Are people actually upset with content being too hard rather than too easy? Are you actually serious? It should always be too hard, then adjusted downward. The less 1.0 maiden/illhoofs that are in the game the better.
I expected more fights like 4H and Kel'Thuzad, except with a higher bar, since you can demand more individual execution and complexity from individual players without pushing difficulty into the realm of impossibility. I'd happily wipe for hours a night there, because that's fun, and knowing that the main obstacle between success and failure is our own execution provides motivation.
I'm not sure anyone expects or wants free loot. A 25-man Naxx sounds good to me. But not with Loatheb in every room.
The problem with this Gurg is you never get any new people into the raid game, which was the hope when they lowered the cap. Can you imagine if in 1.0 WoW the first encounter was gothik, although tuned for the gear available at the time. If you look at the gear many people are wearing it's obvious that from a gear perspective you could gear yourself to raid in without having to have T3, but do things like karazhan really teach people what most of us had to learn over the last 2 years of progression about raiding.
There should be plenty of hard content, things like KT level that are a lot of fun. But that should be a bit further into the progression.
Quigon, I don't have a lot of time atm but I think your expectations are a little off base. I don't think anyone should be near completing TK at this point. We're a month and a half into TBC and you're suggesting that someone should already be about to clear the 4th out of 6 projected raid zones? Blowing through content that fast will leave Blizzard hanging by mid summer. The progression so far hasn't been all that bad if you ask me, especially with the planned changes coming (Mag being looked over) having a decent number of guilds clearing Mag, Gruul and Nightbane while working towards SS attunements is a good place for current progression.
Edit: Rambar, I fully agree, and Gurg said this earlier as well regarding the whole gateway mob concept. If Mag was really easy you'd have people get free attunements if they managed to take advantage of improper tuning while others have to kill him at his true intended difficulty to progress.
Are people actually upset with content being too hard rather than too easy? Are you actually serious? It should always be too hard, then adjusted downward. The less 1.0 maiden/illhoofs that are in the game the better.
Obviously. Much moreso when keying and attunements are involved. I'd rather have an overtuned Mag that they can nerf to the intended level, than a buggy source of free loot that gets hotfixed up to be massively difficult, while the handful of guilds that saw him in his initial form frolic in Tempest Keep.
Mag is overtuned, but based on what I've seen, it seems like a very worthy TBC raid encounter in terms of its design, and it'll be a fun/complex fight in its final form. Most of the bitching is about Gruul, and the initial reports about Hydross suggest he's even more consumable-intensive (albeit more interesting as well). I think it's more that there are hundreds of guilds that did 40-man raids two months ago and structured their schedules around it, and right now the entirety of the 25-man raiding universe for most guilds consists of steamrolling Maulgar and then maybe wiping to Gruul, with no other options.
Gurgthock touched on it in another thread, but you really have to be aggressive in tuning it so it's not too easy -- because if Gruul and/or Mag had been easy, then retuned to be harder, you'd have guilds who got a free pass on their keying segments.
Gruul is a valid debate. I don't think he's that far off from being well tuned. As for Magtheridon, if DnT and Nihilum come out and state that they've put in several week of wiping to him, then I'd believe he's too hard. But we've heard next to nothing about that encounter, and I think it's supposed to be harder than Gruul at least.
My philosophy going back to MUDs and evaluating zones about to implemented has always been "Make it too hard, then adjust accordingly." The opposite is even worse -- tuning things harder will piss off 95% of the people -- and they're bitter at the lucky few who got a free pass. Tuning things easier makes everyone happy.
The problem with this Gurg is you never get any new people into the raid game, which was the hope when they lowered the cap. Can you imagine if in 1.0 WoW the first encounter was gothik, although tuned for the gear available at the time. If you look at the gear many people are wearing it's obvious that from a gear perspective you could gear yourself to raid in without having to have T3, but do things like karazhan really teach people what most of us had to learn over the last 2 years of progression about raiding.
What do people need to learn to be able to raid exactly? Do we really need raid zones to teach people how to "spread out" and "not stand in aoe"? And if gothik was the first raid encounter what would the problem be? Do you need 2 years of raiding to learn how to fucking assist? (Although some of the people in this guild...) What exactly is the super secret key to Gothik that people had to learn in previous fights?
