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.
I think that the difficulty that Blizzard is trying to defeat is not stated enough in this sort of thread. The difficulty of raid encounters begins with the difficulty of raiding. It is hard to find people who are willing to spend 3-4 hours a day (at a specific time of day), 3-4 days a week specced for a specific purpose, doing something with no clear reward for them. Who are willing to listen to one or more people's ideas on how to distribute loot, listen to direction, spend hours dealing with trash that have nothing for them...etc. And then learn an encounter, potentially die to that encounter through no fault of your own, and then get critiqued afterwards for your performance in playing a video game.
That is a very large barrier to entry.
After dealing with that barrier, the encounters themselves are fairly simple for the most part - and I think they have to be. There are simply not that many people in the world interested in playing WoW so hardcore that they want a raid full of RoS or Kael-level difficulties. Raiding is already somewhat lacking in fun for the above reasons, especially compared to all the other things you could be doing; why make it that much harder? It's far better to segment the market and allow players to pick their own difficulty.
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.
I'm fairly certain a very large portion of the raiding populace will actually go into the level 80 5-mans before Naxx, and not simply out of habit but from necessity.
Not all raiders are equal whether it's gear, skill or experience. There are going to be those who need better gear than is gained by straightforward leveling in order to succeed in Naxx. These players aren't bad, they're just average a need a lot more cushioning than the precise, largely flawless performances the high caliber raiders are used to giving on a regular basis.
How large a portion of the populace this constitutes remains to be seen. It'll be a few weeks to a few months before they all reach 80 and their guilds start trying Naxx. It may be a trivial number of players and your concern is validated, or we might be surprised by just how many raiding hopefuls crash and burn when they attempt to leap frog the 5-mans.
Originally Posted by 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 think you definitely lean toward the hardcore, but that's almost an explicit assumption for anyone who consistently posts here. I do, however, think you're overlooking a couple of factors.
For instance, the rate at which guilds as a collective learn. My guild started Karazhan in August of 07. Out first Prince kill was just before Christmas, and we only started consistently clearing the whole instance in late January/early February. Some of that was due to typical casual turnover, but a fair amount of that was simply the rate at which our guild learned encounters.
Now, of course, all of the Karazhan encounters are absolute cake; only the odd bad infernal placement will result in a wipe. Looking back all of these encounters seem blisteringly simple, but thinking back to when we first wiped numerous times on Curator they were monstrous challenges.
Effectively, difficult is relative both when comparing against each other and against ourselves. What's difficult now is mindless later, and what's easy for one is impossible for another. The contrast is only heightened between guilds, where each's situation, organization and mechanisms get involved.
I do worry that there won't be any scaling in difficulty. I doubt there are many people who'd enjoy a flatlined challenge. However, I expect that the only major change we'll see is not a shift in the slope, but its position relative to the axis of challenge.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity. Monte's LoL Blog
As a player in a hardcore raiding guild this expansion has so far (it's very early, let's not forget that) been very good and I've enjoyed every moment of it. 25th of November's problem might be that they didn't sleep for two days and forgot to enjoy the game, I don't know. We, as any other top guild, obviously cleared everything when we had enough people at lvl 80, nothing to shout about and not surprising at all.
Yes, content is easy as expected - even though we didn't do Sarthovar with all three aspects this reset (only two), so it's difficult to say how the challenge will be. Based on the Beta Sarthovar with all aspects is a difficult encounter (especially on the EU Beta servers where everone has 600ms) made to be a challenge for Sunwell guilds. But even though content is easy it's still enjoyable and fun. Naxxramas is obviously a winner, but both the new encounters are very well made. So is a lot of the 5 man content where actually some of the achievements are harder to accomplish than the raiding!
Speaking of gear, I had everything best-in-slot from lvl 70 and after one reset I've upgraded 12 items. I think that's pretty decent upgrade so far and itemization looks very good as we can choose very freely what stats to gear for (even though I still hate cloth with mp5+crit ...)
That being said, I expect som real challenge in the next zone. Until then the whine about content is pathetic and useless.
