Artan

The sad reality is 25thNovember needs controversy, needs drama, and more importantly... needs people to care. Have they really completed all current WotLK PvE content as they've boasted? Not really. Have they steamrolled content that was frequently steamrolled on beta months ago? You betcha. Have they called Blizzard out on their so-called "failure" to generate traffic and awareness of their new guild? You make the call.

The truth is, the majority of the raiding player base doesn't need to armchair raid anymore. The intrigue of D&T and Nihilum battling for first kills on unreasonably overtuned bosses is over. Players can experience these fights for themselves, and rightfully so.

Show me some Ulduar kill shots and maybe some hard-mode achievements and I might be impressed.

 

Zifna

I disagree, for several reasons.

First off, while I am 80, you are probably 80, and most people reading this board are probably 80, not everyone will get to 80 quickly. In all but the most super hardcore guilds there are probably no strict "level before this or lose your raidslot" rules. My guild downed KJ, but we'll probably have just about enough 80s to pull together a 10-man Naxx tomorrow and aren't truly planning on 25 man until Dec 4. I anticipate the downtime for the "casual" guilds on our server to be even higher.



Secondly, having a brick wall in your second instance isn't nearly as damaging to the game as having it in your first. A night or two of farming and then a night or two of wiping still leads to a guild many people will stay in to gather gear as the guild slowly progresses. The issue that TBC had was that your recipe for a beginning guild was "Wipe over and over and over and over with no break unless you are really quite good." That's a guild-killer, and what's worse was that those people demoralized by that generally dropped out of raiding entirely because your choices were to be good, to wipe, or to not raid.


Thirdly, I anticipate that with approximately half-Naxx gear you will be prepared well for Ulduar. When hardcores are a tier further on, in postUlduar content, a player could still gear herself to the teeth in Naxxramas and be an acceptable recruit for their guild. A tier beyond that, probably not so much, but recruitment in TBC was brutal for hardcore guilds precisely because for a long time there were few places you could pick up players. You were in Black Temple looking at Kara-geared apps and giving them serious (if dismayed) consideration because there just weren't enough guilds in SSC/TK. While this does say a brick wall could prove problematic eventually, that "eventually" is much further on and Blizzard will have plenty of time to adjust, particularly as the worst issue with Kara-geared apps was that they'd had no experience in a 25-man environment.



What is overall best for the health of the game and the health of high end guilds is a strong raiding populace. Remember vanilla? Naxx was insane, AQ started "difficult" and got insane, Blackwing Lair was hard but doable by some... but just about anyone could run Molten Core, and that was a good thing. Naxx is Molten Core, and thank goodness.

 

SpaceDrake

As an aside to all of this hilarity, these events have made the Dungeon & Raids forum on the official forums even more useless than before. Somehow people have it in their heads that Naxx25 is equivalent to Serpentshrine Cavern (EG Tier 5) and Naxx10 is like Kara - in other words you do the two in sequence. It blows my mind how misinformed some of these people can be.

Anyway, throwing my coin on the "don't panic" pile. It can be argued that Nihilum-Curse has had this content on farm for two years, and no-drakes Sartharion is supposed to be retard easy. The only concern I have is Malygos; that was supposed to be a fairly challenging encounter. Still, I imagine Ulduar will be hilarious.

 

rochan

There is no doubt the encounters are far easier than those found in Sunwell. Our group of 18 level 80s half still with leveling specs walked into Sartharion's Lair and dispatched him with relative ease.
I’m not concerned by the drop in difficulty. It’s nice to have some easy introductory encounters after working very hard for months on a pre nerf Sunwell.
The raid achievements are a great idea and are backed by more loot which will further differentiate the Karazhan and Sunwell guilds.
But even though SK may have “beat” the expansion, they haven’t completed it. At least, not yet. They only defeated the easymode versions of the encounters, although I’m sure they will, like most other Sunwell guilds, waste no time in working towards the achievements.

As an aside: I’m strongly against putting raid dungeons on the test servers. It really ruins the surprise and excitement. I wish they’d stop doing this. It’s no fun if the encounter has been beaten before it is released. I understand they need to tune it, but they need to come up with a better way.

 

◊ Zoid

I don't know about Game Over. I had a blast this last weekend. I got to 80, got a realm first achievement and an unique title. I played through some amazing quests and zones and still got a ton more to enjoy. I have a ton of new gear to work towards, professions to raise and I haven't even started exploring PvP yet.

