I don't know a lot of people who cleared NToV before doing ST. Anyways, PoP was also my favorite expansion, but it was when they started losing massive amounts of casuals. Also people didn't come into PoP with Quarm waiting for them. They did 28 separate encounters before they got to the last zone. 24 of them before the Elemental Planes. The Rathe was a perfect design requiring everyone to be in top shape. But the simple fact is very few people beat it before the next expansion was out.
Going in the same line of thought, that's a pet peeve of mine. This is something EQ did that I wish WoW would have. If you were a raiding guild in an expansion and were just starting in the end zone, when the next expansion came out, progression was made in such a way that you kept going in that zone and usually finished it before you made any real attempts at the raid zones of the next expansion. I'd really like to finish Naxx myself, since I never finished it. But they did TBC in such a way that no one wants to go there now since green 70 loot is superior and we don't field 40 people anymore.
Awake, my understanding of Everquest is that each expansion built upon the previous expansion. You *had* to do the previous content (to some extent) before going to the new content. Is this somewhat correct, in your opinion?
With The Burning Crusade, there was basically a gear reset. Since the majority of WoW's population is casual, you can level from 1-58 then immediately hop into Outlands and then work your way up. You can entirely skip the 60 end game.
I always thought/suspected that the point of introducing tons and tons of new content/progression in the form of 5-mans, Kara, PvP, etc., was to allow for elitist raiding to continue as a niche, without it being all there was to do.
When Naxx came out, the so-called "casual" player was justifiably irritated at yet another raid dungeon while he was running Scholo for the 60th time (but now to get his Dungeon 2 set, woo!). Here, you can't really fairly say that TBC is a raid-centric game. So what's the harm in having the raid content be largely inaccessible to most players?
I'd argue that, for me at least, MC and BWL were great because they were casual raiding. They kept me subbed because I enjoyed the encounters but they didn't require some of the gruelling wipe tolerance or farming.
So all of this is rather disheartening for a middle tier raider such as myself. I've started to grow a little disenchanted because I see the writing on the wall with regards to the current raiding game: 25 man Naxx as someone said. While I, personally, am good enough (at the risk of sounding immodest) to do 25 man Naxx and I think alot of my guildmates are we're not the sort of guild to institute that structure/farming rotation.
Which is fine. If, in two months time, it looks the same then I can shuffle off to another game that catches my eye. No harm done. But I do think alot of "casual-raiders" like myself are going to be put off if the current difficulty level remains.
And your point of saying this is what exactly? I can like more then one game.
My point is that as 95+% of WoW gamers have not played EQ, many deliberately because EQ did not appeal to them, tuning the game for the minority that wants it to be more like EQ is not a smart business decision.
There isn't any harm..But it depends on what you define "largely" as. To me, Largely would be 4 out of the 6 raid zones being inaccessible to more casual raid guilds, not all of it.
Serp, Temp, Hy and Black temple should all be tuned to be very very hard, to the point of nail biting impossible. Yet, tuning 100% of your raid content to laugh at any casual raid guild, to me, doesn't seem smart, especially considering the loot on said content.
Well, the loot is a separate issue. No one is going to come here and say that Gruul's loot table is appropriate when you compare it to Kara loot. (Also, why the hell does Nightbane drop ilvl 100 loot, 10 below Prince, when he is clearly the hardest boss in Kara?)
And yes, I think Tigole/Blizzard agrees that Mag seems too hard, because they were expecting him to die by now. So I think we're mostly on the same page.
Gruul isn't necessarily too "hard" for entry-level -- he's just a bit dumb as an encounter, and seems out of place compared to the relative elegance and complexity of Maulgar and Mag.
Karazhan, Heroic badges and Doomwalker/Kazzak for the casuals.
Again I think that's insulting at best. I would bet almost everyone here is a raider, and many hardcore raiders, all wanting to experience most if not all of the raid content over time. Yet how many here have killed Gruul? or even attempted it? probably not a lot. Are we all unskilled, or then again why don't we just all quit our guilds right now and join Nihilium? I think it's pretty obvious why. So no, you can't divide it between "casuals" and "top few worldwide guilds". There's a gigantic middle group of people.
