Just to reiterate: This interview implies that both Dragon Soul and Firelands were dream level raids for this team - That should really scare you for future content.
Just to reiterate: This interview implies that both Dragon Soul and Firelands were dream level raids for this team - That should really scare you for future content.
Compared to previous Post Mortems Im seriously dissapointed. Look back at the other end of expac raids, I mean, I know we did ICC for like a year and a bit but it was epically big with new models set in an environment that had been overaching the whole story line with a serious villain.
T11 was boss, so much variety allowed by the three different raids designed perfectly around the typical guild which will raid 3 days a week. They said that raiders were finding this too much (semi hardcore here, never saw anyone complaining about that) and they cut it down to 7 in FL. TBF we did skip 4 winds and al'akir most weeks, but the options and variety was awesome.
FL was unique and interesting, confusing as hell the first time you set foot in it and nice new models. Fights like Alyz and Ryho were truly inspired. Downside was the staff collection rate of 10vs25 but overall a good tier.
THEN we have DS, imo 5 awesome fights (not ultrax spine or madness) (this is heroic) including one of my favs warmaster, the variety of strategy the bredth of the encounters allowed (in these 5) were truly great. HOWEVER Ultrax was literally intended to be a brick wall to heroic guilds racing for world first lacking any truly interesting mechanics for a dragon which was supposed to be better than Nefarion (WTF?!?!?!111?). Spine, how the hell can this guy say how proud he was of it when it induced such a harsh class stacking mechanic and noone even saw the f*cking boss unless the died?! The fight is terrible, the most interesting thing that happens is you get 10000 bloods and your tank has to kite them around *clap* *clap* sure it takes execution but really its whoever has the most legendary arcane mages whos going to get the kill. Madness is such a huge anti-climax, kill a claw kill a tentacle woop woop you beat the game. Oh wait dont forget the big head you have to beat on at the end of the fight, but then again those adds are posing more of a threat better kill them first....
Truly tragic he cant admit that he wouldve prefered another content patch and a more epic climax to the expansion. The guy designed ulduar, ICC, BWD, BoT and FL he thinks that Spine is the best thing to come out of cata? That 5 minute heroics where 1 geared dps can carry a group are a good thing?
I normally never QQ, but this was just horrible. People(inlcuding me) have been so unsatisfied by the current state of raiding and dungeons. For some people they are too hard, for some they are way too easy. What they made of it was some kind of very weird mix between some encounters just being stupidly overtuned and only doable by having shitloads of legendarys in your team, and others were so faceroll even the most clueless people could oneshot them.I'm all in for making encounters for everyone, but the line between heroic and normal is just weird and not in balance. Then when some dude of blizzard just says LOL RED DRAGONS WERE EPIC WE ARE AMAZING I'm really dissapointed by the lack of the learning curve developers at Blizzard have.
I recent resubbed to rift. I havn't had this much fun in an mmo since playing BC era WoW, only with a dungeon finder ^_^.
Amen. It is sad watching Blizz prove they are so out of touch with players and clearly completely lacking in understanding why they are losing subscriptions,
The 4.3 dugneons were great dungeons in terms of design, story and mechanics, but the fact that they provided ZERO challenge made them boring and made players like myself, who isn't in any way hardcore, lose interest very very fast. Compare them to ICC 5-mans, which provided challenges and playable content for months and months, these were just money down the drain for Blizzard.
The problem is the whole "tourist mode" attitude of Blizz to raids and dungeons alike. If you can do it in tourist mode, you get done with it a few weeks after patch day. Then what? Well for me, I've just unsubscribed. I'll come back for MoP, sure, but it will be the same again after completing MoP content 1-2 months after launch. Their business modell really isn't great for people being subscribers for a total of 4 months every 2 years.
Rift currently does have the best PVE endgame content. I have always said if Trion had brought out a popular RTS, RPG like blizzard did before creating a MMO they would have a much larger sub base which they deserve.
Problem is people are sheep and will stick to one thing.
What makes me truly upset is that as a total layman without ANY connection to Blizzard's development department, I can still see *exactly* what the problem with Darkmoon Faire turnins and how to fix it. That's how fucking awful Blizzard's developers are when someone completely outside the game could fix it better than they can.
