BTW doing a quick glance of Flask prices if you were to just buy one they are like 80G but I would hope no one would be buying them at those prices when the herbs are way less with a flask fee (make notice you need to track herb price variations which do vary +/-5G at least daily and in some cases even greater).
Unfortunately the herb market is pretty heavily arbitraged for us. There are few occassions that you actually see any meaningful differences between the cost of herbs vs the end result. The economy of Mal'ganis is smart, it's large, and it's fairly efficient.
The really scary thing is that pot usage is still fairly limited to the heavy progressing guilds on final stages in Kara and the 1-2 guilds going into Gruul. Two months from now, assuming no content nerfs, so many guilds are going to want to pot up for curator onwards and Gruul, not to mention the uber guilds in TK/Eye, its going to be ridiculous. Especially since things like Mana Thistle, Nightmare Vine, and Netherbloom have very limited spawn points.
I've actually found the most frustrating thing about current raiding to be the drastically different demands the existing encounters put on your raid group. For Gruul, you want one prot warrior, one druid tank, then a bunch of healers and DPS. For Magtheridon, there are five separate mobs that need tanked simultaneously, with high damage output that gets worse as the fight goes on. It's really hard to tell my warriors that we'd really like them to be prot for Mag, but then we don't want them for Gruul. If they want to farm or PVP outside raid time, they want a different spec there, too, and while gold is easy to come by, it's not THAT easy. We're doing 25 man raids that seem to expect 40 man rosters and constant sitting out or respecing - and yeah, with the arena rewards and crafted weapons out there, there's hardly the incentive beyond pure competitiveness to kill any of the current bosses, just because the risk vs reward is so out of whack.
Shatter radius reduced to 12 or 15 yards, does constant 20k damage anywhere in that radius.
Growth no longer affects his physical damage, increased to 20% every application (works only for cave in).
His physical damage is consitently at what it currently is with 9-10 stacks.
Everyone takes 4000-5000 damage when hitting the ground from ground slam.
IMO it would be a pretty terrible change to Gruul.
The big problem I have with Gruul right now is that the "Shatter 30 seconds in" Gruul, and the "Wait for 2 minutes before I shatter" Gruul. The difficulty level of both of them is night and day. Shatter is not a problem because it kills people, by now if people are dying to shatter, get more hitpoints and stop sucking (rare cases excluded, but they can happen). The problem with shatter is it completely gimps your DPS if it goes off too often. You spend all your time running out, getting back to position, bandaging (because you can't afford extra healers with DPS stacking).
If they want to fix this fight they can do 2 simple things:
1) Make the cooldown on shatter slightly longer, and prevent him from using it for a full minute up front.
2) Slight hitpoint reduction, maybe 4.35 million hitpoints -> 4 million.
3) Make the fight more melee friendly by enlarging his hitbox, allowing more people to melee him by easier avoidance of cave ins.
We tried as hard as we could to kill him without mass flasking, potting and finally gave up last night, potted up to kill him. Our best non-pot run was 25% and we had several in the low 30's.
Conceptually, Magtheridon vs. Gruul seems to highlight the merits of hybrids who can change rolls as needed. A feral druid can DPS on Gruul but tank on Magtheridon. A prot paladin could heal for Gruul and then offtank the first or second mob for Magetheridon. Its a shame that the tuning is such that even in a fully buffed situation this just does not work at all.
What's worse is that we only have a small number of guilds that are in the later stage of Karazhan. Terocone is annoying enough to find as it is unless you can log on at off hours.
On the other hand, prices are a tad lower Alliance side--at least for now, 14gs for a stack of dreaming glory.
I've actually found the most frustrating thing about current raiding to be the drastically different demands the existing encounters put on your raid group. For Gruul, you want one prot warrior, one druid tank, then a bunch of healers and DPS. For Magtheridon, there are five separate mobs that need tanked simultaneously, with high damage output that gets worse as the fight goes on. It's really hard to tell my warriors that we'd really like them to be prot for Mag, but then we don't want them for Gruul. If they want to farm or PVP outside raid time, they want a different spec there, too, and while gold is easy to come by, it's not THAT easy. We're doing 25 man raids that seem to expect 40 man rosters and constant sitting out or respecing - and yeah, with the arena rewards and crafted weapons out there, there's hardly the incentive beyond pure competitiveness to kill any of the current bosses, just because the risk vs reward is so out of whack.
