Support NeoGAF

[Novel Mike]

Edit: It seems clear to me that explaining my opinion is pointless and any discussion on the subject of LFR and its ramifications is only going to be met with put downs instead of any meaningful dialog on the subject. Good luck to you WoWGAF.

 

[Anoregon]

Word of mouth spreads heavily from betas and whatnot. LOTS of people played it in beta and saw the early experience. Go read the threads from when it was coming out even here on gaf, it was absolutely word of mouth. If quality of content was the deciding factor, people would resub for stuff like throne of thunder/isle of thunder in droves, but they don't. They come when an xpac hits and quit hwen they hit max level. These people don't have any idea what is going on in the game besides questing at this point.

I feel like you are conflating the general interest in a new expansion with a specific interest in the sub-max level quest experience. The vast majority of people who play the game don't spend much time reading forums to see what people's beta experiences getting to max level are like. They get an idea of how the expansion looks in general from official sources/marketing and articles on major entertainment sites like IGN, and if they think it looks cool, they buy it and subscribe for a month or two. It's much more a factor of whatever the overall feature feature set/additions and setting of the expansion are than a concerted focus on like, how the questing is.

 

[Tacitus_]

Why do people write multiple paragraphs about how they like that their gear's name is in purple instead of in blue? And how difficulty levels are bad?

 

[Lomax]

Go and try to find a worthwhile rare alive on your server. Worried you'll get a Zandalari Warbringer mount? No worries, hundreds of realm hopping spawn campers will make sure you never get one. Tired of empty leveling zones? Unfortunately, CRZ doesn't help much there (unless you call people phasing in & out good MMO design).

I'll never make my peace with LFD/LFR, but CRZ is so, so much worse. It's absolutely cancerous game design that has not improved my gameplay one fucking bit in any way at all.

That has nothing to do with CRZ. Nothing. Realm hopping is completely different than CRZ. Honestly I think doing away with realm hopping would probably be a good thing. Letting people realm hop for instance content is once thing, having all the rares in the game farmed by a relatively small portion of the population is another. Granted, I've done it plenty, but it's an unhealthy way to play that I'm trying to stay away from as much as possible.

But again, this argument is "I want people in my MMO except when they are inconvenient to me," which is selfish and contradictory. If it was all one shared server (which I've seen argued for), it would be even worse. This idea that you'd be more communal with people on your own server just isn't true, people have been rare sniping and the like since the beginning of the game. What they need to do is fix all the old rares to be like the WoD rares, shared kills and/or once per day. Then it becomes a non-issue.

 

[Rambaldi]

Why do people write multiple paragraphs about how they like that their gear's name is in purple instead of in blue? And how difficulty levels are bad?

It's just one more way to show off how elite and awesome they think they are. Difficulty levels = casual. Everything should be hardcore. If players don't spend 30+ hours a week in a raid then they don't DESERVE to be able to enjoy the game. Git gud, motherfuckers.

At this point I just wish Vanilla servers would be a thing so every hardcore, e-peen wagging player who wants that can go back and have one "expansion's" worth of raids and gameplay. They can have their hardcore gameplay with no convenience and the elusive trade chat social grouping with no additional dungeons or raids ever. Killing the same bosses over and over with no chance of better gear ever dropping will surely be better than having new features or an expanded storyline. It'll be great! And then they'll get bored and come back. The desire for "the way it used to be" and Vanilla servers remind me of those times when a HOT NEW MMO would release and people would say "I'm done with WoW forever!!!!" then quit and resub again a month later.

 

[ZenaxPure]

Why do people write multiple paragraphs about how they like that their gear's name is in purple instead of in blue? And how difficulty levels are bad?

My favorite part of it this time is that the anecdote used takes place during Wrath. The expansion where the first raid tier contained one of the easiest raids they ever put into the game that rained epics from the sky and if you wanted a full tier set you could just go to a different raid that was somehow (impressively so) even easier, I'd say tuned for 10 monkeys bashing on their keyboard while jumping up and down in their chair, and get half of it then head over to the dungeons which were even easier than either of those raids where you could grind out some currency and buy more pieces of the set.

I mean the entire wall of text has a lot of incorrect assumptions but man the story about how epics used to be epic and then talking about that in the context of WoTLK is the funniest shit I've read in a while.

 

[Laieon]

Just resubbed, haven't played since before Tanaan Jungle was added. How difficult is it to get the Remnant of Chaos? From the looks of it, my guild is pretty much dead (and they were really tight-knit anyway, so I never really got the opportunity to raid with them). The mount looks pretty cool.

Thought I'd sub for a month, check out stuff in the jungle, maybe try to knock out some archaeology stuff.

 

[Lomax]

Just resubbed, haven't played since before Tanaan Jungle was added. How difficult is it to get the Remnant of Chaos? From the looks of it, my guild is pretty much dead (and they were really tight-knit anyway, so I never really got the opportunity to raid with them). The mount looks pretty cool.

