The death of resistance-based gating.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

I prefer the bosses requiring me to be more creative so that I can kill them in order to get gear than spending 100+ hours farming gear off of normal mobs so I can spend 10 minutes killing a boss that is trivialized by said gear. Boss difficulty increasing > Grinding for 10 hours a week, at least that is my opinion on it. Also have to looked at the crafted gear for 5.2? Some of that stuff is BiS until Ra-Den. I'd say that isn't trivial considering the top guilds in the world still have yet to kill him while it is now the THIRD week that heroic ToT has been available. The "lost" aspect of raiding is the grind, the aspect that replaced it is skill.

[ThatsOurEric]

This is a death that I approve of. Having to farm stuff for resistance gear is not exactly fun.

I'm going to have to agree with this. More often than not, you were trading stats to your dps, tanking, or healing just for points in survival
of resisting said element, which honestly would make the fight worse or more difficult in the long run, since you've got reduced stats in
your primary source of combat and support.

If they were ever to bring it back, they could make it a forge stat, or some kind of token that you could put on your gear. It should be
something optional, but not mandatory.

[Nahela]

This is the most egregious case of nostalgia goggles that I've ever seen. I highly highly doubt anybody ever cheered at crafting material drops. It was never exciting, it was frustrating. It didn't add anything to the content especially when once you gathered those sets it made the fights in question largely a joke. There was no build up to a great encounter, there was a build up to finally getting beyond an arbitrary roadblock that nobody had fun approaching.

I'll take well-designed, balanced encounters with legitimately interesting mechanics any day of the week over "go grind partly RNG-based gear for a couple months that you'll never use outside of these 5-10 minutes a week".

[Deleted]

The "lost" aspect of raiding is the grind, the aspect that replaced it is skill.

Can we really still talk about skill in WoW? Most fights are designed so that a player with a moderate amount of sense of what he is doing can finish them. The fact is that the guilds that are competing for the world first are not necessarily the best players in the world. They just happen to dedicate all their day to the game, craft gear faster and spend the most of their time wiping at the same boss for hundreds of times until it is down.

In plain words, instead of spending time grinding materials for gear, they spend the same time dying over and over again. Any guild that has serious members could do it as long as they dedicated their lives to the game and had some sponsors supporting them.

[skitzy129]

Can we really still talk about skill in WoW? Most fights are designed so that a player with a moderate amount of sense of what he is doing can finish them. The fact is that the guilds that are competing for the world first are not necessarily the best players in the world. They just happen to dedicate all their day to the game, craft gear faster and spend the most of their time wiping at the same boss for hundreds of times until it is down.

In plain words, instead of spending time grinding materials for gear, they spend the same time dying over and over again. Any guild that has serious members could do it as long as they dedicated their lives to the game and had some sponsors supporting them.

Yes we can still talk about skill in WoW, more so than ever on the PvE side of things. It in fact does take a lot of skill to be anywhere close to world first progression. It is NOT just repetition and time investment. It IS very hard to do and succeed.

There is more physical button pushing skill and quick mental decisions in PvE now than there ever has been to be completely honest from the perspective of a raider since MC.

[Kazgrel]

I would just quit at this point if we still had to put up with farming resistance gear. For some classes, you'd just about need 4 28 slot bags just to get by on a day to day basis. Unless, of course, they would give us those massive 40-50 slot crates of gear storage they had on beta years ago...lol.

Ok, so it was only 36...but at the time, 36 slot bag seemed absolutely gargantuan (when 18-20 slot bags were the top):

http://www.wowhead.com/item=23162/fo...t-gear-storage

[Xires]

Another thread got me thinking about this lost aspect of raiding.

There was a time when guilds had to raid underbosses for a number of weeks in order to obtain the materials and patterns needed to gear up the raid for the later challenges of the raid that were to be met near the end of a tier.

We had to farm Lava Core, Fiery Core and Core Leather or risk burning to death in the Molten Core.

We had to farm Onyxia Scales to craft cloaks to thwart to Shadowflames of Blackwing Lair.

We had to sacrifice stats and collect nature resist gear from innumerable sources to survive Ahn'Qiraj.

We had to thaw and collect Frozen Runes to build frost resist sets to give us a fighting chance in Naxxramas.

