World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

maxle · 2011-03-28T21:37:58.000Z

Stop feeding Shaco and you’ll be fine, nublet.

guppy · 2011-03-28T22:01:21.000Z

Got the fucker. FUCK YOU CHO’GALL. Also my tier piece dropped and I rolled a 3. :(

That was hard. Cataclysm makes me feel like a bad player.

mk56 · 2011-03-28T22:33:13.000Z

guppy:

Got the fucker. FUCK YOU CHO’GALL. Also my tier piece dropped and I rolled a 3. :(

That was hard. Cataclysm makes me feel like a bad player.

Congrats and have fun on Nef!

Matthew_Bramblet · 2011-03-29T06:49:42.000Z

The 30% ICC buff really did a good job of letting people get through raid content, who wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Blizzard wanted to finally have an end raid where more than 1% of the level cap players got to finish it, and the buff managed that. Going into a starting raid now at 85 tuned right on the edge is a lot more difficult to handle, especially combined with changes like the healer tactics overhaul.

For people who want content that’s harder than the current heroic dungeons, but easier than raids: the revamped ZA and ZG heroic dungeons in 4.1 will certainly do the trick. They’re tougher than most dungeon heroic boss fights, and require people to have tactical awareness on par with easier raid fights. The item rewards are exactly in the middle too, providing ilevel 353 epics. It should work out well to help people who haven’t been raiding at 85 get geared up a bit, and ease the jump into raids.

The primary “catering to the casuals” for raids will come in 4.2, when people can buy all the gear currently sold for Valor Points, with Justice Points – that will make getting the tier 11 raids done much easier. If that system makes it so that the “casual” players end up on average one tier behind in gear all the time, that’s a decent setup.

Brian_Seiler · 2011-03-29T06:57:32.000Z

Matthew Bramblet:

The primary “catering to the casuals” for raids will come in 4.2, when people can buy all the gear currently sold for Valor Points, with Justice Points – that will make getting the tier 11 raids done much easier. If that system makes it so that the “casual” players end up on average one tier behind in gear all the time, that’s a decent setup.

This is what I’m hoping for, but it leads me to wonder about the roadmap as to what tiers we should expect to go through between now and the next bunch of content Blizzard wants some money for. Obviously we’re going to have one raid where the last boss is Deathwing, because he’s the primary enemy for this expansion. We’re probably going to have a redone C’Thun encounter, since that’s the old god responsible for the Twilight everything, and the zone he was in has been pulled out and as far as I know there’s nothing in its place again yet. We’ve also apparently got a Firelands raid with Ragnaros at some point, and we don’t have any raid instances yet identified in Vash or Deep, where I would hope we’d get at least something. As a guy who came in new with Lich King, how many major expansion patches and/or raid tiers can we expect to see?

guppy · 2011-03-29T07:44:47.000Z

Thanks! And yeah, I started raiding when TOC was a thing. It wasn’t that hard and ICC had the zone buff – I think my guild got its first LK kill at +25%. This is nearly my first time clearing raid content when it’s relevant and before boss nerfs or zone buffs. I felt like a pretty good player in Wrath but the content is much harder this time around.

I also mained a rogue in Wrath – I’ll be going back to that once I get mine caught up, but I’ve been raiding on my warlock due to server and guild drama, and having to play destro since it outperforms the others so significantly at the moment. Can’t wait til I don’t have to cast fucking Soul Fire anymore. Fucking up the destro rotation a little bit really screws your DPS, and getting MC’d at the worst times on Cho’gall was a huge problem. I had 4k DPS swings between attempts.

I know it’s the last refuge of the crap raider, but I feel like Cho’gall is maybe a little overtuned. There’s so much going on, it can be really hard to handle all the gimmicks properly. As our destro lock I was doing my annoying-to-track rotation, dodging fire, dodging shadow crashes, shadowfurying MC’d people (and yelling over vent when I got MC’d), BoH’ing Cho and switching for adds, (glyphed) shadowflaming bloods, AOEing bloods, and after the phase change, shadowfurying and nuking down tentacles as fast as possible while doing what I could do survive the increasing shadow damage (Nether Ward, healthstone) and not puking on teammates. It’s a lot to manage for a fight that still has quite high DPS requirements.

intruder · 2011-03-29T07:59:03.000Z

Matthew Bramblet:

The primary “catering to the casuals” for raids will come in 4.2, when people can buy all the gear currently sold for Valor Points, with Justice Points – that will make getting the tier 11 raids done much easier. If that system makes it so that the “casual” players end up on average one tier behind in gear all the time, that’s a decent setup.

The problem is that people stop playing NOW in droves (just take this thread as example which saw a lot of dedicated WoW players declaring that they left) so it doesn’t matter what in 4.2 will come.