Thought I'd sub for a month, check out stuff in the jungle, maybe try to knock out some archaeology stuff.

The easiest way to get it is to buy a carry, runs around 30k on most servers.

 

[Entropia]

Edit: It seems clear to me that explaining my opinion is pointless and any discussion on the subject of LFR and its ramifications is only going to be met with put downs instead of any meaningful dialog on the subject. Good luck to you WoWGAF.

I don't see any response to your original post before editing it? I saw it earlier this morning but didn't get a chance to thoroughly go through it.

 

[Novel Mike]

I don't see any response to your original post before editing it? I saw it earlier this morning but didn't get a chance to thoroughly go through it.

I edited it out/removed it because of a few posts directly below it, I tried to explain my point but it seems like no matter what I say I'm just going to be labeled as an elitist or that I'm against difficulty modes or otherwise insulted instead of actually sparking discussion about the subject so I really didn't see a point of continuing said discussion.

 

[erawsd]

The more difficulties the game has had, the less raids that expansion has had.

Facts are facts.

This is an odd comparison since, minus Kara, the TBC raids were all split and individually smaller than many of the raids we see in WOTLK or MOP. A better metric would be to look at the number of raid bosses since that is mostly what raids are judged on.

TBC
Kara/Gruul/Mags - 13 bosses
SC/Tk - 10 bosses
ZA - 6
MH/BT - 14 bosses
SW - 6 bosses

49 unique bosses

WOTLK
Naxx/Sarth/Mal - 17 bosses
Ulduar - 14 bosses
ToC - 5 bosses
ICC/RS - 13 bosses

49 unique bosses + 3 vault bosses.

Cata
BoT/BWD/4W - 13
Firelands - 7
DS- 8

28 unique bosses + 3 vault bosses.

MoP
MsV/HoF/ToES - 16
ToT - 13
SoO - 14

43 unique bosses + 3 world bosses.

WoD
HM/BRF -17
HFC - 13

30 unique bosses + 4 world bosses.

 

[Tenebrous]

That has nothing to do with CRZ. Nothing. Realm hopping is completely different than CRZ. Honestly I think doing away with realm hopping would probably be a good thing. Letting people realm hop for instance content is once thing, having all the rares in the game farmed by a relatively small portion of the population is another. Granted, I've done it plenty, but it's an unhealthy way to play that I'm trying to stay away from as much as possible.

But again, this argument is "I want people in my MMO except when they are inconvenient to me," which is selfish and contradictory. If it was all one shared server (which I've seen argued for), it would be even worse. This idea that you'd be more communal with people on your own server just isn't true, people have been rare sniping and the like since the beginning of the game. What they need to do is fix all the old rares to be like the WoD rares, shared kills and/or once per day. Then it becomes a non-issue.

Not at all, but you're right about the rest, I guess. It is a realm hopping issue and not a CRZ issue. Losing rares to folks on my own realm cluster doesn't bother me, but when I have to compete with hoppers, my interest fades quickly.

This is an odd comparison since, minus Kara, the TBC raids were all split and individually smaller than many of the raids we see in WOTLK or MOP. A better metric would be to look at the number of raid bosses since that is mostly what raids are judged on.

Eep, MSV! I knew I'd forget one damn raid.

I don't judge them on number of bosses - Never have. Highmaul could have 700 bosses and it'd still be the shittest raid (for its time) that I've ever seen in my life. Give me the boss variety & depth of Warlords of Draenor with the raid variety of TBC and I'd be chuffed with a few less bosses than TBC/Wrath/MoP.

Looking at the calendar & seeing SSC on Thursday, TK on Friday, and MH on Sunday (maybe with a Kara pug thrown in for good measure) was a LOT more exciting than seeing HFC 3/4 days a week.

I need variety more than anything else. TBC raiding impressed me a lot more at the time than WoD does now - Some of that is no doubt nostalgia, but some if it is definitely HFC fatigue & the dislike of a four-tier system over simply having a lot more raid environments to play in.

 

[Metroidvania]

Just resubbed, haven't played since before Tanaan Jungle was added. How difficult is it to get the Remnant of Chaos? From the looks of it, my guild is pretty much dead (and they were really tight-knit anyway, so I never really got the opportunity to raid with them). The mount looks pretty cool.

Thought I'd sub for a month, check out stuff in the jungle, maybe try to knock out some archaeology stuff.

Aside from paying, as has been already mentioned, you can also try and get in the FriendshipMoose runs - look to twitter for the hashtag #Friendshipmoose

On raids, I think that that one 'huge' Raid has the potential for burnout a lot more than multiple, smaller raids. But I don't know if I'd say that HFC is 'too big,' as much as its just a general lack of content that is always experienced by 'end-of-xpac' tier raiding - SoO was way too big. HFC isn't terribly bigger than, say, ICC.

SoO feels like it had a lot of empty space/trash ratio than ICC. HFC is a little in between.

HFC's main problem is the 4-tier system, and having no other access (beyond incredibly lucky Mythic dungeons) to get gear suitable for the next tier, but that just relates back to the end-of-xpac fatigue.

