Hildegard

In the 2.4 post an offtopic discussion about instances suited for raiders and casuals started. Here are some thoughts on the topic that are hopefully far from the stereotyped hardcore vs. casual discussion.

What raiders want:
- Interesting content
- Few as possible spoilers
- Competition among each other
- Signs of their accomplishments

What casuals want:
- seeing the content they have been reading about
- raids that can be done in 90 minutes to 2 hours


Progressive Nerfs
You can't make the same content be enjoyed by people, that spend 4 hours of raiding per week and others, that spend 5 to 7 nights during progress time. So one really useful nerf for older instances would be to decrease the amount of trash by a large amount (50% or more) and to disable the respawn.

The problem with people enjoying the raiding for casuals is less one of not being able to beat bosses. It is a problem of organisation. Instances like Zul'Aman are great. Challenging and different fights and few trash mobs. The main problem for casuals is their raiding time, their lack of raiders for being able to switch their setup for certain bosses etc.

Ideal would be to let instances be doable with about the same time investment as spending a night in front of television and watch a movie. This of course is nothing really interesting for hardcore raiders.

If you want something challenging for raiders have it like SSC and the Eye before the first nerf, but have all bosses be killable. Nerf this as soon as the world first kills are done and give a title only for those that manage to kill the bosses before this first nerf and then continously nerf down the instance so that after 5 months any PUG can down the bosses.

Rewards:
Certain rewards (mounts, titles, perhabs some exclusive areas to enter or NPCs to react on them like now in Ogrila/Skettis on exalted) should only be given to anyone being able to beat these bosses in a certain ammount of time. Decreasing the rewards on how long someone needs to kill certain bosses. Drop perhabs legendaries only for the some few guilds that can down bosses as one of the first 10 or 20 guilds in the world.

This would bring competition among the raiding guilds and would reduce the amount of spoilers and strategys leaked early. More fun for the content-racing guilds and more fun for the casuals that can make their tourist tour through the content some time later.

Gear:
Raiding should be accesible in a way that once the next raiding instance comes out a soft gear reset starts and let other raiding guilds catch up. A three way system would be great like in the arena. Best gear only in the current instance, once it ist out make some of the gear available easily and gave it away for free once the instance after that comes out.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Edgewalker

What's the point of this thread?

Blizzard knows everything you posted, and has been steadily nerfing content this way since release for that very reason. People that killed the boss first will always bellyache, but that's life, and it really isn't a bad thing because it gives more people a reason to push for better raid content.

 

Hildegard

The point is that competition is lacking right now. That except the bear from Zul'Aman all rewards are given out to basically everyone and that the ammount of trash and the respawn isn't taken care of.

I thought to move this discussion from the 2.4 thread (filling about ten pages there by now) would be wise.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

orcsgotbooty

The problem is the vast majority of raiding IS available to casuals, they just don't care to bother to join in. I was one of those people pre-bc there were plenty of mc/bwl guilds I could have raided with but I just never really cared enough to know wtf I was doing or log in same time each week.

 

Thebeat

How about rewarding based on how many people die per encounter? This would cause people to constantly better themselves and give motivation to some of the lesser skilled people to keep themselves alive rather than say "wtf no heals". Also instead of timed encounters I like the idea of timed raids like ZA. Obviously no one will be able to down all of Sunwell within 2-3 hours for a long time but when that happens the top guilds will have some higher incentive to continue to push themselves to be better and more efficient. It also gives guilds who can kill them all but not close to the time limit a reason to experiment with raid composition and give them goals to strive for rather than "maybe Kil'Jaeden will drop the bow this week".

 

Hildegard

Because the amount of time and organisation was to big of a deal. That is the point. Reduce that. Make the environent much more forgiving and way less time consuming and many more would certainly do that for casuals.

On the other hand make the raiding competition time based. Give these first guilds some rewards. Idea that would have been nice are a real big load of money, something like riding 300 for free or a lot of reputation on all outland factions.

Perhabs titles like in the arena. Based on how fast your guild was able to kill certain bosses or a special new reputation rank that reduces repair costs by 50%. Give reward for excellency but do not give as gear only. So that the race can begin anew, once the next instance is out. Basically introduce something like arena seasons for raiding.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Fugazor

I think raids should be just scalable. Put levels: Easy (scale one tier down), Normal (like now), Hard (one tier higher). Balance rewards (easy - just change ilvl) and difficulty (HP, damage, timers).

