LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic: Why?

[Deleted]

Maybe if you only play with bads yeah, not so much if you got players that know what to do.

Worthless comment, you can say that about anything.

Brain surgery - pfft easy, just only take good surgeons. Just stop hanging around bads and every operation is easy.

[Deleted]

Worthless comment? Not at all, Im just telling it as it is without the sugarcoating.

[Deleted]

Worthless comment? Not at all, Im just telling it as it is.

No, it's a worthless comment.

Literally anything becomes easy if you only associate with people who are good at it. Gong to the moon? Piss, just hang around nasa astronauts.

[Raelbo]

Worthless comment? Not at all, Im just telling it as it is.

No you're not. You're using hyperbole to paint an unrealistic landscape of the WoW playerbase by using a derogatory term ("bad") to describe a level of play that would be more accurately described as "normal".

Here is how it actually is:

Bad players struggle with LFR.
Normal players struggle on normal.
Good players clear normal.
Very good players struggle on heroic.
Exceptional players clear heroic.

[Deleted]

Yes Injin, so why do you even try to argue with me when you know Im right? Im just using common sense.

Raelbo so you start with complaining about me using hyperbole while later in your post using a similar hyperbole yourself, lol.

[Raelbo]

Raelbo so you start with complaining about me using hyperbole while later in your post using a similar hyperbole yourself, lol.

And which hyperbole was that? Seems to me you lack the ability to construct a rational argument. lol

[TheFNK]

Yes Injin, so why do you even try to argue with me when you know Im right? Im just using common sense.

Raelbo so you start with complaining about me using hyperbole while later in your post using a similar hyperbole yourself, lol.

Do you...

Do you know what "hyperbole" is?

[Deleted]

Yes I do and hes making up another one in the end, I dont know why but its silly and now you jump on me about semantics?

[Mikael123]

Never understood why people complain about more options. Whatever.

I agree. It is sort of like complaining that game XX can be played at easy, normal, hard and very hard.

[Deleted]

Its when there are options available to fit everybody and people still go and claim x difficulty is too hard, crying for nerfs instead of improving themselves.

[Deleted]

Its when there are options available to fit everybody and people still go and claim x difficulty is too hard, crying for nerfs instead of improving themselves.

Its the most hillarious when X is not even that hard, and spending a fraction of the time people spend complaining on the forums about X instead trying to improve would help them complete X.

[Gondlem]

No you're not. You're using hyperbole to paint an unrealistic landscape of the WoW playerbase by using a derogatory term ("bad") to describe a level of play that would be more accurately described as "normal".

Here is how it actually is:

Bad players struggle with LFR.
Normal players struggle on normal.
Good players clear normal.
Very good players struggle on heroic.
Exceptional players clear heroic.

I really feel like the difficulty of normal ToT has been massively inflated by a kind of groupthink by people who haven't done it, or at least don't do it on a regular basis. The fact is, ToT normal is puggable content. You can pick up random people with appropriate gear from trade chat and go kill all the bosses, as long as someone generally knows the strats and can tell people what to do, and people do this in big numbers. There's 200 guilds on my server alone that have killed every boss in there, and that doesn't account for the massive number of pugs that do it every week. There is just no way you can make the blanket statement that it's overtuned and inappropriate for normal players. It's not completely faceroll for everyone, but there's no reason it should be.

I think Horridon might have been a bit hard on release, plus there was a gear requirement for the zone overall, and a lot of people either went in undergeared because they hadn't cleared/farmed T14, or just had a bit of a hard time on Horridon because it was too hard for the second boss, and gave up. Those people complained on the forums, now there's this ridiculous idea that normal ToT is super hard. It's really not. With VP gear from the vendor + gear upgrades + LFR gear you can easily get 520+ before setting foot in normal, and with that gear you will absolutely destroy it.

In 500 ilvl, on release before Horridon nerfs? Different story, at least until you got halfway through the zone.

[Deleted]

Or... ya know... they could have actually balanced Normal mode for average guilds instead of the people who want some super challenging everything

There is no "average" in this game.

I've been in an average guild wiping on Protectors because the average people couldn't find their average dispel buttons or walk averagely out of a Lightning Storm, and in an average guild (well, bunch of them were 10/13 HC with an average weekly 4 hours of raiding) where we ROFLstomped through ToT like nobody's business. Guess which one I think is average? Right, the ones who could averagely act according to boss mechanics. This might upset a lot of people who think not standing in fire is hard. Our "averages" differ greatly.

I repeat, there is no average.

[Deleted]

snip

Technically Blizzard wants you to only see one iteration of a boss.

Their current system with scaling ilvl basically makes it (almost) pointless to raid other difficulties for gear.

