Is ToT too challenging causing the guild break ups?

[Gilian]

"You only have to use website x, y and z, then spend f hours on the dummy, then use website a, b and c to make sure your gems and reforges are all ok and then you'll be able to perform adequately. Not perform well mind you, you'll only be perform as expected if you do those things, just do all of that merely so that you won't be called useless by me and my hardcore chums. If you don't automatically know all these things then you suck and you should stop playing right now. Loser."

Yes that's what everyone is saying. Forget about all the people trying to help and get complaining in return and content nerfed because those people are not accepting the help and are selfish.

The complaining about content being too hard has never been this bad while the game has never been more accessible and forgivable/easy. But it must be that the game is too hard, it's not our fault!

[Kryos]

ToT heroic 10 man is too hard. The players are already less commited with each expansion and after we managed to have 12/12 normal on farm we managed to kill the first boss heroic after 20 tries.

And when we wiped at the next bosses heroic suddenly people had important stuff to do at the next week and could not attend... we have not raided for 2 ids now... I think people are scared/annoyed about how much effort it is to do hard content.

I personally think that's a sad developement since hard mode should be hard. But I think this time it's a bit overtuned since even players who cleared every content for 8 years with us tend to die often and for different reasons.

ps: sorry for my bad english

[TirielWoW]

I think the difficulty of ToT is fine, I do believe however that the scaling is wrong. The difference between Jin and Horridon is too big, while after Horridon there is Council(which they nerfed to the ground to the point it's not funny anymore). The last 4 bosses(except Lei Shen), boss 8-11 are all relatively easy, while in the middle there are more problematic bosses like Durumu.

Better scaling definitely would have helped many guilds. The fact that guilds are getting cockblocked at the second or third boss in the instance, when there are far easier bosses further in, is really sapping the morale of many casual players. Especially in 10 man guilds.

[Deleted]

I think the difficulty of ToT is fine, I do believe however that the scaling is wrong. The difference between Jin and Horridon is too big, while after Horridon there is Council(which they nerfed to the ground to the point it's not funny anymore). The last 4 bosses(except Lei Shen), boss 8-11 are all relatively easy, while in the middle there are more problematic bosses like Durumu.

Nerfing normal modes would mean a guild like mine(3x 2.5 hours a week) would clear a raid like ToT in 1 or 2 weeks instead of the 4 it took us now, and after that we would hit the wall that is heroic. I don't think that's a good idea at all. a 10 man lfr only for premades would seem a better idea for me then.

The thing is, while it would suck for you to run out of new content to do after a few weeks, as things stand other people have no content whatsoever.

And it's a very different situation trying to keep a guild afloat when there is some content that your team can tackle than when there is no content for them at all.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 09:55 AM ----------

Yes that's what everyone is saying. Forget about all the people trying to help and get complaining in return and content nerfed because those people are not accepting the help and are selfish.

The complaining about content being too hard has never been this bad while the game has never been more accessible and forgivable/easy. But it must be that the game is too hard, it's not our fault!

Oh yeah let me add

"I'll ignore the ojective data and instead pretend the poster themselves need help to clear content, which I will hand out in an incredibly patronising fashion like some sort of interent wow god."

And

"Strawman that people are whinging for nerfs."

[Tekkommo]

>.>

On my realm, pugs routinely cleared ICC on normal, and several did multiple heroic encounters. I regularly did GDKP pugs where we cleared 5-6 heroic bosses, plus Lich King. I ran a pug on an RP server that had no problem going 6/12 normal 10, with people in fairly awful gear.

This was with a 25% buff, there was no pugs with 0% (25 man). 10 mans in wrath were far easier than 25 man, due to the ilvl, so they cannot be compared.

ICC Heroics were pretty hard at 0%, the 25% buff just destroyed any challenge. The pug I did in ICC 25 man was 11/12 HC, but this was all down to the 25% buff.

This is a prime example of how badly people look back on previous expansions.

There is also a very simple reason we don't see 25 man pugs anymore (which I do miss), 10 man is easier and drops the same loot.

[TirielWoW]

This was with a 25% buff, there was no pugs with 0% (25 man).

ICC Heroics were pretty hard at 0%, the 25% buff just destroyed any challenge.

The heroics (well...except for Gunship -_-), yes. The actual clearing of the instance, no. Most pugs were able to get past Saurfang and into the wings without too much trouble. Putricide was a big block. The Blood Wing and Sindy were basically not doable without a couple days of work, but you could do all the bosses up until then with relative ease. If you were in a more "organized" pug, like a GDKP run or a regular pug (I don't know how widespread this was, but we had groups of people in various guilds who would pug content together on a regular basis, with DKP and everything), you had a good shot at getting the bulk of the instance down. Once the nerfs came in, of course, it was faceroll.

