Should T11 raid instances have jhad varying difficulties?

[Deleted]

I've been reading a lot of the recent QQ about people quitting the game for lack of content or "things to do". Be the drop in activity for real or just a mass perception doesn't really matter but there definately seems to be an issue at hand about how the raid-content is scaled.

In WotLK Blizzard successfully introduced a lot of players into raiding. They did this by making epics accessible and content easy. In this regard, WotLK was a very successful expansion and a large portion of gamers have since become accustomed to the idea that raid-content is part of their endgame.

With Cataclysm Blizzard has now removed this "raid-content" from a lot of players endgame because epics have become harder to get and even the first few fights require a certain amount of dedication on coordination (good leadership). For a lot of guilds and PuGs, this is too much to ask at this stage in the game. And these types of players that struggle with such content make up a large amount of the player base.

While in personally agree with Blizzards sentiment about making epics "epic" again and making raids at least somewhat challenging, they are cutting out a lot of their players with this attitude.

People have come to expect at least some easy and accessible raid content for them to pursue. And too be honest, even as a regular raider myself, I'm inclined to agree.

Tier 11 content has 3 instances. Blackwings Decent, Throne of Winds and Bastion of Twilight.

While the individual encounters are of varying difficulty overall the instances are comparable (except maybe Throne of Winds). What I'm saying is, that there is no big variancy in difficulty between the 3 instances.

If we categorise our raiders into 3 general categories: Casuals/Puggers, Dedicated (progress/completed normal modes) and Hardcore (progressing through hardmodes) the 3 instances Blizzard delivered only really cater to the Dedicated and Hardcore. There is nothing there for the Casuals. T11 gave us 12 normal raid-encounters and all are directed at the vary same audience.

If however, there was a clear difficulty curve between the 3 instances, I believe Blizzard could satisy a much larger portion of their player base.

Example:
-BWD becomes an "entry-style" instance. Not as faceroll as Naxxramas but with more forgiving mechanics than currently. Maybe the level of TotC 10 man normal.
-BoT becomes the "advanced" instance maintaining roughly the level of difficulty it has now.
-ToW steps it up a little again, preparing people for future hard-mode content.

Hardmodes could then be concistantely challenging in each instance, as there is no need to cater to Casual players at this level.

I realize this point will become moot once 4.2 is released and T11 content receives further nerfs. I do however think Blizzard could have done a better job in catering to ALL their audiences.

[Carador]

Normal mode raids are all very doable by any casual player. Remember that casual does not necessarily mean that they are a bad player.

[stgeorge78]

Blizzard doesn't really give a crap - they know the money is drying up from WoW and they've dedicated most resources to Titan. Eventually Battle.net will have a subscription cost to mitigate the Diablo 3 effect. There is an article where they talk about expecting a bigger decline in WoW once Diablo 3 comes out, which explains why they have been sitting on it for so long (despite being content complete and in alpha for over a year with no sign of a beta yet).

[Deleted]

That is why TBC rocked. There were different stages and a goal to reach. Now it's just LOL 13/13 ROFLMAO. Really annoying.

[Poodles]

I find BoT to be easier than BWD. Then again, magmaw is brutal on 10 man (looking at world of logs shows it's not just our guild).

I think the new troll 5 mans will help get into the raids easier. Once firelands comes out, it will be REALLY easy again.

[Sting]

Blizzard doesn't really give a crap - they know the money is drying up from WoW and they've dedicated most resources to Titan. Eventually Battle.net will have a subscription cost to mitigate the Diablo 3 effect. There is an article where they talk about expecting a bigger decline in WoW once Diablo 3 comes out, which explains why they have been sitting on it for so long (despite being content complete and in alpha for over a year with no sign of a beta yet).

/tinfoilhat

[Choda]

Normal modes are really perfectly doable at this point. If you look at http://www.wowtrack.org/encounters.lua 70% of all tracked 25 man guilds have killed HEROIC Halfus. On my server (EU-Tarren Mill) all 3 instances are successfully pugged from start to finish on a weekly basis. There are a few people that lead these PuGs and a few semi-regular people in the raids, with a few people changing every week. The only people that are cut out of the content are the bad players that expect to get stuff without ANY dedication.

