Raiding in Cataclysm

[Gron]

As we are nearing Cataclysm, a lot of interviews are conducted, asking Blizzard to draw conclusions from WOTLK, asking about the focus on Cataclysm.

Here are the parts that refer to PvE - or "raiding":
- Making end-level content more approachable has been another big change for the game. It’s easier to get more powerful badge gear, you created the Dungeon Finder tool, etc. I know there’s always been that hardcore versus casual debate that rages on the WOW forums, where some people hate that stuff and some people love it. How do you feel like the general feedback among WOW players has been?

- The general feedback has been positive. We definitely plan to keep going in the direction that we’re going right now. We’re really happy with the Dungeon Finder. I’d like to find a way to extend that at the very least to 10-person raids at some point in the future. There are a lot of complexities with making that work, but anything we can do to alleviate the annoyances or pains associated with players having to arrange their own groups would be great. Being able to extend that into raiding would be awesome if we could do it.

We also have plans to continue making PvP more accessible also. It’s interesting that in Burning Crusade our raiding game was extremely hardcore, and in a lot of ways the PvP was a lot more casual player-friendly. Through the course of Lich King, those have flipped around. A lot of that is just because of the development in our PvE game. We had really aggressive development in solving the problems that we saw in PvE in Burning Crusade as far as making PvE more accessible and easier to get into and more rewarding. Almost simultaneously, PvP either stayed the same or got more hardcore in some ways.

Those flipped roles in Lich King, and we really want to balance them out better than we have before in Cataclysm. We want to continue to advance on that front with PvE, and with PvP we really want to make sure that it feels better-balanced against PvP as far as how much effort it takes to organize stuff and how much reward you get for your time and effort spent.

...
...More than anything else with Ulduar, I think it was just bigger than it needed to be and more hardcore than it needed to be. Those were the biggest lessons for us along with making the connection to the main story arc clearer if there’s going to be one.



I personally feel sad to read these... :/

[bahumut5]

I implied it as "We are not going to make any more Ulduar like raids".

Really made me feel sad.
Best instance I ever saw. It had the right feeling, the right size, good amount of bosses. No matter where you looked, you didn't see a "Normal mode Yogg Down first week!", no, it was people having trouble at Mimiron. It wasn't a "lol lets go" raid, but a tactical raid. You needed to straighten things out before going.
Gear wasn't to important, anybody could do it as long as you listened and did as you are supposed to do.

I love Ulduar.

I don't understand why Blizzard is claiming that they are watching the feedback very closely, but that they decided that they act as if Ulduar was a missed chance...

[Sanguissa]

I personally loved Ulduar for few reasons.

1) Great design of instance itself, the architecture and style was just too good.
2) Epic Lore. I love epic lore, so an old god of death and madness locked inside titan prison, corrupting all his prisoners, thats just awesome.
3) Good level of difficulty on normal mode and cool encounters. Easy enough so man can see whole instance, but hard enough for some progress and not seeing whole instance in first day, which ruins the exploration of instance.

Than take toc. Bosses easy as hell on normal mode, zero exploration, and zero epic feeling, zero of good lore - Tirion making group of awesome champions to step into icc is not good lore imo. And than low amount of bosses, with slow serving of them. Than hardmode wasnt something ones could enjoy, it was progress, but it still missed everything else.

Icc is good. I stopped playing in 1/3 of 3.2, and my last serious 25 raids were progresing of anub 25hm. I stopped playing because reasons above. Now i barerly go into 25, but i enjoy progresing icc10 with friends from old guild. Its not good as Ulduar, but the feeling we are finally fighting against arthas is enough to compensate it. Its difficulty(-arthas, didnt kill him yet) is lower than ulduar imo, but there is some.

Iam afraid that cata will be even more expansion-every-patch style, with extremly easy normal modes, and no hardmode will save this. They will atempt to save it with gating system, but thats not the best opinion either - instead of facerolling 9 bosses first day in 3 hours, we will faceroll them in 3 different days, 1 hour each. By expansion every patch i meant that previous content will become totally pointless when new patch hits. If they will force people farming 5m heroics every day for two years again, ill /facepalm and simple stop playing until final patch of cata hits. Than ill do 50 hcs, get full t13 gear from 5 man instances and ill be ready to kill deathwing. This future makes me sad.

