Athryn
6441
I want to see some transmogging pics! One person in the Drop Bears transmogged their tier whatever into the Black Mageweave set, which is pretty awesome. I want to see some creative things!
So many limitations to transmog there really isn’t much you can do.
Why they couldn’t have done what LOTRO did is beyond me.
Farscry
6443
You know, while I generally dislike the “rose-tinted glasses” thing, the one change WoW made in its history that I genuinely think hurt it the most was the introduction of flying mounts.
When Wrath forced everyone back to ground mounts for a while at first, it confirmed to me that I was right. Flying mounts simply break a lot of the game design.
Nah, flying mounts are awesome, you just shouldn’t have one while questing. Fortunately that’s how MoP will work.
I feel your pain Knightsaber, except from the tanking perspective. I have all epics, save for two slots which are Heroic blues, and still get healers bitching that I’m too squishy. Nevermind the fact that I’ve ran the same dungeon in the past, with crappier gear I might add. I had one rogue say I was weak just because I suggested we use crowd control on a couple harder fights. I always find it funny when people bitch about no one wanting to tank or heal. I always want to ask if they’ve ever tried it themselves. Decided to shelve my paladin for the time being, didn’t even try any of the new dungeons. I switched to leveling a rogue, at least for now.
Athryn, it wasn’t very creative but since I missed my old pre-honor PvP gear I transmogged back to that. I got the mace this weekend and haven’t found a transmog mace I really like with that look, but previously I was using Maladath as my sword, which looked awesome with the rest of the set. At least the mace looks elfy, I guess.
I spent a lot of time this weekend tanking the new 5 mans and that was a lot of fun. Nozdormu fight? Fun. Hanging out with Illidan? Super fun. Mannoroth fight? Super duper fun. Tyrande sounding exactly like Aggra? OK not so great. But otherwise I love the new instances, I’ll be running them some more for trinkets and then on my healer and I’m looking forward to it.
My tank had not raided in Cata but I had a pretty decent set of VP (now JP) and troll gear. I upgraded just about every slot except trinkets, bracers and belt. I ended up with enough gear to qualify for LFR (actually qualify with my equipped gear, not just off spec epics and PvP gear) so I signed up and did the first four bosses yesterday and walked away with two pieces of LFR T13.
LFR is really cool. I know it’s too easy for the cool guys or whatever, but I just love that you can queue up and be in a 25 man raid whenever you’ve got some spare time and the set pieces you get there count towards your set bonuses with “real” T13, so you can supplement your normal raid stuff if you’re a raider. And you can also leave after a boss without much issue, people came and went constantly but we were still able to down four bosses in what I thought was a reasonable amount of time. Raid until you’re bored and then drop out guilt free. This game is awesome.
I know a lot of paladins are using the set, but I actually healed in Burning Crusade in this gear: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/earthen-ring/Wilheline/simple
One of my favorite sets.
But…but…you can actually wear the real Judgement set! You’re gonna look like one of those Death Knight Paladin wannabes!
That reminds me, I need to go run a bunch of BC heroics with my Death Knight for entirely other reasons altogether!
I really believe that LFR is the future of raiding in this game. I know they’re positioning it as a stepping stone to “real” raiding, but since that was always the province of a small minority of players the tool has potentially a much larger player base. I suspect that they will end up tailoring future raids to the LFR raiders, and most likely eliminate the “heroic/regular” mode separation and just have one regular mode for the steadily declining raid guilds to use.
Hah. Lets put it this way:
1, my high school colors were purple and white.
2, my college colors were purple and white.
3, I don’t like the normal judgement set colors.
Whats really bad is that I actually kept the undead slayers plate armor that was judgement set models with even another color set. I’ll prolly use that to change up the colors a little.
Ooh, that set was nice. I think I got one piece of it but I wasn’t really all that into WoW at the time so never finished it and just sold the one piece later on. Transmogging gear that was removed from the game years ago makes you super cool.
Uh, they already are tailoring it to LFR raiders, that’s why there’s an LFR tier. At some point I could see them bringing some of the rewards down, like the mounts or scaled down versions of legendaries, but normal and heroic rewards will always be better. They have to be.
I also think you are greatly underestimating the difference in difficulty between LFR, normal, and heroic and overestimating the decline in raiders. Sure that’s bound to happen in every game eventually but I think WoW has a lot of serious raiding ahead and more than enough people willing to tackle it.
Most single player games have at least easy, normal and hard difficulty modes. In many of them you get some extra special award or achievement on the hardest mode. Blizzard has brought that to end game MMO content. It’s one of those things that’s brilliant because it seems so obvious that everyone should have been doing it by now (and maybe some have, I don’t know every MMO inside out). I really don’t see them going backwards on that one, it’s pretty great as is. Besides, it’s kind of what they already do. Raid comes out then a couple months later you nerf it so people can progress but all of the “real” raiders whine about how it’s so easy now. Instead, raids come pre-nerfed with LFR difficulty. Now the casuals don’t have to wait a few months for a nerf and the raiders don’t have to worry about their content getting nerfed. Everyone wins!
