javelin

Actually, a dual ladder system seems to work significantly well, and was how my old guild tackled AQ40/Naxx. Once we got to Huhu, we pretty much stopped and spent much of the week farming NR gear, and instead went into Naxx to pick of an easy boss or 2 (yes, we were slow). Keeping up a level of new activity was important to prevent burnout, and kept everybody fresh. Offering divergent progression to get to the top (I don't know why this image popped into my head, but I thought like the ninja wall jumping from Ninja Gaiden) seems to work to allow a constant sense of progression in the raider's minds.

I still think there should be a single, definitive, culminating dungeon to finish out an expansion. Arthas should be the final badass of WoTLK, not just 'what's behind final instance #1'.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should chellenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.--Mark Twain

 

Moogul

Another thing you could do, perhaps, is vary the *amount* of loot. Imagine if BugTrioMk2 dropped T7 gloves, if you kill UndeadVem last, you get 2 tokens, but if you kill UndeadKri last, you get 3 tokens. That way people are never really going to moan that they want to do it the easy way if they can do it the hard way, and it gives the better guilds a little more of a challenge and rewards them by gearing them up quicker.

Of course, it wouldn't have to be tokens - I know in the recent patch discussion people bring up how set tokens are more common than the little pieces of offset loot - trinkets, rings etc., so you could just have it drop an extra offset item. By having drops in addition to the easymode drops, the only reason people could have for not doing the hardversion if they're capable of it is laziness.

Think along the lines of the ZA chest rewards, but apply them to the Bug Trio method:

UndeadVem drops an Armour piece
UndeadYauj drops an Armour piece and a Weapon
UndeadKri drops an Armour piece and a Weapon and a Ring

Since each loot table favours most/all specs, you wont really get a case of 'oh the healers don't need and UndeadKri loot, let's just do UndeadVem so we can clear to The Twin DeathKnights quicker'

 

Viia

This simply is not true.

I've been in a full raid, fully flasked, with correctly spec'd people who were simply not good enough at the game to perform adequately. I'll use Vashj as an example over Kael though I'm sure the same thing applies. We had several dps who were pretty well geared and just had really bad awareness, didn't notice spawns, and just could not react fast enough to dps the adds down. They also had an issue finding the right person to throw the core to/clicking/throwing fast enough.

They were trying, and judging by the level of frustration (from them) it was beyond their skill level.

It's hard to believe that someone could be that slow, or not be 'aware' enough to make these decisions and to fix these problems, but I've seen really bad players play, in person, and while you can help them to an extent... it's a huge time investment and then you have to take into consideration their maximum skill level, which they may be at.

 

SanSul

I don't get the logic. Are you suggesting there is only a maximum amount of difficulty points in the pot, and are distributed to each boss, and Kael got the biggest share, meaning most every boss past him had to be a pushover? Its a bit stupid that easier bosses drop better loot, but one of the hardest bosses in the game is the block to said content.

Kael's difficulty needs to be nerfed, and the difficulty in each successive boss needs to be buffed, but unfortunately that is just far to much to ask for Blizzard at this point, because they have barely been able to make original/entertaining encounters save for the gems. But where is the middle ground, a boss these days is either a stupid pushover with no original abilities, or a very quality encounter and a serious challenge.

"If you can't kill Gruul 1.0 with all the bugs, crappy Karazhan gear, pvp resilience, then you just suck" Its funny what you say now sounds so much exactly what top tier guilds were saying about the original Gruul, and yet look at where we are now.

NO ONE IS IN HYJAL or BT. Can you not get that through your head? Raiding is failing. People are getting sick and tired of paying for content they can't even enter (Like Naxx to wipe) that is offering mediocre gear upgrades over arena, or in some cases downgrades, and is rediculously hard to even start. At this point, if you are way past Kael, what does it matter if they nerf him so guilds that pay more to Blizzard then your individual, or small group of Black temple guilds, want a shot at him. I didn't realize killing a raid bosses required a master's in Elitist Jerks doctrine and specs and consumables, and what not.

 

XI-

I've seen plenty of people in T6 who can't even gear and spec themselves correctly, and you expect me to believe that you found some perfect storm raid of people who did that before Vashj, and yet were still too fucking incompetent to kill the boss. Pardon me if I don't believe that for a second.