Yeah the rewards for raiding are a sick joke considering the sheer thousands of man hours required to get to that point.
And 8 warriors for 40 man was a problem right?... well we got 5 tank situations on magtheridon, and 4 tank situations already in serpentshrine. Silly stuff, even when bears are considered. Look at Gruul, what are those other tanks doing? I'm completely unimpressed with the 25 man content, its ill conceived, and trite at best. 10 man stuff is OK, but nothing feels like Naxx anymore; I suppose I'm just disappointed.
BC raiding has taken a pretty sour turn in my eyes, although its generally amazingly unpopular to go against blizzard's viewpoint for some stupid reason.
BC raiding has taken a pretty sour turn in my eyes, although its generally amazingly unpopular to go against blizzard's viewpoint for some stupid reason.
I don't think holding this opinion at this particular juncture makes you all that much of a maverick, sorry to say.
I don't think holding this opinion at this particular juncture makes you all that much of a maverick, sorry to say.
Heh, no kidding. Across a wide variety of guilds and playstyles the majority of people I talk to can't think of anything to say other than Blizzard is fucking up. All but the most casual of the casual players are seeing the cracks in the wall here recently.
Heh, no kidding. Across a wide variety of guilds and playstyles the majority of people I talk to can't think of anything to say other than Blizzard is fucking up. All but the most casual of the casual players are seeing the cracks in the wall here recently.
I beg to differ. Arenas for the most part (minus the disconnect issues) are awesome. 5 mans have amazing risk vs reward. Heorics have some issues but for the most part are well done. The 60-70 questing/leveling is excellent. Crafting (something that was severely lacking in 1.0) got huge buffs and high end new items that are BoP.
At least for me, the biggest source of frustration is that it's not that TBC is a total failure. It's that they've managed to do such a great job on other aspects of the game but yet completely drop the ball on raiding--something that you would think they had 2 years of experience developing.
As an alchemist, I would cheer with delight the day they disabled all pots apart from mana & health pots in instances.
Sorry, but the profession *needs* gutting. It should never have been a main profession, it should always have been a secondary tier like cooking, and everyone could just farm the few pots they need that way. The current situation is beyond ridiculous, and it just isn't fun. Whereas raiding used to be comething that everyone in my casual guild aspired to, at the moment people are hoping that the Black Temple has a 10 player wing rather than caring about 25 player progression - and who can blame them?
Alchemy needs to go from raiding. Just disable it in raid zones beyond mana & health pots. Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Leatherworking and Engineering only have minor applications in a raid zone, the same should be said for alchemy.
hmm? So you mean you can not use that shining new weapon you just created with blacksmith profession in such and such raid instance?
I am sure a lot of people will be pissed and crying nerf.
I beg to differ. Arenas for the most part (minus the disconnect issues) are awesome. 5 mans have amazing risk vs reward. Heorics have some issues but for the most part are well done. The 60-70 questing/leveling is excellent. Crafting (something that was severely lacking in 1.0) got huge buffs and high end new items that are BoP.
At least for me, the biggest source of frustration is that it's not that TBC is a total failure. It's that they've managed to do such a great job on other aspects of the game but yet completely drop the ball on raiding--something that you would think they had 2 years of experience developing.
I don't think anyone would disagree with this statement. 5 and 10 mans are good for sure. But I honestly signed up for big raids from the get go. This must be what its like to be a casual gamer before BC eh? meh, I hate complaining...
I don't think anyone would disagree with this statement. 5 and 10 mans are good for sure. But I honestly signed up for big raids from the get go. This must be what its like to be a casual gamer before BC eh? meh, I hate complaining...
But yeah, no ones saying there aren't successes.
Oh, absolutely not. What I will say is that Blizzard created a raiding game. What was unique in comparison to some of the EQ stuff and ToA DAOC was that they made an accessible raiding game with something for every skill level. Now, if the focus ha shifted off of raiding then I'd call BC an unqualified success for precisely the reasons stated above.
The problem is that I don't think the focus of the endgame has shifted one iota. So if the focus of your endgame is fubar in a million different ways does the game still qualify as a success? I'd say probably not.
I just had to quote this, since it does such a good job of summarizing exactly how major of a difference alchemy/mass consumables makes.
(In reference to Gruul)
Originally Posted by Buiden
We tried as hard as we could to kill him without mass flasking, potting and finally gave up last night, potted up to kill him. Our best non-pot run was 25% and we had several in the low 30's.
