Patch 4.3 Interviews, Blue Posts, Diablo III Beta, Art Gallery Update

To combat the complaints of armor always looking the same, there is a sub-lead who is in charge of guiding the art team to produce new styles not found in the game yet.

hmm let me read it one more time

To combat the complaints of armor always looking the same, there is a sub-lead who is in charge of guiding the art team to produce new styles not found in the game yet.

Hi blizzard, i'm a balance druid player... WTB a sub-lead in charge to make the damned moonkin form looks different because it is looking the same since 6 years.

Originally Posted by Koeevu

No. How about normal difficulties that can be done with 1 good tank, 1 ok tank, 1 good healer, 2 ok healer, 2 good dps, and four sub-par dps, because that's what people that only raid now and then have to play with.

Then make heroics to cater to the e-peens of people in their mom's basement.

I agree with this. If regular-mode gear is going to only be slightly better than dungeon gear, the challenge should be only slightly harder. The 'hardcores' can suck it, their complaining in Wrath has steered the designers to make content that is too hard or time-consuming for most players to bother trying it. I remember doing that worm boss in January, never did beat it because the ranged screwed up, or the tank would get eaten. Omnitron, too much going on would cause wipes at 40%. Part of the problem was that getting perfect gear was a huge time sink, so raid members with outside lives held us back. At this point, I said, "I could wait for 2-3 months before we're ready to tackle this raid, or I could go play other games." So I played other games, mostly Minecraft.

I think that Blizzard will have to make raids accessible again. Less time sinks, less explosive boss mechanics. As much as hardcores may hate this, the fact is that the rest of the game is getting pretty boring for everyone. If Blizz is going to spend most of their content patches on endgame (and they should, it's a lot of fun), they need to make sure everyone can enjoy them.

Originally Posted by Zeekua

Secondly, Deathwing will be the longest encounter in the game? So it's going to be 20 minutes? Because Heroic Ragnaros is AT LEAST 15 minutes long. Longer encounters /= better encounters.

Classic Nefarian etc took also 15Minutes , at least the first few dozen Kills.

Originally Posted by Koeevu

No. How about normal difficulties that can be done with 1 good tank, 1 ok tank, 1 good healer, 2 ok healer, 2 good dps, and four sub-par dps, because that's what people that only raid now and then have to play with.

Then make heroics to cater to the e-peens of people in their mom's basement.

Heroics are run by other people then e-peen braggers, my guild is full of "ok" people and we run heroics just fine. I just really loved TBC. I don't care that all I ran was kara back then it was a good instance lol. I don't like this normal and heroic mode stuff.

Blizzard needs to give us people who can't play on a regular schedule, which is probably most people, more to do in the game. I think they know this and that is why they are doing raid finder. I know it will probably only work with the previous nerfed "puggable" tier, which is fine with me. Let the hard core people have the current tier hardmodes.

Originally Posted by choww

Or, I could not. I played the dungeons, found them too hard to be fun, and reading "this was nothing nub it gets much harder" I figured, why bother? Kept my money, kept my time, did something better with it.
Oops, maybe I was too casual and too bads for the game, or perhaps even a "mouthbreather" (what a great WoW coined term)? Now doesn't that make me feel bad! And that wasn't elite enough? Sure, make it more elite - I think that's a mighty smart decision. Looks like my dollars aren't going anywhere near Blizzard for a good while.

Well then why are talking then. The game isn't for you, you obv made the best decision in your best interest.

More people should just do what you did, realize this kind of games isn't for them (it's not a foreign concept, 400 apm code S starcraft isn't for everyone either, or even Civilization), then quit the senseless whining.

Seriously, analyze yourself, ask yourself "do I really want to play a "game" that's just one giant timesink on every aspect?" "Can I afford that, both in time and money?" "Do I cherish my ingame relationships that much?" "Do I enjoy spending time with these people?" "Do i enjoy this watered down, antiquated gameplay over more modern singleplayer rpgs? (or other genres for that matter, even mp fps)"

Follow these guidelines, discover if this is the game for you. If it isn't, then quit, and stop asking for a warped, zombified wow that isn't true to it's nature.

Blizzard's fault so far in cata has been their pathologic lazyness. They are goddamn slow in delivering promised content (firelands was promised on ship, look it up, blizzcon 2009 I think). They prefer a quick cash in in the form of shining horses and pets, as opposed to true developed content. ( btw, shame on you if you condone this behaviour, buying pets/mounts only makes them sure that they can afford being lazy for longer).
In fact blizzard didn't actually lose any money from the sub drop, they earned the deficit through VAS (value added services).