In TBC, the fight continued... There were resist requirements for Hydross, Solarian (initially), Mother Shahraz.

We saw some of this continued in WotLK with Sapphiron. However, by the time Fjola Lightbane and Eydis Darkbane came along, Blizzard decided resistances should simply be worked into encounter mechanics and the need for specialized gear was removed.

While I believe that having to farm gear mats was annoying and slowed progression and having to do it all again when a raid member left and someone new took his place was tedious; it also added to the building of community and the cohesiveness of the guild and made players work together to help gear up their teammates. And more importantly, it gave the group something to strive for together that would give them an edge as a reward for their dedication week after week.

Being able to decimate a raid tier within days of its release might be fun for a week for .001% of the WoW community as they race to world-first, but in the end, it really means very little and adds nothing to the spirit of the MMO when the only thing keeping you from killing a boss is the fact that Blizzard hasn't opened the door to his parlor just yet.

Building teams, gearing up for survivability rather shear damage output, working together over a period of time to face down bigger challenges, and finally having just enough resistance to whatever it is the boss is putting out is what made WoW raiding feel like something special...

Collecting crafting materials in raids now feels like a afterthought. Sure, we can collect blood spirits, haunting spirits and smelt lightning steel ingots from raiding, but what does any of that really provide? Just some filler pieces that don't add anything to your character but another layer of general stats.

You know- I miss resist gear aswell. These people on here complaining about it are missing the point. What do you all think about trash in a raid? or a lot of trash in a raid? I think its "meh", but when we needed Hearts of Darkness for resist gear...hell I didnt mind trash at all and it felt rewarding when a HoD would drop or if two dropped in a pull. It gave you the feeling of getting closer to a goal...a goal to gear up yourself and your fellow raiders so that you could beat Mother. On top of that...once your raid was geared you could then sell the HoD's for a good price and keep your guild bank happy. All that money could pay for repairs, flasks, mats, gems...something on the AH for a guildy, or make it to where you can have guild events and the winners can recieve something cool like 10,000 gold prizes or mounts....it really did add a lot to the raid experience...it gave the raid a common goal, and if you lose a player and have to get someone else resist gear...you can do it quickly with little to no fuss.

Why dont people ever think of THAT? All they seem to think of is "oh, no! Farm, farm, farm." Well, you gotta raid anyway and in raids there are trash.

[Enosh]

Can we really still talk about skill in WoW? Most fights are designed so that a player with a moderate amount of sense of what he is doing can finish them.

yes that's why the majority of players finished t14 heroic
oh wait

[Deleted]

yes that's why the majority of players finished t14 heroic
oh wait

How many players do you think are interested in completing heroic modes? The majority of WoW's player base are casual players that log in for a couple of hours, do a random BG, do their dailies, maybe complete their LFR run for the week and that is that. What you are saying is that heroic is designed specifically for less than 1% of WoW's players. People have to accept that hardcore is dying if not dead. It is not that the game doesn't have decent players. It is that these players would rather do something more productive than spending hour after hour, fighting a meaningless fight.

The only reason Blizzard keeps heroic modes is because they cannot run back to creating hard normal mode content, because this would mean that a lot of casuals would quit. Otherwise they are absolutely meaningless.

[fangless]

I agree that it's just another RPG element that this game threw away in order to just make the whole experience easier.

Getting item components from a dragon to build items that helps you in another raid? That's something straight out of a Final Fantasy game. Sure someone could leave your guild after getting said items, but ANYONE can leave RIGHT NOW after getting normal loot. Same thing.

[Deleted]

You know- I miss resist gear aswell. These people on here complaining about it are missing the point. What do you all think about trash in a raid? or a lot of trash in a raid? I think its "meh", but when we needed Hearts of Darkness for resist gear...hell I didnt mind trash at all and it felt rewarding when a HoD would drop or if two dropped in a pull.

Two wrongs make a right. Source: Xires.

[Venant]

I think they could bring back resistance gear if they were to make it a small optional buff. Basically take the idea of pet battle stones where you can upgrade the quality of your pet, and invent armor elemental resistance stones that can be used to apply a small amount of resistance to a piece of armor. Invent some creative way to get these items, maybe through an interesting mini game you can complete a quest or two for each day. Or maybe have them drop from once a week events like the troves of the thunder king.