This game is better than its ever been.

 

ayb

It doesn't worry me to see it cleared, it is a little disappointing to see people clearing 10 levels of this game and not finding any upgrades. I look at the level 80's here and only a few pieces were replaced on a lot of people.

 

tommtomm

If people look at the design of ZA and look back at comments from Blizzard designers, it’s easy to see that they are judging success as:

1) Casual raiding guilds are able to clear all Wotlk raids
2) Only a small number of really dedicated raiders are able to gain the Heroic achievements and therefore garner epeen and rare mounts.

Judging success by whether an elite guild, which probably ran all the beta raids to perfect strategies, cleared the early raids is a waste of time and is not an argument worth a grain of salt about Blizzards raid tuning.

 

Groat

Well, unfortunately, they ended up releasing a lot of bugged encounters when they didn't do that. I understand that they have impressive resources available, but even still nothing is as useful as the range of feedback they get from the automated crash tool and just being able to watch real people try out encounters with a range of skills and computer configurations far beyond what they would ever assemble in house.

Ideally, yes, that's where it would be nice if they had a good way to test individual mechanics that they add to bosses to verify that the mechanic is functional (a way to test the bouncy ball on M'uru for instance without revealing him), but unless they create a mechanics playpen instance on the PTRs, they're pretty much going to have to keep just showing the bosses, testing them, and then doing a final secret numbers pass before they release.

 

Nezralix

Blizzard (correctly) emphasized the delivery of an interesting game world and engaging leveling experience with the initial Wrath release, and as best I can tell, they've done an absolutely *phenomenal* job of that, producing a world that's both more interesting and more alive than the Burning Crusade, and an actual *storyline*. And on top of that, they've managed to avoid many of the crippling performance hazards that plagued the previous expansion launch. And they've released dungeons that are fun and polished, including multiple 10/25-man raid instances.

I think it's clear that, barring any horrendous issues over the next few days, this launch will be looked on as a tremendous success as far as MMO releases go.

Blizzard *DID NOT* promise that challenging content would be available on launch, and the majority of people in this thread acknowledge this much. They certainly didn't promise that extremely overzealous players wouldn't be able to powerlevel to 80 at a breakneck pace, and to a certain extent I think that Nov25 is diminishing Blizzard's substantial accomplishments by rushing through the content they released and then having the gall to complain about the experience.

Looking objectively at this situation, they (a) powered through leveling content largely through excessive time investment, (b) completed raid content that they knew would be trivial because they'd done it extensively in the beta, and (c) made implications that Blizzard is catering to casuals because they were able to do (a) and (b).

Sure, Blizzard could have put huge blocks on the ability of players to level up or to participate in raid content (as with TBC), and the introductory raid content would be impossible for new players and very frustrating for experienced players and probably still cleared very quickly by the most hardcore players. Hell, if Blizzard had made gear obsolescence more extreme to force players to acquire better entry-level gear, they'd be catching flak from the very same players.

It seems glaringly obvious to me that these guys understand the situation quite well, and are just stirring up controversy in an attempt to light up the WoW community with their "brand". It's not about whether this content is too easy, because for Nov25 it *is* too easy, and that's no surprise to anyone. Nobody has any grounds to complain or worry until Blizzard puts something out in a few months that they claim *should* be challenging.

And everyone can collect some upgrades and achievements in the meantime.

 

Nezralix

Given what you know about their schedule, how much time do you think they had to acquire gear upgrades before they jumped right into raiding?

 

ayb

I'm not specifically talking about SK/nihilum. I'm looking at members here and just don't see many upgrades. It just feels weak to me to gain 10 levels and not get better gear.

 

SpaceDrake

People had damn well better be upgrading their weapons, at least. 80 blue weapons blow Sunwell weapons completely out of the water and into the stratosphere. I'd say if there's anything "wrong" with what Nihilum-SK did, it might be that; if the melee weren't all tricked out in 80 blue weapons then the DPS checks may not be quite high enough. Granted they have rotations down tight, but still.

 

Merple

The last content Blizzard released was Sunwell, which has largely been acclaimed as "The Best Raid Ever" by hardcore players.

