World First Arisen Arak Kill

[Slipmat]

European based end game Raiding Guild Fires of Heaven based on the Zaviel shard achieved a well deserved World First boss kill by taking down Arisen Arak, the end boss in Rift's curRent hardest Raid, the 20-man Tier 3 Mind of Madness

[theWocky]

Grats to these guys.

How many people still raiding late end-game in Rift? Wasn't it like 3 ~ 4 guilds?

The whole Rift World #1 guild left, right? What were they? Apotheosys or something.

EDIT: oh, yeah -they're doing pretty well for a month in WoW. 3/13 Mythic - pretty darn good guild imo.
You can hear how focused they are in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHfsX78d0nk

[Ahovv]

Grats to these guys.

How many people still raiding late end-game in Rift? Wasn't it like 3 ~ 4 guilds?

The whole Rift World #1 guild left, right? What were they? Apotheosys or something.

EDIT: oh, yeah -they're doing pretty well for a month in WoW. 3/13 Mythic - pretty darn good guild imo.
You can hear how focused they are in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHfsX78d0nk

They are not doing well in wow. Look at their item level at the time of their kills; getting 5/13 is a complete joke with 720ilvl. Additionally, examine their dps rankings and you see they have a ton of mediocre parsers at the moment.

Unfortunately not everyone can make a game transition and play at the same level. I saw this when I first hopped over to WoW with many of my friends from Vendetta/Crayons/Rekt. Most of the Crayons people were top parsers in Rift and became average in WoW for whatever reason.

Of course, this is totally unrelated to the thread! Congrats FoH on a world first for Arisen Arak. If it's like most other end bosses in Rift, I'm sure there were (are?) many annoying fucking bugs.

[Deleted]

They are not doing well in wow. Look at their item level at the time of their kills; getting 5/13 is a complete joke with 720ilvl. Additionally, examine their dps rankings and you see they have a ton of mediocre parsers at the moment.

Unfortunately not everyone can make a game transition and play at the same level. I saw this when I first hopped over to WoW with many of my friends from Vendetta/Crayons/Rekt. Most of the Crayons people were top parsers in Rift and became average in WoW for whatever reason.

Of course, this is totally unrelated to the thread! Congrats FoH on a world first for Arisen Arak. If it's like most other end bosses in Rift, I'm sure there were (are?) many annoying fucking bugs.

LOL ahov so salty!

And yeah we are 5/13 mythic within 2 months, including leveling, i bet you did better, cause after all you are the cleric jesus, the stephen hawking of mmos, what im saying you are the lionel messi of mmos!

[Edge-]

Reminder, this is the Rift forum. Let's keep discussion on-topic/game please.

[jackofwind]

Unfortunately not everyone can make a game transition and play at the same level. I saw this when I first hopped over to WoW with many of my friends from Vendetta/Crayons/Rekt. Most of the Crayons people were top parsers in Rift and became average in WoW for whatever reason.

Probably also has something to do with the ludicrous macros you can make in Rift because everything is automatically /castsequence by default. Lots of macro-able ways to bypass actually having to think about upkeep for all the small buffs/debuffs that you have to manage manually in WoW, and nearly impossible to hit a wrong key if you write your macro correctly.

Likewise, its very easy to perform at a basic level in Rift using a single button with all your abilities and cooldowns (ie: your entire rotation or priority system) /castsequence macroed to it.

[Ahovv]

Probably also has something to do with the ludicrous macros you can make in Rift because everything is automatically /castsequence by default. Lots of macro-able ways to bypass actually having to think about upkeep for all the small buffs/debuffs that you have to manage manually in WoW, and nearly impossible to hit a wrong key if you write your macro correctly.

Likewise, its very easy to perform at a basic level in Rift using a single button with all your abilities and cooldowns (ie: your entire rotation or priority system) /castsequence macroed to it.

Rift doesn't have castsequence, and the basic macro system is a priority system for cooldown-based abilities. Also, performing at a "basic" level in Rift with only a few buttons would never net you competitive kills nor parses. That's simply not how it worked except in early classic.

From late classic onward you saw extremely complex specs across all the classes (except probably warrior which was strict block-based).

To be honest, the fact you're comparing a world first level of competition to how the average Rift player would use a dumbed-down rotation just proves you never did anything worth mentioning in the game. Literally anyone with competitive rankings would realize how silly your comments are.