So no, I do not agree that raids are too hard. They are impossible to faceroll completely, but they are by no stretch impossible.

[Mudkiper]

I do however think Blizzard could have done a better job in catering to ALL their audiences.

Seriously what do want blizzard to do? Make it so people walk into a dungeon and they have to play hide and seek to find epics? But then that would be QQ'd about until they showed up on the minimap. Normal modes are pathetically easy, considering our alts did 12/12 in one night in blue gear says it all really. One night of raiding, in gear from heroic dungeons and every boss was cleared.. can you get more casual?

[Tides]

Remember that casual does not necessarily mean that they are a bad player.

This just says it all. You don't have to play 12 hours a day to be smart about movement or to know that Mutilate deals more damage than Shiv.
If you've levelled your character 1-85 and done Dungeons and Heroic Dungeons for your 346 gear, then you've had ample time and opportunity to understand your own class mechanics and how it should preform in a group.

To add to all of this, it does not take more than 5-15 minutes looking up a fight on Youtube or Google, checking for "How-to" video's or guides.
There's the whole internet at your disposal, being casual doesnt have to mean you can't do a little bit of research.

There's only - imo - 1 problem with the difficulty of the Entry level raiding.
And that's that Blizzard catered to (Yeah i'm gonna say it) dumb people, in Wrath of the Lich King entry. Naxxramas was so easy, you could do it blindfolded keyboard turning with your left foot.
The bar has been upped some for this entry level, but it's certainly not out of reach.

What i'm getting at, is that some people expect bosses to just drop dead, because they are 25 players in the Raid dungeon. That should be enough right?
You see it in 5man dungeons aswell. If there's 1 wipe on a encounter, then people are likely to bail, cause they're simply not used to wiping.

Well get used to wiping, it's a phenomanon that's been here for over a decade in various different games and it aint going anywhere. If there's no fear of wiping, then there's no enjoying the reward.

Personally i absolutely love this Tier. It's been one of the best tuned tiers in a long time and one realy good challenge.

[Arrowstormen]

they get easier over time. like with patch 4.1, the better gear means that casuals will have it easier, and will take down the first bosses. and really, everybody should get a guild, having a guild you like is making it alot better for yourself.
"what if you dont like being with alot of people!"
well, dont raid then.

but Blizzards tries to make people join guilds at all cost, and with the Looking For Guild tool, it will also become easier to do so.
sure, pugs can be there, but that should be for mostly people that couldnt get picked for the weeks first raid, and want to do the first bosses.

[Choda]

Seriously what do want blizzard to do? Make it so people walk into a dungeon and they have to play hide and seek to find epics? But then that would be QQ'd about until they showed up on the minimap. Normal modes are pathetically easy, considering our alts did 12/12 in one night in blue gear says it all really. One night of raiding, in gear from heroic dungeons and every boss was cleared.. can you get more casual?

Exactly my point. This gear has next to nothing to do with gear. Admittedly, clearing EVERYTHING in full blue gear is a bit of a stretch to the casual crowd and some of the damage and healing requirements would be pretty high (Looking at Electrocutes and Cho'gall dps mostly), but it is perfectly feasible to get 352+ iLevel average without stepping into a raid.

Bottom line is, normal modes are easy, skill >>>>> gear.

[BillyMole]

Yeah, sorry, as someone pointed out, you're confusing casual with bad. It is quite easy to PuG 3/4 BoT, 1/2 Throne, and 4/6 BWD (despite atramedes being easy, most people fail hard at it, since it's a reasonably technical fight). If you are unable to do so, there are two possible explanations. One, your server could be dead. There are a number of servers out there on which the prevailing mentality is that these raids are hard and pugging them is stupid. If you want to get them done, find a good raiding server and transfer to it. There will be pugs going every single day, and most of them get pretty far at this point.

The other explanation of course could be that you're the problem, particularly if you're trying to do 10 mans. While 10 man normals aren't all that hard (someone tried to claim that 10 man Magmaw is really rough, which is not true at all), they still require that all 10 people be reasonably competent. Having even one subpar player in the group can really drag it down, and two means you probably won't get anything done at all.