I’m interested to see how it works in MoP when people start coming back to the game for the new expansion, that will be the real test.
I raided for years, and in my experience only a small minority even of dedicated raiders raided for the difficulty in overcoming events. They were always the ones who wanted to push harder and harder, even as the rest of us got tired of repetitive content and the like. The main draw was always gear as an expression of beating the game (this became associated with achievements as they were introduced), followed by seeing the content. The LFR tool eliminates the content issue completely, which leaves gear and potentially achievements - hopefully Blizzard will expand LFR achievements to compensate for that as well
Given the tedium and difficulty of organizing and maintaining a dedicated raid schedule, and given that most raid guilds were having trouble maintaining attendance even before this tool existed, I think that regular mode raiding will see an even greater decline as time passes. It’s just so much easier doing it the other way - I did all four bosses in two hours Saturday morning. My time, not requiring any commitment from me greater than a long heroic 5 man. After running raids four times a week for four hours a night for three years…forget about it.
Most single player games have at least easy, normal and hard difficulty modes. In many of them you get some extra special award or achievement on the hardest mode. Blizzard has brought that to end game MMO content. It’s one of those things that’s brilliant because it seems so obvious that everyone should have been doing it by now (and maybe some have, I don’t know every MMO inside out). I really don’t see them going backwards on that one, it’s pretty great as is. Besides, it’s kind of what they already do. Raid comes out then a couple months later you nerf it so people can progress but all of the “real” raiders whine about how it’s so easy now. Instead, raids come pre-nerfed with LFR difficulty. Now the casuals don’t have to wait a few months for a nerf and the raiders don’t have to worry about their content getting nerfed. Everyone wins!
Yes, but balancing three separate tiers takes time and resources, and I question whether the two separate regular raid modes will justify it. It won’t happen right away, but I suspect they will simplify things eventually.
I’m interested to see how it works in MoP when people start coming back to the game for the new expansion, that will be the real test.
True enough.
90% of the time involved in developing a new raid will still be taken up, even with one difficulty mode or three. If the LFR allows Blizzard to get a lot more people seeing the raid content, with less nerfing of the content along the way, they will have done their job.
It’s a lot more work scaling each boss scenario for 25-man and 10-man, than it is dealing with different difficulties within each of those. But since LFR uses 25-man (and from the viewpoint of getting people into a semi-balanced raid, it’s a lot easier for the system to assemble 25 people than 10) that’s unlikely to go away soon, either.
90% of the time and effort in developing a raid is art and animation.
idrisz
6455
tweaking timing and adjust balance. not art and animation.
Hatter, I just can’t see Blizzard putting themselves in a position where they spend months and months creating raid content and then release it in only one difficulty that everyone clears on the first day. That’s a terrible model for them.
LFR is tuned pretty well right now I think. I had a pretty easy time of it but some of my guildies had much worse experiences. They’d get the first boss down then wipe for an hour before everyone quit. You really can’t make LFR any more difficult than it is now without defeating the entire purpose, which is to let everyone see the content.
However, regular guild runs would completely crush this content if they were allowed to queue for it as a raid. You’d be bored of it in two weeks. Then you’d quit the game. It doesn’t have to be super difficult and it doesn’t have to force you to raid four nights a week. Our group raids twice a week, I figure we’ll kill Deathwing some time before MoP. That sounds great for me.
I think normal mode has to exist, it has to encourage a little bit of a commitment to raiding and it has to have better rewards to go with it. I just don’t see how you get out of that unless you come up with some other type of regularly released content to keep people busy, but that’s probably hard to do when you’re spending so much time building raids.
I suppose I could see how you’d think heroic mode is not needed, but I guess I’m not sure how much time and money that really saves Blizzard. I also think they like having those rare prestige items in the game to get people interested in where that cool stuff comes from.
However, regular guild runs would completely crush this content if they were allowed to queue for it as a raid.
They can’t? So if you had a guild group of 20 players, you couldn’t queue as a raid and fill the last five spots using LFR?
Mouzone
6459
You can queue for LFR with a premade raid upto 25 players. There was actually some conterversory when it became apparent that the top guilds had found a way to get loot from LFR multiple times per week to complete all there t13 gearset. Apparently bans will be incoming.
One thing that this LFR system can’t repilicate from regular raiding is the sense of progression you get from working on an encounter for a couple lockouts until finally everything clicks.
idrisz
6460
every time I see mouzone’s name, I wonder didn’t I kill him in End time instance…