My point is that as 95+% of WoW gamers have not played EQ, many deliberately because EQ did not appeal to them, tuning the game for the minority that wants it to be more like EQ is not a smart business decision.
Please, I've read enough of these posts on FoH over the years.
EQ catered to its own playerbase with all its expansions. High-end raiding drove the game, so they kept releasing more time-consuming and challenging high-end raid encounters with each expansion. At the time, it was also generally believed that the potential MMO market was far, far smaller than WoW proved it could be. WoW appealed to a new mass-market from the start. Apples and oranges.
It doesn't make sense to have Mag tuned so high that only the top 1% of guilds could kill him -- what would be the point? To have several zones of content that 99% of the playerbase would never see?
I wouldn't rate C'Thun as extremely hard -- challenging and fairly difficult yes, but C'Thun was largely a retard check. Do you have 5 retards in your raid who can't stay 10 feet away from other people, and who can't react fast? Grats, you're chain wiping. Naxx actually got it right too. Spider Wing was your entry level wing, most guilds could complete this. If you had a guild who could dance, you could at least do Noth and Heigan in the Plague Wing. Raz was your cool/free loot, the other 2 were on another plane totally, and then of course Patchwerk was the gear check to say "hey, should you REALLY be going further?" Decent guilds could kill anywhere from 3-6 bosses in Naxx, a guild who could get past Patchwerk was looking for at least 3 more boss kills, then the true difficulty ramp up begin to seperate the good guilds from the great guilds. (lets also pretend Loatheb didn't exist for the sake of this discussion)
Naxx was a big zone, with 15 encounters, some of which were the most complex possible. Now lets compare that to the TBC pyramid:
Maulgar
Gruul
Mag
5 in SC
5 in TK
That's 13 total encounters, fairly similiar to the entirity of Naxx. It doesn't make sense to have Gruul or Mag to have a 4-H type complexity to it yet. It's way too early in the game to separate the wheat from the chaff -- still plenty of time later on for that. I think that's what people are getting at. Maybe only the great guilds get into Black Temple, but the good ones should still be getting into SC/TK. (edit: and I mean into, not necessarily killing Vashj/Kael)
I disagree awake, PoP was very much like Naxxramas in terms of progression, and how TBC should have been. There was a lot of lower tier content for most guilds, and all the way to plane of times for the elite 1-2 guilds. Its also instanced now, but the idea is the same.
You mentioned EQ a lot, and this game seems to be careening down that path to emulate everything "hard" about EQ, and there are more and more similarities every day (heroic WoW reminds me so much of EQ now - the proper pulling, CC, management of positioning). Still, that doesn't mean its a good thing. EQ had a lot of great things about it, but WoW has always been a better game, including raiding.
I don't think you can point to EQ and say much about how it did this or that better. It was initially a harder game, but a lot of late-stage encounters in Naxx were as difficult as anything I did in EQ through the GoD expansion. Most of the difficulty in EQ came from tank-and-spank and overgearing and farming issues - and this point needs to be stressed... eq difficulty was largely based around gear.
There weren't encounters like Magtheridon, C'Thun, or anything even remotely resembling what we have today. Raiding today is far better and more fun. No one would accept even the elemental encounters as a passable raid in today's game. For the most part you didn't have to think much until the game was basically dead.
I'm digressing, but if there is any point to be made, it is that you're comparing apples and oranges here. EQ being hard in NToV has nothing to do with TBC encounters being totally out of whack, and there being an extremely gaping hole for entry level 25 man content.
I'm digressing, but if there is any point to be made, it is that you're comparing apples and oranges here. EQ being hard in NToV has nothing to do with TBC encounters being totally out of whack, and there being an extremely gaping hole for entry level 25 man content.
You know a funny thing I just recalled reading that, is reading the exact same comments 2 years ago. MC was seen by the majority of the player base as a big jump in difficulty from the 5-man dungeons. That I think is the main reason they did ZG and they nerfed MC's difficulty. So this just further my belief that they will do many more nerfs to the TBC bosses.