[Fencers]

Probably also has something to do with the ludicrous macros you can make in Rift because everything is automatically /castsequence by default.

This is incorrect. Excessive macro capability has not been available in Rift for years now.

[justinhalfout]

This is incorrect. Excessive macro capability has not been available in Rift for years now.

Let's be honest here though,it is still possible to play a vast amount of classes/specs with just a couple of macros,not saying you will be a better player for it,play at max potential or be a king among parsers but you would arguably "get by".

Wasn't long ago you could play Reaver with just one button and do respectable (note,not top) dps.

[Fencers]

Let's be honest here though,it is still possible to play a vast amount of classes/specs with just a couple of macros,not saying you will be a better player for it,play at max potential or be a king among parsers but you would arguably "get by".

I doubt this but even if true it's not relevant to the conversation here.

[BiggestNoob]

LOL ahov so salty!

And yeah we are 5/13 mythic within 2 months, including leveling, i bet you did better, cause after all you are the cleric jesus, the stephen hawking of mmos, what im saying you are the lionel messi of mmos!

Everyone in your raid is doing unbelievably bad numbers. I honestly have no idea how your mages can do that little damage. I was doing more at 700 ilvl with no raid gear.

But yeah, you guys leveled slowly (2-3 days is more than enough to hit 100 without BoA gear, and you could boost), you progressed through normal/heroic slowly, and you're having trouble on bosses that were trivial by 720. The worst part of it all is that none of you has actually improved yet, given months of playing. It's still the same massive underperformance, and it's mindboggling.

Size of the competitive base, mostly.

I can probably be the absolute best at most anything in a group that consists of "my family" or "people in my neighborhood". Widen the pool to "the whole world" and you'd see that I'm actually shitty at all those things.

Same concept in what you're saying, really.

Not really. If you can do > 95% of what a spec is capable of doing in a game where the rotations are more complex, you don't really have an excuse for doing sub 50% of what a spec is capable of doing in a game that's identical in every way but with simpler rotations.

I don't have any good explanation for why good Rift players suddenly became terrible in WoW.

On this topic: why did this kill take so long? Nothing in that video screams "woah, that is incredibly hard".. I'm guessing it was lots of bugs or attendance problems?

[munkeyinorbit]

LOL ahov so salty!

And yeah we are 5/13 mythic within 2 months, including leveling, i bet you did better, cause after all you are the cleric jesus, the stephen hawking of mmos, what im saying you are the lionel messi of mmos!

Probably has something to do with the BC syndrome. Raids in rift not actually that hard and the people in them not actually that good. A lot of specs can be played with a few buttons, just like in BC. Raiders in BC were not good at the game, just extremely lucky to find players with the same determination to kill raid bosses. Can see the skill level in players based on 5/13 Mythic. So you have had 2 months. That means you've been raiding for 7 weeks. Doesn't explain your numbers.

[BiggestNoob]

I doubt they're doing sub 50% of optimal DPS in WoW, you can do that just by auto attacking with some specs. :| (Some of what you're saying comes off very strongly as having some kind of vendetta against this guild.)

Edit: But yes, it's still mostly an issue of population. The best players in a small population are almost certainly going to be behind the best players of a vastly larger population.

You have people doing ~50k DPS in specs that can do well over 100k in the same gear. That's literally 50% of optimal DPS, and I'm ignoring the inflation caused by fast kill times.

It's not an issue of population. The top 5 people in a population of 10000 are not suddenly going to be median in a population of 100000. That's not how statistics works. You're asserting that people who play Rift are generally much worse than people who play WoW when you say that. I've watched great players transition between similar games with varying population sizes and they are consistently at the top. I'm near the top and I only started playing WoW when HFC came out, but the whole time I've been playing, 90% parses have been common while being so far behind people who are optimally geared for that ilvl. Even on a fresh alt that I had no idea how to play I'm sitting here at 98%+ parses in my bracket without tier or trinkets, and it's very simple to do that, so when I see people doing significantly less DPS than I am with no gear, they don't really engender much respect.

This is a guild filled with people who constantly boasted about being better than everyone else in Rift, in fact mocking the performance of others, yet they're playing at such a poor level they'd be world 300 at best in WoW. And by their own admission, the specs are easier to play in WoW. So yeah, I'm going to be critical of their performance. You can't talk shit like that and then play this poorly and think that nobody is going to point out the irony of it.