Obviously, the relative lack of any sort of significant gear progression is a hindrance here. If they create fights whose execution is a major stumbling block even to the best guilds in the world, and have no path to eventually making it do-able through gear progression, then only 0.1% of raiding guilds in the world are ever going to succeed in those fights. Extraordinarily few guilds are ever going to turn into DnT just from time investment. With gear progression like it is currently, presenting a situation whre blues are competitive with Tier 5, then if DnT can't do it in a week with their current gear then most guilds aren't going to be able to do it in six months.
The problem with this Gurg is you never get any new people into the raid game, which was the hope when they lowered the cap. Can you imagine if in 1.0 WoW the first encounter was gothik, although tuned for the gear available at the time. If you look at the gear many people are wearing it's obvious that from a gear perspective you could gear yourself to raid in without having to have T3, but do things like karazhan really teach people what most of us had to learn over the last 2 years of progression about raiding.
I think the 5 man's and especially the heroics have a number of elements that are a very clear redux of the older raid zones. You do have a point about wanting to get new people engaged in the content without forcing them to go from kindergarten to 7th grade in one fell swoop. However, I would imagine most of the wow community at least saw Molten Core and part of BWL, but maybe my perspective is skewed a bit by the server we play on.
The other big problem is the gear scaling issues people have beaten to death in other threads. There's really no clear upgrades to get you to the point that the "old' content gets a lot easier. You're still going to need to flask up, use stoneshield pots, etc. for that one particular fight that you barely beat last week. I think people would be much more willing to Gruul every week if they actually knew it would make it easier the following weeks. In MC, BWL, AQ, etc. you always had that gear upgrade benefit.
What do people need to learn to be able to raid exactly? Do we really need raid zones to teach people how to "spread out" and "not stand in aoe"? And if gothik was the first raid encounter what would the problem be? Do you need 2 years of raiding to learn how to fucking assist? (Although some of the people in this guild...) What exactly is the super secret key to Gothik that people had to learn in previous fights?
Honestly? Yes, thats exactly what people need. You can easily distinguish a healer in Kara who's healed on Thaddius or C'thun from one who never experienced those zones. Often times the people without that experience aren't stupid (sometimes...) but they haven't had the practice.
Gothik is about working smoothly as a team, in my opinion - something that comes from months of raiding together. Point being, yes - there needs to be raid zones that teach things and raid zones that exercise those skills. Thats the point of progression?
I agree with the spirit of Ultramax's post, but I think that a caveat should be added. Its one thing to have bosses that are overtuned but doable, particularly if the fight doesn't hinge on a highly randomized element that can cause an uncontrollable wipe. However, its another thing entirely to have an encounter than cannot be beaten or that doesn't give the players an opportunity to beat it. Gruul, as an overtuned fight, is okay in the sense that it is beatable, and has been beaten regularly. Were he not a gateway mob and sort of the introduction to 25-man content, it would not be a huge deal. If they tune him slightly downward over the next two months, then I'll be more than content. However, the issue that concerns me is the combination of unkillable content and Blizzard's timetable. Wiping repeatedly on an unkilllable boss is not fun. Its less fun when you are throwing maximum consumables at the boss for several weeks. Its even less fun when the fight has mechanics that are not controllable, such that deduction and theorycraft doesn't help (4-Horsemen was an excellent example of a fight that was interesting to wipe on for a while, while C'thun 1.0 was not). I'm not going to contest that Magtheridon is unkillable, but if his risk versus reward does seem out of whack at the moment. The big killer will be if Blizzard opts for a really slow response time. If they wait 2 to 3 months before patching Magetheridon, it will be a problem, particularly if Gruul remains at its current tuning and if Serpentshrine has any bosses that are extremely overtuned.
Its fine if bosses are overtuned, but they should not be unkillable for an extended period of time. Furthermore, it would make a hell of a lot more sense for Vashj or TK25 bosses to be road blocks than for the Magetheridon to be a road block. The 25-man raiding community really ought to have content it can use to establish itself, and over tuning the starter mobs is an issue, particularly if they are not re-evaluated for a long period of time. By comparison, Maulgar is an interesting and engaging fight that is not hard, but will let mid-range guilds at least get underway for raiding.