Please, I've read enough of these posts on FoH over the years.
EQ catered to its own playerbase with all its expansions. High-end raiding drove the game, so they kept releasing more time-consuming and challenging high-end raid encounters with each expansion. At the time, it was also generally believed that the potential MMO market was far, far smaller than WoW proved it could be. WoW appealed to a new mass-market from the start. Apples and oranges.
You seem to be agreeing with me here. My point is that as WoW appeals to a new mass-maket, raiding also needs to appeal to the same mass market, at the risk of driving away the EQ raiders who consider it too easy as they mathematically cannot make up more than 5% of the WoW playerbase.
I am going to make the sweeping statement that mass market players do not want to farm for consumables. I know from personal experience that at least a portion of the mass market playerbase likes to raid. I think that Blizzard would be well-advised to not neglect that group. If all of the above is true, then the conclusion is that there needs to be content for those players, namely relatively easy (at least compared to Naxx) raids.
Hmm. I feel that Doomwalker is easy enough for the more casual guilds out there. The hard part is to find him up I suppose. You can bring around 25-30 people and take your time with it (since you can simply stop before he enrage and take it easy). Then go full out the last 25% or so.
Dendory,
The rathe was a pain before they fixed the encounter. I like the overall idea of it though. Sadly it was broken for a long time, and that's what make me a lot more confident in Blizzard - since they haven't had as many fuck ups as SOE had. There's been Ouro and C'Thun and Ragnaros. And some in BWL, but overall... it's a lot nicer and better communicated then SOE ever did. When Uqua in Gates of Discord was deemed completely broken I quit EverQuest.
And yeah, PoP was such a blast. I loved following the story line and watch how awesome the progression was through the flags. I completely loved that expansion (with the exception of the broken encounters).
Also, I'm sorry that you feel what I said in regards to casuals is insulting at best - but I believe what I said to be the content for casuals. I never brought up skill when I talked about casuals, you did. I see casuals as people that can play a lot less then hardcore players; I'm sure there's several skilled players in your guild.
Snowy,
Magtheridon really isnt hard. Try him out and then come back here. He's truly not tuned so only 1% of the playerbase of raiders can kill him. He's not hard. Mag is not on 4H complexity level.
You know a funny thing I just recalled reading that, is reading the exact same comments 2 years ago. MC was seen by the majority of the player base as a big jump in difficulty from the 5-man dungeons. That I think is the main reason they did ZG and they nerfed MC's difficulty. So this just further my belief that they will do many more nerfs to the TBC bosses.
Ugh.
Blizzard "nerfed" MC months before anyone who complained that MC was too hard ever saw it, and they weren't truly "nerfs."
The "nerfs" happened around March 2005, and also included "buffs" like making abilities ignore LoS and go through walls (Lucifron, Gehennas), and making Shazzrah actually do things. Most of the changes were bug fixes, like making mobs not get stuck in ceilings, and making Garr and Domo reset properly after wipes. This is the worst urban legend in the history of WoW.
They didn't nerf MC at all. People just got better. They got better gear from Dire Maul, itemization was reworked, mods like CTRA and Decursive massively simplified the process, they followed guides and videos online, and so forth. As someone who was in MC in January 2005, please, tell me what they "nerfed" about it to make it more accessible to casual players?
You know a funny thing I just recalled reading that, is reading the exact same comments 2 years ago. MC was seen by the majority of the player base as a big jump in difficulty from the 5-man dungeons. That I think is the main reason they did ZG and they nerfed MC's difficulty. So this just further my belief that they will do many more nerfs to the TBC bosses.
No, most guilds 1 shotted every boss in MC except domo, magmadar, and ragnaros. With some difficulty on their first raid of lucifron.
People initially complained about MC because the jump was going from a guild of 15 people to a guild of 40 people. 15 to 40 in raid size was an absurd jump, and it was extremely hard to pull off. But everyone who did made very solid and rapid progress in MC.