[carrierz]

Over 40 guilds have 12/12 on my realm, and over 80 has at least 9/12. Pugs for all raid instances are being advertised every day, and especially at weekends the trade can be spammed with pugs searching for people for a 5/6, 4/4 or 2/2 clear. Sorry, I have to disagree with your analysis.

[Dukenukem]

Normal modes are doable by normal ppl who can watch the screen, timers and implement a bit of though in their gameplay.

We recently stepped from 10man (1/13) to 25man (so we struggle to get full 25) and with about 10 new ppl with nearly 346 and less (one even dinged 85 and was instantly invited to Raid) we find still Normals to be pretty easy. Atm we are at 7/12 in 25 with 2 nights of "progress" with 24 ppl in raid on most of kills (22 manned magmaw). We will look at Chogal,Nef before reset and i doubt one of them will not fall.

I personally think if everyone in raid would watched video of tactic the PuGs woul have much more sucess like on other servers (not mine EU - Wildhammer).

On side note - BWD IS entry level of difficulty, it has 2 most easyest bosses in current raid tier.

[sicness]

Not only considering the relative ease of the normal mode encounters but also all the help provided by the user base to teach people these encounters (how to videos and questions on strats on sites like this one) there's really no excuse for not being able to down the encounters at their current difficulty. Are they puggable? Maybe not, but that's not such a bad thing for the first tier of raiding, otherwise you get everyone logging in to do Naxx for 4 hours once a week. Providing a challenge may have upset some people, but it's more than worth it in the end when even the people who complain will eventually get through the raids when 4.2 is released.

You can't please everyone at once, but this method does a much better job of pleasing more people over time than any other method that has been suggested.

[Jaerin]

I think you are far underestimating the abilities of most players. At least on my server there is no lack of runs of at the very least 8-9/12 normal modes. All you need to do is look and there are pug runs, 25's, 10's. The whole kit and kaboodle.

The only thing that I think the existing content lacks is clear progression in difficulty. Although I believe there would have been more of a sense of accomplishment with the walled nature of that content model this one is far more accessible to the masses.

I think more importantly though is that Blizzard seems to have completely eliminated the element of discovery in the game. I will not completely fault Blizzard for this because the community is a huge contributor, but I think that we end up playing through content many times before we even go through it ourselves. If anything is causing burn out its that nothing is new and fresh when its released, its already been picked apart and dissected to the hilt before it even hits the release realm. Whether its through watching videos, reading the blogs about previews and reviews of content, and then finally going through it yourself the dozen or two times it takes to get your loots, its no wonder the game feels old all the time.

That's the mystique that I think is missing from the game.

[Ultramad]

I play on Skywall-US. We're one of the most backward servers there is as far as progression. I also play Hordeside. Which on that server is at a severe population disadvantage. This creates a recruitment nightmare for my fellow officers and myself.

We have cleared 4/6 BWD, 2/4 BoT with only 20 people in raid. Most progression kills come with 20-21 people. It sucks to have to rely on our raiders to do 20% more damage, but the content really isn't that difficult.

Though the best a pug has really done on Skywall is 1 boss, maybe 2 boss kills in a 10 man setting. There are very few free agents on the server itself.

[RollTide]

None of the normal mode encounters are THAT demanding. Every fight is doable if you are willing to take the time to learn the fights. The problem is many players are under the impression that just because you can put together a raid group, epics should drop. Many players don't want to learn encounters or put in any sort of effort in learning their class. WotLK really spoiled people.

[Deleted]

There's a clear progression path.

First you have easy 25m normals.
Then moderately easy 10m normals.
Then hardish 25m heroics.
Then hard 10m heroics.

I wonder when hardmodes for 25m will be released though Seems only al akir is released so far!

[eternalwhitemoon]

Honestly, I think the bosses themselves are the progression path.

Magmaw gave us less trouble than Nefarian, as Halfus to Ascendant Council*. I think this is a fine way of doing it.

*We're talking normals. Heroic is a whole 'nother ballgame.