1561

Unless you are really unlucky on drops and que Heroics as DPS. In which case it can take a very very long time to get LFR ready. I tried doing it via dailies and Heroics but burnt out before my gear was ready.

1562

Scenarios while waiting for the Heroic queue to pop. There’s some very nice gear in scenarios.

There’s still a lot I’d to do in the game, and I see even more coming with the patch (I’m a pet, mount and achievement whore) - but some recent guild drama (yay!?) has taken most of the wind out of my sails.

1563

As large as the active subscriber base/revenue stream is, I think people tend to lose sight of how small a fish they really are in the pond. The people most likely to be upset about dailies and rep grinds are probably 5-10% of the base, and MoP is Blizzard seriously shifting away from focusing on pleasing that tiny minority and towards the majority. The minority is just very vocal in general, it can be easy to think it’s larger than it really is.

First, the daily cap was dumb. Then the higher cap was a tolerable band-aid on the problem because there was so much to do. Now the cap is gone and the complaint is “must do too much!”. We’re like goldfish, incapable of realizing we’ve eaten enough and need to stop (it’s not coincidence that “Slow down!” is in every voiced character’s wordset).

I used to be borderline hardcore in Wrath (weekly raids, but a small guild and we progressed really slowly, maybe 50-70% of the way to Arthas when we lost steam), playing 15+ hrs/week. I tapered off pretty heavily in Cata, never seeing a raid and only getting into a few Heroics.

I’m back to playing regularly, though not as much. Well, probably as much if you remove the hours spent raiding, since our guild is barely more than a chat channel at this point. I play 1-2 hours a night (maybe 4x a week), bang out a set of dailies, a scenario, maybe a Heroic. First the Golden Lotus (which DID get grindy), then the 5.1 Landfall stuff. There are enough sets of quests (4?) and no required first batch to get variety like GL, and the periodic advancement one-off quest hubs in the Landfall story keep it from feeling like a grind. Haven’t really touched the farm (I will, at some point), and don’t do pet battles unless I’m on an alt in a pet level appropriate zone.

Or, if I don’t want to do dailies, I’ll run my Monk or a different alt if the Monk has no rest XP. Classes have been revamped so much and the world is so different now and leveling is so fast (moreso if you had been hardcore enough in the past to pile up some heirlooms) that you could easily run a main and 2 alts up to 80 with only a little overlap in content. Possibly more if you wanted to level an alt mostly through PVP or instances (I almost never run instances while grinding alts, for no discernible reason).

Point is, there’s an assload of things to do without feeling forced to grind for hours a day. That doesn’t mean that people who want a specific thing (crafting pattern, piece of gear, mount…) that’s locked behind a big time sink of dailies/rep grinding don’t have a valid complaint (*), it’s just that Blizzard cares less about trying to feed what is basically an insatiable hunger.

(*) - I “screwed up”, intentionally skipping the two western zones on my main so that when I brought my alt through there would be content I was seeing for the first time. Problem is that my main is a blacksmith, and I guess a lot of the good end game patterns require rep with the bug faction. D’oh.

1564

Yeah, the problem is people always want some kind of progression. It could be to make their characters more powerful or to get new pets or if there was housing it might be to get cooler stuff for the house, whatever. Players want to feel like they are going forward.

There isn’t much player-generated content in WoW so the game lives on dev content, and the devs can never keep up. So welcome to some kind of grind.

1565

Semi-related: I have a game on Android by Gameloft called Order & Chaos Online. It has - and this is an understatement - more than a passing resemblance for World of Warcraft. Does anyone know how this is even legal?

1566

That’s a good question. I think a lot will be cleared up, as far as blatant copying of a game is concerned, once the EA v Zynga case is decided. Likely a few years away, given how slow our legal system moves.

1567

Honestly my only current disappointment about Mists is the ease of the heroics. I loved, loved, loved the Cata heroics because they were so challenging. Heroic bosses should fuck you up if you don’t know their mechanics and how to execute properly, but I’ve been able to face roll heal through the vast majority of the new heroic bosses. I hope the new raids (including LFR) are much, much harder.

On the flip side, I got into the brawlers guild and having a lot of fun actually paying attention to some mechanics there.

1568

They won’t be. Really hard group content appeals to a certain hardcore minority but it’s a bad fit for the majority of WoW’s playerbase and Blizzard knows that (especially after Cata’s increase in difficulty drove so many people - myself included - away). Or at least I see no reason to think high difficulty will be the default mode for new content - they can always include ways for people who have the sort of team and and personal skill that make that sort of challenge fun to seek it out for themselves without expecting people like me who are stuck with the random dregs of the internet to pound our faces into a steel wall.

1569

So what were originally introduced as an elite form of content for only those willing to put in the time and effort (and considered to be entirely optional), have to be made easy enough for everyone to be able to do.

What’s the point in having heroics anymore then? Just remove them and buff normal 5mans.

1570

Nevermind. Read blah!'s post below. Way more insightful/accurate. :)

1571

There aren’t any level 90 normal 5 mans anymore, it’s just heroics and they are meant to be normal difficulty. The new heroic level dungeons are the challenge modes. They are your elite form of content for those willing to put in the time and effort, and are entirely optional. Here is the quote from Ghostcrawler:

There are no level 90 regular dungeons.