The hardest part about MC, aside from Ragnaros, was getting 40 level 60's in that zone. Thats how it always was, minus perhaps the 2-3 guilds trailblazing, and even then, they cleared it rather quickly. Rag was just ill tuned (and was fixed).
The change we can talk about right now is indeed the return of the looking for group channel in the next major content patch. With it comes a rather significant requirement, and that is that you will have to be in the LFG system set to looking for a group or looking for more to see and use the channel. The global LFG channel will only be viewable and available for use to players while they are in the LFG system.
Hurray!
My casual guild, a month into release, has about 20-25 people at 70. About 5-6 are Kara-keyed. I don't think we've done a single Heroic run yet, but I might be wrong. Chances are we'll do our first Kara run around late March.
This expansion is golden for my guild. Seriously, we can do this content for a year or so without any updates. For the first four-five months, we've got questing/repping/ordinary 5-mans. For the five-six months after that, we've got serious Kara runs/Heroics/leveling alts. And THEN, through practice and gear updating through Heroics, we'll be able to venture into the 25-mans that the raiders have left behind. Maybe throw another 10-man in there (Zul'Aman?) to make things perfect.
And that's leaving out PVP entirely.
In other words, speaking through my official position as representative of all casual WoW gamers, Blizzard can take their time beating hell out of the raiders and making them EARN it, along with giving them the great bulk of the content updates.
Magtheridon really isnt hard. Try him out and then come back here. He's truly not tuned so only 1% of the playerbase of raiders can kill him. He's not hard. Mag is not on 4H complexity level.
We killed 4H over a dozen times, and I see no reason to plan on attempting Magtheridon ever again - maybe one day for completion sake, or unless his loot turns out to be insanely good, which is extraordinarily unlikely - might as well spend our time in serpentshrine. I'm not trying to be a drama queen, but it just makes more sense to spend time on real content and progress instead of an optional boss that is clearly out of whack.
To reiterate a bit, I guess, I'd just say that the transition from pre-BC to BC has been a bit shakey at best for most guilds--that being, guilds that couldn't power the majority of their playerbase through Karazhan in the first couple weeks.
For the rest of us raiders, we're looking at a bit longer of a curve to get our entire guild keyed for Serpentshrine Lair. Yet, I end up hearing a lot of comments in guild chat along the lines of, "What's the deal with this 10-man stuff? I want a -real- raid."
I mean, you simply have to admit... going from a guild raiding 40-man content 4-5 times a night, doing Naxx and AQ40 and then having to both trim down and then phase over to having to awkwardly split the guild into inevitably imbalanced 10-man groups, deal with lock-out issues, and A-team/B-team stress is not exactly ideal.
I don't think we need to have a debate about "casual vs. hardcore" on forums that, at the very worst, contain between "casually hardcore" people compared to the average population and "super hardcore" people.
For me, this is more about guild dynamics. If you're looking at it taking a while to get all your guild through Kara, you're basically not looking at any "real" guild raids other than hopping over to Maulgar/Gruul/Kazzak occasionally. I don't consider those to have the same dynamic as full dungeon raids, which is really what people seem to be missing.
It was hard enough to go from 40-man to 25-man. It's even harder to go from dungeon raiding to having to segment the guild into 10-man groups for the decent period of time it will take "average" raiding guilds to get people keyed.
You know a funny thing I just recalled reading that, is reading the exact same comments 2 years ago. MC was seen by the majority of the player base as a big jump in difficulty from the 5-man dungeons. That I think is the main reason they did ZG and they nerfed MC's difficulty. So this just further my belief that they will do many more nerfs to the TBC bosses.
This is an interesting and viable option. Its entirely possible that they will just progressively tune down content after it moves from the cutting edge. That way top guilds would still get the challenges they are looking for, but the content would ultimately become accessible for a broader raiding population. While I do not entirely support this strategy, I can certainly see the appeal. I still hold to the contention, though, that KZ is well tuned for what it does (outside of Nightbane who should drop 110 gear and be slightly reduced in difficulty), Maulgar is great, but Gruul and Magtheridon are a bit much. If Serpentshrine is hard as hell, I'm okay with that. However, I do not see why Maulgar should be considerably easier than Gruul or Magtheridon.