Not at all, but you're right about the rest, I guess. It is a realm hopping issue and not a CRZ issue. Losing rares to folks on my own realm cluster doesn't bother me, but when I have to compete with hoppers, my interest fades quickly.

The major issue with CRZ is indeed the mount/rare farm, which should, IMO, be fixed by either limiting the rares to the realm they're on, or more probably, just increase the rate at which the rares spawn. Having something like Oondasta or Nalak (or the Warbringers), old content, need to be specifically having characters parked there to have a decent chance at a kill is pretty bad.

 

[cdyhybrid]

Yeah, all things being equal (specifically quality and total number of bosses) I think I'd prefer two smaller raids to one big one.

 

[erawsd]

Eep, MSV! I knew I'd forget one damn raid.

I don't judge them on number of bosses - Never have. Highmaul could have 700 bosses and it'd still be the shittest raid (for its time) that I've ever seen in my life. Give me the boss variety & depth of Warlords of Draenor with the raid variety of TBC and I'd be chuffed with a few less bosses than TBC/Wrath/MoP.

Looking at the calendar & seeing SSC on Thursday, TK on Friday, and MH on Sunday (maybe with a Kara pug thrown in for good measure) was a LOT more exciting than seeing HFC 3/4 days a week.

I need variety more than anything else. TBC raiding impressed me a lot more at the time than WoD does now - Some of that is no doubt nostalgia, but some if it is definitely HFC fatigue & the dislike of a four-tier system over simply having a lot more raid environments to play in.

I'm not going argue that WoD raiding is better than TBC (although, Id happily take any of them over SSC) I'm just saying that extra difficulties dont really have any correlation with the amount of content. Now if we're just talking about having more variety in the scenery then I think is what they plan on doing in Legion.

 

[Tenebrous]

I'm not going argue that WoD raiding is better than TBC (although, Id happily take any of them over SSC) I'm just saying that extra difficulties dont really have any correlation with the amount of content. Now if we're just talking about having more variety in the scenery then I think is what they plan on doing in Legion.

It depends what you define as content, I guess. I'd personally say two raids with 5 bosses each have more content/value to me than one raid with 10 bosses.

Oh well, time to chase those CM gold times!

 

[ZenaxPure]

Yeah, all things being equal (specifically quality and total number of bosses) I think I'd prefer two smaller raids to one big one.

I agree but at the same time there is no correlation to more difficulties equaling less raid variety which was stated as fact. There have been plenty of tiers with multiple raids in the multiple difficulty system (T11 and T14 being prime examples of that). The problem is that the later raids in each expansion are 1 raid with tons of bosses. But that's not really a recent problem anyway. There was huge burnout back even in TBC when BT was the endgame raid for a whole year. The roster my guild had for Hyjal/BT was pretty different from the roster we had for Sunwell.

The important thing as it has always been is pacing which they have handled poorly in every expansion. Varying difficulties of content has nothing to do with that though.

 

[Nokterian]

12 years old.

I refuse to believe it.

It's ridiculous. I was a teen when WoW came out, and now I'm pushing 30... Insane.

I am 34 years old now and to think i started playing when i was 23 is just insane.

 

[Zelias]

Christ, I've just turned 29 and I started playing WoW when I was... 18 or 19. Can't remember exactly.

 

[Stalk]

I was 15 when I started, oh god.

 

[RoninChaos]

To me, this all reads as "I liked it better when I could do something and others couldn't."

LFR isn't perfect but I fully support players being able to see content and stories. Schedules don't always align for raiding. Actual adults who have to go to work play this game. Do they not deserve a chance to see the storyline to a game they're paying for monthly unfold because they don't have this supposed "effort required" to join a raiding guild? Who cares if they get to see Archimonde and maybe get a piece of gear to go with it? They're paying the same amount as the rest of us. Would it being a rare rather than an epic allow you to feel better about your digital accomplishment?

Aside from Warlords I was in a raiding guild. Maybe not a HARDCORE MYTHIC TOP 5 Guild but a guild who killed bosses nonetheless. I've never once been offended or threatened by the existence of LFR or LFD. I don't understand this line of thinking.

That's exactly what it is. I'm raiding heroics right now and I don't give a FUCK about LFR or the people who run it. It's there for them, and that's great. The problem is with WoW's core design for leveling that doesn't prepare players for how the game works at level 100.. It rushes you through EVERYTHING so when new players hit 100 they can't really become raiders because the game doesn't do shit to teach them about what their classes can REALLY do. Even in dungeons, everything is tank and spank, and half the time you don't need a tank! So the game does a shit job on preparing you for end game. If they could fix that by bringing some difficulty back into the game and slowing things down I think they'd produce a much better player pool that would expand into raiders rather than staying in LFR.

When you couple that with the lack of variety for raids (we had 3 this expansion, wtf) and how Blizzard seems happy with people doing 4 difficulty levels per raid rather than actually producing more content, it's not hard to see why the gulf between raiders and casuals gets bigger.