The ICC Heroics were fantastic, I thought. I wasn't too keen on Lootship, but I really enjoyed progression through the heroics there. I thought they were very well tuned.

[Gilian]

Um, actually, yes it does. You see, I could pug ICC normal on 10 or 25 man. When was the last time you saw a 25 man pug? I'm no a high population server now, and I still only rarely see successful 10 man MSV pugs, and only if they're primarily filled with raiders who grossly outgear the content.

Like I said things changed. We have LFR now for example. Why would you pug normal when you got LFR?

Those players had an option to raid in previous expansion. That option has dried up for them. These are players that hardcore guilds need, though I get the feeling from your posts that you would be happy if they all just quit and left. Sadly, if that did happen, hardcore guilds would die rather quickly. Hardcore guilds don't recruit the bulk of their raiders from other hardcore guilds. They recruit from less progressed, more casual guilds. And those guilds recruit from still less progressed, more casual guilds. When the guilds at the bottom start dying out, it causes a chain reaction from the bottom to the top.


Essentially, you're advocating cutting the legs out from under hardcore guilds, and I don't think you've quite grasped that yet.

You have to wrong feeling then.

There is no problem for normal raiding players to move to heroic raiding either. This thread is about normal difficulty and if you want to lower normal difficulty you are actually cutting the legs from under hardcore raiding guilds by making the gap between normal and heroic bigger.
Also adding another difficulty will make recruiting even harder when it is already too hard right now because of LFR and "equal" 10 mans.

[Deleted]

You have to wrong feeling then.

There is no problem for normal raiding players to move to heroic raiding either. .

There is if they don't exist in the first place, which is what is happening right now.

If all the normal modes raiders move to LFR, where are you going to recruit from?

[Gilian]

The heroics (well...except for Gunship -_-), yes. The actual clearing of the instance, no. Most pugs were able to get past Saurfang and into the wings without too much trouble. Putricide was a big block. The Blood Wing and Sindy were basically not doable without a couple days of work, but you could do all the bosses up until then with relative ease. If you were in a more "organized" pug, like a GDKP run or a regular pug (I don't know how widespread this was, but we had groups of people in various guilds who would pug content together on a regular basis, with DKP and everything), you had a good shot at getting the bulk of the instance down. Once the nerfs came in, of course, it was faceroll.

The ICC Heroics were fantastic, I thought. I wasn't too keen on Lootship, but I really enjoyed progression through the heroics there. I thought they were very well tuned.

If you just spammed trade for players it was really not that easy without nerfs. Like every tier, before LFR, it took time before these unorganized pugs had a good shot at killing bosses.
During ICC I joined plenty of pugs even after nerfs and plenty of them failed miserably even with players like myself who did the heroic version, decked out in half BiS gear.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 09:06 AM ----------

There is if they don't exist in the first place, which is what is happening right now.

If all the normal modes raiders move to LFR, where are you going to recruit from?

From the good players who raid normal who are left behind by the whining noobs?

[Deleted]

From the good players who raid normal who are left behind by the whining noobs?

And where will those good players come from when no one is raiding normals and everyone is in LFR?

And how will you know who they are?

[TirielWoW]

Like I said things changed. We have LFR now for example. Why would you pug normal when you got LFR?

There's no one to pug with, for one. I avoid LFR like the plague, personally.

You have to wrong feeling then.

There is no problem for normal raiding players to move to heroic raiding either. This thread is about normal difficulty and if you want to lower normal difficulty you are actually cutting the legs from under hardcore raiding guilds by making the gap between normal and heroic bigger.
Also adding another difficulty will make recruiting even harder when it is already too hard right now because of LFR and "equal" 10 mans.

I think you need to look at the raiding population. When was the last time you tried to recruit? Do you have any idea how hard it is to recruit for a casual 10 man? Most casual 25 mans have completely disintegrated. They don't exist. You're either progressing in heroic 25 man, or you go 10 man and progress in heroic there.

The guilds that once trained, equipped, and groomed new players to get into raiding, get interested in progression, and eventually move on for bigger and brighter things with better guilds, are no longer around. No hardcore guild is going to take these people. So where are they going? They're going to social guilds and disappearing into the miasma of LFR. They can't pug into a run and hopefully get SOME real experience because pugs are so scarce, and tend to only take people who already have the achievements (meaning newer players get left out). More progressed guilds have a harder and harder time recruiting because there's no pool of talent, and they generally want to take people who are at least familiar with normal. The guilds even more progressed can't find recruits because those guilds beneath them are either starved of applicants or defunct, having fallen apart getting stuck two or three bosses into a normal instance with 12 total bosses (imagine being stuck on Marrowgar or Lady D for months? Or being stuck on XT for months?).