What's the problem with wanting a range of raid difficulties to go with the range of people who want to raid? When most of you were working on the last few bosses in Naxx, my (former) guild was hoping to kill Jin'do and Ossirian next week. We weren't getting server-wide or worldwide recognition and we weren't getting Tier 3 loot, but we weren't expecting those things. And that was fine, because dammit, we were having just as much fun as the Naxx raiders.
I don't see why a similar setup of many levels of raid instances would be a bad thing. You're in an extremely skilled and hardcore guild - great, you can blow through the first couple instances in a few weeks on your way to the hard stuff, while the casual guilds spend months in there or however long they want to take. Loot, of course, needs to scale appropriately, but if it does - why is this kind of situation a bad thing?
As for "heroics are the new casual endgame" - obviously 5-mans are not the same as raiding. The new non-raid content is good stuff, but there's something about RAIDING with at least 19 other people that is just more fun for some of us than 5-mans, PVP, questing, or whatever. I only play a few nights a week, so I should never be called a hardcore raider, and that's fine with me. But I don't want to be told I should never be able to defeat a raid boss ever again.
I don't feel like any guild that was deep in AQ40 or even had BWL on easy farm can really be termed 'casual'. If you think that's "casual" there's a disconnect. Go look at today's Slashdot review of TBC if you want to see what "casual" really means.
We killed 4H over a dozen times, and I see no reason to plan on attempting Magtheridon ever again - maybe one day for completion sake, or unless his loot turns out to be insanely good, which is extraordinarily unlikely - might as well spend our time in serpentshrine. I'm not trying to be a drama queen, but it just makes more sense to spend time on real content and progress instead of an optional boss that is clearly out of whack.
Awake, my understanding of Everquest is that each expansion built upon the previous expansion. You *had* to do the previous content (to some extent) before going to the new content. Is this somewhat correct, in your opinion?
With The Burning Crusade, there was basically a gear reset. Since the majority of WoW's population is casual, you can level from 1-58 then immediately hop into Outlands and then work your way up. You can entirely skip the 60 end game.
Yes, and that aspect of Everquest is one of the features that killed it in many peoples mind.
The concept that a player would pay £30 just to be able to access the content that is over a year out of date and other people beat 12 months ago just doesn't work, fully stop. And I say that as one of the players who *was* buying expansion to play the new content. It's just a business model that isn't sustainable.
I don't feel like any guild that was deep in AQ40 or even had BWL on easy farm can really be termed 'casual'. If you think that's "casual" there's a disconnect. Go look at today's Slashdot review of TBC if you want to see what "casual" really means.
I think that is exactly the point of those of us who argue for easier raid content. I killed Twin Emps and I read this forum. As such I am way more hardcore than the average gamer. So if even I want more accessible stuff, odds are there are lots of people less hardcore than me who think the same.
Gruul isn't necessarily too "hard" for entry-level -- he's just a bit dumb as an encounter, and seems out of place compared to the relative elegance and complexity of Maulgar and Mag.
Yeah, I would say Gruul IMO is easier than Maulgar. Maulgar feels like a quite rewarding fight for a new 25 man raiding guild and one they can pick up pretty easily. Then they goto Gruul where skill means little besides I can move quickly based on my new surroundings and the rest is all about your stats.
Mag, I'm not sure how hard the encounter was (we tried it once shortly after expansion came out to determine where to focus), but we could tell was the fight seemed overly complex for an entry fight and based on loot we seen from other bosses decided to hold off till we were actually ready to attune people to TK25.
Could we kill him in his old form, prolly based on what Awake has said but the rewards for killing him weren't there till we were ready to goto TK25 was where the issues came up it seems to me. If say Mag had iLvl 125 loot we prolly would have been working on having him down already but for some really minor upgrades when the potential for better upgrades from Serpentshrine Cavern was available to us it seem the way to go (though we were planning to take another glance at Mag now that we are much better geared and not fresh 70's and based on some comments from Awake before).
02/23/07, 4:41 PM
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