Probably has something to do with the BC syndrome. Raids in rift not actually that hard and the people in them not actually that good. A lot of specs can be played with a few buttons, just like in BC. Raiders in BC were not good at the game, just extremely lucky to find players with the same determination to kill raid bosses. Can see the skill level in players based on 5/13 Mythic. So you have had 2 months. That means you've been raiding for 7 weeks. Doesn't explain your numbers.

Comparing recent Rift to recent WoW, they're comparable in difficulty with Rift generally having several harder wall bosses, and this was relatively more important because there wasn't significant power creep. Things only really got easier after significant nerfs, while most guilds clear content in WoW because of power creep. You'd only see a handful of kills in Rift before nerfs, which is similar to WoW.

I'm quite confident that if the best guilds in Rift's history were playing WoW at the same level, that they'd be in the world top 10 with ease.

[BiggestNoob]

That's actually exactly how it works. Pick one guy off the street, teach him chess. Then pick ten guys. Then pick one thousand guys. Chances are extremely good that you'll find some players emerging from the larger group that destroy the best player from the 10-man group, and it's pretty much a statistical impossibility that the single random guy will be the best out of all the groups.

That's not a 100% solid comparison, of course. But the concept is pretty much the same.

No, that concept is not the same. You're conflating taking a random person and guessing where they'll be on a normal curve of ability with comparing two random sets of people. You expect a randomly chosen individual to be near the mean, and generally within several standard deviations of it. If you take a large group (say 5000 chess players) and you take the top 1% of those players, those people are unlikely to be near the median of a larger group of 100000 unless there's a correlation between that group of players and being mediocre or bad at the game.

If you agree that your average person you pick off the street is not already biased towards being bad at chess, then it's safe to say that we can generate random numbers in a normal distribution. I've built a simple demonstration here that you can run: https://jsfiddle.net/s5eevx5w/1/.

It uses the CLT to approximate randomly generated normally distributed numbers. You can see that the top 1% of each group is similar regardless of the sample size. There are fewer 1%ers in the smaller sample, and the max and minimum are fairly different largely due to the difference in sample size, but the best in the smaller sample are clearly far above the mean in the larger sample, even if there are more extreme outliers in the larger one.

Nope, just that with a larger group, you'll have a higher chance of seeing exceptional players emerge - or a higher number of exceptional players.

You don't have a higher chance, the distribution is still approximately normal. You just have more people overall, so more people are exceptional. Relative to the group size, the probability is roughly the same.

I couldn't care less who they are or what they did, honestly. This isn't the guild drama forum.

The "world first" guild of Rift that constantly flaunted being the best moves to WoW and does horribly there against any reasonable expectation. I think that's plenty relevant for this forum, even if it's off topic in this particular discussion.

In regards to relevance here, discussion about how the bosses in Rift are easy compared to bosses in WoW and how player skill in Rift is small I think is relevant when discussing world first clears of zones. I think you've made assertions that are completely unfounded and provably false, and my experiences (and those of many others I speak to regularly) are quite contrary, and I didn't go and become average in WoW despite being one of the best in Rift.

[BiggestNoob]

There's nothing "provably false" about the statement that as any given pool of competition increases, the chances of "you" being at the top of that group decreases and the chances of exceptional players emerging increases.

And that's not even beginning to touch the concept of the outliers in any competitive pool gravitating toward the perceived "most competitive" field.

Yes, what you just said is provably false. In fact, the thing I just linked proves that it's false. A basic course in statistics would explain why it's false. The odds of someone being at a specific distance from the mean is completely independent from the size of the population. Because the population is larger, your fixed percentages of that population are larger (2000*0.001 < 20000*0.001), but the probability of someone being at a certain distance (a percentile) does not change at all.

Additionally, there's a hard ceiling on player ability in every MMO that has ever existed, and it's well below player capability.

The top end competitiveness in Rift was more competitive than the vast majority of raiding in WoW, as is expected. Aside from a handful of guilds (less than 5% of the guilds that did 13/13 before it was irrelevant), nobody in WoW raiding is really well beyond what I've seen and done in Rift and in other games at their respective tops in terms of competition or effort. Almost nobody is going to go play another game because there's a higher perceived competition from their current game. If you aren't so far ahead of everyone else that there's nobody to compete with, there's likely not a game that is more competitive. Having more people != more competitive. Method/Paragon largely haven't scratched the surface of what's possible in raiding because they can't compete at all with perfect play. People just think that raiding in WoW is far more difficult than it is in other games, and that certain guilds are far better than they actually are. That's not represented in reality by facts or statistics, it's largely a cognitive bias, and one that you're demonstrating here.