That way everyone would have something to do:
* People with low amount of time and less skilled friends could choose "Easy" level get worse loot but clear it fast and have fun. If they got bored there is always Normal and Hard!
* People that do not want any changes could just choose "Normal".
* People that got to the points that they clear content with easy and/or want challenge can choose "Hard" mode and be rewarded with best loot and glory.

Additionally Blizzard would not need to nerf instances anymore which would reduce QQ from people that completed it pre-nerf. Much more people would be able to see content (T5 difficulty would be maximum for "Easy" level).

It would also open more content for beginners (problem of TBC), you could go "Normal" T4 and "Easy" T5 instances with same raid for example.

Yes many people would complete the game at "Easy" but so what? They can always switch to "Normal" and even "Hard" if they are looking challenge and better rewards! Better that than doing T4 or T5 content for too long, get bored and quit.

 

Coel

You're forgetting another sub-set of the population though, who would likely be very upset with this. The people who would raid hardcore but don't have the time or the guild to compete for world top 100s. These people like doing the content at their own pace and don't want nerfed content.

Some people would be very upset with the idea that because of something someone else did they had parts of the game they were never going to be able to access(gear, bosses, whatever).

 

• Playered

Itemization plays a problem here unless you have it so say T4 'hard mode' items become T5 'normal mode' items and T6 'easy mode' items due to the nature of item stat deviation nowdays.

 

Hildegard

They can have the slightly down tuned variant that comes out a little later. That's the thing about competition. Not everyone can become merciless gladiator. And so not everyone would be able to become a phoenix, but the Top10 guilds would all have them.

It should not change the gear the people can get, but these titles, mounts, special reputation or something like that. Have Illidan for the first 4 ids drop 20000 gold and 400 marks of illidari or have special reward quests only available in that time or give them something like 30000 honor for free. Many ideas - for sure not all are good, but in my opinion the way should go to more competition in raids.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Shadout

Further rewarding fast kills (or other ways you can come up with for measuring "skills" and progress) seems like a very viable and good way to go (listen Blizz!).
Hildegaards idea of rewarding the first world kills (and maybe server kills) with some stuff too, is also something that could definitely add to the competitive feel. It might be a bit problematic though, with raid instances that has to be unlocked, and thus being not entirely in the hands of the single raiding guilds.

Rewarding based on people not dying wont really work well, in most fights when done right, no one dies. And even then, time based kills pretty much assume you dont let people die in the first place, to be able to beat the timer.

It would make the raid content last longer for the good guilds. Sounds like a win-win sitatuion right there.
Only problem is, whenever Blizz do nerf the raid content, it would kinda ruin the time based trials (nerfed bosses being faster to kill). Either the timed rewards would have to go away or be retuned under such circumstances.

About the OP "What raiders want" I see nothing there that indicates raiding had to take a lot of time, compared to the statement that casuals just want raiding to take less time. Cant you achieve great content, competition etc. without raiding having to be a time sink? Personally, while I fit into the raid category I would still see it as beneficial for the overall game, if raiding took less time, without making it easier (Less but more difficult trash is one way, Im sure there are others.). Its not like its the trash and similar timesinks that creates the hierarchy of guilds in the bleeding edge race. They all spend around the same time to stay competitive, and its hardly trash that makes some fall behind.
Reducing time required for raiding, but buffing the feel of accomplishment and rewards through "timed encounters" for the best players to strive for, and spend their time on (like "dammit, we are 3 sec too late on this boss, lets wipe and try again" = new sort of timesink, but at least a more interesting one).

 

Hildegard

The timesink would be reduced afterwards by the rewards for downing the bosses early. Like free flasks, lots of money, free reputation, honor... less stupid grinding for people that show this kind of excellency. The first timesinks are part of the competition, like very narrow respawn timers etc.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Cthalupa

I like this idea. It allows people with the skill, but not the time, to do content in it's intended form, but still allows more casual players to go through it and deal with it as well.

 

Shadout

Good point, and I certainly do like your ideas overall. Raiding should try to spread out even more to reward both the hardcore raiders as well as the more casual ones. These days it feels like it mostly goes toward rewarding the casual players through instance nerfs (which is a good way to do it), while the better raiders dont really get rewarded for being the better ones.

Still I personally feel trash is being overused in raids, since its a boring timesink. Fast respawning trash is different, since its not a forced timesink, but rather a timesink only if you fail to down the boss, e.g. a penalty, which makes a lot more sense, especially for the competitive raiders.

