Heroic raids for the rest of us

[dendory]

Dragon Soul is a raid that proved to be very annoying to me lately. Not so much because of the zone itself. I don't dislike it, so I was thinking why I almost burnt out on it. I'm in social, semi-casual guilds, and back in ICC days (the best raid instance in my opinion) we cleared the normal version then stopped there. We never tried to clear the heroic version. In fact I didn't clear heroic ICC until Cataclysm was released. But with DS, for some reason I felt the need to get a full heroic clear. While doing a normal clear was realistic, even trivial now with pugs, thanks to the current nerf, the heroic mode proved to be a whole other ball game. Now I'm sure those of you in hardcore guilds progressed through heroics just like normal modes. But here we're talking about people in DS gear unable to pull over 20k dps, or repeating silly mistakes week after week, or joining a raid and then having to leave for 'RL' stuff 30mins later. The result is night after night, many hours of nothing but wipes. I used to do the hardcore raiding thing and this is exactly the reason I left, after years of progression raiding, it just wasn't as fun anymore, and I prefer to do raids to see the content rather than try for the best loot and titles available.

So in retrospect I shouldn't have tried to push through H DS with pugs and semi-guild runs. Heroic raids for the rest of us are things we do for titles, achievements and mounts, when the next expansion comes along. Just look at how popular H ICC and Ulduar have been in the past year. On my server, there are pugs forming for these zones every week, even to this day. These instances see far more traffic in heroic than they ever did during Wrath. And as sad as it is, when MoP arrives this week, while it allows us to start seeing new content, for most people it also means we get to restart Cataclysm, do all these raids over again, this time in Heroic mode for the meta achievements and such. This is, actually, how most people will get to see the content. I wonder if Blizzard ever thought of it this way?

[Aqua]

There's no happy medium, Either you're in it for the long haul on heroics, or wait for the nerfs with everyone else. Otherwise... excuse the overused meme but, you're gonna have a bad time.

Very few 'semi casual guilds' will get pass Hc Morchok, mainly because you'll probably have one guy who knows what he's doing and the rest will be running around aimlessly thinking there no change between heroic and normal. (Those that think this isn't true need to step outside their elite bubble now and then and raid with a casual guild incognito)

You're either in it, or you're not. And for Heroic Raiding I still feel that this is how it should be. People wouldn't make such a big deal of it otherwise and Blizzards constant 'toning down' of the accomplishments of guilds who get 25 people working together against insane mechanics just to appease their larger player base is both helping but hurting the aspirations of making your character good enough to reach that level of play...It's like the leveling after the leveling is done. Alot of casuals start out wanting to reach that pinnacle and strive for it regardless of how difficult it is. And that's a good thing.

[Alltat]

The problem with tuning raids is that there's a huge span of skill levels even among the "casual" group of players, mainly owing to the fact that some players have been playing the game far longer than others. We're a fairly casual guild, raiding twice per week, and cleared normal mode DS in about ten hours pre-nerfs in Firelands gear. If we are to have anything at all to do between patches, the heroic content has to be tuned to around where it is now. That may mean that some people have no chance of seeing heroic modes even with the nerfs, but there's really no other way of tuning it without introducing a fourth difficulty level. But considering that the issue here is that you want to see all the difficulty levels, that wouldn't help at all.

I think Blizzard's view on it is that heroic modes aren't "content" in the sense that it's something people should expect to experience. If you've seen the LFR version, you've seen the content. Normal and heroic are there for people who want a challenge. LFR lets everyone see what Deathwing looks like and get to experience some of what it's like to fight him. For those who want to actually fight Deathwing, there's normal/heroic.

[Heltoray]

the biggest problem is what people think of themselves. Playing 10 hours a week doesn't make people 'semi-hardcore' and most definitely doesn't mean they should be able to push through content with such a small time investment.

But this is what is happening. Self-claimed super pros and people who don't even have enough time/ dont want to spend enough time to play a MMO at all are demanding Blizzard to tailor the game to their needs. Just look at all these retards you meet in pugs bragging all the time and talking like they were the best players on the internet when in reality they just finished DS HC in August....This is what made DS an absolute failure. And rushing the final tier Cataclysm with minimal development effort.

And sorry Alltat - but whever didn't clear heroic DS by now can pretty safely assume it was a L2P matter...

[Maleric]

the biggest problem is what people think of themselves. Playing 10 hours a week doesn't make people 'semi-hardcore' and most definitely doesn't mean they should be able to push through content with such a small time investment.

But this is what is happening. Self-claimed super pros and people who don't even have enough time/ dont want to spend enough time to play a MMO at all are demanding Blizzard to tailor the game to their needs. Just look at all these retards you meet in pugs bragging all the time and talking like they were the best players on the internet when in reality they just finished DS HC in August....This is what made DS an absolute failure. And rushing the final tier Cataclysm with minimal development effort.

And sorry Alltat - but whever didn't clear heroic DS by now can pretty safely assume it was a L2P matter...

People can and do play ten hours a week, or less, and clear heroic modes just fine. The people who have trouble are the ones who don't care to learn to play, or who try to carry people who don't care.

If the only difference between an eight hour a week guild and a twenty hour a week guild is quantitative - how much time they spend raiding - then the eight hour guild can clear heroics with about as many attempts per boss as the twenty hour guild. If the difference is qualitative, though - the guild spends half or more of its limited raid time waiting for smoke breaks and wiping for stupid reasons because "it's just a game" - then the guild isn't going to get far in heroics.