[BiggestNoob]

Stop and actually think about what you're saying for a moment. You're really going to suggest that someone's "distance from the mean" never changes as the competitive pool increases? That being the best player among your group of friends means that you're the best player in your city, and therefore your state, and therefore the nation and therefore the world?

You're making two errors here. The first is assuming that "your group of friends" is a sufficiently large or random sample. All of the raiders in a fairly popular game is both sufficiently large and sufficiently random. But if your group of friends is Method and a handful of other world top guilds in WoW, being even average in that group may mean you're one of the best in the world easily.

The second is claiming that "the best" is equivalent to a distance from the mean. It's not. The best means the absolute maximum in a data set, which is largely not a useful metric in statistics. If you have a normal distribution of ability and you have a sufficiently large, sufficiently random sample of people, and you're in the top 1% of that group, you will remain around or near the top 1% of your state, your country, and of the world in general.

This is how statistics works.

Of course not. Partly because the granularity just isn't there. You can't have "0.00005% of a Kasparov" in any given group of people. And while Little Billy might be the best Street Fighter player among his group of friends that he plays with after school, he's probably not even in the top 50% worldwide.

You're making that same error again. Your group of friends could indeed have Kasparov in it. Statistically speaking, you expect more Kasparovs in a sample of 10 billion than you do in a sample of 10 million, but you also expect substantially more non-Kasparovs in that sample as well. The probability for each individual is the same.

The larger the population gets, the more any given individual will tend toward the average, unless you really do just happen to be Michael Phelps. Of course, the distance that individual moves from their initial position depends on the amount that the pool increased, and after a certain size the pool is large enough that changes will become negligible, but at that point you're already dealing with a pool that likely encompasses all interested parties anyway.

This is incorrect. The larger the population gets, the more and more extreme outliers you have. The mean remains the same and the probability of being a certain distance of it also remains the same. For every extreme outlier, you have an enormous number of average people. This is why the probabilities don't change.

This doesn't matter in general though because there are often limits that prevent this from extending indefinitely. The human body has physical limits, and games like WoW put incredible limits on players with things like GCD and limited amounts of stuff to heal or DPS. It doesn't take much to reach the edge of what's possible in terms of mechanical execution to the point that RNG and latency are the deciding factors between individuals in identical situations. The difference between Methods and most other top guilds is time investment and ability to adapt.

That has nothing to do with anything that I've said. This and other comments lead me to believe that you're too wrapped up in some other agenda to approach the topic outside of the boundaries of whatever bias you're carrying.

No, you're the one that's biased here. You think WoW raiding is difficult and Rift raiding is trivial. You've literally made this claim multiple times. Have you raided at a top level in both games?

If you honestly think there's a massive skill difference between world 1 and world 50 in WoW, you're delusional. If you think that the best players in Rift are average in WoW, you're both delusional and incapable of understanding basic statistics.

[Gromnak]

If you honestly think there's a massive skill difference between world 1 and world 50 in WoW, you're delusional. If you think that the best players in Rift are average in WoW, you're both delusional and incapable of understanding basic statistics.

There is indeed a very massive difference between world 1 and world 50 in WoW and anyone who claims otherwise is most certainly delusional. And this "top rift guild" can only manage to get to 5/13 M with nerfed content & inflated gear levels via valor upgrades. They are certainly progressing faster than most "newly formed" guilds in WoW would due to their RIFT experience...but they still aren't above average yet. I barely post on MMO champion so I probably won't reply again. Just letting you know the cold, hard truth.

[Ahovv]

There is indeed a very massive difference between world 1 and world 50 in WoW and anyone who claims otherwise is most certainly delusional. And this "top rift guild" can only manage to get to 5/13 M with nerfed content & inflated gear levels via valor upgrades. They are certainly progressing faster than most "newly formed" guilds in WoW would due to their RIFT experience...but they still aren't above average yet. I barely post on MMO champion so I probably won't reply again. Just letting you know the cold, hard truth.

