Horridon nerf a indication on underestimating the boost?

[Deleted]

Keep dreaming buddy.


You did though. Basicall you are complaining that this trend toward addons and vent and video is screwing up the game. "Blizzard are engaged in an arms race with very elite players and it's fucking their whole game in" -Injin Sounds like a complaint to me.

Can't read, doesn't know the difference between complaint and observation. Got it.

I did read. I read your entire post before I posted the first time and you called me lazy and assumed I didn't read it. As for being rude, you better call the manners police!

Sorry, I assumed you had the reading comprehension to do the job but hadn't bothered. If you just can't read even if you try, I apologise. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to belittle you in that way. It was wrong.

[cabyio]

The hard "one mistake and it's over" style of play is relatively recent, though.

It also used to be on one or two bosses per instance, not every boss having a few of them. In addition, previous iterations of wow had mechanics that would get an individual one shot, not the whole group - and the group could often carry the mistake.

It is fine if people make those mistakes, it only takes a min to get all reset and ready to go again. I'm not going to yell at someone who is learning the encounter. It is when someone keeps making that same mistake over and over that is the issue.

These kind of mechanics are good. They make people more responsible for doing the mechanics properly. If just you die and the group can keep going and finish the encounter... then its not that big of a scary thing to fail the mechanics, basically "No Biggie". If you wipe the whole group though, thats more push to do them correctly.

[Raiju]

The hard "one mistake and it's over" style of play is relatively recent, though.

It also used to be on one or two bosses per instance, not every boss having a few of them. In addition, previous iterations of wow had mechanics that would get an individual one shot, not the whole group - and the group could often carry the mistake.

Are we just going to continue ignoring aran's / netherspites group wipe mechanics caused by individuals for the sake for this? How about vashj? Gorefiend? I mean I'm just naming the most obvious ones...

The only time I found ToT really penalized the whole raid for personal responsibility on lei shen. On previous bosses you could cover for people - but on lei shen you had to have groups of 2-3 on each quadrant and everyone had to not fuck up.

[Deleted]

Are we just going to continue ignoring aran's / netherspites group wipe mechanics caused by individuals for the sake for this? How about vashj? Gorefiend? I mean I'm just naming the most obvious ones...

The only time I found ToT really penalized the whole raid for personal responsibility on lei shen. On previous bosses you could cover for people - but on lei shen you had to have groups of 2-3 on each quadrant and everyone had to not fuck up.

Aran didn't wipe the group, it would hurt for sure, but a good chance of survival. Unless you chain fucked up flame wreath it'd be fine. Netherspite was optional.

Vashj? Endboss and really, nothing like the modern stuff. Gorefiend? Sure. That's one. Compare it to everything in Mop, do.

[cabyio]

Can't read, doesn't know the difference between complaint and observation. Got it.


Sorry, I assumed you had the reading comprehension to do the job but hadn't bothered. If you just can't read even if you try, I apologise. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to belittle you in that way. It was wrong.

Must be nice to just be able to dismiss people offhand. I did read your post and I misunderstood. Sorry if not everyone gets the same meaning from a piece of text. But again, thanks for being sanctimonious.

[Deleted]

Must be nice to just be able to dismiss people offhand. I did read your post and I misunderstood. Sorry if not everyone gets the same meaning from a piece of text. But again, thanks for being sanctimonious.

You called me a bullshitter 4 times because you can't read properly. The misunderstanding might have been my poor text, but acting like a knobhead was entirely done at your end.

[Raiju]

Aran didn't wipe the group, it would hurt for sure, but a good chance of survival. Unless you chain fucked up flame wreath it'd be fine. Netherspite was optional.

Vashj? Endboss and really, nothing like the modern stuff. Gorefiend? Sure. That's one. Compare it to everything in Mop, do.

Aran wiped teh group if they had sustained any damage at all (like from the water elementals/blizzards/chain casting he does.. you know the rest of the fight)

Why is optional an excuse?