We know they can and will make truly hardcore content. They're going to spend a few months focusing on the content that 95% of their player base will play and enjoy for the next year because that keeps the dollars rolling in. Those dollars will then fund the crazy content the hardcores are looking for later.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Skellum

Who cares if people can clear the normal versions of these instances so quickly? The difficulty is not in clearing the bosses, but in doing the achievements for them. Naxx/Sarth/Malyg with no deaths. Sarth with 3 drakes alive. Thats what will seperate the casual from the hardcore/overgeared.

My Name Is Skellum, And I wear a Silly Hat.

 

Kjallstrom

Guild skill distribution is probably bimodal: a bell curve of raiders (Blizzard is targeting the middle of this), and then a big spike of non-raiders. Based on BC, the standard deviation of raiders is huge, seeing as how even at the end of BC you had guilds with Sunwell on farm and guilds who were wiping in Karazhan. Obviously gear, and total time working on the content, is a big factor there. While I acknowledge SK/Nihilum's skill, the end of their announcement fails to understand the statistical distributions of players. They are outliers, by a huge amount, so what they do has no bearing on the difficulty of the content. Blizzard has to target the middle of the pack at the highest (a place they erred on in the early days of BC, as many have said).

If I can engage in a bit of metaphor, this is like a straight-A student talking to the teacher in front of the entire class about how the last test was too easy, and if they're really going to learn anything in the class the tests should start using material from next year's textbook. It's an obnoxious thing to do (not getting As, but talking about it in front of everyone in a way that makes them look stupid, and puts the teacher on the spot), and it's going to earn the enmity of most of the rest of the class. I think this parallel is pretty accurate (especially since a properly tuned test will have a gaussian). I think it's impressive that they beat this stuff already, but the way they announced it wasn't cool.

 

Skellum

I really do have to ask though...what can you do to make these instances take a long time without putting them into a range of frustration that everyone hates?

You can make a boss spikey.

You can make a gear check, you can make a retard check, you can make a boss a DPS check a healer check or a tank check. You can make a boss a math check something akin to Kalecgoes or 4H where you have to be spot on with your mechanical movements.

In the end they can tune it to where you will kill the boss 1% out of 100 times based on RNGs and Mechanics, but is that fun?

You could make bosses unlock only after X ammount of time. Isnt what we have here better? Clearable by 100% of the player base, hell a stiff breeze could kill these bosses, but with achievements for substantive rewards titles/mounts/Feats of Strength, for the Hardcore crowed.

We all know gear comes and goes, but a Title and a mount can stay with you forever.

My Name Is Skellum, And I wear a Silly Hat.

 

◊ Praetorian

There are a ton of upgrades I could've gotten from 76-80 or so, to say nothing of raids. In many cases I simply didn't see them or didn't go out of my way to find/craft/etc. them, let alone enchant and gem them. I could replace everything I'm wearing at 80 without setting foot in a raid zone if I wanted to.

 

Volrath50

As I've said, I think it's great for the game that they cleared it so fast. It shows that leveling through Northrend doesn't take a silly amount of time, and that the Tier 7 raids are appropriately tuned. The only reason this is really news, is because it wasn't done with TBC, and that was largely because of TBC's failure in the initial raiding game. Had Kara, Gruul, and Magtheridon been appropriately tuned for a Tier 4 raid, Nihilum, DnT, et. al. would have cleared it in a similar amount of time (probably longer, because, from my recollection, 60-70 took longer than 70-80 does).

I'm in a pretty average guild, one that ended TBC a little bit through BT, and at the end of Hyjal, both instances that Nihilum cleared in the first week or so. While we're not amazing by any standards, (though we think we are ), we're certainly not terrible, and still ahead of the vast majority of the playerbase. Despite being in probably the top 20% or 25% of guilds, we still couldn't clear an instance that Nihilum did in a week. If 25November had had any difficulty whatsoever in Tier7, my guild would have had a fair amount of difficulty, and other guilds wouldn't be able to get anywhere at all.

So, yeah, 25November cleared WotLK in the old way of looking at things, where raids were seen only by a few people. Blizzard, in a move to make the game more fun for 99% of people, has moved away from that model, instead letting far more people see and kill the bosses, but putting the epeen factor in the achievements, some of which look really difficult. And if 25November runs out of achievements to achieve, it's far easier for blizzard to add more achievements for them, then to make another raid for maybe 5-10% of the playerbase. I imagine the long BT-Hyjal clearing days for many guilds wouldn't have been so bad if blizzard added new sets of goals in them every patch.