---------- Post added 2011-09-03 at 04:27 PM ----------

Originally Posted by roboscorcher

I agree with this. If regular-mode gear is going to only be slightly better than dungeon gear, the challenge should be only slightly harder. The 'hardcores' can suck it, their complaining in Wrath has steered the designers to make content that is too hard or time-consuming for most players to bother trying it. I remember doing that worm boss in January, never did beat it because the ranged screwed up, or the tank would get eaten. Omnitron, too much going on would cause wipes at 40%. Part of the problem was that getting perfect gear was a huge time sink, so raid members with outside lives held us back. At this point, I said, "I could wait for 2-3 months before we're ready to tackle this raid, or I could go play other games." So I played other games, mostly Minecraft.

I think that Blizzard will have to make raids accessible again. Less time sinks, less explosive boss mechanics. As much as hardcores may hate this, the fact is that the rest of the game is getting pretty boring for everyone. If Blizz is going to spend most of their content patches on endgame (and they should, it's a lot of fun), they need to make sure everyone can enjoy them.

But the raids are accessible, there are no attunements anymore, it's easier to gear up a new player (it's less rng related), you don't have to farm for flasks, pots , elixirs and enchants for too long.

What else do you want? Accessibility is there. You can enter the dungeon, you can tackle the bosses. If your guild fails then, you have to spend more time developing it, you have to form a team, that works together, that sticks together. Teach lesser players how to play, let them discuss with more experienced ones.

That's how you kill bosses, by letting people care for their team, not filthy epics. This is wat differentiates wow from say, diablo. That you have a persistent pool of people to play with, people you CARE about.

Sadly, if you cannot develop such spirit, every raid you will ever do will be doomed by boredom, selfishness and greed.

I just noticed that the Diablo characters look nicer than our WoW characters. I just...I...v.v;; C'mon, Blizzard - there's no excuse for our outdated models!

Originally Posted by Dembai

I just noticed that the Diablo characters look nicer than our WoW characters. I just...I...v.v;; C'mon, Blizzard - there's no excuse for our outdated models!

It's just a gargantuan ammount of work that's not in the best interest of the game. Do you realize how much dev time would redesigning every single piece of armor that's been in the game since launch take for 16 different models? Are you crazy? We would get another half assed endgame like cata...

Originally Posted by plosion

(snipped for space)

I love everything about this post. I definitely feel like the majority of people complaining about content being "too difficult" these days either forgot what it really means to "raid" or perhaps they never understood it at all. It's definitely not a self-focused deal by any means. The guilds that actually succeed in wrecking content are the ones that care about gearing THE GROUP, and not individual players (unless legendaries are involved...) The fact is that Blizzard is driving this community based system away with things like the raid lfg and such. :/ And I could bet that everyone knows at least one person that belongs to a guild simply for the perks. It's really disappointing that blizzard is encouraging such selfish solitary greed.

Originally Posted by Xe4ro

Classic Nefarian etc took also 15Minutes , at least the first few dozen Kills.

Well honestly, if you wanted, you could make it last 30 minutes :P No enrage coupled with no raid damage = luleasymode once you hit Phase 2.

and it's a longer fight because of the multiple phases, so longer, in this case, does mean better. What boss have we had before where you fight it over the course of a raid instance. Each phase looks to be fairly intensive considering they're willing to give out loot for each.

But the raids are accessible, there are no attunements anymore, it's easier to gear up a new player (it's less rng related), you don't have to farm for flasks, pots , elixirs and enchants for too long.

What else do you want? Accessibility is there. You can enter the dungeon, you can tackle the bosses. If your guild fails then, you have to spend more time developing it, you have to form a team, that works together, that sticks together. Teach lesser players how to play, let them discuss with more experienced ones.

That's how you kill bosses, by letting people care for their team, not filthy epics. This is wat differentiates wow from say, diablo. That you have a persistent pool of people to play with, people you CARE about.

Sadly, if you cannot develop such spirit, every raid you will ever do will be doomed by boredom, selfishness and greed.

Maybe they're accessible now, but in my view, it was far too late. The guild I was in WAS tight-knit. We raided through ICC just fine. The 4.0 raids were just a terrible experience, and I don't have any urge to return yet. I think the main problem was the timesink required to get entry gear and mats...I knew tons of people who just botted to get mats while they were working. Those that didn't, caused us to wipe. We tried to be positive, but there's only so many times you can fail before the morale goes down and people go to bed because they have morning shifts.