I'm not sure you ever killed vashj, either. I'm not going to go through 1 by 1 of every boss in TBC but in general mechanics were simpler but less forgiving back then.

[Pua]

Yes, although I can't say i've noticed a massive skill difference between people who've raided for a few months and for years. Very few people these days have played as long as we have, yet still plenty of them do fine in normal modes. Is a few (2-3) months not fair for getting used to raiding?

Erm... Tough to say. It's different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Maybe, rather than time, we should talk about it in levels of experience; how long you've been raiding, how long you've been playing arena/ranked PvP, that kind of thing. Those whose first experience of raiding was Attumen the Huntsman probably stuck with it and killed him because it didn't feel insurmountable. Those whose first experience was the Stone Guard gave up and waited for LFR.

I love VOIP, but I know someone who has played more than me and raids more than me who still prefers to use macros to call out and not use VOIP, doesn't use DBM and such (mostly due to stubbornness - no denying it makes it easier with it from my POV as long as people dont rely on it too much)

An individual player can get away with it.

A guild group can't.

I think stone guard would've been a better example. Stone guard respresents a non-obvious challenge to beat when you first encounter it, and was the first raid boss of the expansion. I enjoyed the fight but feng could've been first, as he's a lot easier in every respect other than numbers. Horridon being a guild crusher in normal was nothing to do with complicated mechanics, either. It was tuning with a necessity to have every type of dispel to have the fight "in line" with it's place in the instance.

The Stone Guard had a specific issue - namely, that it was the worst introduction to raiding that the game has ever seen. I mentioned Attumen, but I could have easily gone for one of the Zul'Gurub bosses, one of the first four in Naxxramas (or even Sartharion), or maybe even Magmaw or Halfus who were easier. The biggest issue with the Stone Guard was that certain combinations were extremely painful on new groups, and many of the "simple" things weren't obvious. Tuning was also a significant problem for a lot of new/less capable groups I chatted to around that time and, worst of all, it had a single point of failure.

The tanks.

I counter with flame wreath :P

Flame Wreath couldn't have been simpler!

He casts it, and you don't move! Of course, I could be mixing that up with Blizzard because it's been a good few years since it mattered to me... >.<

I do take your point, though. Everything in the game teaches you not to stand in fire, the Flame Wreath pops up (fire is certainly implied) and the idea is not to move. The Ascendant Council had a bit of this too, along with many other ludicrous mechanics in heroic mode.

TL;DR I'm not saying dark animus is as simple as the TBC bosses, but I'm not saying he was innately difficult to understand either. The reason people failed him was teh execution requirements, not the tactics involved.

I certainly think the premise of filling up golems was simple enough. Getting the execution down, however, was anything but simple.

Well, most players that played in Cataclysm and MoP already played the game before. You cant really remove your experience and start from scratch again. That said, I never do any external study before playing really. I never study for boss fights or whatever.

If you're on progression, I'll guarantee your guild group does.

You would also be surprised how similar the in-game boss mod is to the addon boss mods. VOIP is really not needed either.

Again, perhaps not to a single person. Guild groups certainly need these things, and you can see that even from the application process for an average normal mode guild. It's a requirement.

Most bosses are very easily explained with a few sentences. I have recently helped an old friend of mine get into raiding. Been doing some heroic and some normal mode pugging. On pretty much every boss I explained the entire boss for her in a few seconds, and she performed flawlessly all the time. Even though she never played the bosses before after simply hearing one or two sentences she did better than most of the other players in the group that have done the bosses dozens of times.

It feels like people nowadays overcomplicate bosses. It is suprising how far you can get by keeping it simple.

Interestingly, during TBC and WotLK, one of my friends was a Russian fellow who really struggles with English. I spent a reasonable amount of time going through things with him and the first part of the process was to completely remove anything that he didn't actually need to know. Even fights like Firefighter were managed in this way, just by completely cutting out anything that was superfluous to what he was doing.

