I dunno, Flowers. You haven't made any assertions that don't seem like hyperbolistic threadshitting. Maybe if you were saying things that had some vague resemblance to reality, I'd feel like there was the tiniest smidgeon of a chance that you were actually posting in this thread sincerely instead of just trying to stir up shit wherever you can, but such is life. World of Warcraft is a game in which personal skill at playing your character made a huge difference in the amount of damage and healing you put out and in the amount of damage you took, among other things (positioning enemies properly for tanks comes to mind). The ejecta which constitute your posts such as these: bear about as much resemblance to actually playing the game as your posts due to good-faith contributions to a thread. Not that you give a fuck, because you're only here to keep being your own fluffer and bask in your sense of self-superiority, but I quit because the raids went from fun and challenging to boring, shallow, and easy. Kael'thas and Vashj were fucking amazing, but even the mediocre TBC raid encounters were on the level of the good Wrath ones, of which there's basically just Nef. It's like Blizzard looked at TBC and said "Oh man, Najentus! That dude was the most fun fight in Burning Crusade. Let's make every fight as shallow and mechanical as he was!" But I'm sure that somehow you'll interpret as it suits you the fact that I actually enjoyed downing Kael'thas, that I actually liked working on getting Yogg with fewer and fewer allies up. That the best players I played with could pull four times the DPS of a mediocre player with the same gear and were respectful, calm individuals who just enjoyed "killing internet dragons", or that said best players I've played with were in a guild that raided less than most "casual" guilds did to clear every fight in whatever the current content tier was. Nothing gets in the way of your schtick, Flowers, not even being completely, totally wrong, and I understand and accept that.
That's actually a good point. Current raid tier in TOR we spent an obnoxious amount of time over the course of a week and cleared it. Since then we've spent seventy minutes per week to clear it. In contrast, a casual not-quite-guild I sometimes fill in for has spent way, way more time on that place than my group did, except they haven't even cleared half the zone. I filled in for a few other "casual" guilds a while back as well and it was the same story there. I don't want to make definitive declarations, but it certainly seems as though casual is an euphemism for "not interested in improving". Which is totally fine, not every needs to play or enjoy games the same way. I'd just been thinking that casual was about time played, and it doesn't seem to be; the casual players I know play way, way more than the raiders
Aaron, 1. I respect and value you as an individual with opinions. 2. I think you are too upset to continue this discussion without calling names. 3. I am glad that we agree raiding gets boring. 4. It is nice that you have gotten good at running instances, but I think that forcing people to beat extended content repeatedly at the mercy of random number generators because the items they want do not drop is not good gameplay.
As a long time UO gamer and ex-GM, I find that equivalence to be hilarious. You just illustrated how little you know of WoW raiding.
Raiding never got boring. The quality of raid encounters Blizzard put out got shitty. If Blizzard were putting out an instance at the quality level of Ulduar every time they put out an instance tier, I would still be subscribed.
Talk about what? Are you looking for a critique of the Wrath and (even moreso) Cataclysm raid encounters and their design from the kind of raider who truly enjoyed raiding in Burning Crusade? Or are you looking for an enumeration of the reasons, the ways in which raiding in TBC was fun for me? Your suggestion is ambiguous.
I'd like to throw in a "raid events that became ever more complicated and ridiculous and unbending scripts that you had to follow to the letter became a fucking chore and Flowers is right in mourning for the loss of individual skill as a result". Yes, we get that you can play your character to the best of your abilities to eke out the highest DPS while ensuring you're right on the money with the script, but there's little that can actually surprise you and force you to think on your feet without it being an inevitable raidwipe.
It's pretty straightforward. Blizzard has been moving towards content for the masses since they killed off the attunement component of TBC raiding. That led first to the separation of normal and heroic mode raiding and then LFR. Having long since gone casual myself, I find LFR a great way to see content I was otherwise locked out of. It's nothing like raiding back in the day though, and from what I'm told by those who still raid neither are the normal/heroic boss fights.
Most of the fights in Cataclysm are actually stupidly simple. It's just that their failure states are binary "dodge the fire or die", "press the button or die" kind of things. And there's no flow to it. You could kill Vashj without having any bossmods unless you were the one person who had to pick up the strider. I know you can, because I did! Archimonde made you stay on your toes and dodge the fire, but you didn't have to put out huge DPS while you were doing so; it was a safety dance fight without the boredom of Naxx's Safety Dance and without the bullshit timing of Ragnaros. Maybe I'm kinda bitter. Meh.