 

[Data West]

Gold-making in Legion stuff, I kind of want to buy out all the mats for Tomes of Illusions now and shove them all out onto the AH on pre-patch day

 

[Tacitus_]

Even in dungeons, everything is tank and spank, and half the time you don't need a tank! So the game does a shit job on preparing you for end game. If they could fix that by bringing some difficulty back into the game and slowing things down I think they'd produce a much better player pool that would expand into raiders rather than staying in LFR.

Eh, that's always been the case. I remember running dungeons with an enhancement shaman tanking back when Rockbiter gave +threat. At least now they make you do the Proving Grounds to weed out the worst offenders.

 

[cdyhybrid]

WOW could definitely use better mechanics introduction pre-raiding. The MOP rare spawns were good for this - they had mechanics that could one-shot you if you ignored them.

To head this off immediately though, LFR is not and should not be raid training. It's tourist mode for casuals to see the content. I'd rather they put those mechanics into Heroic dungeons instead.

 

[Dog Problems]

What is the most accurate site to show how many people play a certain race and class? I was using Realm Pop but read that Warcraft Realms is more accurate.

 

[LAUGHTREY]

I edited it out/removed it because of a few posts directly below it, I tried to explain my point but it seems like no matter what I say I'm just going to be labeled as an elitist or that I'm against difficulty modes or otherwise insulted instead of actually sparking discussion about the subject so I really didn't see a point of continuing said discussion.

In a way I sort of pity them. They can't really fathom exactly what we're talking about, so they resort to the really old and tired comebacks and name calling. Particularly the elitist card.

When people say they want to get rid of LFR and instant gratification stuff in the game, I'm not sitting here raging because other people get to play the game or something. I don't like that people don't have enough to do in the game.

Back in MoP my guild fell apart and I stopped raiding. The entire expansion my main focus was pvp. I was able to still see the raid content though through LFR and through that, got the same sense of accomplishment and 'beating the game' feeling when I was doing raids normally.

I did MSV/HoF/ToES Once through. I did Throne of Thunder 3 times I did SoO 3 times. I have the legendary cloak, I have a ton of transmog gear from it. All without being in a guild or talking to a single person. I still to this day feel like I "did" MoP even without setting foot into a real raid.

I got back into raiding in WoD and got 5/7m, 9/10m and now 13/13m. There's really no difference in my schedule at all, I play the same amount I always did. I'm in a weekend raiding guild even. I went from LFR being my endgame to mythic being my endgame. Keep in mind the motivation here for me was not that I wanted necessarily to raid mythic all of a sudden. It was because PVP really sucks in WoD and I had nothing else to do now.

I guess, fuck me for basing my opinions on my own experience right? Maybe there's nobody else in the game who wants to go from LFR to mythic. It's been proven time and again people will always take the path of least resistance in WoW. When you give an instant "I win" button like that it just removes so much potential from the community.

 

[jaundicejuice]

That's exactly what it is. I'm raiding heroics right now and I don't give a FUCK about LFR or the people who run it. It's there for them, and that's great. The problem is with WoW's core design for leveling that doesn't prepare players for how the game works at level 100.. It rushes you through EVERYTHING so when new players hit 100 they can't really become raiders because the game doesn't do shit to teach them about what their classes can REALLY do. Even in dungeons, everything is tank and spank, and half the time you don't need a tank! So the game does a shit job on preparing you for end game. If they could fix that by bringing some difficulty back into the game and slowing things down I think they'd produce a much better player pool that would expand into raiders rather than staying in LFR.

When you couple that with the lack of variety for raids (we had 3 this expansion, wtf) and how Blizzard seems happy with people doing 4 difficulty levels per raid rather than actually producing more content, it's not hard to see why the gulf between raiders and casuals gets bigger.

I agree PVE is too easy. PVE combat does a poor job of teaching people some important basics, it's probably not the right choice to simply shuttle people through content quickly (or having them skip it all outright), that having to clear Proving Grounds before heroic end-game content is a band-aid but that's likely the only sane solution the WoW team can implement at this point.

 

[TheYanger]

This is an odd comparison since, minus Kara, the TBC raids were all split and individually smaller than many of the raids we see in WOTLK or MOP. A better metric would be to look at the number of raid bosses since that is mostly what raids are judged on.

TBC
Kara/Gruul/Mags - 13 bosses
SC/Tk - 10 bosses
ZA - 6
MH/BT - 14 bosses
SW - 6 bosses

49 unique bosses

WOTLK
Naxx/Sarth/Mal - 17 bosses
Ulduar - 14 bosses
ToC - 5 bosses
ICC/RS - 13 bosses

49 unique bosses + 3 vault bosses.

Cata
BoT/BWD/4W - 13
Firelands - 7
DS- 8

28 unique bosses + 3 vault bosses.

MoP
MsV/HoF/ToES - 16
ToT - 13
SoO - 14

43 unique bosses + 3 world bosses.