This rises up the chain. Hardcore raiders burn out. You need to ask yourself where hardcore guilds are going to find their replacements when no one is training them.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 04:11 AM ----------

If you just spammed trade for players it was really not that easy without nerfs. Like every tier, before LFR, it took time before these unorganized pugs had a good shot at killing bosses.
During ICC I joined plenty of pugs even after nerfs and plenty of them failed miserably even with players like myself who did the heroic version, decked out in half BiS gear.

I don't know what to tell you. I know what I experienced during Wrath. I do not recall having great trouble with these runs. And I was in quite a lot of them after I stopped raiding with my main guild for a few months.

From the good players who raid normal who are left behind by the whining noobs?

And this is the crux of why you are so condescending and antagonistic. I guess you were never a noob, hm?

[Kryos]

On Normal mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 25,429 raid guilds. That's 99.87% of all raid guilds.
On Hard mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 5,425 raid guilds. That's 21.31% of all raid guilds.
this goes down to Hard Mode Lei Shen who was killed by just 85 raid guilds, that's only 0.33%!

This is clearly overtuned content since even vanilla Naxxramas was cleared by 3% of the raid guilds according to Blizzard iirc.
For comparison hard mode final boss kills:

H: Madness of Deathwing: 14126 (22.05%)
H: Ragnaros: 7945 (11.53%)
H: Nefarian: 3560 (4.71%)
H: Halion (25): 969 (7.99%)
H: The Lich King (10): 5664 (6.71%)
H: The Lich King (25): 1101 (1.85%)

And we could all agree, that the LK 25 man was also overtuned. And even he has 500% more kills than Lei Shen.
I think they need to nerf the heroic and normal content a little bit more or they will lose the remaining raiders in the long term.

The number of raiding guilds has dropped from nearly 90,000 during WotLK to 25,000 now!

PS: source http://www.wowprogress.com/

[Tekkommo]

What's strange is, Ulduar had the exact same complaints when it came out. People were used to face rolling raids, then they had to think a bit more in Ulduar.

Now apparently everyone loved the difficulty.

[TirielWoW]

On Normal mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 25,429 raid guilds. That's 99.87% of all raid guilds.
On Hard mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 5,425 raid guilds. That's 21.31% of all raid guilds.
this goes down to Hard Mode Lei Shen who was killed by just 85 raid guilds, that's only 0.33%!

This is clearly overtuned content since even vanilla Naxxramas was cleared by 3% of the raid guilds according to Blizzard iirc.
For comparison hard mode final boss kills:

H: Madness of Deathwing: 14126 (22.05%)
H: Ragnaros: 7945 (11.53%)
H: Nefarian: 3560 (4.71%)
H: Halion (25): 969 (7.99%)
H: The Lich King (10): 5664 (6.71%)
H: The Lich King (25): 1101 (1.85%)

And we could all agree, that the LK 25 man was also overtuned. And even he has 500% more kills than Lei Shen.
I think they need to nerf the heroic and normal content a little bit more or they will lose the remaining raiders in the long term.

The number of raiders has dropped from nearly 90,000 during WotLK to 25,000 now!

I did not find Heroic LK to be overtuned. That was a crazy, crazy fight, but it was also a very good one. I've just started progression on Heroic Lei Shen, and I don't see it being overtuned at the moment. It's a very hard fight, and it's meant to be a very hard fight.

I think Heroic modes are fine. I am concerned about Normal modes, however.

[Deleted]

For my normal 10 man guild progression it's hard. 1/12, more than 90 wipes in Horridon. But it's fine we will go over it or die trying!

I myself lead a small raid in ToT and yes the encounters are hard and we actually really like that. We are currently at 6/12 but we only raid 1-2 days a week for 3-3.5 hours each. It's ok. We still have time till 5.4 to finish the raid.

What you will benefit the most is a constant roster of players. Players that are actually trying to push their class to the limits. Wiping 90 times on the second boss is a joke. Fire your raid leader he is not doing his job right or find the person that is failing on every single try. Find out how people are dying. Improve the strategy.

Not sure about your raid ilvl though but doing Horridon on ilvl 490 is very hard. If that is your problem make sure to improve your raid ilvl first.