Whereas an achievement like Intense Cold - Achievement - World of Warcraft, which is basically "do the fight right, and do it perfectly, even though you can win with some imperfections," makes much more sense.
Originally Posted by Buiden
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.
Well I think Blizzard's intention is that the reason to go to 5-man instances is that you have 4 friends, rather than 9 friends you can do a raid with or 24 friends you can do a heroic raid with. They've spoken a lot about making 10 and 25 man raiding parallel progression for differently sized guilds, presumably 5 mans are supposed to be, also.
The difficulty of raid encounters begins with the difficulty of raiding. It is hard to find people who are willing to spend 3-4 hours a day (at a specific time of day), 3-4 days a week specced for a specific purpose, doing something with no clear reward for them. Who are willing to listen to one or more people's ideas on how to distribute loot, listen to direction, spend hours dealing with trash that have nothing for them...etc. And then learn an encounter, potentially die to that encounter through no fault of your own, and then get critiqued afterwards for your performance in playing a video game.
I'd be inclined to agree with you. The barrier of entry is incredibly intimidating, especially if WoW is your first serious MMO (and for many, it is.) and the idea of being part of a group of 25 is a new experience. Enter in 10 mans, which should be much less demanding and tuned to a more casual player base. I guess my concern is that too much "casual" has crept into what I've always seen as the territory of the "hardcore". I'm also probably in the minority of players, who want difficult content that requires the whole raid to think and execute, not just the tank and a few healers. But as I am in the minority, it's probably not fair to Blizzard for me to except a whole expansion to be tuned around my personal desires for a game :P.
If there's one thing I'm worried about, it's that the expansion cycle might be getting shorter. Icecrown is slated to be the final raid at all costs, which means either there will be quite a lot of content in the intervening instances or the raiding scene will be similar to TBC if Sunwell never existed. If it's the latter, do we really want Blizzard to live up to the one-expansion-per-year principle?
That would be three tiers per year, compared to three and a half tiers per two years. I don't see what would be bad about that, unless the quality of the content started slipping.
[e]: But it does seem to me that it would be hard for them to keep up the quality up, since not only would they be chugging out raid content faster, but they'd also need to put out more leveling/outdoor content, more 5-mans, etc.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
But even though content is easy it's still enjoyable and fun.
I think this is key to the whole expansion at the moment. Do the instances, quests and raids provide for fun entertainment? Can you have a fun evening in a raid even if it's easy?
If the answer is yes, I don't see how it can be a failure.
Not all raiders are equal whether it's gear, skill or experience. There are going to be those who need better gear than is gained by straightforward leveling in order to succeed in Naxx. These players aren't bad, they're just average a need a lot more cushioning than the precise, largely flawless performances the high caliber raiders are used to giving on a regular basis.
It's probably different for warriors, but a mage in Sunwell gear can exactly upgrade 3 slots from blues:
Main-hand weapon and two trinkets. The are a couple of well-designed blue sidegrades, which are exactly that - sidesgrades.
I guess it's different for warriors due to stamina, armour and especially defense.
But mages are more or less set with running heroics for a day or two to get the Kirin Tor head enchant and caster weapon and a badge trinket.
So when the nerf to BT/Sunwell came out, I think most of us who weren't caught up in our own egos kind of shrugged and said "well, it's just 4 weeks, not that big a deal."
I mean, it was laughably easy, of course. People were calling BT 25-man Kara. But the truth is, my guild which largely stopped raiding at Kalecgos was doing Sunwell with less effort than it took us to do the original Karazhan. As in 45 minutes of actual pulls to kill the Ledge Boss, aka Twins.
Wrath comes out and so far, it's every bit that easy. It's a bit unnerving. And sure it should be a cause for concern.
It appears that Blizzard's dial has three settings: pretty hard (Sunwell), standard (BT/SSC/TK), too easy (nerfed everything/Wrath so far). I'm not persuaded that it's a good thing that average Karazhan guilds should steamroll Naxxramas. If they do -- and yeah it remains to be seen -- it's going to continue a bad trend.