"As surely as I live forever, when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgement, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me."

 

Nezralix

While I do think it's crazy to be complaining about raid difficulty now, I also think it's extremely premature to be making sweeping generalizations about Blizzard's intended raid experience while the only raids on the table right now are ones that are openly intended for beginners. Later raids could very well be extremely hard at the baseline. The existence of very difficult achievement criteria doesn't imply that they'll never release very hard instances again, it just means that Blizzard has given something for hardcore players to do even in easier instances.

Personally, while I think it's a little bit lame to intentionally release very hard content and nerf it over time, I think it's probably the best solution as long as they're set on a gradual release cycle. It does definitely produce make more work for Blizzard in the long term, as they have go back and rebalance existing content, but it's probably a better situation than having serious players twiddling their thumbs for a year and a half until the "hard" instance is released.

But I do definitely think that, even at the very beginning, the introductory instances have to be unequivocally easy to complete. The gradual-nerf cycle can only really start after there's already a enough raids in place to constitute a real progression for new players (i.e. easy -> medium -> hard, where hard can be a set of instances where the lower-end is gradually phased towards the "medium" range as new instances are released).

 

PsiVen

I agree, that's why I said it's a good thing that Blizzard realizes this and hasn't made everything a timer. But I believe that if Ulduar was cleared in a week and had the same layout of achievements for the people who want a challenge, it would be a failure. Hard-mode achievements are fun, but there needs to be a sense of progression and accomplishment for actually beating an encounter rather than completely dominating it and screwing around to get achievements.

Blizzard has proven many times that they can tune bosses to be decently challenging without discouraging raiders. They may err on the side of caution after SWP, but there's no reason to expect that the next tier of content will continue to default to "easy mode". Will the top 25 addicts in the world still clear it in a week? Probably, but I won't.

 

Balog

Absolutely. My understanding is this guild is paid to play WoW, right? From some of their comments it seems they have other people farming consumables for them as well. Playing for ~20 hours a day, using very expensive raid consumables the entire time because someone else is farming them for you, and clearing an instance that's been around for ~2 years != epic skills.

People seem to forget that WoW is a business. Alienating the vast majority of your customers to appease a few arrogant pricks is just silly. Out of the 11 million or so WoW subscribers, how many raid? Of the raiders, how many are "hardcore?" And even out of the hardcore, how many can afford to just take a week or two off work to play 20 hours a day? I know young, single 20somethings are the largest base of raiders, because let's face it, who else has the ability to sink 5 hours a night, 5-7 nights a week into a game? But if Blizz did what they apparently want and issued a statement that basically says "Unless you're able to devote approximately as much time to this game as you do to your job, you will be stuck with nothing fun to do in a couple months" would be suicidal. WoW is a commercial success because it does appeal to people with kids and full time jobs and obligations in life other than the game. People who bitch and moan about this to help their epeen have no business sense. If Blizz flips off the "casuals" that make up 75% of their customers, WoW would die and no one would be able to raid anything. Blizzard has addressed this brilliantly with the shorter 5mans, high quality BoE crafted items, BoE raid loot, and heroic badge loot system. I can still acquire good gear, even if my shedule means I can only play 1-2 hours a night during the week, and raid every once in a while on the weekend.

I share this concern, but I think heroics are intended less as a way for raiders to supplement their gear, and more as a way for people who don't raid to be able to have access to good gear. A positive solution, to my mind.


Preposterous. I play WoW because it's amusing and enjoyable, not for some silly epeen. The people who base even a part of their self-esteem or self-image on a video game (especially a video game where success is largely based on time spent playing) are the same people who make their 10 y/o practice 5 hours a night for Little League, then scream and curse at the coach/umpire etc. And if you think spending 20 hours a day playing a video game will help with the ladies you need to get out more.

As for getting paid to play WoW.... ask some Chinese gold farmers how awesome that is. I totally agree with your last sentence though.

 

Copernicus

Sartharion ( Heroic: The Twilight Zone - Achievement - World of Warcraft) seems to be the best option for extending difficulty and scaling encounters. I think the main thing I like with that achievement is that its supported by the loot and supported by the tactical aspects of the fight. I can have a raid group that has it as its goal, and not accidentally fail because someone used an AE spell or disconnected. Although the Naxx achievements seem like fun, I don't look forward to the idea of trying to do The Immortal - Achievement - World of Warcraft with my raid group or the 20-man achievements. On the other hand, I am looking forward to doing The Undying - Achievement - World of Warcraft and the 8-man achievements with the 10-man zones.