BTW core macros++ another thing that you don't need to have any more brain power than my lunch to accomplish.

Also you said, you can help them, and they can change, this implies that they are making a choice to be bad players because they simply don't care. Why should content be dumbed down for players who aren't willing to help themselves, this isn't a case of the content being too hard, it's a case of the playerbase being unwilling to improve themselves.

No I'm suggesting that it is standard developmental practice to place easier bosses, after a hard bosses because placing multiple very difficult bosses in a row with a long learning curve tends to dishearten people. Thus past each very difficult boss there is frequently one or more easier bosses as a reward.

I find it quite ironic that you're asking for one of the few interesting and well made encounters that actually provides some semblance of difficulty in TBC to be nerfed, and then crying that Blizzard isn't pushing enough fun and entertaining content.

The problem with Gruul 1.0 was the fact that where you were placed before shatter was completely out of your control and the damage high enough that you could effectively die to RNG. There's no dying to RNG at Kael, there simply isn't. (I'm also ignoring the consumable stacking to beat the soft enrage timer here).

No one is in Hyjal or BT eh? According to WoWJutsu, out of all the guild with at least a Karazhan kill, ~9% of them are currently in BT/Hyjal. ~45% of them are in SSC or TK. That seems like a lot of no ones to me. If you want to argue that people don't raid because you can lose your way to epics in arena you have a completely divergent point that needs to be addressed in a seperate thread, but the solution to that problem, is most definitely not to allow people to lose or cry their way to PvE epics.

Also in case you're wondering your incessant whining about people won't pay for content they don't get to see. At last check the WoW subscriber base was still climbing, and continued to climb even through Chicken Little idiots like you chanting this same mantra from the time Molten Core was released right up till today.

 

• goss

What? Even sketchy statistics such as those on WowJutsu show that a really significant portion of people who raid are in BT/Hyjal. Roughly 10%, and thats including a population of Karazhan raiders, so do with that what you will. I think you're going to be hard pressed to find people here who don't think (beyond the massive content deadzone since Illidan died) that WoW raiding isn't the best tuned it has ever been.

 

javelin

XI, if that's the case, and spec/gear/consumables are what wins the fight and not the players per se, what, in the end, makes you and yours, or Nihilum, so special? If any retard with the right buttons in front of them to push with the right buffs and passive skills behind them can do anything so long as they can 'move out of the fucking fire,' what prevents guilds that have the same level of commitment to farming and gear from accomplishing the same feats as you? More than that, what allows guilds with less dedication to spec and gear and buffing to accomplish the same goals where those that put forth the same effort as you guys in terms of gear and buffing and spec fail?

While gear and buffing and spec are important to be sure, does the gear play the game? Do the flasks play the game? Does the spec play the game?

Hell no.

I can say, with absolute certainty, that if you were to (god forbid) ebay your toon and give it to some spectacular nubtard, that nubtard would be the biggest failure in the game, simply because they don't know what the fuck they're doing. You make it sound like sick monkeys could bang their head against the keyboard and win, so long as the tank was flasked out and had a Thunderfury shoved up their butt.

That's the point we're trying to make. Those of us that don't live in the top 10 world servers don't exactly have the same amount of skill or honed abilities that you guys have. Us common folk still have to learn where it comes naturally or by learned instinct to you guys. This holds especially true for newer guilds that might only have 1-2 players with 3+ years of raiding experience, and everybody else is soft. Not sure why you hold contempt for everybody that isn't you or above you.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should chellenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.--Mark Twain

 

andastra

Actually, Heigan is easy. My guild only got to Sapph before the xpac so we returned last week to beat it. We killed Heigan before the first dance phase. And that's with all the veterans stopping dps at one point because we wanted to see the dance phase. All the post-TBC additions (more than half the raid) continued dpsing, though, as they didn't want to die on the dance phase.

I'm actually not opposed to Blizzard taking one of the hardest instances of a previous expansion and retuning it for the next expansion as the entry level raid. They could retune Black Temple for the expansion after WotLK as well for level 90 players. It lets casuals experience the lore and it's easy to do. The art and all that stuff are already there and it doesn't take much time away from designing harder dungeons.