[Borakh]

Yeah the Ulduar bit makes me sad, I thought it was really great (save for the siege machines). I loved how they made the trash interesting. The non-linear design with the possibilitiy to skip some bosses and play around with the order in which you approach the others was nice, too. I wouldn't have needed just this huge an instance (dare I say titanic?), but if all Cata raids were linear with 5-6 bosses, that would be really lame.

[Grimbold]

"TBC was rly hardcore"... he's prolly thinking just of SWP, cause the rest of the instances were done just like they are done now, except KT, Vashj and Illidan. The difference is that tbc produced a generation of much better players than Wotlk has.

[Sanguissa]

"TBC was rly hardcore"... he's prolly thinking just of SWP, cause the rest of the instances were done just like they are done now, except KT, Vashj and Illidan. The difference is that tbc produced a generation of much better players than Wotlk has.

By hardcore he propably meant not encounters itself (exept some bosses, some prenerfs and sunwell), but the requirements for instances itself, mainly attuments. To do hcs you needed to farm normals for while, to do kara you needed clear some harder heroics(which were harder than wotlk hcs). Than you had attuments for SSC and TK, you whole raid needed to have them again. Than Hyjal, and finally BT.

Every raid instance had long chain which involved heroics and some "achievements" in them, and again clearing some raids. And because you needed every people in raid attuned, progression was harder itself. Now imagine that you could farm some hcs in tbc and have full karazhan gear, next patch the same with full t5 gear (i know they were in release), and full BT gear with sunwell patch. And no attuments at all. If it would be that way, tbc would be considered easier than wotlk, general. Imo ofc.

[Muraske]

By hardcore he propably meant not encounters itself (exept some bosses, some prenerfs and sunwell), but the requirements for instances itself, mainly attuments. To do hcs you needed to farm normals for while, to do kara you needed clear some harder heroics(which were harder than wotlk hcs). Than you had attuments for SSC and TK, you whole raid needed to have them again. Than Hyjal, and finally BT.

Every raid instance had long chain which involved heroics and some "achievements" in them, and again clearing some raids. And because you needed every people in raid attuned, progression was harder itself. Now imagine that you could farm some hcs in tbc and have full karazhan gear, next patch the same with full t5 gear (i know they were in release), and full BT gear with sunwell patch. And no attuments at all. If it would be that way, tbc would be considered easier than wotlk, general. Imo ofc.

Maybe because they did that so people were prepared for the instances ahead of them and that they were more difficult then the previous raids. I loved the fact that I had to progress my way up the "raid chain" by working out and learning the initial stuff and working my way into the harder raids. If full BT was given with the Sunwell patch I can still guarantee that the majority still wouldn't of considered it easy and would probably cry nerfs.

[Thatwsntmilk]

Maybe because they did that so people were prepared for the instances ahead of them and that they were more difficult then the previous raids. I loved the fact that I had to progress my way up the "raid chain" by working out and learning the initial stuff and working my way into the harder raids. If full BT was given with the Sunwell patch I can still guarantee that the majority still wouldn't of considered it easy and would probably cry nerfs.

Yeah, the character progression curve of TBC was the best thing imo. Its sad that there is no real character progression in wotlk. I guess thats what makes it feel "not as good as TBC" for most people.

[Sanguissa]

Yeah, the character progression curve of TBC was the best thing imo. Its sad that there is no real character progression in wotlk. I guess thats what makes it feel "not as good as TBC" for most people.

Expansion-every-patch, yep.

[Taen]

Now imagine that you could farm some hcs in tbc and have full karazhan gear, next patch the same with full t5 gear (i know they were in release), and full BT gear with sunwell patch. And no attuments at all. If it would be that way, tbc would be considered easier than wotlk, general. Imo ofc.

That's not how Wrath worked at all. You could get a couple pieces of Ulduar gear when ToC was top-tier, and now you can get a set of 232 and a couple 245 when the lowest bit of gear from ICC is 251. And getting full 232 T9 during 3.2 wasn't exactly an achievement comparable to getting full tier 5.

[blackone]

I see another problem with a looking-for-raid tool: Randomly generated raid groups will probably be even worse than the pug raids we see today, which means that they will fail at easy content. And considering the approach Blizzard is taking right now, this will make them swing the nerf bat at everything (at least everything 10man) so that even an assortment of 10 absolute idiots can faceroll through it.
I was really hyped up for Cataclysm when it was announced but now I suspect it will be even more casual centric than wrath. And the fact that they don't seem too happy about one of only two instances in wrath that were not totally ridiculous in normal mode (the other one being icc obviously) strengthens this feeling.
My only gleam of hope is that the Lich King is kind of tough in normal and pretty damn hardcore in hard mode, but that seems kind of contradictory to what Blizzard is thinking about difficulty. I'm confused.