Too many times, however, we'd recruit someone who'd ask who the "retard" was. It was laughable, considering the guy concerned (who remains a personal friend of mine) has two masters degrees and is one of the brightest and best educated people I know. He just had a language barrier that made much of his initial forays in an encounter challenging but, amusingly, he often helped others to understand mechanics by fucking them up and dying, so as to highlight just what the danger was.

The bottom line, however, is that we're not just talking about mechanics anymore.

We're talking about how to play a class properly, learning an encounter, and understanding more mechanics than ever just to do your job passably. Tuning is also tighter than ever it was outside of specific hard DPS checks such as Brutallus, and the days of carrying bad players are gone because even a single mistake from them is enough to wipe an entire group. I think that's potentially where Cataclysm and its design intent for raiding hit more casual groups the hardest, but that's just a feeling. There are now so many different lines in the sand for what makes an encounter difficult, but the actual depth and puzzle-solving aspect has almost been completely removed in favour of quick reactions and button mashing.

We could say a difficult encounter is created by one of three things (and I think in descending order):

1) Tight tuning: Algalon the Observer.
2) Complicated individual mechanics: Yogg-Saron.
3) Complicated group mechanics: Professor Putricide.

Now, even one of those is enough for the average casual attitude group to struggle, as I've tried to highlight with each boss. Hell, even up to the top end it can be challenging; Algalon had neither complicated individual or group mechanics, but his tuning was brutal enough to make him extremely challenging. When you then look at, say, Ragnaros or Sinestra, you're looking at all four phases having all three difficulties slapped in, in lesser or greater degrees, and it's right for a tiny percentage of players. Everyone else just gets smashed, demoralized and thoroughly sick of these fights because they're absolutely brutal.

But there is nothing wrong with being that person, as long as you don't KEEP being that person. Wiping is part of raiding. It's going to happen. Sometimes it is one person's fault. Sometimes it is just failure in general. As long as 1 guy doesn't keep making the same mistake, everything should be fine. If that person does keep making that mistake, then they are not learning and need to be gone anyway because they obviously don't respect everyone else's time.

If you're in a 25-man raid, and everyone cocks something up once, you're at 25 wipes before you can finger someone in particular for being any worse than anyone else.

Depending on the time involved, that could be an entire lockout for a guild (particularly if they're casual-time).

[Raiju]

Erm... Tough to say. It's different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Maybe, rather than time, we should talk about it in levels of experience; how long you've been raiding, how long you've been playing arena/ranked PvP, that kind of thing. Those whose first experience of raiding was Attumen the Huntsman probably stuck with it and killed him because it didn't feel insurmountable. Those whose first experience was the Stone Guard gave up and waited for LFR.

I'm relatively in agreement with rest of what you said and cba the quote splitting so just responding to this for clarity - the people in question started in cata/mop. A DK I knew started in 4.1, we picked him up in 4.2 and he was one of our most capable raiders from the get-go, and an asset in 4.3. Same with a monk in mop, we picked him up in 5.1, he had a bit of a shakey start going into the beginning of 5.2 but got a lot better very quickly and now is a respectable raider in normal/hc content. They had only started the game a few months ago, and I find if you give someone who wants it the chance - most end up that way.

[cabyio]

You called me a bullshitter 4 times because you can't read properly. The misunderstanding might have been my poor text, but acting like a knobhead was entirely done at your end.

I'm sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities. There is your apology.

[Deleted]

Aran wiped teh group if they had sustained any damage at all (like from the water elementals/blizzards/chain casting he does.. you know the rest of the fight)

Yeah, so ti didn't one shot the group then, did it?

Why is optional an excuse?

I'm not sure you ever killed vashj, either. I'm not going to go through 1 by 1 of every boss in TBC but in general mechanics were simpler but less forgiving back then.

I didn't kill vashj at the time, no. Doesn't really matter what I did or didn't do though, does it.