I'll admit that maybe I'm just sick of the raiding experience in general. LFR could maybe change that, by letting people raid whenever they please. Also, the Deathwing raid sounds like fun (battling him in different areas of the world), so maybe I'll be back for that. 4.0 just left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Originally Posted by Revrant

Sigh, no, not at all, guys, people were upset over the low quality of the end game content, not because it was "more" accessible, it was really less accessible, and also less rewarding, reused five man EVERYTHING, crappy looking point gear with much higher grinds, the tier armor being rather bleh this expansion, the much smaller 80-85 experience, the dropping of non-recycled content meant for Vashj'ir replaced with recycled old world junk. B-Team, B for Bad.

Well being as how we havent even reached the end game content....

Originally Posted by fangless

Well honestly, if you wanted, you could make it last 30 minutes :P No enrage coupled with no raid damage = luleasymode once you hit Phase 2.

and it's a longer fight because of the multiple phases, so longer, in this case, does mean better. What boss have we had before where you fight it over the course of a raid instance. Each phase looks to be fairly intensive considering they're willing to give out loot for each.

Its not that its such a long fight that theres loot between sections. It appears he's going to be the only boss so he's just going to run away you chase and its a different encounter. You wipe you start off on the section that you left off on. Plenty of people will look at this as lack of design being only 1 boss in the raid AND there is no real dungeon, its wyrmrest, flying from wyrmrest to maelstrom, fighting at maelstrom. Maybe he has some secret domain realm thing for a heroic mode fight but yea. Think of each of his sections as different boss fights, but against enemies with the same model.

Originally Posted by jibbyjackjoe

If the next expansion is just as beat my head on the wall difficult as this shit, I probably won't get it. My entire guild was so, so pumped for this expansion. Turns out , it was made for the hard core players. What did blizzard want the casual player to do for $15 a month? Our fishing dailies?

If they would just release another difficulty with better than 5 man normals, on par with 5 man heroics gear, they may find a solution.

They better do something awesome, rather than just amp up the difficulty forthe exclusionist snowflakes that want me to continue to pay for them to play.

Every new x-pac seems hard because all we remember is steam rolling through old content in the highest Tier sets. Does no one remember Loken when Wrath launched? Or the QQ about HoR? The biggest problem has been the merging of 10 and 25 mans. It killed many 25 man Guilds and spread the talented players among a plethora of 10 mans that have trouble beating the easy Bosses of each Tier. Make 10 mans the easy content with lesser drops and make 25's the harder content. Lose the Hard modes and bring back Ulduar style Hard mechanics.

Originally Posted by PotatoCoffee

Multiple fights in multiple locations? U gotta be kidding me? And deathwing desides to drop loot for lulz when we tickle him uhu makes sense.

OH! Im sorry. You wanna complain a little bit more? Items dropping from most bosses is a bit confusing in general. Why would they be carrying that crap? Oh but this is just blasphemous. WHY would Deathwing do this?

Originally Posted by roboscorcher

Maybe they're accessible now, but in my view, it was far too late. The guild I was in WAS tight-knit. We raided through ICC just fine. The 4.0 raids were just a terrible experience, and I don't have any urge to return yet. I think the main problem was the timesink required to get entry gear and mats...I knew tons of people who just botted to get mats while they were working. Those that didn't, caused us to wipe. We tried to be positive, but there's only so many times you can fail before the morale goes down and people go to bed because they have morning shifts.

I'll admit that maybe I'm just sick of the raiding experience in general. LFR could maybe change that, by letting people raid whenever they please. Also, the Deathwing raid sounds like fun (battling him in different areas of the world), so maybe I'll be back for that. 4.0 just left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Well to be honest, the time required to put a char up to speed, even at the beginning of cat, just dwarfed in comparison to the months needed for getting something done pre wotlk.

What happened to your guild was just lack of a strong and inspiring leadership, or a clear focus on what to do and how to accomplish it. Plus I cannot phantom as how close knit you could've been, if some members needed botting in order to farm mats, or others even refused to farm outright. Usually that's not a good symptom of a coesive group, honestly.

Guilds used to camp entire nights farmzones or istances together, in order to get everyone in "raid ready status", even sacrificing raids.
Another example may be the fact that some guilds used a taxation method to buy maths for everyone, epic mounts, all sorts of stuff.

It's called investing time in your team, wow isn't a casual game in the sense that you can just login and play (what's written on the box is somewhat misleading). You are much more engaged than that, without taking time into consideration. (there's gms who login msn from work in otfrt to check on their guild status, people online, what's going on, managing the bank through other people etc).