What do people need to learn to be able to raid exactly? Do we really need raid zones to teach people how to "spread out" and "not stand in aoe"? And if gothik was the first raid encounter what would the problem be? Do you need 2 years of raiding to learn how to fucking assist? (Although some of the people in this guild...) What exactly is the super secret key to Gothik that people had to learn in previous fights?
Yes you do, TBC has attracted a great deal of new customers, take into account guilds reforming, new members and just plain new guilds and your looking at a lot of new faces who have *never* raided before. Not to mention the many people who were never in a large enough guild to raid.
You can explain to somone "what to do", but first hand experience is difficult to come by if you don't have any starter grounds. Guilds shouldn't have to go pop open an onyxia instance so people can get their first non-4h raid experience. There should be a clear progression, one that offers avenues of difficulty based on time. IE a place where the difficulty is slightly lower, where you can gear, and make the next difficulty raid slightly lower, while more advanced guilds can just choose to obtain less gear and deal with the increased difficulty of the "next tier raid zone".
Grul/maulg are technicly difficult encounters, yet lets face it, no one here is going to say they are impossible without laughing, however, they are really hard. So where is the "first tier", where is the place that people go which ramps up the difficulty. If serp/Tempest were both as hard as nax (or harder), I think it would be great, but, not putting out two-three "onyxia" difficulty bosses for people to learn and get thier feet wet and learn/enjoy the first "kills" of real raiding, is, in my opinion, a mistake.
People like us won't "need" the kill to want to kill Grul/Mag, we understand how awsome is it..A new raid group who goes in there and gets pounded for 4 hours a night with little progress? Well, they might not raid again, they have no feeling of what its like to win, the first bar is too high and they might give up.
People who compete for gold at the olympics don't have their first competition at the olympics, my friends.
Last edited by Lithose : 02/23/07 at 3:42 PM.
Reason: Spelling
Honestly, I rather enjoyed raid zones having a steadily increasing difficulty. Take Maulgar, he isn't terribly hard, you might spend a night or two figuring him out. No real consumables needed, it is all just learn the encounter and play well, well here you win. Gruul on the other hand, its like why are these 2 in the same zone. Not that its impossible either, but honestly fights like that aren't fun at all. You throw money at the problem and just hope you won't have to do it many times.
There is a valid point though, for a lot of guilds who did not raid Naxx, the content is a really steep hill to climb. Its not so much that encounters teach you how to play the game but rather have similar elements, so when a problem comes up, since you've seen the mechanic before, you should know how to deal with it and thats how the raiding game has been designed until now. For most guilds the current content which isn't even the end game in the long run of the expansion will be about what they can do.
And to be honest, as much fun as herbing slave pens 5 times per hour is, I would've rather have put my required farming time towards the end of the expansion rather than a month into it. And fuck the guy who decided every tanking potion requires an instance only herb.
The other big problem is the gear scaling issues people have beaten to death in other threads. There's really no clear upgrades to get you to the point that the "old' content gets a lot easier. You're still going to need to flask up, use stoneshield pots, etc. for that one particular fight that you barely beat last week. I think people would be much more willing to Gruul every week if they actually knew it would make it easier the following weeks. In MC, BWL, AQ, etc. you always had that gear upgrade benefit.
So many times you hear people use the excuse of "yea his loot table sucks or yea its not worth wasting my time". I think people get sorta flustered in a sense when the only gear upgrades they are seeing are really sidegrades. I can't even count the number of times a piece of blue tanking gear has dropped that has an increase in 1 type of stat but a drop in others. People want clear upgrades and not situational sidegrades. Even in your hardcore guilds which are supposed to be about "progression" you can feel the unexcitement about boss loot.
Yeah, although it may not even be that extreme, Gruul is starting to make me turn away from raiding. We haven't spent much time on him (2 nights at a few hours each with no consumables) but just thinking about having to farm up 20-30 pots and seeing them all dissapear in 3-4 unlucky attempts and having to call the raid due to people running low on pots is a nightmare I'd like to leave behind with Sapph.
Honestly? Yes, thats exactly what people need. You can easily distinguish a healer in Kara who's healed on Thaddius or C'thun from one who never experienced those zones. Often times the people without that experience aren't stupid (sometimes...) but they haven't had the practice.