Raiding guilds:
- Mostly heroics, some normals.
- Heroic T15 similar or better than Flex/LFR T16. => No need to run those at all.
=> Only 1 lockout for gear.

Casual raiding guilds:
- Mostly normals, some heroics.
- Since both Flex and LFR are released after normals and feature a 'not so great' loot distribution system there is very limited need to run those.
=> Only 1 Lockout for gear. (2-3 for a few weeks at the start maybe.)

Friends and family guilds:
- Mostly flex, maybe LFR and some normals.
- Players in this bracket have the biggest overlap. However you really don't need the gear to beat Flex so why obsess over optimal loot per lockout? There is no point. Only raid what you want to raid.
=> 3 Lockouts for gear. (But people in this bracket usually only raid what they want to so it's fine.)

People who don't want to / don't have time to raid:
- LFR mostly, Flex pugs sometimes.
=> 1 Lockout for gear. (2 if they decide they have time/want to do more.)

So yea in reality unless you are in a friends and family guild that wants to maximize gear per lockout (WHY?!) you will mostly clear 1 lockout per week and also mostly see 1 difficulty per tier.

[Deleted]

Yes Injin, so why do you even try to argue with me when you know Im right? Im just using common sense.

I'm not arguing with you, i'm labeling your worthless comment as worthless, then explaining why it's worthless. No arguing required.

- - - Updated - - -

There is no "average" in this game.

I've been in an average guild wiping on Protectors because the average people couldn't find their average dispel buttons or walk averagely out of a Lightning Storm, and in an average guild (well, bunch of them were 10/13 HC with an average weekly 4 hours of raiding) where we ROFLstomped through ToT like nobody's business. Guess which one I think is average? Right, the ones who could averagely act according to boss mechanics. This might upset a lot of people who think not standing in fire is hard. Our "averages" differ greatly.

I repeat, there is no average.

Yes, there is. You take all the players, measure them out, stick them on a distibution graph and what's around the centre is the average.

- - - Updated - - -

I really feel like the difficulty of normal ToT has been massively inflated by a kind of groupthink by people who haven't done it, or at least don't do it on a regular basis. The fact is, ToT normal is puggable content. You can pick up random people with appropriate gear from trade chat and go kill all the bosses, as long as someone generally knows the strats and can tell people what to do, and people do this in big numbers. There's 200 guilds on my server alone that have killed every boss in there, and that doesn't account for the massive number of pugs that do it every week. There is just no way you can make the blanket statement that it's overtuned and inappropriate for normal players. It's not completely faceroll for everyone, but there's no reason it should be.

I think Horridon might have been a bit hard on release, plus there was a gear requirement for the zone overall, and a lot of people either went in undergeared because they hadn't cleared/farmed T14, or just had a bit of a hard time on Horridon because it was too hard for the second boss, and gave up. Those people complained on the forums, now there's this ridiculous idea that normal ToT is super hard. It's really not. With VP gear from the vendor + gear upgrades + LFR gear you can easily get 520+ before setting foot in normal, and with that gear you will absolutely destroy it.

In 500 ilvl, on release before Horridon nerfs? Different story, at least until you got halfway through the zone.

I do think you have a point - the gearing and upgrades make throne very doable, it's quite well done. The issue is that shitloads of people simply gave up around garalon and never came back, and if they did they hadn't the gear to get anywhere in ToT.

Tot is fairly unique in modern wow in that it didn't arrive with a gear reset, mostly farmable by 5 mans/whatever. The mad idea that raid progression is useful or wanted had kinda stuck around and it was sortof expected that people would go back and do (of all things) T14 heroics to get gear when tot was launched.

Needless to say people didn't do that. They've largely jacked it in and blizzard hopes to bring them back with flexi. I hope it works.

edit - I dunno about puggable though, maybe on a high pop realms but wows playerbase are scattered accross loads of dead realms where pugs are non viable. I've not seen a trade chat pug for any current content since DS here on zenedar.

[Deleted]

edit - I dunno about puggable though, maybe on a high pop realms but wows playerbase are scattered accross loads of dead realms where pugs are non viable. I've not seen a trade chat pug for any current content since DS here on zenedar.

At normal hours there are always 1-3 ToT pugs up on my realm, on peak hours it can be up to 5 pugs up. Ranging from the bad pugs that are only 11/12 or 12/12 normal to the better pugs that are doing a couple heroics, usually 1-6 heroics.

At my server I had no issue pugging Lei-Shen normal on my 480 ilvl alt BRM monk with a completely random pug that I knew noone in.

[Deleted]

At normal hours there are always 1-3 ToT pugs up on my realm, on peak hours it can be up to 5 pugs up. Ranging from the bad pugs that are only 11/12 or 12/12 normal to the better pugs that are doing a couple heroics, usually 1-6 heroics.