It's an interesting contrast. I guess I'm more comfortable with asking 10 people (who might not need loot from the zone) to juggle their lockouts and their specs to try to do something complicated. Instead of asking 30ish people (the entire raid group) to please don't die this week. Oh, and next week we can only have 20 people going through the instance. But I'm also happy with asking people to do a different kill order or leave something alive or kill something quickly... but I'm not happy with asking people to do something that is the opposite of the setup for an encounter Heroic: Spore Loser - Achievement - World of Warcraft .

 

Kuthumii

[quote=zyklone;978208]I really hope so.
I expected some heroic runs to be required, not weeks. I found the whole 'I'm 70! Now I have to get gear, enchants and gems so I can take on Karazhan.' part of TBC to be very fun. I was hoping for the same thing. /QUOTE]

I don't recall that being the case for Karazhan. I know guilds that only had minor upgrades and a few level 70 enchants cleared Kara. They didn't run heroics before they were entering Kara because that mean running Regulars and then Heroics to some degree. You have misinformed yourself.

I am not surprised. Naxx was rolled on Beta. Why not on Live? This is an entry level raid. Blizzard wants people in the raids. It makes developing it worth the money. Why spend so much money on things that most of your player base will not see?

I expect the patch in raids to be more difficult however. I do think that SK/Ni did this to cause drama and get attention. Part of the reason they raid is for the fame.

 

Buiden

Well I think they did a pretty good job of making a statement of "Hey your game is easy!" but I don't think that should be too shocking to anyone here. We knew it was going to be easy, we cleared it on Beta, we posted it was easy. What people should be "WTF"ing about is how goddamn fast they got 25 80's imo.

I think after TBC started off too hard they may have made things start off a *bit* too easy here. I'm not talking about for just for Twenty-Fifth either, I fully expect 50 or 100 guilds including mine to be "done" within a week or two at most. I could be wrong as I haven't personally experienced 25-man Malygos, but I don't hear he is too difficult.

Honestly my only gripe about the whole thing is they made level 80 dungeons and heroic dungeons prety useless again. There's no reason to go to 5-mans except to accelerate your gear acquisition initially. You can easily jump right into Naxx in level 80 greens if you want. It would have been nice if we had to farm up some 80 blues and what not to progress in Naxx initially.

Anyway as noted above by Zoid, who cares as long as I'm having fun. There are just so many non-raiding things to do! I do hope that Ulduar kicks a ton of ass and is significantly more difficult, but I will happily experience everything else in the meanwhile.

 

Legitimate

Perhaps I lean toward the hardcore more so than the majority of the player base, but I personally am somewhat nervous for the future of raiding, not necessarily because SK & Co. has cleared the entirety of 3.0 in 3 days, but because if Blizzard thinks TBC was way to difficult, what should we expect in WotLK? If we look at the raids of TBC, there really aren't that many difficult fights.

I don't think it's a bad idea for Blizzard to force a raid to be able to think and then react instead of knowing exactly what's going to happen the entire duration of the fight. Some fights in early BC were pretty tough. As was mentioned previously, Mulgar was relatively difficult because it introduced positioning, control and movement to the raid, but when you get down to it, nothing in that fight was overly difficult except for the pull. Even then, the pull itself was a series of trial and error.

So, was Mulgar too difficult of a fight in TBC? Maybe, but I would like to think that it's about where it should have been. Through TBC, Pre-Sunwell, the only difficult fights in the game were Vashj, Kael, Archimonde and I think you can honestly make a point for Reliquary of Souls, but other than that, we are talking about fights were 2 - 5 people need to know what they are doing and the rest of the people spam their DPS without much more thought to the fight. Illidian especially was disappointingly easy in this regard. When it comes down to it, TBC had a few very tough fights and the rest was either a gear check, or relatively mindless.

So, before I get too off track here, what I am then worried about is this: If we think TBC had too steep of a learning curve, how easy has Blizzard made this game for WotLK? Especially in an era where 10 mans are now available for even the most casual guilds to experience the lore, it seems unjustified to make 25 mans clearable by banging your heads against the keyboard.

Regardless of SK/Nihilium's progress, I think it's justified to be worried about not only the difficultly of the current raids available, but what's to come.