And is it only possible to learn how to spread out or clump properly by doing Thaddius and C'thun? If some fight in the future required this are you saying it'd be impossible to learn it then?
Gothik is about working smoothly as a team, in my opinion - something that comes from months of raiding together. Point being, yes - there needs to be raid zones that teach things and raid zones that exercise those skills. Thats the point of progression?
So what exactly is learned by killing a loot pinata? Nothing I did in MC or BWL prepared me for C'thun yet somehow I magically learned it. Throwing people easy fights doesn't let them learn anything, because they'll only do the minimum they need to win.
Wasn't that about as good as it gets? There were mobs which most guilds could kill (5-6). Then a "significant" hurdle with Patchwerk that cut out to mid tier guilds, then the final three which only very good guilds would ever kill.
My point is that there should be something for everyone, and in doing so there is more of a sense of progression, more diversity, more loot, and more to show up for each week than just "more of the same". Instead, we're starting on Loatheb essentially, and a block which very few guilds will kill in the next 1-2 months at best. Many good guilds had 3-5 bosses dead in naxx within their very first week (I think we had 4 or something); whereas some of those same bosses gave other guilds months worth of trouble. Yet those same guilds that dropped 5 bosses on week 1, probably took nearly half a year to finish the zone. I really liked how Naxxramas panned out. I thought it was the pinnacle of my raiding experience over the last decade.
We had fun wiping to Noth, to Gothik, to 4H, to KT, to Anub'rhekan, and each provided their challenges, but it was a much more appropriate increase in difficulty. Further, a lot of the loot reflected that, which doesn't appear to be the case in TBC. There were still meaningful and significant world firsts, etc etc.
I do believe you need a zone like Karazhan level difficulty, only for the 25 mans. Or at least a winged situation with low-end rewards for initial easier kills, and then give the sweeping naxxramas/uber type rewards for the much more difficult encounters. No one wants free loot, so please, get over that point. What we want is some getting our feet wet content; and then the real challenges, with the real rewards (seriously itemization team... wtf), should be after.
I would think from an economic standpoint this idea would be straightforward to blizzard, but I'm not worried about their bottom line. From my own perspective, I think there should be a bit more meat to 25 mans. The outdoor encounters are about on par with the difficulty I'm talking about. I love raiding with my guild, and the more to kill the better, even if some of it is a bit silly and almost no reward.
Gruul would have a lot less bitching if he was the fourth or so raid boss in the progression series.
And is it only possible to learn how to spread out or clump properly by doing Thaddius and C'thun? If some fight in the future required this are you saying it'd be impossible to learn it then?
Obviously not, we have people learning the skills you gain (as a healer) on C'thun for the first time on something like Aran. I'm not sure I follow your train of thought - my point was (I believe) reinforcing Xi in that there needs to be a skill progression to introduce raiding to new players once again. Its swifter than it was in 1.x, so that its not totally boring to people who've mastered them already.
Originally Posted by Ultramax
So what exactly is learned by killing a loot pinata? Nothing I did in MC or BWL prepared me for C'thun yet somehow I magically learned it. Throwing people easy fights doesn't let them learn anything, because they'll only do the minimum they need to win.
The fights leading up to C'thun prepared you (partially) for it. Sartura was movement and spacing, there are a number of dps checks which contribute greatly to the management of C'thun. Of course it did introduce new things, but thats okay too? Absolute stepwise building of skill is clearly not the ideal, that'd be boring (Boss A uses ability X, Boss B uses Ability X + Y). However, the opposite is hardly what we want either - every boss is completely new and has nothing familiar.
I do believe you need a zone like Karazhan level difficulty, only for the 25 mans. Or at least a winged situation with low-end rewards for initial easier kills, and then give the sweeping naxxramas/uber type rewards for the much more difficult encounters. No one wants free loot, so please, get over that point. What we want is some getting our feet wet content; and then the real challenges, with the real rewards (seriously itemization team... wtf), should be after.