Originally Posted by lilbuddhaman

Since you (and sadly most people) clearly have zero understanding of how the game engine works, how scripting works, etc, I would expect a response like this.
There is nothing epic about an on-rails scripted event in between phases.

No, actually you have no understanding. Boss encounters have grown progressively more and more complex since BC. Outside of KT and KJ, most BC raid encounters weren't terribly complex. Malygos and Sarth + 3, despite Naxx 2.0 being an abortion, were more complex encounters than most BC ones were. Ulduar's encounters were exceedingly well tuned and designed. Heroic TOC, as much of an abortion as the lore and quest hubs backing it were, had four very well done encounters (not considering faction champions). ICC was quite well designed and Lich King heroic was exceptionally well-tuned.

Now you go into Cata and you have Al'akir (very complex encounter on heroic with many mechanics to watch for, 3-dimensional flight in phase 3), Conclave (requires raid to split into 3 distinct groups with separate roles swapping back and forth between platforms), Omnotron (wide variety of mechanics and fast-paced on heroic), Atramedes (sound mechanic turns an otherwise tank and spank boss into something interesting), Nefarian (optimal use of mind control buff required to meet soft enrage on heroic), Cho'gall (very complex and demanding encounter with multiple strategies that all work) and more. Even Paragon came out and said that T11 was by far the most difficult and demanding tier of raid content put in the game thus far. Firelands heroic bosses are equally interesting and challenging.

You don't even raid current content, but like to complain about it. A brief skim of your forum posts is you crying endlessly about how the game has gone to pot and how BC was the game at its peak. "BC was great. Sure it came out with bugged gear itemization and all the T5 raids were massively bugged and almost unplayable for 2 months until they finally got fixed, and I had to run the same heroic dungeons over and over for weeks and weeks to build reps up to get gear to get more gear to get even more gear, the same way as the game works now, but it was just so great. It was so great man. Casuals ruined everything."

While I certainly think the vast majority of the game's playerbase are awful at progressive PVE/PVP content, you're Yet Another Nerd who rants and raves because you can't be a special snowflake anymore by sitting at your PC 15 hours a day 6 days a week grinding mobs and chaining heroics. Now people can get that level of progress by spending 4 hours a day 5 days a week. Boo-hoo. The only thing BC did better was the lore and immersion. Casual players don't have time for deep immersion, and a lot of hardcores don't give a crap about the storyline, they just want to kill heroic internet dragons.

I still get to sit in Org floating on my Mount Casual Players Can't Get wearing my Heroic Gear Casual Players Can't Get, not because I nerd it and "dedicate" myself to spam grinding reps and mobs, hopping from guild to guild building my gear up the way many people in BC did, but because I and the people I play with are better players than most and can accomplish 12/12H T10 (at 0-5% with LK at 20), 13/13H T11 (by may) and 6/7H T12 (thus far) in 16 hours a week of raiding.

The game outgrew you, cry more. Go play something else and enjoy that. You have no place to criticize the game because you haven't actively played this expansion.

I've raided the 1st tier in Cata post-nerf, and they really weren't THAT bad (can't say for pre-nerfs), but I also think that maybe people are just too scared tbh to try and PuG a raid, due to troll factor from other people and time restraints. Ever since I started college and working night shifts, I don't really have time to do ANYTHING other then dailies of fire and troll with some trolls, so I'd be nice to see what Blizz does for these situations. I really hope raid finder works out...really do.

Originally Posted by bofedy

•More armor customization could be coming in the future; Transmogrification was a solution that could be finished in time for Patch 4.3.

What you highlighted on it's own means not sure wether it will or not..! The whole sentence howevers supports that Transmogrification is finished and more will follow on future patches!

Originally Posted by mkultra55

Every new x-pac seems hard because all we remember is steam rolling through old content in the highest Tier sets. Does no one remember Loken when Wrath launched? Or the QQ about HoR? The biggest problem has been the merging of 10 and 25 mans. It killed many 25 man Guilds and spread the talented players among a plethora of 10 mans that have trouble beating the easy Bosses of each Tier. Make 10 mans the easy content with lesser drops and make 25's the harder content. Lose the Hard modes and bring back Ulduar style Hard mechanics.

Yeah, 10 man raids brought all sorts of bad stuff.

As a result of them, class design was totally changed to welcome homogenization, people became less and less interested in guild related activities (that's the core of the game, socializing, pugs are an abomination belive it or not), forging more greed and selfish individuals. Raid design had to accomodate both versions ( 10/25 man dedicated raids were much better crafted than 25/10 hybrids, deal with it), gear distribution became a mess.