1 alliance guild on that server. But that means we have killed Gruul. The playerbase is just too small to facilitate effective raiding. It doesn't matter how skilled I am, I cannot find a guild where I'm at to go further than Gruul, unless I fork out another $25 to transfer. Blizzard needs to figure out a way to fix this problem.

2. Rapid release of xpacs.

The release of new content seems to be timed to prevent the top end guilds on the biggest servers from getting bored. There might be strong guilds on smaller-but-not-tiny servers that will also not see the Sunwell because they can't quite build up fast enough.

Makes little sense for Blizzard to put tiny servers on the recommended list, because if the new and unaware players go there, they have no shot to see end game later on. I know there is apparently some issues that prevent Blizzard from doing xserver instances, but that would really be nice and probably fix everything.

 

Douglas

Eh. Consider the actual practical difference if instead of unlocking a new character it changed your old character into a Death Knight.

If the amount of work involved in making that transition was about the same as the work involved in doing this quest and then leveing from wherever the DK starts up to 80, then the total amount of work involved is the same.

And heck, that even makes sense -- in WarCraft 3: TFT, for several of the missions, Arthas lost levels. So having someone have to re-level after switching to Death Knight actually makes sense within the WarCraft milieu. It's far from unprecedented.

So if you are more comfortable with that way of thinking of it, just pick a Death Knight that's the same race and gender as your current character and pretend that's what's going on. The only difference is you get to save a "checkpoint" of your character before the change, and you have the option of picking a different race and gender (and server, I think).

 

Copernicus

Looks like there's a little bit on information on Zul'Aman, but nothing beyond the first pull.

Hands on with Zul'Aman - WOW Insider

 

Deliverance

I tend to think you are off the track here and confusing symptoms following from the difficulty with the difficulty itself. Your assumption seems to be that overall it is reasonable that, in order to see all content in the game, you should be in the sort of guild that can collect a full raidgroup of very skilled and dedicated players such as requires a large player-base to provide by picking and choosing from the best. In other words, that the difficulty of content is right since it caters to such a raidgroup, and that the true difficulty comes from organization.

I'd like to challenge that assumption. Given how WoW is "bringing raids to the masses" (to use an oft repeated blurb) and how WoW character progression is generally set up as "single->group->raid" it looks like raids are not intentionally designed for hardcore raiding guilds despite the natural inclinations of designers with a history of hardcore-raiding to produce content at a difficulty level that they, themselves, would enjoy.

If an approach like you believe is necessary to see all content is actually really, truly, necessary, then the content is plain and simply too hard for the player-base at large, and the easiest solution that will please more players than it will hurt would be to reduce the difficulty of the content sufficiently to open it up to the masses. Reduce damage, hitpoints, and have greater tolerance for individual mistakes.

In other words, the difficulty level in raiding revolves primarily around whether the content is too difficult for your average player or guild of players and not around server sizes (though the difficulty being too high certainly leads to symptoms such as you note) or rate of release of expansion packs.

It will be interesting to see how Blizzard tackles it in the expansion. There is no doubt that the simple solution as I advocate above (reduce content difficulty significantly, more tolerance for a couple of individual major screw-ups on a fight rather than requiring near-perfect executing from the majority) would work for a large portion of the player base, but it would certainly alienate other players including some of the most vocal communities, not to mention a significant loss of "street cred" in the "we designed a more awesome dungeon than you guys" when developers chat cross-company.

 

Douglas

My bet is that in either a content patch or an expansion that really fleshes out the Emerald Dream, the "Archdruid" hero class will be added.

Or, if a content patch or expansion based on the Maelstrom and the islands out in the ocean comes first, maybe there will be some fleshing out of Island Trolls, complete with a "Witch Doctor" hero class.

Either way, the second hero class is likely to be one that can heal I think, for the same exact reasons that the first one is one that can tank -- to enable some of those "extra" DPSers to reroll into one of the more scarce roles without having to grind levels again. As much as that's frustrating for long-time tanks, I think it's good for the health of the game. Even though my main is a healer, I hope they do it.

 

berg

His point is that some servers will have many end game raiding guilds and some will have few or none. My server has, I think, 6 guilds that have killed Kael. There are some servers that have no progress past gruul. To a person rolling a new character, the 2 servers are indistinguishable which is a problem.

Imagine a player in a small guild who discovers he really likes raiding based off of experience in Karazan. Unfortunately his server has no raid progression in ssc or tk. What is this guy to do, transfer away from any friends he has made? From the other side how often have T6 guilds had to shoot down apps from people wanting to server transfer who were wearing nothing but Karazhan crap? Those guys gear might be great on their server but it is slop by our standards.

I think such a player has a genuine complaint and there is no easy solution.

