5801

My own personal viewpoint (as someone who may be dropping WoW again) is that there is a big gulf between heroics and raiding.

Raiding is too hard, or at least I find it a bit too frightening and you have to be too dedicated to do it.

Heroics, on the other hand, were relatively simple - I fairly quickly got the point where I was just doing them as a grind. I don’t really have much interest in running something 5-10 times to get one of the last 2-3 ilevel 346 pieces I’m missing.

At the same time, I’d love to go raid to do it, but the seriousness with which people take raiding, combined with the strict timetable requirements that don’t appear elsewhere in WoW. I can get a heroic PUG in 10 minutes; to raid I have to be home at night for a specific time a couple times a week and willing to go to work on 6 hours of sleep the next day.

There’s really nothing much in between, and I don’t find “grinding rep” to be entertainment. Entertainment is still the reason I play games. I’m not worried about a sense of accomplishment in a game like WoW.

5802

It really depends on your guild. If you can find the right guild many of the problems you claim for raiding don’t actually exist. However finding such a guild can be difficult (understatement). However there’s nothing in the game that forces people to raid until early morning, or only raid with people who can turn up twice a week, every week.

5803

That’s… kind of a misrepresentation, I think. If you want to progress on content while it’s still relevant (i.e., current raid tier), you need to have a reliable group, you need a couple nights, and you need a couple hours each night. It’s not so much a WoW problem as it is the inevitable result of coordinating 10 or 25 people’s schedules on a regular basis.

5804

If you want to complete a tier, that’s true, but we’re on course to get most of this tier down before 4.2, raiding once a week from 7-11pm, with a quite changeable team (although we do rely heavily on 3 core people) We raid, we kill things, and we have fun - we are not shut out of the raiding game.

5805

Who raids and doesn’t want to complete the raid? I can see “it’s not a huge deal if we can’t down it in time,” but I have always assumed that that was the goal.

5806

Define “complete.” The group that I ran Magmaw and ODS with evacuated the raid afterward because there are much, much easier bosses in other instances. It makes absolutely no sense to me, because my distorted brain leads me to think that one raid should be the easiest, one should be the middle, and one should be the hardest and they should go in difficulty order, but apparently you can be geared and skilled enough to do some bosses in an instance but not all of them. My discussions with the raid leader leads me to suspect that “finishing” the instance isn’t in the cards for a while. It might be a distant, long-term goal, but realistically I don’t think that many of us are expecting to “finish” this tier of content before the next one drops and we start to outgear it.

5807

I have no idea why, but abusing tanks seems to be some sort of sport among certain types. I have several tanks, and the behavior of the dps consistently makes me wonder why the hell anybody bothers making a group run possible for these assholes. Willing, capable, and active tanks are becoming rare for a reason.

5808

That’s the goal, but this is a game. We’ve decided the amount of time we put in, and the attitude we want to have to raiding, and we celebrate the success we can achieve within those limits.

There does seem to be an increasing tendency to make the end bosses of a dungeon fiendishly difficult execution fights, which we do tend to have difficulty with. I’d rather see more fights that are about dps checks and tank checks and healer checks rather than dance checks. Some dancing is good, but fights like V+T where dancing is basically 95% of the challenge and everyone has to do it right get tiresome.

5809

I’m with the Drop Bears, who seem to be a bunch of good dudes. Honestly, I don’t really do that much with them - one of my issues with WoW is that I often feel like I’m playing in isolation, even when I am in a guild. I think that is a “me” thing; I have a hard time because if you are relatively casual you just seem to float along with the current and don’t get very involved, and the steps to become more active require that nasty advanced planning and availability thing I talked about.

I understand that they don’t have to make the game for guys like me. I think it is just a fundamental element of human nature and interaction - guilds are just going to have that hardcore nucleus of people who are more involved and who do play together more often, even when they try to be open and casual friendly. It just makes sense.

But it does not resolve my particular problem, which is that there does not seem to be a good bridge between heroics and raiding. Hell, even figuring out raiding (where to start, what you are capable of and when) sometimes seems overwhelming for me as a casual player. People take the stuff so seriously - you read all of these reports about needing to be “geared” appropriately, etc. But as mentioned, while I’ve had fun doing heroics, I really don’t want to run 30 more (or grind some rep or battlegrounds) to get kitted out for raiding.