We've been running most instances without the slightest clue what to do, having read nothing or seen nothing. And we're just blasting through them. We did A-K at 70/71. I don't think there was a chance in hell we could have done Mana Tombs at 60/61, and I'd call that a valid comparison. Yeah, we had a bunch of Tier 6 running around, so it's not a totally direct comparison, but so far, everything has been insanely easy. I get why: They want to make the game available to people showing up in greens to Northrend. A better way around this is to provide a wardrobe upon reaching Northrend that is a baseline of gear, say Tier 5 quality. Stop with the endless, duplicative quest rewards please. I have gotten at least 12 helms, chests, boots, trinkets, gloves, belts, etc. so far. They could, similarly, reset gear when you reach Outland to allow leveling through there -- at 58 -- with a gear set that contains real stamina and decent dps/healing stats. And since everyone is just trying to get through there and into Northrend, offer the Northrend gear at 68.
The game is running the risk of being overly dumbed down. In it's place we are being fed annoying tedium like a body of un-crossable water in Howling Fjord who's only discernable purpose is to ensure that every person with sense levels all their subsequent alts solely in Borean Tundra.... But I digress.
So when the nerf to BT/Sunwell came out, I think most of us who weren't caught up in our own egos kind of shrugged and said "well, it's just 4 weeks, not that big a deal."
I mean, it was laughably easy, of course. People were calling BT 25-man Kara. But the truth is, my guild which largely stopped raiding at Kalecgos was doing Sunwell with less effort than it took us to do the original Karazhan. As in 45 minutes of actual pulls to kill the Ledge Boss, aka Twins.
Wrath comes out and so far, it's every bit that easy. It's a bit unnerving. And sure it should be a cause for concern.
It appears that Blizzard's dial has three settings: pretty hard (Sunwell), standard (BT/SSC/TK), too easy (nerfed everything/Wrath so far). I'm not persuaded that it's a good thing that average Karazhan guilds should steamroll Naxxramas. If they do -- and yeah it remains to be seen -- it's going to continue a bad trend.
We've been running most instances without the slightest clue what to do, having read nothing or seen nothing. And we're just blasting through them. We did A-K at 70/71. I don't think there was a chance in hell we could have done Mana Tombs at 60/61, and I'd call that a valid comparison. Yeah, we had a bunch of Tier 6 running around, so it's not a totally direct comparison, but so far, everything has been insanely easy. I get why: They want to make the game available to people showing up in greens to Northrend. A better way around this is to provide a wardrobe upon reaching Northrend that is a baseline of gear, say Tier 5 quality. Stop with the endless, duplicative quest rewards please. I have gotten at least 12 helms, chests, boots, trinkets, gloves, belts, etc. so far. They could, similarly, reset gear when you reach Outland to allow leveling through there -- at 58 -- with a gear set that contains real stamina and decent dps/healing stats. And since everyone is just trying to get through there and into Northrend, offer the Northrend gear at 68.
The game is running the risk of being overly dumbed down. In it's place we are being fed annoying tedium like a body of un-crossable water in Howling Fjord who's only discernable purpose is to ensure that every person with sense levels all their subsequent alts solely in Borean Tundra.... But I digress.
How exactly do you know this? Because it's already been cleared it's so insanely easy? To everyone saying that the raids are a complete and utter joke and can be facerolled through in 30 min, go do Malygos in your leveling gear. If you haven't previously done it on beta, in which case it's obviously not your first 30 minutes there, it will take you a fair bit of effort. You're all acting as if every guild that gets 25 people to level 80 will be able to clear all instances within a day. They won't be able to, can I just remind everyone that while some guilds cleared BT in 2 weeks from start to finish, others never even finished it, some never even got there.
The 25man raids are fairly well tuned for their target audiance, Sartharion easy mode, spider and plague wing are a complete joke. But that will be neccesary for a large amount of players to get the gear they need to get past Patchwerk, Sapphiron, Kel'Thuzad and Malygos.
I'm not persuaded that it's a good thing that average Karazhan guilds should steamroll Naxxramas.
I am. Forget TBC for a moment and look back at vanilla. How long did it take the average raiding guild to gear up for and complete UBRS? That's the level the "first raid" should be at. There's time enough to crank up the difficulty later.