There is no mechanic in TBC even like jinrokhs lightning pool. There is very little in TBC that one person chosen at random has to do flawlessly every time or it will kill everyone. Certainly not on the first boss of an instance. Very few one shot mechanics and hardly any (in fact I struggle to think of any) mechanics that will one shot the entire group if fluffed.

[Raiju]

Yeah, so ti didn't one shot the group then, did it?


I didn't kill vashj at the time, no. Doesn't really matter what I did or didn't do though, does it.

There is no mechanic in TBC even like jinrokhs lightning pool. There is very little in TBC that one person chosen at random has to do flawlessly every time or it will kill everyone. Certainly not on the first boss of an instance. Very few one shot mechanics and hardly any (in fact I struggle to think of any) mechanics that will one shot the entire group if fluffed.

Jinrokhs lightning pool doesn't do significant damage if you stand in it, it just doesn't give you a damage buff and adds unnecessary raid damage.

[cabyio]

If you're in a 25-man raid, and everyone cocks something up once, you're at 25 wipes before you can finger someone in particular for being any worse than anyone else.

Depending on the time involved, that could be an entire lockout for a guild (particularly if they're casual-time).

Ya but everyone isn't going to mess up. It also depends on the fight and where the wiping happens. Hate fights with super complex mechanics at the end of a 10 min fight, those can take forever. :S

[Deleted]

The hard "one mistake and it's over" style of play is relatively recent, though.

It also used to be on one or two bosses per instance, not every boss having a few of them. In addition, previous iterations of wow had mechanics that would get an individual one shot, not the whole group - and the group could often carry the mistake.

So when according to you did this trend start?

And what would you define as a group one shot?

[Wunderland]

There is very little in TBC that one person chosen at random has to do flawlessly every time or it will kill everyone. Certainly not on the first boss of an instance. Very few one shot mechanics and hardly any (in fact I struggle to think of any) mechanics that will one shot the entire group if fluffed.

Teron Gorefiend off the top of my head. Illidan's aerial phase was reliant on each person knowing where to be. Felmyst was the same. Reliquary had pieces that were very reliant on certain indiviudals.

Maybe it wouldn't one-shot the raid failing some of the above mechanics, but it would lead to a irrecoverable wipe - same thing, but less time wasted as the group dies slowly.

[stgeorge78]

I certainly think the shared lockouts also contributed to the ransacking of server PuG communities. It's as you say; people would progress one setting with their guild, and PuG the other with those on the server who fancied it. Tier 11 wrecked that too and, again, thanks to a vocal minority that "didn't want forced to run two raids every lockout".



Something Morhaime himself admitted to. I think Osmeric has already linked the interview in this thread, actually.



LFR doesn't really have anything to do with this particular topic. We're talking about why you felt tier 12 was out of reach rather than arguing that everything should be in reach (which no reasonable person believes). And while I'm certainly sorry that Cataclysm saw most of your friends leave, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from making more and moving on from that time. I mean, you're still playing now which is a couple of years past tier 11 which means you've had more than enough opportunities to do so.

I'm not having a go at you here, I'm simply saying that content designed for lots of players can't also be farmed out for single ones - and, in an MMORPG, nor should it be. You're choosing to not make any new friends in the game and, honestly, only a few is enough to make the game hundreds of times better.



I think you and I have discussed this before, but I've often been struck by the sheer stubbornness of what happened going into Cataclysm and has stuck since. We all blamed Ghostcrawler but, with him now gone and the direction not having changed with regard to raiding being "the" content, it might lead us to believe that he wasn't responsible for that choice after all. Alternatively, he could have left after the ship for WoD had sailed and the next expansion will herald the end of raiding as the game's primary content because it was Ghostcrawler that made it so.

It's a conundrum, it really is, and I'm personally interested in Hazzikostas' part in all this. I doubt he's the only one, but his design philosophy is certainly in the "hardcore minority" camp and he's calling an awful lot of shots these days. The fact he's a pretty lousy (and arrogant) designer doesn't help.