The problem? It's so fucking obvious. They made the criteria for the achievement QUESTS that they then RESET every month. DUH FUCKING DUH. Because they couldn't find a non-fail way to limit the Darkmoon turn ins rather than let people just farm them and get "too many" previous tickets at once.
Who gives a shit about Darkmoon tickets at this point four months later? Just make the turnin quests infinitely repeatible without resetting them every month, done, the end, so fucking obvious.
Spine is awesome? I've tried my best to watch the scenery during the fight, but it's just too much out of the way. I can't move around or deathwing rolls. I've got to wait for some adds to do something and then just attack something that I don't even exactly get to see exactly what it is. Yeah, awesome.
The Omnotron Defense System and Atramedes bosses were fun, but that was it. People in general were teed off about facing Nefarian and Onyxia yet again. Old is old, Blizzard. Also, while TotFW was a beautiful raid zone... its loot wasn't worth the trouble beyond having another chance at a tier token, and only if you were having some seriously bad RNG. For the most part, the drops were disenchanted.
Heck no! I think I can speak for many players when I say "NEVER AGAIN!" I hate those places with a passion, and am still mad what Blizzard has done to the Zandalar tribe. (And they removed content for this tripe.)Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
This I don't mind. It still needs some work, but it's great to refer to for boss(es) abilities.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Raid Finder is great for alts. Mains, not so much.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
So the death of many 25 guilds due to the equalizing of loot item level doesn't even appear on your radar? Ok. And Grim Batol... ooh, that name greatly increases my blood pressure.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
I would give kudos to Blizzard for belatedly recognizing that the starting tier of dungeons was over-tuned, but I can't do that in good conscience. They were told before-hand about the problem, and still ignored feedback even as they were [strike]ruining[/strike] developing the troll heroics.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Deathwing. The great villain that never was.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
My dream is being able to over-gear dungeon mechanics that are current to the expansion. Basically, I want back the days of running around inside instances in my ICC gear and just trampling everything. RIP AoE damage.Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
To be fair to the new 5-mans, they *are* tuned around 353 geared players when a lot of the people running them are in 378+. They're still fairly easy though, but IMO, they hit the sweet spot in length for the most part. Don't necessarily mind a longer dungeon from time to time, but even then, rather than make one long dungeon, it probably works better split into two wings. As far as some of the other things, I think some of you are reading more into some of the responses than is actually there. Overall, thought the article was pretty sparse though. Was hoping for some more interesting info to come out of it.
After reading this Q&A I think many players that have unsubbed will not be returning to the game. There is no respect to be had in the PVE aspect of the game in anymore.Well if my 8 year old nephew wants my account it's all his.
Most people playing today never saw Molten Core in it's prime or at level. While it was very, very, very simple in it's raid mechanics (tank, spank, decurse, heal, stay out of fire baddies, feral druid innervate me) it was hardly terrible. TOC has it beat by a mile for bad. The reason most hate it as well was the sheer fact you had to farm resistance to be able to also complete the place and were rewarded with T2 quality items and level 48 blues for your efforts. Rag's entrance was also considered by many the most epic of all boss entrances in the game for years.
You just had to see the original BWL, AQ40, and Naxx at the level as they were developed and for the classes available at that time. Since the player population has turned over 3 times in 7 years (Source: Ghostcrawler) it's really difficult to get a solid internet opinion. This is one huge reason why I think MoP should include Legacy servers - just to give everyone a shot at playing the way they really want to play. I'd actually pay money for an expansion if it gave me the option to play the game in 5 different versions rather than the crap we're fed today. Pandas... no. Regrind the entire AQ event? Yes please.
Pokemon... no. A true GM/HW grind again? Omg yes please. Take me to Illidan with all the gating and toppings, please. One day, maybe not anytime soon but someday. I've waited almost 12 years for D3, so I'm one patient no-lifer.
MC was awful and not remotely challenging except for tanks without fearward on Magmadar and assigning adds on Garr with them running around until Domo, where teamwork actually mattered a bit. Rag was pretty good, but the mana burn mechanic was really annoying Firelands was fine in both creative design and difficulty tuning, for both heroic and normal. A minor nerf to push people over wall was fine, but not the 15% abomination given. There was just nothing redeeming about Dragon Soul
I enjoyed BWL in general (aside from more the half the boss being fire immune and others highly fire resistant), C'thun, Twin Emps, and about half the fights in Naxx. And yes, I completed them while they were relevant.