Wrath comes out and so far, it's every bit that easy. It's a bit unnerving. And sure it should be a cause for concern.
If you haven't done the 10/25 mans yet, please don't comment on their difficulty. Naxx 10 will be wiped in for a while by previouys "kara" guilds. If you don't know the mechanics, if you aren't in Sunwell gear and need some heroic boosts, you will wipe and will spend time learning. The difficulty in there feels right where it needs to be coming out of leveling. The challenge ramps up nicely through the wings and you start to feel the stress on your old gear, but you get a lot of nice upgrades along the way.
All of those things you are describing with the 5 mans was true in TBC. My 5 man group back then plowed through 5 mans just DPSing through every "mechanic," and I didn't see any doom and gloom stories back then.
You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.
Sunwell guilds on my server are hitting a bit of a speed bump with their tanks folding due to insufficient mitigation on 25-man Patchwerk, so there is at least some semblance of a gear check there. As Sovelis said, a pre-TBC Karazhan guild isn't simply going to walk into Naxx25 and steamroll it.
The end-game blues from 5-mans and heroics seem roughly comparable to Sunwell purples, only with more raw stats (str/sta/int/spi). I suspect that non-Sunwell guilds will need a fair smattering of that gear to progress in the raid content. Meanwhile, the guilds that were able to farm Sunwell will get a free pass straight into the raid content.
A lot of people will be seeing all of the raid content in WotLK. They won't be seeing it as early as the elite guilds, and they won't get the heroic achievements, but they will see it all. This is a good thing for the game, not a bad thing.
If you haven't done the 10/25 mans yet, please don't comment on their difficulty. Naxx 10 will be wiped in for a while by previouys "kara" guilds. If you don't know the mechanics, if you aren't in Sunwell gear and need some heroic boosts, you will wipe and will spend time learning. The difficulty in there feels right where it needs to be coming out of leveling. The challenge ramps up nicely through the wings and you start to feel the stress on your old gear, but you get a lot of nice upgrades along the way.
All of those things you are describing with the 5 mans was true in TBC. My 5 man group back then plowed through 5 mans just DPSing through every "mechanic," and I didn't see any doom and gloom stories back then.
I absolutly agree with this. Don't think that those hardcore nerds that are raiding Naxx right now are anywhere comparable to those people who cleared BT after 3.0 or were stuck in Kara or ZA without doing more than 2-3 chests. When I rerolled in May i had the rather dubious pleasure to accompany such groups with my shaman. These groups are the focus group for the first tier of instances and they will wipe over and over in Naxx due to not having the experience nor the skill normally associated with those who did SWP pre nerf. If you really think that those people will instantly know how to do Gluth, Thaddius, Heigan or other bosses involving more than tank and spank, you really should do some PuGs to get a more accurate feeling on this. Naxx is really well tuned for this audience. I really doubt that those people will clear Naxx10 during their first month on level 80.
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.
Maulgar was a fight with an annoyingly complicated pull including special never-before-seen mechanics, multiple tanks several of whom are not normal tanks, need to spread out the bosses/raid, at least 2 'don't stand in the fire' zones tied to positioning, and a need for strong healing assignments with limited opportunity for healers to cover each other. Do you really think that a fight this complicated is really appropriate as the introduction to 25-man raiding, that a fresh guild with people who geared up in 5-mans and Karazhan and maybe some people who poked into Molten Core should expect to combine their 2 Karazhan groups plus some pick-ups and have an enjoyable evening going into it?
Numerous guilds fell apart or gave up on post-KZ raiding because they couldn't go from 'never raided' to 'farm status' on that complicated fight with their inexperienced raid team. If you want lots of players to get into raiding (and Blizzard clearly does), then those players need to be able to get into it gradually with some 'show up and be awake' fights and slow introduction of more complicated concepts. Spending several wipes while a mage learns the timing on his first attack and spellsteal to get Kiggler into place is a mild annoyance if you've downed several bosses and are learning another one, but makes you question why you're bothering with raids when you know you're going to have to go right into wipes on another mechanic right afterward and still haven't killed anything.