It wasn't the difference between a 1% wipe and a kill, or even a 5% or 10% wipe. One tradeskill and its mass consumables was the difference between a wipe at 25% and a kill.
hmm? So you mean you can not use that shining new weapon you just created with blacksmith profession in such and such raid instance?
I am sure a lot of people will be pissed and crying nerf.
Totally different situations, and I'm not even sure why you'd try to draw that analogy to be honest. Alchemy in it's current form, as the number 1, surpreme raiding profession (with it's sidekick, herbalism) is just all consuming (hah). It bears no semblance to crafting 1 epic weapon from your profession.
Anyway. It's worrying when Flasks seems to have become standard, which is seemingly what everyone is reporting as being the standard.
The easiest fix would be to retune all raids to make them doable without anyone using a flask/elixir.
So what, people driven to get server-firsts and loads of e-peen will flask and pot up (that's nearly 1k extra AP for me as a rogue) and burn through encounters, but at the same time nobody is forced to do this.
I don't remember it mattering much to anyone that ZG was cleared in a day and I'd have laughed at any raid leader odering me to flask and pot up to the gunwhales to kill individual bosses. Some people get easier loot, but the price they pay for it is what we are all railing against and what is making many people reconsider their raiding status.
I don't mind completing raid content at my own pace and having fun. We were never the first to get kills in Naxxramas, but I've had the time of my life in WoW dropping bosses with my guild and despite the lateness, killing Luci was as exhilarating as beating Faerlina. We could have been faster, added more raid days, made pots compulsory but the fun vs. effort balance would have gone out of whack.
The easiest fix would be to retune all raids to make them doable without anyone using a flask/elixir.
I don't mind completing raid content at my own pace and having fun. We were never the first to get kills in Naxxramas, but I've had the time of my life in WoW dropping bosses with my guild and despite the lateness, killing Luci was as exhilarating as beating Faerlina. We could have been faster, added more raid days, made pots compulsory but the fun vs. effort balance would have gone out of whack.
This was brought up before in this thread, but the other extreme that you're suggesting isn't really a valid fix. As much as content isn't (and shouldn't be) designed and tuned to only be accessible by 0.1% of the population, it can't be a bubble bath either. A lot of the hype is driven around the server/world-first kills and guilds, and if the groups that use consumables walk through an entire zone of raid content, start to finish, on the day that it's patched in (which is what you're suggesting would almost certainly mean), then what's the point?
You can't balance encounters around no buffs and then have the buffs still be accessible.
I don't remember it mattering much to anyone that ZG was cleared in a day and I'd have laughed at any raid leader odering me to flask and pot up to the gunwhales to kill individual bosses. Some people get easier loot, but the price they pay for it is what we are all railing against and what is making many people reconsider their raiding status.
The gear to trivialize ZG was already in-game when it was implemented. If people flasked up and cleared all of TK and SS in a day, I think we'd be pretty angry... and I'm sure a door would bug out somewhere.
Flasks and pots should be a crutch. If you are going to go all out on everything you achieved nothing particularly special. I can play a single-player game at my own pace or god-mode cheat to the last mission. The consequences of each action are known to the player and he is capable enough to decide which way he wants to go.
Flasks haven't stopped one guild for outpacing all others by a mile, and they will experience catastrophic burn-out and long periods of boredom with only 'on farm' instances available to them. Meanwhile, everyone else has the choice of stopping raids or farming for days for zero guaranteed benefit.
So we're cheating if we use consumables?
Honestly consumable usage is so retarded in WoW that it wouldn't be a problem if it was completely removed minus maybe some mana/health pots. I'm not sure why people are so afraid of removing consumables. Screw consumables. Screw loatheb. Please tell me anyone here would lose sleep over never seeing another Loatheb like encounter again.
Would it be so hard to have encounters tuned more around minor consumable use? Say a couple flasks, some elixirs here and there, and general overall usage of mana/health pots.
I would be okay with this. I'm definitely not hardcore in the least, but I would still like to see raid content without devoting the majority of my time online to consumables.
This may have been said, possibly many times, but if it was I have missed it.
How hard is it for Blizzard to implement an arena-esque consumable ban on certain if not all raid instances? Or do they really want to keep it in to add another aspect to raiding that divides the hardcore raiders from the casuals?
02/28/07, 3:06 PM
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