Cata initial dungeons were hard? ROFLThe wow community is really really bad. Lol having trouble clearing Deadmines Heroic, Grim Batol etc. I actually enjoyed these instances and i found them funny to do. But never hard.Go figure.It's a game for morons.
---------- Post added 2012-03-06 at 04:04 AM ----------
BtwHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAThe community is very creative and intelligent.
Almost everything he mentioned were things I hated, Grim Batol was a pain, Conclave of Wind sucked, ZA and ZG were boring and we had to deal with them for way too long, and the Dungeon Journal is laid out incredibly poorly. Basically, everything they see as a good point, I see as a bad point, guess that's why I stopped playing >
This is such a BS. Do players enjoy Spine? No! I mean the idea was good but it turned out to be fail. Do players enjoy Madness? No. If your idea of fun is doing more or less same thing 4 times to get to final phase to kill head of the dragon, head. Seriously there was no new content, its like Crtl+c -> Ctrl+v and what is with the tentacles? They are everywhere, its sick. But from the start: T11 hc dungeons were indeed too hard. I mean if u went with friends that have a clue it was ok but if u went alone, after work to get your vp points you sometimes spend 2 hrs with noobs. Endless "cc that, cc this, do that, do this". BTW the idea that u have whole week to cap ur vp was very good. They should did it faster. T11 raid were cool but there are some flaws for me. First of all they were unfinished (Sinestra for example), they were buggy and had many shits like grounding totems on Twin Drakes, the ice shit on Council, Magmaw adds kiting, Atramedes bug and some more. I know there will be always bugs but there were just too many. Also what with this "extraplayerbar" shit. They can't just add this as a debuff with "sound level" or "corrupted blood level" like on yog? Instead they add some new bar and think ppl will go like "oh, this is new". In DS they added some new button to press. I mean rly, after MoP we will have like 10 new buttons to click 20 new bars to watch and maybe something else. Throne of the 4winds was good. Al'akir fight was fun, but i know its like u want to eat your own face fight on the beginning . Troll dungeons = Crtl+c -> Ctrl+v. Zul'gurub was nice mechanic wise, nice bosses, almost no trash, coll stuff with claudrons but Zul'aman was like omfg. Tons of trash, long dungeon i mean instant leave. T12 was nice raid. It was small, cool bosses, some cool mechanics, and the most important good final boss. T13 its joke. I think I dont even have to comment on this. LFR is joke. The idea to get every1 to see everything is stupid. First of all if Blizzard says that only like 5% of wow players go raid why do you even care? Leave those 5% alone and do something for rest/or everyone. Now its like u have to go for LFR, and then to go normals to get your gear. Its like 10 and 25 again. Hello? Not to mention final boss. When i heard the Deathwing will be 2-boss encounter i thought "man, that needs to be cool" but then this bloods/tentacles and shit. I mean rly Blizzard. You have misstake in your cinematic, insteand of big dragon flying around and destroying azeroth put there big tentacle flying around, add some bloods as a tail and there you go. Final boss.
The biggest issue I had with Cataclysm was patch 4.1. While I could praise the unique boss mechanics for new Zul'Gurub, it was vastly overturned -- the gear didn't justify the time investment to clear either of the overhauled Zandalari dungeons in a reasonable amount of time for most players who the dungeon's gear rewards were aimed at.
I mean, if you've routinely experienced LFG groups where a tank is votekicked if they're not vastly outgearing the dungeon, that is indicative of a huge balance problem. Considering that there are going to be challenge mode dungeons in Mists of Pandaria based off of the Mount speed runs for Zul'Aman, this is something that Blizzard desperately needs to be careful of.
Risk vs. reward levels for different levels of gameplay, and attempting to shove an apple (an instance where blue-geared players earn mediocre epics without the group dissolving due to a long dungeon/difficult trash mobs) and an orange (instance where well-geared players race to a bonus loot chests) into the exact same instance should not be something to be repeated.