At my server I had no issue pugging Lei-Shen normal on my 480 ilvl alt BRM monk with a completely random pug that I knew noone in.

Yeah but you are on a high pop server wheich people move to specifically to get progression. There are a few realms like that and then a vast array of realms with like 2-3k people on them (realms where you are lucky to get see heroic kills at all from guilds, in some cases.)

Flexi and server merging has great hope within it.

[Gondlem]

edit - I dunno about puggable though, maybe on a high pop realms but wows playerbase are scattered accross loads of dead realms where pugs are non viable. I've not seen a trade chat pug for any current content since DS here on zenedar.

You might not be able to find a pug on every server, but that's not really because of the difficulty of the content. I've pugged it a bunch of times on random characters just because I'm bored and see people spamming in trade for people, and it's definitely widely done and not really that hard. There's a big issue with realm populations of course and there's a fix in the works for that, at least potentially. Unrelated but definitely an important issue.

I do agree that some people have given up but "stuck on Horridon" has almost become a meme without substance. I'd challenge anyone to find me a guild that is in fact stuck on Horridon, and still raids. People try and give up because they don't care for raiding, not because the content is hugely overtuned, and there's nothing anyone can do about that. If you make the content mind-numbingly easy those people will clear it and still stop raiding because raiding isn't their thing, and the people who do like raiding but aren't in heroic-level guilds will have nothing to do.

Flex is a perfectly reasonable idea and might help some guilds out when an issue like this comes up again but basically you have to look at Horridon as an aberration. It was mildly overtuned for its place in the zone, and was nerfed a few weeks after release. That's going to happen from time to time. Anyone who walked in there, pulled it a dozen times and said "fuck this raiding thing" wasn't going to stick with the content anyway.

The one mistake Blizzard made that I think they should correct is trying to make the gear requirements of the zone a bit clearer. Honestly, having some sort of minimum ilvl attunement or just a warning that says "YOU ARE UNDERGEARED FOR THIS CONTENT" or something might have helped, because I really think a core part of the problem was just that. The gap between the release of the expansion and the release of ToT was pretty short. A lot of people raiding casually just hadn't finished t14, or had stopped trying at some point and were doing other things. The new tier came out and a lot of those players expected to walk in and just stomp the new bosses as easily as they could stomp Stone Guard and Feng, but they were tuned for around 500 ilvl or so. You need to farm the last tier's normals and take advantage of gear upgrades and the new VP gear to get that. If you'd just made everyone have 500 ilvl before they did the content I doubt there would have been anywhere near as many guilds that hit the "wall" and gave up, and at the same time I think a lot of those guilds that did give up on Horridon would have farmed their way to 500 ilvl so they could see what normal mode was like, and had a better time with the content after doing so.

I don't think a lack of gear catchup was at fault either, ToT released with 522 ilvl VP gear and 502 gear in LFR. There were plenty of chances to catch up if you hadn't been farming t14 normals, you just couldn't walk in and clear the zone.

[Barcasaur]

LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic: Why?

Because the developers know that raiding is endgame and they want a version of that for people that know how to press buttons and people that do not even know how to operate a keyboard.

You know how they claim players are better now then they were back then and that is why content is consumed faster? that's a load of shit, content is consumed faster cause its easier and MOST of the player base is just "content" with their LFR gear.

Lets take away Heroic, which was first created because we had to nerf raiding to make it accessible, then we had to make LFR because we could not justify nerfing normal even more because its already to easy, now we are making Flex which has great tools because its dynamic depending on the amount of players but its just in between LFR and normal? cause apparently some people think normal is to hard and LFR is to easy?!?!

Lets take away LFR, Herioc, and the apply the hardware side of FLEX to "Normal" which should just be raiding, and raiding is HARD, it makes you better, it lets content last longer and you fix a ton of shit by doing this.

If blizz came out and did this Id be hard pressed to let this game go (a game I have 8,700 hours in) but they won't and the chances of me getting xpac5 is extremely low, ready for Wildstar hope it will rekindle the love I used to have for mmo's and it will be the first new one I play besides Warcraft (not counting gw2)

[Nobleshield]

If blizz came out and did this Id be hard pressed to let this game go (a game I have 8,700 hours in) but they won't and the chances of me getting xpac5 is extremely low, ready for Wildstar hope it will rekindle the love I used to have for mmo's and it will be the first new one I play besides Warcraft (not counting gw2)

Not to derail, but it won't. WildStar has this idea that they are the saving grace of MMOs and what the community really needs is a return to Vanilla/TBC-style of "raiding isn't for everyone". Their devs have said as much, and IMO show that they are totally clueless about how MMOs ought to work in 2013. This isn't 1999 or 2004.