Originally Posted by Mideci
A better way around this is to provide a wardrobe upon reaching Northrend that is a baseline of gear, say Tier 5 quality.
Going from 'old blues and greens' to T5 is more drastic than the gear jump in TBC, and there was a ton of complaining over the BC gear reset. I don't think you can really declare that a gear reset replacing purples with greens is a 'better way' without significant justification, considering how much disagreement there is with that idea just on this board.
One way I'm happy. A computer-game shouldn't be about elitism. Everyone pays the same monthly payment, the same amount for the expansions. Why should I need to spend ridiculous amounts of time to achieve something in a game. Its not normal. Playing should be entertaining, worthwhile and not time-consuming.
And to bring out the inevitable analogies... A 15 year old tennisplayer most likely won't be a challenge for Nadal or Federer... What about other games, though RPG's are slightly different. Most casual CS players won't give the top teams a run for their money.
Elitism is bad, skill-differences and different levels of achievements is good. Should everything in life be so simple so that anyone can attain it without any work?
I think it's good that Naxx and the other dungeons have a lower limit than the stopgaps that were Vashj/KT and some places in MH/BT but I think they went sliiightly over the top. There should have been some need for gearing up from TBC before spending a total of 5 mins on every boss just about.
Nightbane, HKM, Gruul pre nerf etc were all pretty much a face-inn-wall move for a lot of guilds but this just seems a little over the top.
I've debated this with myself a lot lately, though I can see the point of everyone being able to achieve something is it really right that everyone should be able without work to get the best of items and achievements? I think not.
Until we see how the patches roll out and the further raiding of Wotlk will unfold it will be hard to judge wether the low entry level of 25 man raiding in LichKing was a sucessful gambit or not.
Personally I think the gradual easening of content is still the way to go.
Setting the bar insanly high and letting guilds slowly climb over it one by one until everyone can jump over it without even leaving the ground. The rather static locked doors in Sunwell Plataue was one way even if it lacked finesse and once the door was down there were a few bosses that barely had time to spawn before top guilds were knocking on the next.
The gear checks is one way of implementing slowed progress where the slow amassing of gear from the bosses before the "gatekeeper" ones will enable the encounter.
This method has the drawback of making poorer guiilds having to do the earlier bosses endless number of times to stand a chance. (any boss that require a guild like 25november to kill the previous 5-10 times before will demand 50-100 kills and a nerf to let lower end guilds thru)
The resist checks where the resist gear is gathered from the instance (mother shazzrah comes to mind) is one version of forcing people quite a few weeks of redo to stand a chance.
There was the Onyxia cloak on Nefarian encounter. Imagine if cloak dropped three times per run of BWL instead of having been available from Onyxia for the longest time. This method would of course force top end guilds to stack rebirthers (soulstone,ankh,combat resurection) but the idea that you accumulate a certain item before being able to pass further is not undoable. The more people got it the easier the fight becomes.
First idea out of my head: Frequency Atuneer trinket. Say a boss has an aura that have a haste,runspeed and stamina debuff (in the lines of 20%) and the trinket removes that debuff. You could even have some epic storyline with this thing that the player had to solo or something. Then limit the number of those available per week. First few guilds maybe only need to get it for their Maintank and a healer or two while a noob guild needs 20 people with it.
That is a interesting limiting mechanic that isn't circumventable immediatly. (allthough guilddrama regarding people with trinket leaving and getting autoinvites for better guilds might be off the scale with this)
Other versions is say a powerful npc mage stands somewhere in an instance and shouts "Hey I need your help with this powergridthingy. I need to weaken it to weaken all the evil entities(trash/bosses) in this place. "You can find Major ingredient on all lieutenants (subbosses) and also I need minor ingredient that MrEndboss hidden all around the world (heroics/dailies or what not)". The effect of doing this quest would make all/some of the monsters in the instance easier each time you do it. (Im thinking of a sunwell radiance that slowly gets weaker as one possible example). The exact implementation would of course probably require some thinking to work. (will ingredients be BoP, will only raidleader get advanced thru the compeltion? or will everyone?. If you has done this quest 4 times and leave the guild and start raiding with a new guild will you be able to instantly lift your new guild to the 4 level?)
