Proving Grounds - Success?

[Sierra85]

It's pretty bad IMO. The only "hard" thing is staying focused and not dying by making a simple mistake from boredom.

i'm not saying it's good in its current itteration, but focusing and not making mistakes doesn't make it bad, seems like a weak argument to me. Scaling up doesn't make it a better experience either, so i don't quite get your thoughts!

The endless waves etc are kind of cool but there doesn't seem like there is much guidance in the proving grounds. i want it to be a system of learning about the game, learning about your class and learning how to improve. I hope that blizzard continues to enhance the PG!

[MoanaLisa]

I see it continuing but like the Farm once new expansion hits no-one will use it and they will have to copy-paste it to the new content but I fail to see how it will end up as anything more than a niche.

I don't think it's intended to be anything but a niche. And I'm guessing that they'll move them to capital cities at some point. Near the target dummies would be logical. Although they could put a portal to it from anywhere.

[Sierra85]

Although they could put a portal to it from anywhere.

you can port to it from any class trainer. seems like a logical spot.

[Xomniuri]

Waste of time, even more of a waste than challenge modes (Atleast that gave VP, sometimes a port and a mog if your into that thing).

No one cares if you can get to wave 30 on endless, because everyone's gear may be scaled back to 463 but alot of classes have specs that don't perform at those ilvls.

We have 1 person in our guild who gets really into proving grounds, and every time he talks about i either don't bother listening or tell him no one gives a crap. Because everyone knows they don't mean shit.

Blizzard shouldn't have wasted their time, and instead made an really hard 1 boss dungeon that'd be more useful in gauging a players actual performance

[espoire]

I had a reasonable amount of fun pushing deep into Endless. In general, I feel that it doesn't teach skills directly applicable to raiding. (Managing mana in a raid as a healer? You dun goofed your gearing, not your spell choice.) It does however, provide an environment to work on extremely low-end dungeon healing, a la Cataclysm heroics. It also provides an environment to work on fight debugging, a staple of progression raiding. It does not, however, teach either of those skills. I think the NPCs should explain what you could have done differently after a "wipe". This might at least teach fight debugging to new players.

[Erikc]

Didn't get past silver as arcane. And honestly I didn't give it many tries, after the mechanics were clear I went to my Frost off spec and it was easy. Made it through a few stages of endless until I realised it was so boring and proved nothing because raiding isn't a solo activity.

How successful? I had no idea how to get back into it until reading the post here.

My idea prior to reading anything about it or seeing it in-game was that it would simulate and guide you towards a raiding experience and I feel they haven't delivered on that part and this again became another epeen measuring contest which is very tied to class and abilities.

[NoiseTank13]

It was resources spent that could have been better utilized elsewhere.

[Masternewt]

As it is, scaling down gear puts us ALL on equal footing (if, nothing else, on a class-by-class basis). It's easier to scale down than it is to scale up and, quite honestly, it also makes more sense.

Only it doesn't. It favors classes that aren't too realiable on stat stacking and stat scaling. As in Challenge Modes, some classes will find these fights easy. Others will find it nothing short of frustrating, because their class will simply not operate as required. It's just Blizzard's lazy way of handing piece of content to players who play the right classes.

[Starghlin]

It taught me things I was doing wrong (or could be doing better) as a Hunter. Particularly, the inclusion of burst macros and commands for my pet into my standard rotation.

I thought it was a lot of fun, and exhilarating at waves past 30. And! I get to compete with Hunters around the world who give a crap about it.

I also wear a title that only 4 people on my server have.

[Deleted]

I love it, but once you've reached a high enough number, it's just too annoying to redo ALL the easy waves and a huge waste of time I'd love to practice more to improve my score, but I won't if I have to wait half an hour before getting to the interesting part.

[lokatii]

I'm not trying to be mean but if you can't get to wave 30+ as your main role then I'd say you're definitely not "good" at this game. Not that being good at this videogame really matters however just making a point when some of you say "I consider myself an elite raider but..." or "I know I'm really good at this game but I can't get past silver..." I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

- - - Updated - - -

Only it doesn't. It favors classes that aren't too realiable on stat stacking and stat scaling. As in Challenge Modes, some classes will find these fights easy. Others will find it nothing short of frustrating, because their class will simply not operate as required. It's just Blizzard's lazy way of handing piece of content to players who play the right classes.