It might be a little too late as every day not subscribed shows people that WoW is not that important as it once was to them (myself included that hasn’t logged in 2 months although the sub still runs).
Every day people have fun in RIFT is a lost day for Blizzard.
Unless there is a major 180 degree turn from Blizzard I only will play the Goblin start area once as I haven’t seen that content so far and then cancel my sub at least until the next expansion or their major turn in design philosophy concerning difficulty / time needed / possibility for some easy-going PUG raiding.

Brian_Seiler · 2011-03-29T08:03:54.000Z

intruder:

The problem is that people stop playing NOW in droves

Only if people stop their subscriptions. Blizzard would LOVE for you to go play Rift and keep sending them money. I’d be curious to see how much of that actually happens, but I doubt that they’ll ever be transparent enough with their numbers to tell.

Wolff · 2011-03-29T08:12:36.000Z

I don’t expect RIFT to be a wow killer, but it may be the first chink (sp?) in the unbreakable armor of WoW MMO total domination. Note this is primarily because RIFT came out stable and ready to play and isn’t a buggy pile of imba crap. I know part of it is that RIFT Is the new shiny but there are also some design decisions that make me smile whenever I run into them in RIFT.

Matthew_Bramblet · 2011-03-29T09:23:39.000Z

There were 4 arena seasons during both TBC and LK expansions; Cataclysm will likely have the same. Possible raids include: Firelands is in 4.2; there’s likely going to be a troll raid sometime down the road (which the revamped ZA/ZG are leading up to); War of the Ancients has been hinted at; and of course the final Deathwing raid.

Blizzard is already taking steps to move faster to release content and keep people busy, as noted with the fact that they’re splitting out the Firelands raid to 4.2 and releasing new dungeons and other content sooner, with 4.1. Getting out more content quickly is a good goal, but Blizzard is known for valuing quality over quantity, and they’ve made a ton of money following that course – it’s not in their best interest to crank out more content if it isn’t actually good content.

As for RIFT, it would be great if there was some competition in this part of the MMO market; hopefully that will provide some. So far, the history of ‘WoW killers’ is pretty thin. Once one of them actually manages to have over 500k paying monthly subscribers, which Final Fantasy XI did before WoW was released and nobody else has managed to do since… then maybe, there will be some real competition to think about.

Creole_Ned · 2011-03-29T11:28:37.000Z

How well have the previous collector’s editions of the expansions sold? I was at the Future Shop location in downtown Vancouver a few days ago and they still had piles of both the regular and CE boxes for Cataclysm. I honestly don’t remember if the collector’s editions of Wrath of the Lich King or Burning Crusade were in plentiful supply months after release or not.

Gunmetal · 2011-03-29T11:44:07.000Z

Creole Ned:

How well have the previous collector’s editions of the expansions sold? I was at the Future Shop location in downtown Vancouver a few days ago and they still had piles of both the regular and CE boxes for Cataclysm. I honestly don’t remember if the collector’s editions of Wrath of the Lich King or Burning Crusade were in plentiful supply months after release or not.

Yeah, that was kind of surprising to see on my last trip to Best Buy. They had 5 or 6 Cataclysm CEs sitting around. EB wouldn’t even take my money to pre-order it originally because supplies were supposedly so limited.

Duality · 2011-03-29T13:12:02.000Z

I think there was a major miscalculation on Blizzard’s part regarding the CE. The story is true pretty much everywhere you go – piles of the CEs are on shelves. I can’t imagine its simple customer backlash and lack of buyers to explain why they’re on shelves.

It really took the wind out of my sails. I had gotten my CE a week before the street date and I wanted to show off so badly! Now everyone can have the thing!

Athryn · 2011-03-29T13:34:33.000Z

Pretty sure that was the case with all the other expansions.

AaronSofaer · 2011-03-29T20:56:33.000Z

A plug for for my current Guild, Shining Force, which lost a number of raiders to RIFT and is recruiting:

Shining Force is good people. No complaints at all, having raided with them for a few weeks now. Good people, relaxed and competent. No drama to speak of, people actually shut up and let the raid leader talk.

We’re currently working on Omnotron Heroic, and we’ll probably move to the twin dragons in BoT afterwards. We have Magmaw, Halfus, Chimaeron, Maloriak, and Atramedes hardmodes on comfortable farm, and clear through Nef/Cho’gall every week, though we usually don’t bother killing Conclave / Al’akir.

The server is Mal’Ganis Horde, and we’re in dire need of Shaman (of all specs), Warlocks, a Shadow Priest, and a bunch of other classes. Deathknights, DPS Warriors, Retadin, I can’t remember everything we need but the list is long.

http://www.shiningforce.net/phpBB3/index.php.