I certainly hope Blizzard put a lot of work into the next raiding instance so that it will be a challange for everyone without overly artifical work done. I personally took little joy in post patch KJ kill if compared to my mediumskilled guilds prepatch twins kill and I feel the extent of the nerf was the key ingredient here. Guilds that were trying pre nerf TBC encounters that only managed it after massive nerfs probably don't feel the same enjoyment after knowing that it wasn't their own gradual inrease in skill or gear nor their persistance that enabled them.
My two sugestion above are just two quickly brainstormed ideas that are much more gradual than what blizzard did in TBC. I'm pretty sure Blizzard could outdo both me and themselves if they put their minds to it.
Overtuned and then massivly nerfed isn't the way to go anymore.
Going from 'old blues and greens' to T5 is more drastic than the gear jump in TBC, and there was a ton of complaining over the BC gear reset. I don't think you can really declare that a gear reset replacing purples with greens is a 'better way' without significant justification, considering how much disagreement there is with that idea just on this board.
Spot on. Not everyone see the game entirely through "game mechanics" eyes, and I, for one, am quite pleased to see that my high-level gear isn't going to be replaced as quickly as the lower-quality one from my alt. Sure, I spend a lot of time without seeing upgrade, but it makes me feel that there is actually some slight continuity between TBC and WotLK, and not a "reset button" as soon as I hit the loading screen of Northrend. And it will make it even better when I finally see the first pieces being an upgrade over what I have right now.
Personally I think the gradual easening of content is still the way to go.
Setting the bar insanly high and letting guilds slowly climb over it one by one until everyone can jump over it without even leaving the ground.
Disagree. I much prefer a more stable world, in which the achievements don't cheapen with time.
It's disheartening to hit a brick wall, which is what overtuned boss is about.
It's also disheartening to feel you've killed a boss only because he's been nerfed to death, and even worse to fight a boss for some time, trying to learn the encoucter, and suddendly see him drop dead without anything in your execution having changed. It cheapens the whole thing.
I prefer gradual progression in difficulty than gradual degression. At least I feel like I'm progressing, rather than the whole game being dumbed down around me.
Last edited by Akka : 11/18/08 at 10:44 AM.
If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !
Disagree. I much prefer a more stable world, in which the achievements don't cheapen with time. It's disheartening to hit a brick wall, and it's also disheartening to feel you've killed a boss only because he's been dumbed down. I prefer gradual progression in difficulty than gradual degression.
Well the way blizzard has pointed at from Naxx it seems you will have your wish. As naxx wont get nerfed, and as time goes on you only can compleate the achievemnts easier because you outgear the instance.
Disagree. I much prefer a more stable world, in which the achievements don't cheapen with time.
It's disheartening to hit a brick wall, which is what overtuned boss is about.
It's also disheartening to feel you've killed a boss only because he's been nerfed to death, and even worse to fight a boss for some time, trying to learn the encoucter, and suddendly see him drop dead without anything in your execution having changed. It cheapens the whole thing.
It's *always* the case that fights get easier over time, as people obtain better gear from various sources, as talents and skills get revised, as better addons are developed, etc. There's always a sliding window. It's a little irrational to be distraught over changes Blizzard makes to content.
And frankly, the changes they make are usually far less substantial than people make them out to be, with a few exceptions (i.e. 30% HP nerf, or the nerfs to the initial incarnation of SSC/TK). Much of the time it's just a minor revision to numbers, or a modification to the nature of some boss ability that they felt was too strong. I really feel that many changes that players interpret as "nerfs" are things that Blizzard really considers to be bugfixes.
I'm fairly certain a very large portion of the raiding populace will actually go into the level 80 5-mans before Naxx, and not simply out of habit but from necessity.
Not all raiders are equal whether it's gear, skill or experience. There are going to be those who need better gear than is gained by straightforward leveling in order to succeed in Naxx. These players aren't bad, they're just average a need a lot more cushioning than the precise, largely flawless performances the high caliber raiders are used to giving on a regular basis.