Part of the problem is there's a limited amount of boss gimmicks you can add to a game over the years before you either start basically cloning encounters or just make them overly complex. If you don't massively change the tech behind it all then you're a bit stuck. There's a lot of creative encounters that just can't be done with the WoW engine, or are so radically different to what's gone before that the majority of players would struggle to come to terms with it, and that's a real disappointment for me.
I don't mind LFR or normal/heroic separation. Ulduar was a fucking amazing instance, for example, and Anub'Arak in ToGC is one of the best technical fights Blizzard ever made. Blizzard just shifted way towards mechanistic fights, and towards having very little going on at a time, both in an effort to make sure people can hold the entire fight-state in their heads and to make it friendlier for 10man raids. The sad thing is that it's not like you couldn't make 10man versions of raids that are just as deep as the best of the 25man raids. Shit, the 5man Kael'thas encounter was a very good homage to the 25man raid, and a better fight than most of Cataclysm's raid encounters.
Some of the Cataclysm 5man encounters (particularly the second and third fights in Well of Eternity) could have been solid raid fights. Significantly better raid fights than what we actually got in the raid instances.
What was it about Ulduar that you compare so many encounters to it? It seems like you want to let it fly and it seems like you should.
It had flavor, variety, and depth in the encounters themselves. The fights had larger scope in terms of active space that demanded attention, and the scripting couldn't be cheesed to the level of "stand in place and pewpew until the timer tells you to move 2 feet that way". I really think one of the most important things that Blizzard lost sight of is that if you have a lot of things going on, but not handling one of them perfectly doesn't instantly kill you (Yogg), that's way better than having only a couple of things going on that instantly kill you if you fuck up (Ragnaros). It's okay to have moments when you need to move/"safety-dance" (Archimonde, Mimiron) but if too much of the fight involves desperately watching your movement (Alysrazor) it's shitty and boring, especially if the amount of damage you take from a misstep is massive. Ulduar wasn't mechanically-speaking Blizzard's most impressive raid instance (that'd be Sunwell) and none of the fights were the most technically polished or flawlessly balanced fights in the game (Anub25HM, Lich King 25HM, and especially M'uru). But it was solid, varied, flavorful... Deathwing was a mechanically solid fight and pretty well tuned, but goddamn was it boring and felt completely unsatisfying in every way. Seriously, Blizzard, we're fighting his claws? Get the fuck out.
Well of Eternity was supposed to be a raid, along with the Throne of Tides raid for 4.2. Someone at blizzard decided "designing interesting raids is hard, so we're just not going to do it for this content update" and cut Throne of Tides/Abyssal Maw completely. Luckily, the designers were able to keep the work they had done on WoE and re-tune the instance to a 5-man.
Of course, the real problem is any one game trying to please everyone. You seem to be saying that you want to play a game that requires everyone to have bossmods, whereas I think any game that needs people to have bossmods is terrible.
Huh? The game has shifted towards bossmods, or at least timing bars built into the interface, since Burning Crusade. I raided without bossmods most of the time in TBC, enabling it for specific fights (this wasn't out of some principle, it was because my computer was really, really shitty) in a way that would have been completely impossible in Cataclysm. I wish I could go back to that, because having to have timing bars all over my interface is fucking lame. The one time I was on strider duty I had DBM (or was it the other boss mod that was around at the time? I don't remember) running so that I could have a timing bar for the strider. If I'd had a better computer, I probably could have done without it, but I tended to get around 2-3 FPS in a raid if I was zoomed out to that point.