 

Deliverance

I quite agree that he has a genuine complaint but I consider the major reason for his complaint to arise in the first place being that the content is simply too hard for the majority of players and hence you end up with servers that, while certainly having many players interested in raiding, don't have enough players of the skill/organization to actually succeed.

As you say, take the one in a guild with some friends - and if they aren't 25 friends they can try to cooperate with another guild as advance as theirs to field 25 people; If they cannot succeed, your immediate answer is along the lines of "then he'll have to transfer to another guild, which is bad, possibly even to another server, thus losing his friends, which is even worse, and it may not even be possible to join such a guild for various reasons anyhow". That may well be true for a player whose major reason for being in a guild is raid-progress, but, as far as I'm concerned, that's focusing on the symptoms, not the cause: The real problem, insofar as there is a problem in that scenario, is that the content is too difficult for him and his friends to succeed in the first place. Keeping friends together and avoiding breaking social ties while allowing your players to visit the in-game content ought to, not so much from a moral as from an economic point of view, be one of the highest priorities for a game where social ties play a major role in player-retention (and hence monthly payment).


EDIT: Sorry, this is close to being unconstructive - it is just that so often the focus seems to be on alleviating symptoms rather than going for the root of the issue: "If things seem too difficulty they probably are". Fugazor has some much more readable constructive ideas in the next post.

 

Fugazor

You could scale down all content to 10 man. The less people the better and thats the lowest you can go.

You could add difficulty settings, easy - something around Gruul, medium - something around SSC/TK (end end end bosses like Vash/Kael), hard - well... Yup loot would be worse but it would be good as long as there would be upgrades.

Something to allow all people to "finish" game, see all content, because for now it is "if you are not in top end guild you are fucked and will never see anything past SSC/TK".

Of course you could try a transfer but:
a) you will loose all your friends and for me it is the only reason I am still playing for example
b) your class is probably not needed/they are full
c) your gear is probably not good enough (and you cannot get better)

 

aleyro

I'm really suprised that we haven't heard about a Demon Hunter hero class yet- i could see it as a combo caster/melee.

 

Northerner

Worse yet, those that can distinguish between the two broad server types will almost always be better off rolling on the mature server. This only makes the problem worse by overpopulating the "good" servers and making the dead ones even less viable.

After leaving our heavily queued (but also fairly poor at progression) server, my guild is now on a complete sandbox of a server. Pretty much all of our applicants are cross-server and it's quite painful. We've even toyed around with the idea of transferring (paid this time) but it just isn't going to happen. With multiple people having 6+ level 60+ characters, it's simply too much cash to pay out for no guaranteed result.

I do know this though, if and when we have a handful of key people quit we'll be in some serious trouble.

 

Fugazor

Like... moonkins are in devs vision?

Anyhow if they want to add even more melee classes then they would need to fix melee being inferior to ranged in raids.


You are not alone. Horde on PvE server is well... worst place to be in WoW probably I noted for future MMO: "never roll on underpopulated side to be nice".

 

Herde

I don't really see how melee are inferior - sure, they have to be healed a bit more but the damage potential is much greater. I think its a fair tradeoff.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Demon hunter would make for a great hero class, especially if it had a system similar to Devil May Cry/God of War, where instead of demon form just being cooldown based, you build up some sort of meter by doing melee damage and once it's full, you get to go into demon form.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Gryzemuis

I think you are over-rating the difficulty of this game. And under-estimating the skill of the average WoW player.

If you look at the general population on your server, you will probably see a lot of people in only Karazhan gear. Or even worse, in blues. And it seems your conclusion is that those players don't have "the skills" to beat SSC or TK. I don't think so. The average WoW player can learn and improve. Even when a player has soloed his way to 60 or 70, and never has done any group play, the majority will learn to play in 5-man dungeons. They will learn to control their aggro, learn to use crowd control, learn to not break crowd control, etc. People thought that the average player would never be able to kill bosses in MC. Well, MC had been nerfed, but still many more players beat bosses there than people predicted in early 2005.

The biggest problem is organization. Imho, the fact that Karazhan is a success proves that the average WoW player can learn and improve, as long as he gets a chance. Getting 10 people together is doable for most players. Getting 40 people together is not. Besides that, even if you could get 40 people together, many do not enjoy such a large guild. And if you join a guild only because of the progression, chances are it is a lot less fun to be in such a guild. At least the guilds I've been in. And from what I've heard, there are many progression guilds that are run by their officers like it is the army. No thanks. I also believe that on european servers these problems are even bigger, because of language and cultural differences. It is just no fun to be Turkish in a guild full of Greeks with Greek officers.