[Deleted]

What's strange is, Ulduar had the exact same complaints when it came out. People were used to face rolling raids, then they had to think a bit more in Ulduar.

Now apparently everyone loved the difficulty.

You got to pick your poison in Ulduar. Stuck on Ignis? No worries, loads of other stuff to go at...

[Tekkommo]

On Normal mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 25,429 raid guilds. That's 99.87% of all raid guilds.
On Hard mode Jin'rokh the Breaker was killed by 5,425 raid guilds. That's 21.31% of all raid guilds.
this goes down to Hard Mode Lei Shen who was killed by just 85 raid guilds, that's only 0.33%!

This is clearly overtuned content since even vanilla Naxxramas was cleared by 3% of the raid guilds according to Blizzard iirc.
For comparison hard mode final boss kills:

H: Madness of Deathwing: 14126 (22.05%)
H: Ragnaros: 7945 (11.53%)
H: Nefarian: 3560 (4.71%)
H: Halion (25): 969 (7.99%)
H: The Lich King (10): 5664 (6.71%)
H: The Lich King (25): 1101 (1.85%)

And we could all agree, that the LK 25 man was also overtuned. And even he has 500% more kills than Lei Shen.
I think they need to nerf the heroic and normal content a little bit more or they will lose the remaining raiders in the long term.

The number of raiders has dropped from nearly 90,000 during WotLK to 25,000 now!

PS: source http://www.wowprogress.com/

So you are comparing old content to current content? Old content that has been out much much longer and cleared by people when they over geared it by miles.

Not to mention all the nerfs and players buffs that happened. Maybe get numbers when the raids were a few months old?

This is how to get accurate results!

[Mteq]

i think the main problem is that if you are playing in a social raiding guild with friends and skill isnt (or shouldnt) feel like such a big issue, MoPs raiding is very much about personal performance.

the morphing on amber shaper, the rockfalls and kicking on tortos, the durumu maze and life drain intercepting, the platform mechanics on lei shen transition are just a couple of examples of mechanics or requirements that rely to much on personal performance. the rest of the raid can't compensate. you actually need a solid TEAM and you are only as strong as your weakest link.

You can't out DPS or outheal it like previous raids; this can either be a blessing or a curse. in a 10 man raid, with 1 BR, if you got 2 or 3 people that perform sub par you just wont get there untill you greatly outgear everything and this, provided you get 1/12 (cause horridon is the actual first roadblock) and Nalak down, will take ages.

the scaling of the different fights and the mechanics of the fights ask to much of players in comparison to earlier expensions. it used to be DPS A while taking care of B, while multiple fights in ToT are quite complex.

a good exaomple of what i mean would be durumu; DPS the red add, stay in your assign beam and intercept the life drain in order and be sure you can compensate if the beams target the "wrong people" and there are not enough people in each beam to prevent the massive aoe damage. there's A, B, C and D and sometimes even E going on, and this is not just on durumu.

high DPS and awarement requirements on normal isnt a good balance. its nice for HC but for normal it should be either the one or the other.

LFR; easy DPS requirements and easy awareness requirements
normal: high DPS OR high wareness requirements
HQ: high DPS and high awareness requirements

ToT is failing on the normal balance.

[TirielWoW]

What's strange is, Ulduar had the exact same complaints when it came out. People were used to face rolling raids, then they had to think a bit more in Ulduar.

Now apparently everyone loved the difficulty.

Ulduar also had bugs, don't forget that. Some amazing, incredibly hilarious, and horrendously frustrating bugs. A few of the fights were actually deliberately tuned to be uncompletable (anyone remember Hodir? Yogg was also overtuned for the specific purpose).

On the other hand, Ulduar was an open-concept raid. You didn't have to follow everything in a line. The first boss was quite easy (even though it was a vehicle boss, which gave a lot of raiders fits as no one was really used to that yet, even after Maly), and you could pick and choose what bosses you wanted to tackle yet. You didn't have to do Ignis and Razorscale to do XT, and you didn't have to do Iron Council to engage Kologarn. Once past Kologarn, you could choose which order you tackled the next few bosses, as well. This meant that if a guild was having trouble on a boss, they had other options for that raid week.

[Gilian]

Oh yeah let me add

"I'll ignore the ojective data and instead pretend the poster themselves need help to clear content, which I will hand out in an incredibly patronising fashion like some sort of interent wow god."

And

"Strawman that people are whinging for nerfs."

What objective data? You have just as much or less of a clue of what is happening as me.

How is that a strawman? People are complaining in this very thread about normal being too hard and wanting to have Blizzard lower the difficulty. It's not an argument, it's a fact.