 

• Playered

Trash is a necessary evil, you cant have gauntlets to every boss (It will get old, especially for people learning him who arent 'uber-skilled' enough to kill it in one night) or even lessen trash that much because then instances are pathetically small.

For example MT feels like a very tiny instance when I went there because it was like trash.. trash... boss, few trash packs, boss, few trash packs, boss, 1 trash pack, Kael.
And to be fair aslong as its tied to the upcoming boss, then having a 2hour respawn time is perfect for people who cannot raid much on the days they raid, because aparently that is as much as they can play in one night?

 

Fugazor

Could be different items but with same ilvl. All those items should be T5 quality as all three "instances" you mentioned would be T5 difficulty. There could be a problem with tokens here but T5 "Easy" could drop T4 tokens for example - problem solved.

If you look at this, similar system is already in game - heroics. You are able to see all 5 man content with less reward. It lack ilvl rewarding mostly (mostly same drops as in normal), it lack "Easy" level (well normal 5 mans does not really need it) etc. But it works.

As for T6 hard mode it could drop uber-badges with best loot in game without RNG (as it would be mode for min-maxers anyway).

 

Shadout

The problem with different modes if raid instances is it would require a serious amount of extra work to test and balance 2-3 of them. Nerfing content over time is much easier, as it doesnt really matter if the nerf is 100% perfect, if will just slightly change the new limit of who can access the content, and if it didnt get nerfed enough, they can just nerf it a bit mre the next patch. Its incremental raid nerfing, while the others are supposed to be balanced from the get-go.
Just as well as timed rewards doesnt require as much testing, since its the exact same bosses as before.

Heroic 5 mans themselves shows how much extra work had to go into this, and for the first many month after TBC they were hardly tuned very well, and even today, its very debatable if Heroics are well-tuned at all (they went through the same nerf cycles as raids do, which kinda kills the point of having these different modes in the first place).

 

swills

I think a good way to do this is rather than progressively nerf bosses, would be instead have in-game mechanics that do provide better rewards based on your performance, or based on how you chose to tackle the boss. The timed ZA event is one such existing example, the bug Trio from AQ40 is another.

This is comparatively unexplored territory so far in WoW though. It's easy to imagine a boss fight with three chests containing progressively higher ilevel loot, with the boss smashing a chest to pieces on 5 min, 7 min, and 9 min timers or something of that nature. Or another fight where you have three mobs leading up to the boss, that don't hurt players at all, but that if killed grant an extra ability to the boss and also increase the ilevel of his loot.

There's pretty much endless possibilities here, and this would also go a long way to providing repeatable content. You start out with Boss V1.0, and when you gear up the raid a bit more you can deal with Boss V2.0 and so on.

 

Astiron

I just wanted to chime in my agreement here about the time it takes to raid.

I really have no idea why Bliz seems to make dungeons full of trash with a few bosses sprinkled here was a good design. If anything, dungeons which are more complex and have trash should be RARE. Instead of having a couple Magtheridon type encounters, make this the norm. And make the trash filled dungeons the rarity.

What if they designed raids as more or less very harsh boss encounters? What I mean is, why not design several bosses that guilds can go through and have 2-3 full out dungeons as the raid standard? It seems likely it is easier to create Onyxia style raids than it is SSC style raids. Why not do this as the standard and make the big dungeons the exception? These big dungeons, like BT, could be the ultimate final raid of the game before moving into the next expansion.

Trash is just ...stupid after a while. I can understand why they have it in the current design of the game, but I don't understand why this is the standard for raid dungeons. Cut the trash completely and make some challenging boss battles. This serves both ends of the community demographic: casuals get to walk into these dungeons and have a boss progression, while cutting edge gets their trash filled dungeons at the end of the tunnel, the pinnacle of the game.

As far as items, the boss drops non-set pieces, while 2-3 set tokens drop per kill. Have the reset be every 3 days. This is a good casual pace.

 

Grogi

Multiple time trials and instance nerf in every patch are very good way to control difficulty and accessibility of raid instances in the future. The most skilled raid guilds could always try to get better time (and thus get better rewards), mid tier raid guilds could try to complite instance before it's next nerf (and maybe easiest time trials) and casual raid guilds could see the available content sooner or later.