I tend to agree with this. My and many friends' guilds have kinda been in a "WTF?" situation in regard to raiding in TBC, simply because there is no "initial" 25-man content that is a "real dungeon" at all. Our options until everyone clears Kara are:
a) Split up into 10-man groups and deal with potential lock-out frustration
b) Have access to some pretty steeply tuned "Onyxia-like" 25-man encounters that require tons of consumables
I'm pretty sure most people were hoping for having a dungeon to raid alongside the guild with when they got to 70, and Karazhan doesn't really cut it for that purpose. Karazhan is a team effort, not a guild effort...and that's a big difference when you're -already- shifting down from 40-man to 25-man, only to find that the shift is currently from 40-man to 10-man.
Although many bosses in Karazhan aren't super-hard, I think for the majority of pre-BC 40-man raiding guilds that weren't super-hardcore, it -does- take a long time to get the whole guild potentially attuned to Serpentshrine Lair to do "real" 25-man dungeon content. That delay is a bit frustrating, IMO.
Wasn't that about as good as it gets? There were mobs which most guilds could kill (5-6). Then a "significant" hurdle with Patchwerk that cut out to mid tier guilds, then the final three which only very good guilds would ever kill.
The funny thing about this is that what you refer to as "most guilds" was probably around 1% of the population. What you refer as cuting out the "mid tier guilds" really was maybe 0.1%, or 1-3 guilds per server who actually got Naxx on farm.
I do agree with the general trend of this thread that putting stuff that experienced Naxx raiders feel is on-par with Naxx encounters but tuned for 10 or 25 people as the very first raid content in TBC is retarded. If say half the population saw at least ZG or MC, only a tiny tiny portion had the time, skill or desire to go to hard core mode to learn Naxx.
I'd be willing to bet that what made ZG in particular a success, where PuGs ran it daily and most groups could get it on farm after a few weeks were several things that are all missing from TBC entry level raiding: easy once learned, easily accessible by alts and new 60s without huge gold investment, and providing clear loot upgrades. I really don't know why they went the complete opposite way with TBC by making the very first raids into difficult, restricted encounters with little loot incentive. I'm all for hard raids myself, but from a game making point this seems weird.
Originally Posted by Quigon
I do believe you need a zone like Karazhan level difficulty, only for the 25 mans. Or at least a winged situation with low-end rewards for initial easier kills, and then give the sweeping naxxramas/uber type rewards for the much more difficult encounters. No one wants free loot, so please, get over that point. What we want is some getting our feet wet content; and then the real challenges, with the real rewards (seriously itemization team... wtf), should be after.
I agree that the loot from those hard encounters are side-grades from blue lvl 70 dungeons. Making easier raids with lower rewards would actually mean making them drop loot which is worse than quest rewards which is pretty funny in itself.
And to come back to the original point, if 2.1 is really their last finishing touch to TBC before the majority of the content designers start working on expansion #2, we're stuck with this game model.
Karazhan is a perfect example of a "ramp-up" dungeon where the first boss is a freebie and everything gets (more or less) progressively harder. Guilds who've played with each other for a long time and had great gear simply waltzed through the place until Nightbane, while some new guilds take an entire week to get to Opera. I've thoroughly enjoyed progressing through there and learn to work with members who I've never raided with before (like many guilds, we split from our old beginning-Naxx guild and reformed with friends).
What drives me mad, and from what I'm reading it's the same with some other folk, is that Karazhan isn't a 25-man instance, or that they don't have a 25-man equivilent to Karazhan. Not really sure why they didn't have a shorter 25-man Kara-equivilent that was a keying requirement...
Speaking of individual players role. Magtheridon is like that. No idea why people on this forum say he's hard, because I feel he's about as hard as Gruul (who isn't hard at all). I'm sad to see that they already "hotfixed" Magtheridon. When I do Magtheridon I think Thaddius 2.0 or The Four Horsemen. It's a pretty fun fight.
A lot of people assume things like "oh my god fire resist gear" and that he's impossible based on X and Y rumor - or the little gem where some guy made a thread on this board and claimed Magtheridon to be impossible when they only killed one channeler before he got lose? Oh please. We've killed 4 before he got lose.. And it took us what, 2 hours of attempts or less. Also as I can recall, this person didn't even know what the cubics was for.. anyway, you get my point.
My point of the above text is that I strongly believe people should attempt an encounter far longer before they decide it's impossible. In EverQuest it took us sometimes months before we beat an encounter - and not because it was broken - but because it took that long to learn and figure it all out.. I love that.
02/23/07, 3:03 PM
Similar Threads