It's why I decided to quit when WotLK beta came out, and why my single vote in this thread probably doesn't make sense. I was hoping for more interesting gameplay elements and mechanics from WotLK, and they didn't come (I suppose except for phasing, which I never saw). My problem with WoW raiding, and coming to many of the same conclusions as Flowers, albeit less poetically, is that skill didn't really matter. The tiered gear stepping requirements made skill meaningless up to a certain point, and that point was often way too high, like months of playtime high. I lead a raid guild for a bit over a year, doing TBC 25-man and 10-man, and before that leading Molten Core and Blackwing Lair and that 20-man troll zone or whatever it was, as an officer. I tried to take the casual players to the hardcore, appointed class leaders that made sure everyone had raiding specs and proper DPS techniques, I oversaw Priests/Druids/Paladins helping them with using good mods to make them more efficient healers, instituted what I thought was a fair (but still slightly random roll-based) DKP system, raid schedules, farming DKP rewards for guild bank, all that stuff. We went at TBC content for months and never got past the first boss of Serpentshrine cavern. It was a fun experience about 20% of the time, and I had to ask eventually, what was the point of all of this if a guild that's in the middle of the casual/hardcore curve has to beat its head over and over again, re-running content to get their DPS geared up before that same DPS gets bored and joins another guild/server (like I eventually did)? We saw about 25% of the endgame content of TBC after months of constant playtime, while a few other guilds were regularly clearing Black Temple. The majority of guilds never even stepped into Black Temple or even Tempest Keep. It was this design of having a minority of players see content that was obviously exciting and proudly worked on by the developers that baffled me. Apparently they changed that and the vocal minority started complaining about how the game got "casual," but it's the only thing that made sense. I got to see Sunwell Plateau and Black Temple eventually, but only by having the massive amount of DKP available to the leader of a raiding guild, all those people I left for that last month got left behind in a system that encouraged people to guild-hop after getting lucky with drops, since there was no incentive to keep playing in a guild not getting geared fast enough (especially if you weren't getting Main Tank drops). Strangely enough I had fun with PvP after getting my troll mage up to level 70. Ice Mage was a legitimately fun experience all around at that point, especially with the addition of the water elemental pet summon that made the class borderline overpowered but still susceptible to a smart opponent (and hunters, fuck hunters). The game is just really good at rewarding you for figuring out good timing with your attacks, using the right ability at the right time, chaining the right moves together, and punishing you when you fuck it up. As a co-op RPG the game was a dream to play so many times. But now when I see a game pretend to be as good as WoW with its combat, while also including treadmill elements, or the developers saying "Our game really opens up at level cap because that's what everyone wants right guys?!", just... fuck it all.
Oh.... the Throne of Tides was supposed to be a raid instance? I always wondered about that. It seemed weird how the underwater zone was its own completely seperate thing, with a couple 5 man instances but no raid instance and no connection to the overall storyline despite the highly developed storyline within the zone itself. That zone was one of my favorites in the entire game, too. But it didn't seem to fit into anything.
ToT was a five man with an accompanying raid "Abyssal Maw". The connection to the overall story is that the Naga were working with the Twilight's Hammer and had captured and corrupted Neptulon (using that giant squid thing). The raid instance 'plot' would involve cleansing Neptulon of Deathwing's influence via giant squid. Instead, Blizzard decided that the Neptulon story had been settled and that no further resources should be spent on it. Because ending a story arc with the major lore character, in this case an Elemental Lord, getting abducted is the perfect resolution point. Instead of getting the Abyssal Maw raid, we got the Trolloloics: the revamped ZA & ZG that nobody liked.
FWIW, I really really liked the revamped Troll instances. But they were my last hurrah before I quit the game entirely, (I unsubbed before the next content patch dropped) so apparently I didn't like them that much.
They weren't *that* bad if you had a competent group. The biggest problems with them were that they were tuned for people mostly in raid gear, they required a lot more teamwork and coordination than LFD allowed for (a problem of most of the cata heroics), and they were the only new content for a very long time and wore out their welcome rather quickly.
Remember that 'hate that burns like white phosphorous' comment? What a perfect example. Thanks, Flowers. Thlowers.
This isn't actually evidence that raiding isn't a glorified dance routine. In fact, if the encounters go from ball busting hard to trivial once you learn the routine, it seems more in favor of it being a routine. Now, dance routines still require skill, so I'm not arguing that raiding takes no skill. I know it does, because I don't have the skill set to raid.
For what it's worth, I think it's not so much memorizing the routine as it is a change of mindset from just derping around doing what you want to powergaming. As people pointed out in other threads / upthread (don't remember which), a lot of more casual raiders simply respond with an unblinking, disbelieving stare when you tell them that they have to do more damage to the boss or the boss will not die.
For whatever reason, these days Dark Souls scratches the itch that WoW raiding scratched for me a couple of years ago. Complex encounters, fairly low margin for error, premium on being familiar with the enemy and my own toolkit. And I don't have to bother trying to corral 9 other people! As a bonus, the gear grind isn't nearly as rough; there are no "optimal" builds so I can have fun and experiment with different weapons / abilities / etc.
They were also long compare to other Cataclysm instances. There was a time when I not only had the patience for but actually enjoyed something like a full Scholomance clear or going through multiple wipes on the way through the Scarlet Crusade side of Stratholme (which actually served as a proof of competence for my old raiding guild). Those days are long gone.
i reinstalled WoW and played for a few minutes and I already need to take a break. Probably because I'm getting dizzy for multiple reasons, but I mean. It's cool being in Pandaland and being a Panda and Chinese influence and China and Traditional Instruments Playing A Looping Sleep-Inducing Song and yeah okay i get it. Main reason I reinstalled is because a friend could really use the RaF 2x exp boost before this weekend comes and goes (event item or some bullshit idfk). At least now I'm tired enough to go to bed! Thanks WoW! :D