WoD
HM/BRF -17
HFC - 13

30 unique bosses + 4 world bosses.

It's really shitty to try and bolster WotLK by including Naxx tbh. Wrath had one good raid, one mediocre raid, and two bad raids (Naxx/TOGC).

I think it's fair to say that including more difficulties inevitably reduces the amount of raid content we get, but it makes it more accessible and lets especially the hard versions be significantly harder. Instead in TBC even the hard fights were a lot easier than what we get now, and MOST of it was just easy (1-2 bosses per zone that were hard, the rest a modern guild would decimate within a handful of pulls). I'd say pre-difficulty split, most of the fights fell somewhere just above current heroic difficulty.

Regarding difficulty: I mostly see complaints of "Why do I care, I've seen the boss before" from folks that are progressing in normal/heroic, not mythic. I think your average mythic raider is pretty happy with how different fights on Mythic can be. Just adding 1-2 mechanics in conjunction with tuning the rest to be challenging can VASTLY alter how a fight progresses, and as long as it's interesting and difficult we're usually happy with that. The reason this strikes me as funny, then, is because those same people playing on normal and heroic would not see the fights at all under the old wow model from vanilla/tbc. People doing anything other than mythic are directly getting access to content that didn't used to exist, as much as "I see someone in town and I want to strive for that gear" might have been true, it doesn't actually add any content for you to consume unless you go for it. You still can. Mythic gear still looks different from shitty lfr gear and normal and heroic gear, like it's still an obvious difference. Heck, in TBC the raid gear looked like recolors of the pvp gear, but I bet you saw someone in full T6 and still could tell. If anything it's just gear visual fatigue. I know when I see new tiers pop up on MMO-Champion, even if they look cool, I no longer care all that much. We've had so much gear in this game over the years that looks unique that it doesn't matter anymore, and people are going to transmog to what they enjoy looking like anyway.

I guess to me every complaint people have about the good old days and how wow is dying generally strikes me as strawman arguments that they can prop up instead of just admitting that they're tired of the game itself and it hasn't actually gotten worse by any real measure. There are totally aspects to old wow and other old MMOs that were super fun and I think everyone enjoyed, but when it comes to still playing the game over a decade later I would hate to have to deal with a lot of that shit, and so would everyone else. At some point seeing someone in T6 while you're not running it yourself loses its novelty and you say "Hey, I want to see that stuff. Illidan is on the box and I haven't seen him once". At some point the 'community' of standing around for 2 hours trying to get into a bad Stratholme group loses its luster and you're thankful that you can be matched in to a dungeon automatically. At some point caring that other people can experience LFR or normal raiding disappears and I can just focus on the people I actually want to play the game with and what we can achieve in our mythic raid: why should it bother me that there is an easy mode in the game? I don't care when people play other games on easy, it has nothing to do with me, I care about actually enjoying the stuff that I'm doing within the game.

 

[Tacitus_]

Back in MoP my guild fell apart and I stopped raiding. The entire expansion my main focus was pvp. I was able to still see the raid content though through LFR and through that, got the same sense of accomplishment and 'beating the game' feeling when I was doing raids normally.

Do you complain about other games with multiple difficulty modes too? LFR is just the easy (ok, very easy) difficulty setting.

 

[Novel Mike]

In a way I sort of pity them. They can't really fathom exactly what we're talking about, so they resort to the really old and tired comebacks and name calling. Particularly the elitist card.

When people say they want to get rid of LFR and instant gratification stuff in the game, I'm not sitting here raging because other people get to play the game or something. I don't like that people don't have enough to do in the game.

Back in MoP my guild fell apart and I stopped raiding. The entire expansion my main focus was pvp. I was able to still see the raid content though through LFR and through that, got the same sense of accomplishment and 'beating the game' feeling when I was doing raids normally.

I did MSV/HoF/ToES Once through. I did Throne of Thunder 3 times I did SoO 3 times. I have the legendary cloak, I have a ton of transmog gear from it. All without being in a guild or talking to a single person. I still to this day feel like I "did" MoP even without setting foot into a real raid.

I got back into raiding in WoD and got 5/7m, 9/10m and now 13/13m. There's really no difference in my schedule at all, I play the same amount I always did. I'm in a weekend raiding guild even. I went from LFR being my endgame to mythic being my endgame. Keep in mind the motivation here for me was not that I wanted necessarily to raid mythic all of a sudden. It was because PVP really sucks in WoD and I had nothing else to do now.

I guess, fuck me for basing my opinions on my own experience right? Maybe there's nobody else in the game who wants to go from LFR to mythic. It's been proven time and again people will always take the path of least resistance in WoW. When you give an instant "I win" button like that it just removes so much potential from the community.

