Is ToT too challenging causing the guild break ups?

[Deleted]

Maybe ToT isn't hard, but everything before it is too easy so there is no learning curve. You don't even have semi-hard 5man heroics anymore. You can AFK your way though LFR and scenarios, then suddenly you get to normal mode ToT and you have something that is tuned for experienced raiders. There isn't anything resembling a progressive difficulty curve. You go from "nothing kills you" to "everything kills you".

[bigfoot1291]

Relatively speaking, they have the exact same amount of health as they did back in WotLK. Enrage timers are the same 10-15 minutes, and you usually killed the boss with a couple minutes to spare. Remember Lich King? LONG ass fight.

[Odina]

I mean WTLK was the expansion I got into serious raiding and fights this expansion and even last are just so complicated. .

Ebonheart just a fast question were you doing 25 man normal ICC pre nerf? I'm just trying to understand those that say compared to normal raiding in wotlk the current tiers are so much harder. I rememeber ICC 25 normal being plenty hard with shitons of stuff to look out for so trying to get an understanding of where the increase is comming from.

[Ashardis]

I saw somewhere on forums (can't remember which) about people complaining about healer burn out too. Esp in 10 mans where it's tighter, most guilds wanting pally/priest combos, a fps monk with good heal offset, and shammies and druids feeling pigeon holed into balance/elemental.

Its been noticed that healers seem to be giving up/resting/quitting in half the time that tanks and dos do, and with some realms on low pop, they're struggling to replace them

Its just what I read though, I've no experience of it personally, since my guild/s and server have all but died

[Deleted]

Ebonheart just a fast question were you doing 25 man normal ICC pre nerf? I'm just trying to understand those that say compared to normal raiding in wotlk the current tiers are so much harder. I rememeber ICC 25 normal being plenty hard with shitons of stuff to look out for so trying to get an understanding of where the increase is comming from.

Part of the increase is due to rotations giving way to priority systems. You can't muscle memory stuff when it only procs a semi random 3rd of the time, you have to react.

[Ashardis]

Fps = dps

Bloody phone

[DeadmanWalking]

I don't think difficulty has anything to do with it. People are just burning out on a personal level becaus ethey have played for years and burn out is inevitable. I played Games workshop games for 8 years and burned out so I quit and walked away. My entire gaming group had moved on to other miniature games and didnt want to play Games Workshop games anymore, and they all had different reasons for doing so. Some thought it was too expensive, some didnt like changes made to their armies, some didn't like changes made to the game in general, some wanted to try something new, some thought that warmachine was a superior game, some wanted to play board games, some wanted to go back to magic the gathering. In the end the whole group changed to warmachine and I stopped playing and put my time into WoW.

In the end it was the same result, the group stopped playing games workshop but our reasons were varied. To point to one factor and say that was the only reason just because its my reason is pretty simple minded and narrow sighted.

[zpiff]

ToT is tuned just right.. as i remember wrath and even cata, i think norm mode is as i use to be..
what makes this x-pack feel a little harder, is all the grinding.
people tend to get a bit burned out, and not raid with the usaul focus.. ToT. is a super raid imo. the right balance of mecanic fights and nuke bosses. so im realy happy with it.

[Chrispotter]

If normal mode is too hard for you (EVEN AFTER ALL THE NERFS) you should really consider that A) Maybe you should play better / make your group focus up. B) Games of this nature are not for you, and you should search for a single player game where you can play on "super easy" difficulty all of the time.

Too bad people choose B more often than A =/.
If Normal ToT got any easier than it is now after the nerfs, I would be gravely worried for the future of WoW.

[Hypasonic]

I think it's the trash before horridon that's causing alot of guild's to break up.

[Ferocity]

I'd say it is transition t14->t15 which heavily added on top of what WoW raiding has become. Our guild broke as we no longer have recruitment pool on our server, and our server is almost dead on Alliance side now (was medium and sometimes high pop in WotLK). We never progressed past Amber-shaper (that's after beign stuck on Garalon for longer than eternity till the very day before global nerf, we plainly cheated his berserk), cause of having people going awol/quitting, and new ones causing us wipes while learning buttons and interrupts, so it became chain reaction.

When ToT was released, Blizzard heavily hinted us that we need to farm ToES, to which we don't have access, as 2nd boss in ToT is overtuned to no end (and whole raiding in general is way over the top with dances for our core people). People can't stand those insects in HoF anymore, and being generally tired of what raiding has become (no fun, no jokes, nothing like using halloween wands whole doing SSC trash, instead - atmosphere of stress, if not aggression to each other for mistakes), we just decided to not bother with all that stuff altogether.

I don't care who says about hardcore raiding is dying, we were semi-hardcore raiders ourselves and had every hc beaten up till end of Cata, but we saw dangerous direction of raiding in Cata. For normal raiders they were overtuned (DS prolly exception). Overtuned Cata normal raids problem was mostly lost among massive drama with "flexible" lockouts. MoP costed us heavy losses at very start due to "optional" dailies so we decided to take more relaxed and "normal" route. But Blizzard keeps excluding normal raiding altogether. I really wonder don't they really understand that they are killing raiding entirely.