1) The only person in here suggesting Apotheosys is progressing at a good rate is thewocky. He's free to have that opinion, but it's pretty objectively false. Most of their initial kills were with extreme ilvl bonuses over the original kills. They're on gorefiend and still can't kill it with 723 ilvl. So I think most of us agree their progression isn't impressive.

2) I came in here explaining that good players don't always transition from one game to another. Apotheosys players were objectively very good in Rift; anyone who played the game would be pretty stupid to deny that.

3) I don't understand why this turned into a discussion about game vs game. The differences are too nuanced to really reference without every participant having played both games.

Probably also has something to do with the ludicrous macros you can make in Rift because everything is automatically /castsequence by default. Lots of macro-able ways to bypass actually having to think about upkeep for all the small buffs/debuffs that you have to manage manually in WoW, and nearly impossible to hit a wrong key if you write your macro correctly.

Likewise, its very easy to perform at a basic level in Rift using a single button with all your abilities and cooldowns (ie: your entire rotation or priority system) /castsequence macroed to it.

They try to imply that Rift is somehow this easy game which is pretty hilarious. The reality of game transitions is that someone can be good in one game but average at another, and it has nothing to do with the actual difficulty. Many of the former "top 50 raiders" came to Rift and got absolutely wrecked in classic, quitting the game at the first sign of overlapping mechanics and dynamic timers.

I held my judgment on WoW until I actually played it, and that's what I would expect from everyone else.

- - - Updated - - -

Stop and actually think about what you're saying for a moment. You're really going to suggest that someone's "distance from the mean" never changes as the competitive pool increases? That being the best player among your group of friends means that you're the best player in your city, and therefore your state, and therefore the nation and therefore the world?

Of course not. Partly because the granularity just isn't there. You can't have "0.00005% of a Kasparov" in any given group of people. And while Little Billy might be the best Street Fighter player among his group of friends that he plays with after school, he's probably not even in the top 50% worldwide.

The larger the population gets, the more any given individual will tend toward the average, unless you really do just happen to be Michael Phelps. Of course, the distance that individual moves from their initial position depends on the amount that the pool increased, and after a certain size the pool is large enough that changes will become negligible, but at that point you're already dealing with a pool that likely encompasses all interested parties anyway.



That has nothing to do with anything that I've said. This and other comments lead me to believe that you're too wrapped up in some other agenda to approach the topic outside of the boundaries of whatever bias you're carrying.

I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to comprehend.

If you're in the top 1% with a sample of 100,000, and the populace is completely random, you would be expected to be in the top 1% for a much larger population. You know why? Because, both being random, you're going to increase the number of top players in proportion to the shit players. For some bizarre reason you seem to believe the number of good players would outpace the bad players.

Your example is absurd because you're starting with a sample size of a "group of friends." Part of this is flawed right off the bat because there isn't even a top 1% to pick from. If you have 5 people, the first person is essentially rank #1-20. So your "1%" from that group could just as easily be 20%, or even much lower since the sample size is *incredibly low*.

[theWocky]

1) The only person in here suggesting Apotheosys is progressing at a good rate is thewocky. He's free to have that opinion, but it's pretty objectively false.

I don't play WoW. Haven't played seriously since WotLK.

So, yeah, I'm not a good judge of what's good or not, but based on my experience (when I was raid-leading in BC and WotLK), I assume (possibly incorrectly) that 5/12 in a month is above average. Not sure how quick top dedicated guilds progress.

Also, wouldn't be able to give any opinion on DPS as I have not raided / done dungeons in WoW in ages.

I don't like stating an opinion unless I back it up with experience - and in this case, I concede that it is limited, so in all likelyhood, if you have more experience, then my opinion is tainted.

[Ballpooner]

The first five bosses are significantly easier than Gorefiend. He is one of the largest cockblocks in the instance, especially compared to how early he appears. He has had some nerfs from his release version, but he is still rather difficult. After him, there will be 3 bosses that should be easier, then the last 3-4 will start to ramp up in difficulty. With current gear levels (when they get there), everything becomes significantly easier (i.e. 12 minute Arch kills turn in ~6 minute Arch kills).

I have no experience in Rift, but if this guild transitioned to WoW, then I would expect them to have some difficulty on Gorefiend for sure--even the world first guilds spent a lot more time on Gorefiend when you compare the difference in time stamps of the prior and post boss kills in that part of the instance.