Basically the idea would be to allow players to put a small amount of extra resistance on gear that would reduce damage taken from the associated damage type.

[Kazgrel]

I think they could bring back resistance gear if they were to make it a small optional buff. Basically take the idea of pet battle stones where you can upgrade the quality of your pet, and invent armor elemental resistance stones that can be used to apply a small amount of resistance to a piece of armor. Invent some creative way to get these items, maybe through an interesting mini game you can complete a quest or two for each day. Or maybe have them drop from once a week events like the troves of the thunder king.

Basically the idea would be to allow players to put a small amount of extra resistance on gear that would reduce damage taken from the associated damage type.

Sounds familiar...

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Agony

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion

[Akylios]

If they were to implement resistance checks again, I think they would have to set them up in such a way that earned resistances stay within a guild, even if member X, Y or Z leaves it. So in essence, resistance checks would be something a guild can work towards conquering, without every new recruit having to start from scratch, or the guild being gutted by the loss of their main tank.

I personally found progressing towards beating resistance checks add to the whole raiding experience back in Classic, but the whole system definitely had its flaws. Fix those flaws and I'd be more than happy to see resistance checks again. At the end of the day, it's just a form of gating, but at least it's a 'progression based' form of gating, unlike the 'date based' form of gating in T14.

If done right, I think it would add some fun variety to the game.

[Sesshou]

So was my guild the only one who's MT for heroic Lei Shi in t14 used frost resist? His threat was ass so he couldn't tank first, but it apparently made a big difference. Now that isn't like the Vanilla days or Mother where basically the whole raid needed it or Hydross where it was definitely required but only for the tanks...

Death of farming resistance gear -> birth of dailies. Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.

Also, this. I'd rather go farm Mara or BRD or whatever than dailies, but I'm sure some will disagree.

[Mandible]

Can´t say it was that much of a pain to gather the needed materials. But I do agree on the people leaving bit though - but that goes for anything.

[Airlick]

I actually loved fights with special gear requirements, and I loved the farm as well. I loved attunements too. It helped bond the guilds together, I know I myself have been in the same guild for almost the whole TBC and it was something really special, I talked with some of them years after leaving (it was an international guild, I needed a change and jumped into a national one. Also we were on a dying server and noone wanted to move, we pretty much started falling apart at the end of TBC), and I'm sure these things helped, if not simply allowed it to happen.

Reading some of the topics nowadays, I can't not notice how selfish the players have grown, something like this would be unimaginable in TBC and early WotLK.

[Kazgrel]

Death of farming resistance gear -> birth of dailies. Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.

Strange, I can do current raids now without necessarily doing dailies. The only "necessities", I suppose, are the enchant patterns locked away behind AC rep.

Meanwhile, if you didn't grind out mats for your resist gear during vanilla/BC, you would pretty much be benched, especially if you were a tank.

[Maelstrom51]

How many players do you think are interested in completing heroic modes? The majority of WoW's player base are casual players that log in for a couple of hours, do a random BG, do their dailies, maybe complete their LFR run for the week and that is that. What you are saying is that heroic is designed specifically for less than 1% of WoW's players. People have to accept that hardcore is dying if not dead. It is not that the game doesn't have decent players. It is that these players would rather do something more productive than spending hour after hour, fighting a meaningless fight.

The only reason Blizzard keeps heroic modes is because they cannot run back to creating hard normal mode content, because this would mean that a lot of casuals would quit. Otherwise they are absolutely meaningless.

You know that less than 10% of the raiding population has even cleared the normal mode version of the raid, right?
Heck, less than half the raiding population has even killed Council.

To say that Blizzard can't create difficult normal mode content is bullshit.

[Neazy]

Strange, I can do current raids now without necessarily doing dailies. The only "necessities", I suppose, are the enchant patterns locked away behind AC rep.

Meanwhile, if you didn't grind out mats for your resist gear during vanilla/BC, you would pretty much be benched, especially if you were a tank.

Resistance gear was farmed in raids, so it's not like tanks were doing tons of extra work. At least that's the way it was for most of BC and the end of vanilla. MC and BWL had some fuckery going on there, and gearing a warlock tank for fire resist for Leotheras was stupid.

I don't mind resist gear. If they brought it back I would be ok with that as long as it was more like Naxx/BT where the important mats drop in the raid.