You are absolutely right about Hazzikostas, the guy is a complete tool (talked to him at BlizzCon) - he does not give one crap about normal mode raiders and think they all suck. I would not be surprised if he designed Horridon, Garalon, Elegon all as major "screw you" bosses to give normal mode guilds the finger.

When you realize he's a guild leader of a world-first 25-man guild (gee, how convenient to have the encounter designer explain the mechanics to your world first group) and it quickly becomes apparent what direction this game is going in (right down the crapper)

[Deleted]

I'm sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities. There is your apology.

Thank you.

Firefly33

what would you define as a group one shot?

That would be when the mechanic.... one shots....the...group....

[Pua]

I'm relatively in agreement with rest of what you said and cba the quote splitting so just responding to this for clarity - the people in question started in cata/mop. A DK I knew started in 4.1, we picked him up in 4.2 and he was one of our most capable raiders from the get-go, and an asset in 4.3. Same with a monk in mop, we picked him up in 5.1, he had a bit of a shakey start going into the beginning of 5.2 but got a lot better very quickly and now is a respectable raider in normal/hc content. They had only started the game a few months ago, and I find if you give someone who wants it the chance - most end up that way.

I think to a certain extent, you're quite right - there will always be players who, with the right support, can be very good, very quickly. Are they really casual-attitude players, though? I'd argue probably not, but that's me being pedantic.

The point I'm trying to make is more that what's cool or common for a player, really isn't for a guild group. That's the real point I'm trying to make to Firefly, too. Individual players can be exceptions, but groups certainly aren't, and new players coming into raiding for the first time will resort to type as far as the group is concerned. If you join a guild of casual-time veterans, you're likely to pick up good habits from them and develop accordingly because of even passively picked up good advice in /g. If you join a guild of noobs, you're more likely to think one button push per three seconds is just fine because "shit dies" and then try a raid boss, only to get your arse handed to you.

Part of this is community driven, but part of it is lousy design that's seen the learning curve in the game smashed to smithereens. Why that happened is another debate, really.

Ya but everyone isn't going to mess up. It also depends on the fight and where the wiping happens. Hate fights with super complex mechanics at the end of a 10 min fight, those can take forever. :S

I think that's another reason why I always felt Ragnaros was a terribly designed encounter. Everything up until phase four was hard enough, while phase four was a significant jump up. Twelve minutes into a fight before the "real" fight begins, then wiping, is obscenely punishing and utterly needless. Arthas' final phase, on the other hand, wasn't necessarily the hardest of the five and felt far more approachable as a result. Different designers at that point, though (Daelo was in charge then, IIRC... Scott Mercer was his real name? He was a far better and more level-headed guy than Hazzikostas).

And you're right, there's no doubt that not everyone will cock something up and, in 10-man, the damage is lessened by at least half. What I'm saying is that phased encounters have many different mechanics to learn per phase, which all cause wipes when they don't necessarily need to. Part of this is potentially raid-leading where the leader calls the wipe as soon as someone dies, but it's often a case of "one error, everyone dies" and that stops people learning the fight off the bat.

Personally, I think continuing when you know you're going to fail is okay when there's some learning value to be had for those who've survived. This, however, is becoming the case less and less.

One person gets Geyser wrong?

25 people are dead, fifteen minutes into the fight.

Horrible design.

[Deleted]

That would be when the mechanic.... one shots....the...group....

There are still different levels of it. But nvm.

You still seem to think this is a recent trend. One mistake and its a raid wipe is not something recent and has been around since a long time ago.

[cabyio]

That would be when the mechanic.... one shots....the...group....

Ahh but what is a one shot to one group is just a bad recoverable hit to another.

- - - Updated - - -

Personally, I think continuing when you know you're going to fail is okay when there's some learning value to be had for those who've survived. This, however, is becoming the case less and less.

Depending on the fight we will sometimes keep going even if we know we won't down it. Just to get people more practice on the mechanics.