5810

Yeah, we have Nef and Cho’gall left in my raid. Everything else we can down consistently, no problem – hell, we 1-shotted Ascendants’ Council last night – but Cho’gall is blocking us pretty good. But he’s the last boss of the raid, that’s not so abnormal. We haven’t tried Nef yet. (Nor have we bothered with Conclave at all.)

I don’t understand why you want more gear check fights. Where’s the challenge in that? What’s the point of seeing if you have enough shiny purples to stand in place and mash your rotation under optimal conditions? I think some of the end-raid fights can be a bit much sometimes – I could really do without those damned tentacles in Cho’gall’s burn phase, for example – but I certainly don’t want more tank and spanks. Those are boring.

I’m not the best – most really good raiders have long since cleared all the normal modes – but I didn’t think the dancing required of Valiona and Theralion was particularly demanding. I’m not trying to be insulting, I hope I’m not coming off that way – but do you have much prior raiding experience? Spread out, collapse, spread out, don’t stand in fire; run around in a circle and stay away from everyone when DBM puts a big mark on your head. It’s even a fairly forgiving fight mechanics-wise apart from the flame breath. Are you really finding that one person is wiping you on that fight? We have a player who gets Engulfing Magic two or three times a fight, seems like, and is not good about moving out of the group promptly, and we still survive it.

5811

So on my server and in my battle group it’s actually the norm for Heroics to be reasonable.

I have actually noticed a very significant improvement over the last two months in terms of group quality on Heroics. It is now very rare for me to get into a group that is “so fail” that we can’t complete the dungeon.

Example:

Last night I pugged Stonecore with one guildy (new guy I had never run with before) and a tank that had never done Stonecore on heroic mode and neither had my guildy or one of the other dps.

So we had some trouble at the beginning because nobody was interrupting the earth shapers from doing the transform, and we had a little trouble the first time on the worm boss.

Then we did Slabhide and the tank and the other so-so dpser died when he was at about 60%. My guildy (Frost DK) then proceeded to tank him for the remainder of the fight while me and the Destro lock popped every cooldown and 3-manned him down.

Then we got to Ozruk and it was a disaster. The tank simply could not get the hang of it. We wiped four times and finally the tank offered to leave and we accepted.

The new tank comes in and we wipe one more time because this tank had also never been there on heroic mode but we got it the second time after some additional explanation.

We got Azil on the first try.

My point with all of this is that heroic performance is highly dependent on player skill and patience and that is not constant across servers. I think at the moment the best bet if you are really struggling with Heroics on your server/battlegroup is not to petition Blizz, it’s to switch servers.

Kind of stinks but it’s an option. Even “crappy” groups from a good pool of players are better than a lot of groups on newer servers.

5812

It’d be nice to stand still for a change. I like the occasional gear check fight because I can just sit down and punch my buttons in the order that I punch them and try to make the number grow big. It’s boring if there’s too much of it, but finding any fights like that in this raid tier is hard. If you asked me what one part of the game I liked least, I’d have to say it’s the moving around bit and positioning, because I don’t have a lot of tools I might like to have (like a measuring stick for knowing how far I am from things) and the positioning and movement isn’t as clear as I would expect for some cases. For instance, I managed to wipe an entire group trying to kill Erudax on heroic because I was standing in the swirly bit of the circle that looks like nothing you’re supposed to be standing in, I heard the first “you’re stupid” honk from GTFO, and I picked the wrong direction to move in and was dead before I could correct (and he’s not even a raid boss) because there wasn’t any indication of which direction I was supposed to move in, how far, and how fast (and I wouldn’t even have known I needed to move at all if I hadn’t installed a third-party interface add-on). We won’t talk about the emmer effing Heigan dance (in brief, I was trying to heal that on a Disc Priest the first time I saw it, so I wanted to stop running as soon as possible to cast something other than my shield, and finding the seam between the area that would be exploded and the area you could live in was practically impossible).