Johan_A · 2011-03-30T02:38:51.000Z

Duality:

I think there was a major miscalculation on Blizzard’s part regarding the CE. The story is true pretty much everywhere you go – piles of the CEs are on shelves. I can’t imagine its simple customer backlash and lack of buyers to explain why they’re on shelves.

It really took the wind out of my sails. I had gotten my CE a week before the street date and I wanted to show off so badly! Now everyone can have the thing!

For me it was more…

Why go out to a store and buy the game, when i could buy the download and preload and play instantly.

Ranulf · 2011-03-30T11:04:15.000Z

Brian Seiler:

As a guy who came in new with Lich King, how many major expansion patches and/or raid tiers can we expect to see?

Eh, 3-4 tiers or so. IIRC, you had tier 1-3 in Vanila (MC, BWL/AQ, Naxx), 4-6 (Kara,SSC/TK, Sunwell) in BC, 7-10 (Naxx, Uld, ToC, ICC) in LK.

I’d be real tempted Aaron to bring my horde shaman over if I wasn’t trying to get my alliance guild’s raids stable. Though he’s not 85 yet and I’ve not played resto much since 80 and ICC.

AaronSofaer · 2011-03-30T13:20:18.000Z

Ranulf:

I’d be real tempted Aaron to bring my horde shaman over if I wasn’t trying to get my alliance guild’s raids stable. Though he’s not 85 yet and I’ve not played resto much since 80 and ICC.

Well, you can always just bring him over and hang out without committing to raids. Mal’Ganis is a pretty amazing pug raiding server, if nothing else, and I’m sure we’d bring a just-hit-85 Shaman in blues over doing h-Halfus with 24 people (not joking).

sluggo · 2011-03-30T16:12:30.000Z

Brian Seiler:

As a guy who came in new with Lich King, how many major expansion patches and/or raid tiers can we expect to see?

For people interested in such stuff, here’s a rough timeline of major raid (and tier gear) releases in WoW. (I’ve left out some of the VoA bosses, and I might be off on some of the BC stuff.) Blizzard’s usually released a few major raids during the first year of an expansion, slowing down the in second year.

// VANILLA WOW (Nov 04)
launch - Dungeon 1 set (AKA Tier 0)
launch - Molten Core, Onyxia (40 man, tier 1)
Jul 2005 - Blackwing Lair (40 man, tier 2)
Sep 2005 - Zul’Gurub (20 man, tier 1.5)
Jan 2006 - Ruins of AhnQiraj (20 man, Tier 2+)
Jan 2006 - Temple of AhnQiraj (40 man, Tier 2.5)
Mar 2006 - Dungeon 2 upgrades from Dungeon 1 set (AKA Tier 0.5)
Jun 2006 - Naxxrammas (40 man, Tier 3)

// BURNING CRUSADE (Jan 07)
launch - Dungeon 3 set (BC dungeons)
launch - Karazhan (10 man, Tier 4)
launch - Gruul / Magthr (25-man, tier 4)
launch - SSC / Tempest Keep (25 man, tier 5)
May 2007 - Hyjal Summit / Black Temple (tier 6)
Nov 2007 - Zul’Aman (10 man, no set pieces)
Mar 2008 - Sunwell (25 man, tier 6)

// WRATH OF THE LICH KING (Nov 08)
launch - Naxx, Sarth (10/25 man, tier 7)
Apr 2009 - Ulduar (10/25 man, 10/25 man, tier 8)
Aug 2009 - Crusaders Coliseum (10/25 man, tier 9)
Oct 2009 - Onyxia 2.0 (10/25 man)
Dec 2009 - Icecrown Citadel (10/25 man, tier 10)
Jun 2010 - Ruby Sanctum (10/25 man, no set pieces)

// CATACLYSM (Dec 10)
launch - BWD, Tot4W, BoT, BH (10/25 man, tier 11)
? 2011 - Firelands (tier 12?)

intruder · 2011-03-30T17:16:26.000Z

Nice list sluggo!

I want to add that each expansion and vanilla had a “server event” leading up to a new raid so far which took a lot of time / resources.

Vanilla
-> Opening of AQ (handing in materials for the “war” (bandages etc.)) and the actual opening event (the gong).
Depending on size of the population and dedication of the server population the gates opened at different times for each server and there was a race of whom would open it first.

BC
-> To access Sunwell and Magister Terrace (new 5 man instance) the server population had to do dailies to open portals to the new zone for a while

Wrath
-> The AC tournament led to the attack of Icecrown (finding the worthiest fighters on ally and horde side)

I guess there will be something similar in Cata, too probably leading to Deathwing (maybe slapping more Twilight Hammer in dailies in Silithus. :o )