Which classes can't reach 30+?

wowprogress.com shows every class getting 30+ in appropriate roles...

[Grummgug]

So i just finished gold on the proving grounds, and wondering what people thought of them as a new feature?

success / fail / what is proving grounds?

Are they something guilds will look at when reviewing applicants?

As someone who has recruited, organized and run both PvP and PvE guilds and raided in very top end guilds, no I wouldn't give a crap about proving grounds. What I look for is:

1. People who will show up.
2. People who care.
3. People who can follow directions.

WoW is not hard. If you can do these 3, your guild will succeed. That's it.

Using Proving Grounds to filter applicants is like the NFL using Wonderlic scores. Wonderlic measures aptitude and it fails to predict NFL success because NFL success comes from desire.

I only ever saw ONE difference between the worst bottom-end raiding guilds and the elite top end guilds.

1. The elite guilds don't quit.

Both types of guilds make horrible mistakes and wipe a million times on stupid crap. But in the elite guilds, raiders don't get discouraged. They always race back for the next attempt. In the crappy guilds, you have 5-6 bad wipes, people start logging off and the raiding night collapses.

So I just want desire. People who show up and care. People who follow directions.

[melodramocracy]

It was resources spent that could have been better utilized elsewhere.

This thread isn't about pet battles :P

PG is good for what it is... however, it's content that few (probably) are going to visit again once they get gold. And as far as teaching, I'd argue that pvp is a better 'how to play' tutorial, simply because of the randomness of it.

[Koji2k11]

i consider Proving grounds a failure since it scales you down to 463 and some classes just dont scale that well with gear this entire conept of scaling down is stupid the grounds should scale with your current ilvl .... iven tho i had to try it a few times to get gold it was a challange it was so much harder then on my hunter

[Hyve]

i did it till wave 26 . nothing fun nothing new to learn and nothing to prove :/ title is not that cool either

Kind of depends on your Role & Class. If I see a Mistweaver with the Endless Title, I bow down in awe! I've tried Endless far too many times on my Mistweaver, and I know how intense it gets!

[Frozenbeef]

not that interesting...you do it once then forget about it...i would say the 5.4 noodle chain is more entertaining at least you get something useful :S

[Hyve]

i consider Proving grounds a failure since it scales you down to 463

Going to agree with this statement though.

No-one has iLevel 463 anymore and scaling down to that level is just silly. A new level 90 goes almost straight to iLevel 480+.

[Deleted]

i consider Proving grounds a failure since it scales you down to 463 and some classes just dont scale that well with gear this entire conept of scaling down is stupid the grounds should scale with your current ilvl ....

Even though I agree that scaling everything down to 463 isn't ideal, scaling with your current ilvl would probably be even more imbalanced since curves dps(ilvl) are probably not exactly linear and are far from the same between different specs/classes

[The Flavour Cat]

What I don't get is that it's designed to test your class skills. So why not make it available at lower levels as well (60/70/80?)? You will have learnt a lot about your class by the time you've hit max-level.

[Deleted]

Impossible for me as Arcane, as I have no on-the-move spells aside from ABarr and FiB (and a non-Frost Bomb). Failed on stage 2 every time, simply because blowing cooldowns was pointless.

I'm not playing a mage, but AFAIK every form on CC works on them. I won't blame you for not realising that, I think it's blizzard's fault for making all 5 mans faceroll-able.

- - - Updated - - -

Waste of time, even more of a waste than challenge modes (Atleast that gave VP, sometimes a port and a mog if your into that thing).

No one cares if you can get to wave 30 on endless, because everyone's gear may be scaled back to 463 but alot of classes have specs that don't perform at those ilvls.

We have 1 person in our guild who gets really into proving grounds, and every time he talks about i either don't bother listening or tell him no one gives a crap. Because everyone knows they don't mean shit.

Blizzard shouldn't have wasted their time, and instead made an really hard 1 boss dungeon that'd be more useful in gauging a players actual performance

Sounds a somewhat egoistic way of saying "I can't be bothered to do it so I say it doesn't matter". Of course classes are not on equal footing (even though blizz stated that every class/spec should be able to reach wave 30), that's why you can compare yourself to other people of the same class than you.

Also, I'm pretty sure that a frost mage who reaches wave 40 is much better than an arcane mage who can't complete gold, even if frost is much more suited to PGs than arcane is.