Let’s just take Magmaw as a ferinstance. Magmaw, the way that I’ve done it, is about positioning to an utterly ridiculous degree. You’ve got one schmuck running around like an idiot in ranged zone gathering billions and billions of worms that you apparently have to either be composed just right for or geared all to crap to kill at the rate that they pulse (so doing the fight honest isn’t in the cards). Everybody else has to stack in melee range. That’s fine for the first phase, before he either sets the room on fire, collapses on the spike (forcing you to manually retarget - because if you hit tab you’ll end up on a damn add - and wiping all dots for no good reason), or both. Then you have to reset, at which point you’re probably running back to the side opposite the tank, where you have to stand in melee range, but just a little bit further away than the tank, or you either wipe the whole group by inviting the damn column of fire and its accompanying adds into the DPS group (you’re too far away) or getting yourself smashed to crap because you’re closer than the tank and that’s how the aggro table apparently works. Figuring that out and getting it right is fun, but it’s only fun once and making the fights so intrinsically tied to execution of specific movement patterns means that it’s going to be just as taxing every time you have to go in and kill the ugly bastard.

Looking at the fights in Blackrock Descent, I can’t see even one that lets you stand still and focus on what you’re theoretically good at. They all have interesting gimmicks, but I do kind of wish there were a few encounters that could be settled without having to learn the equivalent of the freaking Konami code. All raid encounters boil down to some combination of memorizing a pattern and having big enough numbers on your character sheet to beat a timer - it just feels like Blizzard has cheated pretty far to the former side. Maybe that’s just raiding - I certainly never was a big participant, even in Lich King, but it seems like I could stand still and focus a lot more in ICC than I could with any of the encounters I’ve tried so far.

5813

One fight, sure. That wouldn’t bother me. It is kind of nice to have one thing that you can, for example, test your optimum DPS or whatever. But we all did that through all of Wrath. I don’t see a problem with there not being one sometimes.

ICC had less movement, but movement was required in most of the fights. Saurfang did not require movement on normal at least if you were melee; same for Festergut (normal) unless you needed to move for a spore. The other fights all required some movement and had positional requirements, albeit in different ways. Had to run around and avoid fire on Marrowgar, and if you did heroic positional requirements were a bit more important; had to switch to adds on Lady Deathwhisper; you jumped between boats on gunship; had to kite slimes and spread for explosions on Rotface; all -kinds- of positional fuckery on Professor Putricide; add control on Valithria required movement, especially for melee; Blood Princes had all kinds of movement; Blood Queen required kiting fire, spreading out for fears, and tracking and locating unbitten players to bite them; Sindragosa had two kinds of ice blocks to worry about positioning, and fucking it up frequently meant a wipe. And nothing I’ve done so far in Cataclysm matches the positional complexity of the Lich King fight. Normal is bad enough; heroic is even worse, and the mechanics are such that you can’t outgear some it. Step on a shadow trap and you’re getting punted to your death, no matter what ilvl your gear is.

Cataclysm has some movement fights, like Atramedes, but most of it is not noticeably more complex. Position is basically a nonissue on Halfus, and movement requirements are simple enough on V&T, Ascendants’ Council, Magmaw, Omnitron, Maloriak and Chimaeron.

Most raiders have long since mastered their rotations. Seeing if you can do that isn’t really challenging for most serious players anymore. The challenge comes from mastering gimmicks and mitigating the DPS loss from movement as much as possible.

I don’t really understand your Magmaw complaints. They spawn in a clump, they can be AOE’d down by your ranged without much difficulty. You only need one person in melee range to avoid enrage as far as I know, although we are light on melee so I’m standing in close as a warlock anyway to help chain. (I still help kill the adds.) If you just have one poor bastard killing the adds, no wonder you’re having trouble. An AOE slow or snare or stun is helpful here – destro or demo lock, fire mage, hunter, that sort of thing. I generally shadowfury as soon as they show up. Gear requirements to nuke them down quickly are not especially high. What’s your raid comp?

5814

Raiding experience? I’ve killed Xegony, so this WoW stuff with its boss fights taking under 10 minutes is kind of cute.