At lvl60 I used to be a "scrub" player in blues. Been in MC, but got no loot there. One day I got into a progression guild, and the next day I was fighting in AQ40 and Naxx. I was able to adjust just fine. Two months later when I had some proper gear, people suddenly knew who I was, started to talk to me, etc. As if my knowledge or skill suddenly had increased. But I was still the same player that I was when I had blue gear. In an RPG we are our character. And our character in WoW can only be judged by the gear he's wearing. But that gear really doesn't say anything about the skills of the player. Don't get confused.

There are loads of players in WoW who could beat all content. Of course there are differences in skill. Some people will be able to learn quicker and beat content quicker. Some people will never be good enough. But that majority of players is blocked from progress by organizational difficulty. Not by the difficulty of the game. If you want to allow more players to see more content, you got to fix that.

 

• Shabadu

Zul'aman sounds pretty killer.

 

Zzbzq

Heal or something completely different would be preferable.

But unlikely. The hero would basically have to be a blademaster or demonhunter. After that, the tauren chieftan, dark ranger, mountain king, dreadlord, are some of the popular heroes somewhat in that order, and add the archmage and farseer as some of the best/most used. Making up new classes or using normal WC3 units defeats the purpose for me. -Maybe- using normal WC2 units since that game worked entirely differently.

Really, the only healing heroes were the deathknight (biggest heal bitch of all actually), paladin, shadowhunter, and goblin alchemist. There was some blizcon talk about shamans getting some sort of CC, so that pretty much crosses out shadowhunter as it would be exactly a shaman. That's one of the problems with the idea of hero classes... all our classes are already better than heroes.

Clearly neither the blademaster or demonhunter is a healing class. The demonhunter, however, is so vaguely defined that you might be able to stretch it into some sort of true hybrid class which buffs and does CC, and then is forced to split time between healing and dps through an innovative resource system. Precedent is that they wear no armor, have mana burn and something resembling shadow form, so there must be some priest in there somewhere! I think another healer is just untenable. There's no point to making a hero class which isn't one of those aforementioned top 4-6. Every person who ever begged and pleaded for hero classes was really begging for a blademaster or demonhunter.

 

tedv

There are a lot of subtle signs that show when a player is a "diamond in the rough". You can often tell when someone is undergeared but overskilled in their current guild, and it's not always from perfect play. For example, I once wrote this about an undergeared trial:

But I really feel that players like this are the exception, not the rule. There ARE a lot of talented players in bad guilds out there, and many of them don't know how talented they really are. But there are a lot more players who are just flat out bad, and it's too time consuming to actively go out and find the good ones scattered in there. You just have to get lucky.

 

andastra

They might have to totally change some encounters to retune Naxx for 25 players. 6-8 tanks for 4H on a 25-man would be nasty. Only way I think they can do this is to change how the marks work completely or remove them. If they remove marks, you can probably tank Thane and Mograine in the same spot and offtank Zeliek and Blowme on the other corners. The lack of having to rotate would make the fight a lot easier though.

I certainly wouldn't want to do another Loatheb where farming lots of shadow prot potions are required. 25-man Thaddius should be a lot of fun, though.

 

Earthhoof

They could tie the marks instead to physical areas in the room, so that instead of tank-swapping you'd have to merry-go-round the four bosses to keep mark stacks off (I guess you could oscillate back and forth, too). They could also lower the general melee damage of the four, and increase the significance of the special abilities to compensate, allowing you to tank them with alternative classes (though the lack of a "taunt" is, I suppose, the thing necessary for 4H tanking, not just threat or survivability).

As someone who's read a lot about these fights but (sadly) never got to see them pre-expansion (or post-expansion, yet), I would actually be really interested in seeing some of these fights retuned for 25 and for Level 70+ classes and abilities. I hear nothing but praise for Naxx, and I think it would be a fun chance to reuse excellent content (for people who didn't see it before) and to add some new surprises and interesting twists on the old mechanics for those who did it before.

 

Sapp

You could make the marks scale much much slower (so that instead of having ~30 seconds of "in time" you have basically a minute or two, end result tank swaps only need to be done 3-4 times across the whole fight), you can also make the mark radius much smaller or fade duration much quicker, to allow the original 5 tank concept to work (or more likely, 4 tank + Taunting paladin to move each horseman to his new tank in the cycle).

A lot of the difficulty of the fight is how tight the tolerances on tank swapping were, resulting in the 8 tank solution. Ease off on that a bit and you can do some more interesting things with four, and every guild nowadays can consistently field 4 tanks in most any given raid, if needed.

They already hit like women. The special abilities and marks were always the threat, except for Mograine because of his proc. All of them had only the least part of their melee as the threat. What killed tanks was always taunt resists leaving them in mark or stepping in a void zone or bad meteors.

 

Emeraude

You can actually do 4H with 5 tanks atm, the inflated HP pools make it much easier to slack and take your time, and the inflated raid damage makes it much easier to burn down each boss faster(though I imagine you'd lost a bit of that DPS in a 25-man format).