I agree 100% I'm 11/13M right now and I don't think any of the fights are really that hard at least not in the current item levels its just shitty because some people clearly perform better then others but there isn't a large group of people that we can pull from to phase out those who just can't keep up or don't care to. We need 2 DK's for Manno so we had to have one of our better dps start playing his DK alt and run him through the lower floors the last two weeks when pretty much no one needs anything anymore but what can you do, we had one DK leave and even if we try to recruit one most of the people that are interested in getting into mythics aren't anywhere near geared enough and you don't know if they will stick around once they have said gear or if they will actually be any good once they join.

Also the part about the 'path of least resistance' rings so true to me and the same thing I always said about 10 man vs. 25 man before this expansion and yet people still want 10mans back and I just shake my head >.>

 

[Data West]

I don't know how anyone can finish LFR and feel like they finished the game. I did it on Mythic in SoO and I just did it on Heroic this expansion and that felt like an accomplishment even if it was a lower difficulty.

LFR has never felt like an accomplishment to me. The only time LFR felt like an accomplishment was when I helped guide 39 bozos through Molten Core after about 4 hours in there

 

[cdyhybrid]

I agree 100% I'm 11/13M right now and I don't think any of the fights are really that hard at least not in the current item levels its just shitty because some people clearly perform better then others but there isn't a large group of people that we can pull from to phase out those who just can't keep up or don't care to. We need 2 DK's for Manno so we had to have one of our better dps start playing his DK alt and run him through the lower floors the last two weeks when pretty much no one needs anything anymore but what can you do, we had one DK leave and even if we try to recruit one most of the people that are interested in getting into mythics aren't anywhere near geared enough and you don't know if they will stick around once they have said gear or if they will actually be any good once they join.

Also the part about the 'path of least resistance' rings so true to me and the same thing I always said about 10 man vs. 25 man before this expansion and yet people still want 10mans back and I just shake my head >.>

Complains about keeping a raid team intact in one paragraph and shakes his head at the idea of 10-man mythics in the next. Fascinating.

I don't know how anyone can finish LFR and feel like they finished the game. I did it on Mythic in SoO and I just did it on Heroic this expansion and that felt like an accomplishment even if it was a lower difficulty.

LFR has never felt like an accomplishment to me. The only time LFR felt like an accomplishment was when I helped guide 39 bozos through Molten Core after about 4 hours in there

Yep. If you beat LFR and feel like you've completed the content, that's more of a you problem than a WOW problem. LFR has never kept anyone from doing real raiding if they actually wanted to do it.

 

[TheYanger]

I agree 100% I'm 11/13M right now and I don't think any of the fights are really that hard at least not in the current item levels its just shitty because some people clearly perform better then others but there isn't a large group of people that we can pull from to phase out those who just can't keep up or don't care to. We need 2 DK's for Manno so we had to have one of our better dps start playing his DK alt and run him through the lower floors the last two weeks when pretty much no one needs anything anymore but what can you do, we had one DK leave and even if we try to recruit one most of the people that are interested in getting into mythics aren't anywhere near geared enough and you don't know if they will stick around once they have said gear or if they will actually be any good once they join.

Also the part about the 'path of least resistance' rings so true to me and the same thing I always said about 10 man vs. 25 man before this expansion and yet people still want 10mans back and I just shake my head >.>

Difficulty is all over the place this tier, the squish was ncie but the inflation within warlords was astronomical. And yet people still aren't 13/13, it's mind blowing.

I think it did a huge disservice to the content, the first few weeks in Hellfire Citadel were AWESOME. Even some of those early bosses are a lot of fun when you're appropriately geared (Kormrok is actually a super fun boss, for example), but the difference between bis Blackrock Foundry gear and even heroic HFC gear is like double at this point. Throw in the ring? forget about it. the ring completely invalidated half of the mechanics of the tier. It's a huge disconnect between the player numbers and the fights themselves due to the inflation imo.

Look at Iskar, I bet it's probably something like 5% of the raiding population that have ever had to properly do the chains mechanic, because the ring let you ignore it within the first few weeks of the fight existing.

 

[Data West]

Also I did a pug Normal Reaver on my Warlock today with 15 people. It was set to ML but I was like whatever, got to start somewhere on my alt until my guild runs alts again. If ever. 15 people in the raid. Fucking 2 pieces of gear drop. I hate loot scaling. I hate non-Personal Loot for pugs. How does that even happen?


I do hope my guild runs alts again because otherwise I'm not going to be playing other than raid dyas on my DK since I've already said the lock is what I'm playing for Legion. I'm never going to be the one to beg my main switch because I don't want to burden people with gearing a new character until all of it's on super farm status. But I do think the closer we get to launch, the more people are going to quit if they can't play what they want to play. Except me. I'll just be crummy and do it anyways on my raiding main.

 

[TheYanger]

Also I did a pug Normal Reaver on my Warlock today with 15 people. It was set to ML but I was like whatever, got to start somewhere on my alt until my guild runs alts again. If ever. 15 people in the raid. Fucking 2 pieces of gear drop. I hate loot scaling. I hate non-Personal Loot for pugs. How does that even happen?