 

Fenwick

The bad players don't stay in the 10-mans, though. Granted, a guild full of bad players could spend months wiping on Attumen and never leave Kara. What really happens is this. The top guilds snatch up all the excellent players, leaving the good, average and bad players to fend for themselves. The good players form guilds to progress through content, but are forced to fill out raids with average (no real problem) and bad (why did we bring him again?) players because there's no longer enough good players to go around. All it takes is a quick glance around Shat or SW to see people in equal or greater progression than you, but obviously only have the gear because their guild needed a warm body to fill a slot. Excluding perhaps the most critical and challenging of fights, bad players will eventually make it into just about any content out there.

Looking at it from a perspective of numbers, there are many more "warm-body" guilds out there than elite guilds, so it'd be wiser to cater more content toward that end. As someone else suggested, adding in extra challenges (timed runs, for example) with extra loot as a reward could be a good way of mixing the two types of content. It could also be different from ZA to add extra incentive for the elite guilds. For example, currently in ZA the timed run essentially boils down to an extra piece of loot for four bosses, one of which being a "unique" mount. However, even if you're so bad that you can't kill one boss within the allotted time, you can still go around and see/fight every boss after the special event is over. Well, what if they give you X time to complete each boss, and each time you kill a boss fast enough it unlocks another boss that you have different amount of time to beat? This way the casuals will have a challenge, but they're not going to match the elite guilds' accomplishments simply by zoning in. It's kind of a sketchy idea, but it's something.

Well then, here's my question for people who feel that "lite mode" cheapens their experience: Do you completely shun normal 5-mans until you gain access to the heroic versions and then start there? If at any point you step into a normal-difficulty dungeon, people with the idea that doing a "lite mode" encounter is cheap have already made themselves a liar, really.

The easier versions of a dungeon simply exist as a mild-mannered training ground. I personally don't want "EZ-mode" raids, but faced with the choice of either never seeing content or seeing content but not getting the same rewards as the harder version, I'd prefer the latter (and not having to wait for an increase in the level cap).

 

XI-

The difference between the top end guilds and you is they get there with no strategy, no video, no screenshots, nothing. They have to figure it out. Their players will see a fire and instantly move out of it, and they'll tell other people fire is dangerous don't stand in it, thus the experience of one becomes the experience of all. In lower tier guilds each players must have their own experience with the fire, sometimes multiple times before they get it.

What this DOES NOT MEAN is that lower tier guilds cannot handle the fire and it must be removed, it merely means that they take more time to understand to not stand in the goddamn fire. People in this thread are advocating removing the fire because they don't feel like elevating their play level such that they can avoid or move out of the fire.

In a word, yes. The only normal modes I did leveling up were Ramparts and Blood Furnace because the xp/hour was excellent and avoided the camped quest mobs. The only other normal mode instances I did were for loot/rep or to help my guild members achieve the same. Quite a few of the TBC instances I've never done except on heroic mode.

 

Nezralix

You heard it here first, folks. Throw money at raiding like it's going out of style, or die in a fire (possibly literally). If XI is happy with this state of affairs, then Blizzard must be equally pleased.

 

dreadai

I am pretty excited about the expansion for two reasons. Firstly, new content ... 5 man, 10 man and 25 man content is a good thing. Yes, the transfer into 25 man from 5 man/heroics in TBC was sticky, but Blizzard have improved tuning, but to be truthful, Blizzard overtune encounters so that the hardcore can beat them only, then they nerf them slowly so that more and more people get access to content

Secondly - Naxxramas. I never got to see past Gluth in PreBC so that will be a nice thing, I must admit I am quite looking forward to playing at MC again on Razu adds ... that was fun. (ps you only need 2 priests to do it, and they dont need hit cap, just 4%)

Tigole (I think) said that the some encounters would need major tuning for 25man ... he cited the 4 Horsemen as the main area of concern.


So, to answer the question, I think that the standard of instance design has improved 100fold since 1.0, the horror of MC is a dim and distant memory, and one that new players never need to subject themselves to. They can learn their skills in 5 Man and 10 man content well enough to prepare them for current 25 man content.