And I am afraid that it will be too late if they will make normal raids being normal again, people won't come back to it, as such situation lasted for too long and GC lied too much (e.g. "enrage timers in ToT won't be a problem") for people to take anything out of his mouth seriously.

[Odina]

Part of the increase is due to rotations giving way to priority systems. You can't muscle memory stuff when it only procs a semi random 3rd of the time, you have to react.

By all means take a gander in my sig and look at one of my vids. I'm a prot war so naturally sword and board will change my "rotation" as it's really a priority system > set rotation. A couple of mins and TADA you can see my priority at my toons feet and I don't even need to think of it just mash the coresponding hotkey for what pops up.

If a priority system > set 111211121112 is your issue it's a player problem not an overtuned boss issue!

[Puri]

I also think the normal modes are too hard. It's fine if they overtune heroic modes, but they should also consider guilds with lesser ambitions. Perhaps they were designed with the knowledge of the returning of the item upgrade system, which will reduce the difficulty by quite some margin.

Especially with the exodus to the fuller servers, it is quite hard to get replacements if someone leaves the raid. And many of the new players have no interest in spending entire evenings wiping on one boss (they only know raiding from lfr, and even there they leave the raid after the first wipe). Some people leave for a better guild, some people change servers or factions, and lately we have more and more people that simply do not log on anymore.

I think it's kinda funny. When the raids are accessible, the forums are filled with complaints about how Blizzard is catering to "casuals" at the cost of "true raiders". When they turn up the difficulty, suddenly the forums are filled with complaints about the game being too hard.

Yes, this is the actual challenge, to cater to people with opposite ambitions. But Blizzard often makes the same mistake - as they also admitted several times - instead of gradually go into one direction, they change from one extreme to the other.

[jayinjersey]

I believe the order of the bosses is playing a big role in guild stress.

if this was either nax/icc setup or even blackrock (can't remember this one's name) where you could say Gear Check on Jinrock...then go Horridon -> Council OR Turtle to Jink (flying guy) OR Mag -> Primordius then it gates to Dormu -> Animus etc...

That would at least let guilds that are stronger in one aspect say Healing & Tanking go one way, or ones stronger in say healing & DPS go another way...slamming your head against the same boss every week...and you keep seeing its one guy that "just isn't getting it" will start boiling over

[Ashardis]

If normal mode is too hard for you (EVEN AFTER ALL THE NERFS) you should really consider that A) Maybe you should play better / make your group focus up. B) Games of this nature are not for you, and you should search for a single player game where you can play on "super easy" difficulty all of the time.

Too bad people choose B more often than A =/.
If Normal ToT got any easier than it is now after the nerfs, I would be gravely worried for the future of WoW.

Maybe people are tired of coming across this kind of attitude all the time...

[Peng]

I already spend 10 hours each day at work. I don´t need another job for the evenings.

LFR doesn´t do anything to get me back into real raiding as well. It´s just boring, time consuming and the "community" shows its darkest side here. Try Rnd-RBG instead and you will see that the community can be really enjoyable.

There is so much to do in MoP. I prefer to play with six toons instead of working with one main. Looking back I can´t believe I raided five days a week for six years. ôO

[Deleted]

By all means take a gander in my sig and look at one of my vids. I'm a prot war so naturally sword and board will change my "rotation" as it's really a priority system > set rotation. A couple of mins and TADA you can see my priority at my toons feet and I don't even need to think of it just mash the coresponding hotkey for what pops up.

If a priority system > set 111211121112 is your issue it's a player problem not an overtuned boss issue!

Well yes it's a player issue.

Most players don't have enough working memory to raid at these levels of reaction. A priority system on bosses with fewer mechanics could work, a set rotation on boss with more mechanics could work - both together is just too much for the average would be raider to cope with.

As this is a hard cap on cognition it can't be overcome by effort. And so, because that sweet spot between ease and the impossible is no longer in the game, we see guild break ups, sub losses etc

[jayinjersey]

Maybe people are tired of coming across this kind of attitude all the time...

I agree.

And to that poster I would say, try running it again with only low 500 gear...it's still quite challenging

[Odina]

I agree.

And to that poster I would say, try running it again with only low 500 gear...it's still quite challenging

and by challenging you mean 9 mannable up to and including jukun by a guild that has not yet cleared normal modes and raids 4 hours a week?

[MoanaLisa]

I think it's kinda funny. When the raids are accessible, the forums are filled with complaints about how Blizzard is catering to "casuals" at the cost of "true raiders". When they turn up the difficulty, suddenly the forums are filled with complaints about the game being too hard.

Unfortunately, this is exactly right. It's not a stretch to imagine that if Blizzard took pity on casual raiding guilds and put in an optional buff as they have in the past when people get stuck there would be a lot of complaining about that. In some cases there's no doubt that a few people now complaining about them being overtuned would complain about the buff as well. Which makes it difficult to separate true feedback from those that are simply more interested in complaining than playing.

I think an optional escalating buff is probably the right answer for normal ToT but it's folly to think that people wouldn't loudly criticize it as 'catering to bads' or whatever.

EDIT: I should add that with 5.3 and the return of the vendor that allows you to raise the ilevel of your gear, this will likely abate somewhat. In essence that works out to be much the same as the buffs.