Our guild spent 4 months wiping to Archimonde. There's minimal upgrades to my gear before Naxx10/Naxx25, at least per shadowpanther.net, and most of the upgrades will be achieved through quests for blues or reputations, not so much heroic instances.
There are a few nice little items from heroics, especially trinkets, but for the most part it's "Hit 80, zone into Naxx10, when 24 other buddies hit 80, zone into Naxx25".
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
Whereas an achievement like Intense Cold - Achievement - World of Warcraft, which is basically "do the fight right, and do it perfectly, even though you can win with some imperfections," makes much more sense.
Well I think Blizzard's intention is that the reason to go to 5-man instances is that you have 4 friends, rather than 9 friends you can do a raid with or 24 friends you can do a heroic raid with. They've spoken a lot about making 10 and 25 man raiding parallel progression for differently sized guilds, presumably 5 mans are supposed to be, also.
One. The achievements are not asking you to do the fight wrong. They are asking you to use a different strat than the one you are used to.
Assuming that 5 mans are to parallel 10/25 man progression because Blizzard spoke about making 10man parallel 25 man is, imo, pretty stupid. No where did they hint at that.
10 mans are supposed to parallel 25 mans, not be free loot. I see no reason Blizzard can't ramp up difficulty with the next wave of raids.
If you seriously think there is a problem right now, I don't know what to say other than put your e-peen away, Naxx is to be the entry level raid. It is suppose to teach people how to raid and make it fun so people will want to do it. Not be so hard you wipe all the time and eventually quit.
25thNov only made their claim to incite drama and draw attention to themselves. They feed off that. They raid for the recognition. They wouldn't get much once people knew how easy Naxx was so they created drama over it.
Learn to have fun with the game. That is what it is here for.
I personally took little joy in post patch KJ kill if compared to my mediumskilled guilds prepatch twins kill and I feel the extent of the nerf was the key ingredient here.
Your mediumskilled Twins guild? Excuse me sir, but you need a reality check and a big one too. You are not medium skilled, you are very much in the top 0.5%. To use the tennis analogy, you may not be Nadal, but you are still very much a professional player, leaps and bounds above the average club player and let's not even mention Joe overweight couch-potato Sixpack.
I was the MT of a guild that was between the 10th and 15th to clear Karazhan on our fairly average server. That puts me firmly in the top 10% of WoW players. Even so, I quit the game shortly after 2.3. Not because I could not progress any further, but because I wasn't enjoying the game anymore. Granted, there was a good bit of guild drama involved, but that stemmed from the same reason: TBC raiding was too hard to be fun for a good part of the subtop players. And that was after a couple of serious nerf rounds.
Does Blizzard need to cater to the top 0.5% of players (who generate a good amount of the buzz)? Certainly. Do they need to cater to the 5-20% subtop players as well? Just as much. Not only because there is much more money in that group, but also because those are the players who keep the community as a whole going. These are the players who are the backbone of the vast majority of guilds, the ones who connect to top with the masses. And these are the players the current Naxx is tuned for.
Last edited by Bregonn : 11/19/08 at 12:12 PM.
Reason: Inappropriorate language
My guild never really raided in Burning Crusade or before that. We cleared M'uru post-nerf in only a few attempts and got Kil'jaeden down to 26% or so (only had one night to work on him) and then the expansion hit. Now, we're doing Naxx 10-man, and we're finding it to be quite the challenge purely from a gear standpoint. Mobs like Maexxna simply one-shot our tank sub 30%.
Anyways, the point I wanted to make was that a lot of guilds are really going to enjoy Naxxaramas. From the 5-6 bosses I've seen so far, I think it's perfect in design. The fights are somewhat challenging, but at the same time, very easy. Usually it only comes down to one or two people doing their job correctly and the fight is won.
You take 25 of the top PvE players in the world and give them 5 days in content that they'd already seen in beta (and pre-BC), of course they're going to down it quickly.
11/17/08, 6:25 PM
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