I do hope my guild runs alts again because otherwise I'm not going to be playing other than raid dyas on my DK since I've already said the lock is what I'm playing for Legion. I'm never going to be the one to beg my main switch because I don't want to burden people with gearing a new character until all of it's on super farm status. But I do think the closer we get to launch, the more people are going to quit if they can't play what they want to play. Except me. I'll just be crummy and do it anyways on my raiding main.

But but...in vanilla you got 2 pieces of loot for 40 people!!

Also 2 for 15 means AT LEAST one person (and bad luck) was locked already. Probably several were for some reason.

 

[cdyhybrid]

Also I did a pug Normal Reaver on my Warlock today with 15 people. It was set to ML but I was like whatever, got to start somewhere on my alt until my guild runs alts again. If ever. 15 people in the raid. Fucking 2 pieces of gear drop. I hate loot scaling. I hate non-Personal Loot for pugs. How does that even happen?


I do hope my guild runs alts again because otherwise I'm not going to be playing other than raid dyas on my DK since I've already said the lock is what I'm playing for Legion. I'm never going to be the one to beg my main switch because I don't want to burden people with gearing a new character until all of it's on super farm status. But I do think the closer we get to launch, the more people are going to quit if they can't play what they want to play. Except me. I'll just be crummy and do it anyways on my raiding main.

Yeah, I imagine there will be a lot of turnover in guild rosters between the prepatch and the start of raids. Especially with a new class in the mix.

 

[Novel Mike]

Complains about keeping a raid team intact in one paragraph and shakes his head at the idea of 10-man mythics in the next. Fascinating.

It's not the same thing. It's hard to keep a raid team intact for a verity of reasons but I would NEVER want a mythic 10man. I do not find small raid sizes fun, I think 20 is a good balance between the 10/25 split we had before. It would obviously be easier to have 10 people do a raid then 20 but that also ruins part of the challenge of having a bigger raid.

Also not directly in reply to you but I find this video oddly approprate for how the game is now despite its subject material and when it was made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfxPZZ6fmNE

Difficulty is all over the place this tier, the squish was ncie but the inflation within warlords was astronomical. And yet people still aren't 13/13, it's mind blowing.

I think it did a huge disservice to the content, the first few weeks in Hellfire Citadel were AWESOME. Even some of those early bosses are a lot of fun when you're appropriately geared (Kormrok is actually a super fun boss, for example), but the difference between bis Blackrock Foundry gear and even heroic HFC gear is like double at this point. Throw in the ring? forget about it. the ring completely invalidated half of the mechanics of the tier. It's a huge disconnect between the player numbers and the fights themselves due to the inflation imo.

Look at Iskar, I bet it's probably something like 5% of the raiding population that have ever had to properly do the chains mechanic, because the ring let you ignore it within the first few weeks of the fight existing.

You are absolutely right, my guild went back to finish mythic BRF and it was crazy to see how we could just zerg down piratically every boss without doing any of the mechanics, its nice on the one hand because it makes it really easy to get everyone the mount from Blackhand but on the other there isn't any challenge at all in that tier anymore.

 

[CarbonatedFalcon]

Difficulty is all over the place this tier, the squish was nice but the inflation within warlords was astronomical. And yet people still aren't 13/13, it's mind blowing.

To be fair my group only raids 6 hours a week on the weekends, though we're getting pretty fucking close on Archimonde. More time or slightly more skilled recruits for that time slot and we'd have it already. We have/had fewer wipes on Mannoroth than Archimonde at this point, which is by many considered more difficult. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Look at Iskar, I bet it's probably something like 5% of the raiding population that have ever had to properly do the chains mechanic, because the ring let you ignore it within the first few weeks of the fight existing.

Can't deny this one. Definitely cheesed the mechanic by the time we got to Iskar, and I assume most guilds did as well, even top 100-200 ones. Kind of a shame as having to deal with chains there probably makes it harder than at least a few bosses on the floor, rather than potentially the easiest fight after Gorefiend.

 

[Peachpies]

Streaming the raid test here https://www.twitch.tv/peachpieswow , it is not with my guild but it is a pretty cool fight.

 

[erawsd]

It's really shitty to try and bolster WotLK by including Naxx tbh. Wrath had one good raid, one mediocre raid, and two bad raids (Naxx/TOGC).

I think it's fair to say that including more difficulties inevitably reduces the amount of raid content we get, but it makes it more accessible and lets especially the hard versions be significantly harder. Instead in TBC even the hard fights were a lot easier than what we get now, and MOST of it was just easy (1-2 bosses per zone that were hard, the rest a modern guild would decimate within a handful of pulls). I'd say pre-difficulty split, most of the fights fell somewhere just above current heroic difficulty.

I didnt include Naxx to bolster WOTLK, I included because it was mentioned in the original response. Whether its there or not doesnt change the point anyway since there'd still be no direct correlation difficulties and raid content. In fact, it reinforces that point since MoP has more difficulties and more raid content than Wrath.

 

[TheYanger]

To be fair my group only raids 6 hours a week on the weekends, though we're getting pretty fucking close on Archimonde. More time or slightly more skilled recruits for that time slot and we'd have it already.