The dancing in V+T isn’t hard. I, by and large, don’t have a problem with it. But if one person makes a mistake it’s often a wipe. This blocks people out from raiding because noone wants to carry the guy who wipes 50% of all attempts. And that’s without even considering nonsense like engulfing magic hitting just before a tranquility tick.

I wasn’t saying I want no dancing - I just don’t want too many fights where the dancing is the entire challenge to be the norm. This is a relatively new innovation - it certainly wasn’t the case in most of Wrath. I think we first started to really see it in the second wing and later of ICC. I don’t begrudge the end of Ulduar it’s challenges :)

Also, dps checks, healer checks, tank checks - these are about a lot more than gear. Healing triage is about understanding damage patterns. Tank switches and add handling require situational awareness on the part of the tanks. Dps need to get into the right place to dps down adds and understand their class so that they know when to use damage reduction and damage boosting cooldowns based on the encounter.

Magmaw and Halfus are examples of the kind of fight I liked, although post-nerf Halfus is confusingly easy. From what I hear there really isn’t much of that kind of fight in Cata.

guppy: Based on your comments, are you a 25 man raider? I can’t see a 10 man raider saying what you say about Magmaw unless they have the right comp for ranged AE. There are perfectly straightforward ways to kill Magmaw by tanking the adds of course, so it’s a bit of a nonissue. The only problem I have with that fight is effloresence seems to hide the pillar of flame ground effect :)

5815

Nope, I’m a 10man raider. I hate 25mans and always have, although I did some of it in my guild in Wrath. In 10mans I feel like a team member. In 25mans I feel like a number. And that’s not even getting into the difficulty of getting 25 people to show up consistently and on time and not have a rotating roster of three people absent for all of raid time.

We are ranged-heavy, it’s true. But it’s always been good to have, oh, three ranged or so, and I don’t see that number having trouble getting them down.

I agree with you about what’s required; in my experience, the terms “DPS check” and “healer check” and “tank check” are about raw throughput (or raw survivability in the latter case) without complicating mechanics. If that isn’t what you mean, then I don’t think we disagree. I was talking about a fight like Patchwerk. To me, stuff like “positioning for adds” and “using defensive cooldowns” aren’t gear checks, they’re how you raid.

5816

Damn videocard hasn’t shown up. My last card died while I was under water for a quest, and looking at my profile it lists (1 drowning) as cause for one of my toon’s deaths. Bummer.

And thanks Sinnick, that’s another new one for me. Think I’ll roll a different char then and join the boys and girls in Drop Bears.

I will never be more than a casual player though, and I fully expect to bug the crap outta people with questions and constant “ohhh, ahhh!.. that was so cool! amazing! beautiful! my god the MUSIC!” in guild chat :)

Edit: no horde side? The latest post in the Qt3 thread about the horde guild appears to be 2008!

5817

We don’t have an active Horde-side guild, to my knowledge.

5818

I’m in a really nice guild, Savage Darkness. They are raiding early stuff, do heroic five mans and TB. Nice people, little guild drama in chat. They don’t allow profanity in guild chat, so not a good fit if you feel you want to do that. But other than that, they are a pretty laid back guild. They are on Arathor Horde side. I’m Mayveena in the guild.

5819

It seems to me that the current raid tier is definitely harder overall then ICC, but I always wonder if that ICC buff didn’t really mess with people’s perception of how hard raiding usually is. During the last part of the expansion there was a 30% buff to dps, healing, and HP, which makes (obviously) a massive difference in how far a raid group is going to get. The margin for error is much bigger, and if a guild finished ICC only with that buff, it’s going to be a dramatic change going into the new raids.

For example, my guild got the 10 man drakes in ICC after doing all the hardmodes except LK with, I think, the 25% buff. We felt pretty good about it, but we knew it didn’t compare with finishing it 6 months earlier with no buff, which was fine with us.

However in the current raid tier, we still only have 1 hardmode down, though we have been pretty close on Chimaron. With that ICC buff, we would have a bunch more down. The same idea can be applied to progression at any point, so it makes perfect sense to me that people find this raid tier that much more difficult.

5820

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