Raiding at anything less than the bleeding edge is an exercise is following a predefined strategy, with bigwigs modules available the week after a boss is killed for the first time (and betas before that) Yeah, it takes skill (for want of a better word) to execute the more complex strategies, but it takes nothing like the same amount of patience and dedication that the cutting edge guilds need. I would love to be at a boss with no idea of what to do, but being an EU player it means that the US servers have had 2 days to look at content before we can see it, and someone *always* blabs.

 

◊ Penguin

I cannot believe that this is being brought up again after the 2.1 changes. Back then, this would have been a valid complaint but now with Marks giving you flasks for free and the cooking quest giving you free food buffs there's hardly any need for farming. If you're seriously complaining about the 'cost' of properly enchanting your gear, getting it socketed with rare-quality gems, or the 'cost' of not respeccing out of PVP for the PVE encounter....then yes, you won't be able to kill Vashj or Kael.

You want to speak of throwing money at things? World-first guilds don't have detailed strats and videos and flash tutorials. Everything that you take for granted while describing a boss fight took multiple wipes for these guilds to learn. I'm not saying that we should kiss the ground they walk on, but respect the fact that they have put far more money and consumables into it so that you can sit and whine about how hard the encounters are to beat.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

JamesVZ

Organization, passion, a workable raid schedule. Some of the above, all of the above. The ability to analyze the game on the whole and apply that to a raid full of people willing to put in the time and effort to make themselves better is what makes a good guild. PvE is not hard on its own, PvE is hard because of the organizational aspect of it all. It's hard because it takes a lot of know how to get shit done in this game.

Nihilum is a great example. When Sunwell is released, there are many, many guilds that will be at the same gear level Nihilum is. In fact, some greater since I don't think they've seen a Warglaive drop yet, let alone a pair (side note: I just LOVE the RNG, my first born is going to be named RNG it's so awesome). Yet I'll bet dollars to doughnuts they're still the ones pushing world firsts simply because of the level of organization they have and their hardcore recruitment to assemble the exact right type of mentality to get shit done.

Every guild has Joe Badplayer, or even whole groups with Little Timmy, even the top 5. It's how they're organized and motivated, not their l33t sk1llz.

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Riallatar

That is precisely what people are NOT saying.

What the semi-casual people want is a version where one person standing in the fire for more than a second doesn't mean an immediate wipe.

We all get that "Fire is bad." There are people with the skill to do these fights who just plain don't have the time to invest, and yes, that's a choice that we have made, but that's not a reason to exclude people from content that they have legitimately paid for. These people have the time to do the fights. They just don't have the time to wipe repeatedly because "somebody else" isn't quick on the uptake.

Perhaps Blizzard needs to adopt a policy similar to what Time Warner is starting to do. Raiders pay $40 a month because they use 100% of the Developers' bandwidth. Nonraiders only pay $5 a month because they don't use the content that takes the most time. (Yes, I realize this is an idiotic analogy.)

 

• Playered

Mag, Gruul, Al'ar, VR, Leo, Archimonde* all have aspects of 'fire' which you can stand in for between 2-3+ seconds in, even die and not cause a wipe.
You can CR or live with a couple of deaths if needs be, however if you all panic because one of your random DPSers or Healers died and wipe because of it... yeah no amount of numbing down will save you.

I can go and buy a 6pack of bananas, only have time to eat 4 and then complain to the store because I paid for 2 bananas I did not have time for?

 

XI-

What the semi-casual people want is a version where one person standing in the fire for more than a second doesn't mean an immediate wipe.

Until you get to Archimonde there are very few occurances where the failure of 1 person causes a complete and immediate wipe for the group (Solarian's bomb comes to mind as a counter example). And even Archimonde is recoverable provided there is not a chain of failure along with a soul charge.

No one's excluding them, except themselves. I know in this day and age it's hard to take responsibility for your own problems since everyone's a fucking victim and the man has his foot on your goddamn neck. If you have the skill, etc but are 'being held back' then maybe it's time to go join a new guild. If you don't take advantage of that choice, you made your bed, you're letting someone else shit in it, and now you have to sleep in it, enjoy.

There's more to do than a non-raiding perspective than ever before, if we actually used your analogies, casuals would pay far more than raiders. Raid content lasts a very long time, eg. people are still running the raid content that was in at expansion, how many casuals are still running 5 mans every single day/week like raiders are running SSC/Kara/etc.

 

Noxana