Can't deny this one. Definitely cheesed the mechanic by the time we got to Iskar, and I assume most guilds did as well, even top 100-200 ones. Kind of a shame as having to deal with chains there probably makes it harder than at least a few bosses on the floor, rather than potentially the easiest fight after Gorefiend.

I mean, the chains were a relatively easy mechanic anyway, but it turned transitions from 'healer/tank' ball handling into 'tank, healer, chain person, tank, chain person, healer, tank' etc and the chain people had to actually LOOK to see who they were connected to, etc. I dunno it's just one example. Fel lord is another good one, when you get 4 soul cleaves it's a vastly different mechanic than when you get 1 or 2. Here, this is what it looked like on our first kill when I got the fourth cleave:

https://youtu.be/TSOduc8m0Ms?t=3m20s

When gear makes such a difference that that fight is 100% a different fight, I think THAT's a problem.

 

[biaxident]

Wow big discussion since last night lol. I don't mind LFR existing as it lets people see the "content" no matter how bad they are. Now I don't believe legendary quest lines should be advanced through LFR. Just because everyone can get the legendary ring if they put in some afk time in LFR doesn't mean the players who only do LFR should be able to get the full blown legendary ring. If a player doesn't have time for normal raids to progress the quest, then I think it's fine they shouldn't get the ring. I'm one of those players who really doesn't have time to raid 6-8 hours a week and I don't feel entitled to having a legendary ring cause I pay my sub (with tokens of course).

Now is there a system to appease everyone? Probably not. Having 4 difficulties is a bit excessive, but if you take away 1 (normal is probably the one to go) then they just have to make sure there's a way to gear for heroic without relying on LFR gear. Challenge modes at launch of this expac basically provided that but you can just afk in LFR and get similar gear. I'm very curious how the gear looks from the new mythic dungeon system in Legion. I assume it's like the current Mythic dungeon gear but instead of randomly getting a 685 or 720 ilvl, it scales based on what level you passed which would seem fair.

 

[cdyhybrid]

I hate the idea that there's four difficulties. LFR isn't real raiding. Raiding only has three difficulties.

I think if people got it through their heads that LFR is raiding in name only then a lot of the misguided complaints about it would vanish.

 

[Sölf]

Before I join you guys, how much Legion spoilers do you have in here? While I do take a peek here and there (especially at the new systems), I try to avoid as much lore spoilers as possible.

 

[MetroidPrimeRib]

Before I join you guys, how much Legion spoilers do you have in here? While I do take a peek here and there (especially at the new systems), I try to avoid as much lore spoilers as possible.

there is a separate thread for that, anything posted in here usually by etdp is tagged

 

[Sölf]

there is a separate thread for that, anything posted in here usually by etdp is tagged

Well, seems save to join you guys then. xD

 

[Novel Mike]

I hate the idea that there's four difficulties. LFR isn't real raiding. Raiding only has three difficulties.

I think if people got it through their heads that LFR is raiding in name only then a lot of the misguided complaints about it would vanish.

Honestly I question the need of both normal and heroic rather then getting rid of LFR. Normal and heroic are the same thing (in terms of mechanics) just heroic has a higher required item level. I rather see normal made a bit easier (although you still have to do mechanics) but have it function like LFR (Something you can queue for as an individual into a random group or as a full raid of up to 30) and have that just be LFR. Can give people queuing in raids the option to host a group for random people to join or just go with whatever raid they already formed. Basically combing normal flex and LFR.

 

[TheYanger]

Honestly I question the need of both normal and heroic rather then getting rid of LFR. Normal and heroic are the same thing (in terms of mechanics) just heroic has a higher required item level. I rather see normal made a bit easier (although you still have to do mechanics) but have it function like LFR (Something you can queue for as an individual into a random group or as a full raid of up to 30) and have that just be LFR. Can give people queuing in raids the option to host a group for random people to join or just go with whatever raid they already formed. Basically combing normal flex and LFR.

I definitely think this ismore along the lines of what I'd see. Maybe not that implementation, but making normal slightly easier/lfr slightly harder and combining those two aspects.

 

[Lomax]

For that matter, I kinda wonder why we still have normal/heroic dungeons. If heroic is tuned so low that it's getting steamrolled instantly, and mythic is where the real challenge is, why even have normal? Maybe they could use the level scaling tech and make it so that any Legion dungeon could be used both for leveling and for max level (ie heroic) content.

 

[TheYanger]

For that matter, I kinda wonder why we still have normal/heroic dungeons. If heroic is tuned so low that it's getting steamrolled instantly, and mythic is where the real challenge is, why even have normal? Maybe they could use the level scaling tech and make it so that any Legion dungeon could be used both for leveling and for max level (ie heroic) content.

I mean, normal is the levelling equivilent. It lets them make more levelling dungeons and less 'max level' dungeons since then every dungeon is effectively max level. I think you could consolidate like you're saying now, but that's why it evolved that way.