The Mists of Pandaria heroic dungeons are easier than the Cataclysm heroic dungeons.* Once we made that decision, we thought that having two versions of the level 90 dungeons (normal and heroic) didn’t make sense because they would be very similar in difficulty and offer similar loot. We thought about calling them something besides “heroic,” since heroic tends to mean hard to a lot of players, but we also needed to call them something, because some dungeons like Temple of the Jade Serpent have a lower-level and a level 90 version. We thought about calling them “level 90 versions” but figured “heroic” required less explanation. (We also could have dispensed with lower level dungeons, or made lower level versions of the level 90 dungeons, but we felt like both solutions were just to make the nomenclature of “heroic” more clear, which seemed like bad reasons.)

TLDR: Some Mists of Pandaria dungeons have lower level and level 90 versions. Others just have level 90 versions. In both cases, the level 90 versions are called “heroic.”

    • If you like very difficult dungeons, Challenge Modes are targeted at you.
1572

There’s that, plus if you want to ever raid you’ve been required to run heroics repeatedly since at least Wrath (and probably BC, but I skipped that whole expansion at the time). And yes, raiding is technically optional but it’s a substantial part of the game content that ought to be at least basically accessible to anyone that’s interested in pursuing it. Hence LFR, and the easing of heroic dungeons.

PS: It’s not about being willing to put in the time and effort. I have been willing to put in the time and effort, but it’s group content, and if it’s hard you can’t just run it with any old PUG, you need a dedicated group that knows what they’re doing, and those are not easy to come by. I started playing the day WoW came out and I have never ever had such a group, merely been lucky enough to occasionally tag along when one was down a member for that particular run.

1573

Tried a challenge dungeon for the first time last night (Jade Temple). Yeah, those of you bitching about easy heroics? You’re in for a big, possibly unpleasant, surprise… A day later the tank is still twitching and shaking, the healer is still weeping and I’m still a little tetchy my own self.

1574

One wonders if this wasn’t a great big “put up or shut up” to the cadre of leetist forum trolls for whom nothing is ever hard enough. I’d love to see some participation numbers for the population at large.

1575

That sounds great. Are the encounters actually tuned to be more difficult, or does the extra challenge come from the time limits?

1576

Cata heroics and the entry level raid with their “bring the player not the class” routine that was an outright lie should have killed WoW. They’re lucky it didn’t. My guild didn’t see many coming back after leaving LK and/or Cata until they got it for Christmas 10 days ago.

I grew to hate cata heroics because even two years later, I couldn’t run a basic heroic without idiots wiping in black rock caverns with the transform beam boss (boss #2). The new heroics are a God-send for my sanity. The new daily rep grinds are bad (gating reps is dumb) but after waiting for the initial glut of people its tolerable now.

1577

I’ve broken down. A physical condition makes me unable to watch any more of the wow pandarian cutscenes, listen to any more of the audio, or read any more of the quest dialog. This would be some degree of good taste of course.

I am a warlock. I use dark energies to destroy my enemies and summon demons from the darkest planes existence.

For some god forsaken reason i’m tracking down a hidden kung fu master. Now he wants to teach me kung fu. Excuse me sir, i’m a warlock, i don’t need to learn kung fu. It does not make sense! He isn’t hearing anything of it, i need to learn kung fu, by clicking a button to hit a wooden plank. WHAT THE HELL! I’m a warlock and this quest design sucks! I’d rather get a typical mmorpg kill quest.

Blizzard heard my thoughts as after hitting the plank, i get a couple generic kill quests. This sucks but it is the average level i find in mmorpgs, so ok, a huge improvement for this expansion i suppose since i didn’t have to listen to an unskippable dialog hell.

I do the generic kill quests, turn them in and get… ANOTHER FREAKING “hit this plank to learn kung fu” except now it is harder because i have to hit it twice! GOD DAMN IT! This is your improved quest design blizzard? So i hit the plank, but now twice, and i get… more generic kill quests. Ok, at least i’m not hitting planks like some cheesy kung fu movie i guess…

I do the kill quests and i get… YES, you guessed it, another “hit this plank to learn kung fu” except now i’m hitting it three times. Right now i just to throw my monitor threw a window, either that or play The Secret World or any other mmorpg that has half decent quest design.

Why Blizzard? why would you make the quests even worse than collecting 20 boar asses? Why do i need to learn kung fu as a warlock? How does this make sense? How can a human being possibly withstand the sheer level of cheesiness in any dialog present in Pandaria without bleeding from the eyes?

Do i have the remaining sanity to withstand getting my last level (i’m 89) before succumbing to this writing hell? Only time will tell…

1578

Seriously - if the game rubs you the wrong way that badly, maybe it is time to walk away. Yes, there is a bit of suspension of disbelief when it comes to the quests. They are there to move the Pandaria story forward, not roleplay your character for you. We’d all love quests designed specifically for our class/race/self. Interestingly enough, there was a point to those quests (revealed later in the storyline). No, it doesn’t mesh with being a warlock.

1579

I have to say that that Hidden Hollow questline is six shades of amusing, it has SO many jokes and overplayed bits of stereotyping involved…

1580

That explanation sounds pretty damn stupid, why not just remove the name heroics and keep the challenge mode?

And how was it impossible to make level 90 heroics significantly more challenging (and rewarding) than ‘normal’ level 90 heroics? Surely they would have faced that issue in every previous expansion.

(In case it isn’t clear, I haven’t played since Cata!)