[KandyCane]

I think the Ulduar comment was more directed towards the pre-nerfed encounters. Mimiron was a huge challenge for most guilds(my guild never got past him untill he was nerfed), and the difficulty didn't really suit the second tier of the expansion. It was Normal Mode, afterall.

A lot of stuff was nerfed in Ulduar because it turned out to be harder than expected.

However, I think that what it is at the current stage is what they were aiming for. Hopefully. It'd be a shame if all raids were on pair with Naxxramas difficulty in Cataclysm.


NOTE: The difficulty of the mentioned raids are considering you're using the appropiate gear-level and 10-man for 10-man.

[Gron]

Ulduar comment likely was directed at the whole of Ulduar, not the initial build only. "Too long and too hardcore" = "next time we will do less bossess and make them more easy".

I see another problem with a looking-for-raid tool: Randomly generated raid groups will probably be even worse than the pug raids we see today

Not if the raids will be made as easy as the current 5-man heroics.

[quiz]

"TBC was rly hardcore"... he's prolly thinking just of SWP, cause the rest of the instances were done just like they are done now, except KT, Vashj and Illidan. The difference is that tbc produced a generation of much better players than Wotlk has.

Blizzard made the game easyer to give people with lower skills the chance to try raiding instead of doing only BG's and Dungeons. Now you can pug almost every raid where you couldn't PUG any raid in TBC before the big nerf.

[Astray]

You can't judge if something is "too hardcore" by the people who play hardcore. ICC is very well tuned, you need 232 gear and you can start. you wont beat everything there but the first bosses can be done if the group is good, then you gear up and more and more bosses become available.
Ulduar-10 needed some pieces of Naxx-25 gear at the beginning, thats why it was nerfed. ICC is better than ulduar and he never said something about ICC being too hardcore.

[Shullski]

That interview destroyed what little hope I had for Cataclysm. No way Blizzard is reading feedback when they say that WOTLK was loved by the majority of players and most people didnt like Ulduar.

This convinced me that the Blizzard dev team doesnt have a clue what theyre doing, If their going to say that their best raid of WoW, Ulduar imo, was trash and their never going to do something like that again.

It had everything..casual parts for the casuals, and very hardcore moments that even Top world guilds couldn't down. Yogg +0 took 77 days to down after 1st attempt, which was the longest time its taken to down a boss in all of WoW. And then the scrubs were left out of Ulduar, exactly how it should be. Make raids Casual friend, not 10 year old friendly.

Its a real shame whats happening to pve.

[blackone]

That interview destroyed what little hope I had for Cataclysm. No way Blizzard is reading feedback when they say that WOTLK was loved by the majority of players and most people didnt like Ulduar.

Well, probably they actually do what the majority of their players want, and that is facerollable ridiculously easy content that you can clear playing an hour a day. I don't even think more than 50% (= the majority) of 11.5 mio players are actually raiding at all. The people who are writing stuff on mmochampion or the official forums or anywhere on the interwebs are not representative for the whole player base.
Maybe they keep the hard modes hard to satisfy the non-casual 0,1% of players because those are the ones that made wow such a huge success but I think that's the only thing we can hope for.

[Gron]

Well, probably they actually do what the majority of their players want, and that is facerollable ridiculously easy content that you can clear playing an hour a day.

... hmmm... and show me this fantastic piece of research please! Who says that? Just because Blizzard developers say "this and this is what people want" does not equal to truth. Whereever I turn, read online, people have issues with WOTLK content. Most of the people. I have not yet seen any website showing that casuals were crying about Ulduar being too hardcore. Because it never existed.

I don't even think more than 50% (= the majority) of 11.5 mio players are actually raiding at all. The people who are writing stuff on mmochampion or the official forums or anywhere on the interwebs are not representative for the whole player base.

So you think you are entitled to speak for the non-vocal majority? How do you know what they think?
Also majority of players don't even want to raid - they just don't care. Blizzard just wants to force raiding down their throats (its a "business goal") so they ignore their vocal fanbase, and focus on the shifting casuals, trying to give them what they don't need.