Currently time trials are still in early stages but perhaps Blizzard will develop this idea later on. Guilds who can do the Zul'Aman time trial in 10 mins faster then it's required shoud get something extra for that archivement. Maybe even there should even be teir after that for runs that are made with Sunwell gear. Perhaps there shouldn't be any tiers, but rather just reward those who got the best time per week/month. Single realm outside few selected realms wouldn't offer much competition, so it could be US or EU wide contest. I've love to see best times and guild names in news section of WoW main page.

 

Coel

I don't really totally agree that Blizzard nerfs all content for casuals anyways. Some encounters do get nerfed, but mostly due to their position in progression being out of whack. Gruul got nerfed because of this, so did Magtheridon, so did Kael'thas. That's balancing the content across a tier, not nerfing for casuals.

I don't see a problem with just leaving content the same and having all facets of players face the same content at their own pace. Raiders get their challenge, casuals get theirs, in their own time. Casuals don't always totally want to beat all the content in the game, although many of them think they do. Many semi-casuals(kara-type raiders) do it because there is something bigger out there, and if they ever finished all of the content in the game, the lure of a possible drop the next week might not keep them in the game the way it does with min-maxers.

 

Shadout

Actually I dont like the Onyxia style instances that much I prefer the bigger instances with multiple bosses, it allows for a more epic feeling, and for more storytelling inside the instance.

What I would like to see happening to trash was rather, instead of having 5-10 of the same damn group of trash mobs between bosses, just have a few of those groups, made a bit harder maybe to balance it out.
Its not like it requires you to be any better to kill the same group of easy mobs 10 times, instead of 3.

While I like the challenge of raiding, and thats the main reason I raid (beside experiencing content), it also feels a bit boring or waste of time to do the repetitive part of raiding, which is usually trash mobs.

I know some argues (Blizz included) that trash makes the instance more difficult, by reducing the time you can try a boss before your raid ends. While true, is that really needed?
Its not like your average Karazhan guild could go kill Illidan tomorrow, just because there was no trash (Not that I argue there should be no trash, just less).
And while reducing time spent on trash would make the hardcore raiders go through content even faster, it would be the same for all of them (thus not chaning the compeititve aspect), and this is of course also why timed raids and other stuff would be perfect.
It would add new and better timesinks to replace the trash, imo.

However Blizz has been fairly consistent doing this the last 3 years. Old instances gets easier to reach through multiple means, one of them is nerfing bosses and nerfing/removing trash, others might be removing attunements, adding new loot that indirectly makes the bosses easier. The nerfs happens consistently enough, to assume its a conscious strategy from Blizzard, and not just them balancing overtuned bosses.

 

Liebestod

I wish this were true, but I don't think Blizzard has been that good with progressive nerfs in TBC. I wasn't able to experience the early iterations of SSC/TK, but iirc the only main hard things about early SSC was the trash and Leotharas and Vashj, everything else has been untouched? And in TK, Solarian was only beaten after being nerfed, same with Kael'Thas.

But in any case, the fact that these instances weren't even tested on the PTR demonstrates that they weren't tuned well. Huge mistake, it's hard to even debate the merits of their tuning seriously.

otoh, one can look at MH and BT, which haven't received many nerfs (iirc Illidan received buffs..) and were not really tuned to be difficult for "world first" guilds. They could have been, should have been imo, but they weren't.

Sunwell may suffer the same fate, but it's too early to tell.

In any case, though, I think things like timed runs are good ideas, but you have to keep in mind that the reason why Blizzard doesn't give awesome rewards for many PvE accomplishments is because raid guilds will eventually just sell those accomplishments off to the highest bidder. "We're doing Vashj/Kael tonight, we'll take 3 people to get their Vials to become Hands of A'dal for 1500g each", that kinda thing, which degrades the value of the accomplishment. Granted, this probably isn't too much of a worry with things like the ZA bear and titles for world firsts, but... yea.

Personally, I'm disappointed that there isn't an NPC that keeps track of fastest clear times, like fastest Kara clear, TK clear, BT clear... stuff like that could be competitive even without offering rewards.

 

Shadout

Hellgate London (not a great game to compare with, and not even an MMO, but still...) got posters in-game stating the richest and biggest guilds. Stuff like this could surely be done for fastest kills, first kills, most kills and such stuff.

 

◊ Vectivus

This.

There's a ton of very skilled players whose guilds aren't at the level they would like to be, or who started late (rerolls, people who took 6 month breaks, etc.). They still want to beat the game the way everyone else beat it - not in some attunement-free, no-trash gimmick version of its former self.