Is ToT too challenging causing the guild break ups?

[Exystredofar]

Quite simple. THey should as easy as tbc bosses. Let's take Durumu as an excellent example of a boss that's overloaded. If Durumu were a tbc boss he would only have ONE of the following mechanics.

Life Drain
Maze
Spectrum Phase

So Durumu would be Life Drain and then the occasional aoe and maybe an add summoned or two. Maybe a frontal cleave or something that melee have to run out of. VERY SIMPLE. Very straightforward and not complicated hard to see mechanic on top of complicated hard to see mechanic. Theirs one boss. Another boss could be the Maze and lingering gaze combined. Or let's take megara. Megara is really three or 4 mechanics rolled into one

Rampage
Green Head explosion
Cinders
Blue Ice beam

Cinders itself would be pretty much be the biggest thing overcome in any tbc boss example. The hypothetical raid would have a boss that say had one mechanic like Cinders and then again some aoe, potentially an add to be spawned for either killing/kiting/ or cc and then a generous enrage timer.

I don't know if I agree with nerfing them that much exactly, but some bosses even on normal do seem extremely overloaded with one shot mechanics. And let's not even get started on heroic. Personally, this is my favorite raid since ICC, I like the difficulty, but it makes it hard to find groups to do it with on servers with low populations or even medium populations like mine.

[melodramocracy]

Like anything else in warcraft the value of an action or a reward is almost always defined by the amount of players who can obtain it. It is not something that can be sustained in the long term.

No? That aspect of human nature has been around for as long as we've walked upright, is prevalent in nearly all aspects of our society, and is engrained in every multiplayer game on the planet.

I don't think it's going anywhere.

[Glorious Leader]

The devs said it best : " If we don't care about small minorities, then we should stop supporting trolls and dwarves."

Which was a total deflection to a serious question. Ghostcrawler is full of shit.

[Huehuecoyotl]

We have pugs running heroic modes. I don't see how "challenging" and "ToT" can be in the same sentence.

if those pugs are entirely made up of alts of the tiny percentage of people that have already seen heroic modes, then your point is invalid.

or are these pugs being put together on the basis of "LF1M for ToT heroic. no experience required".

[Glorious Leader]

No? That aspect of human nature has been around for as long as we've walked upright, is prevalent in nearly all aspects of our society, and is engrained in every multiplayer game on the planet.

I don't think it's going anywhere.

it isn't sustainable in the long run for humanity either...

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 08:52 PM ----------

Why BC? Was the average joe able to complete the content? I highly question that. But I'm sure you have prove to backup your claims. Oh, and there are bosses in TBC that are full of mechanics. Not every boss in BC was Brutallus.

The average joe wasn't able to complete that content for a wealth of reasons, none of them being that the bosses were actually to hard. I mean we could go back to vanilla and Baron Geddon the easiest boss in the universe but most average joes didn't raid then because gettign 40 other people together was a pain the ass. The game has done alot to remove barriers to entry for players but in it's wake it has erected a new one in terms of difficulty.

[TirielWoW]

but would you like raids tuned down easier because their best doesnt match yours?

Normal raids are already not difficult to me. Normal raids mean nothing to me. I do not feel that hardcore raiders should say, "Well, we have heroic content, but we ALSO want Normal Content to be ours, too." That isn't fair.

[Deleted]

ToT is hard, but you know what? I don't even give a damn. I enjoyed the hell out of the raid. It was a mixed bag in terms of difficulty. I'll agree that it was pretty ridicolous of Blizz to go from a no-brain boss such as Jin'rokh, to suddenly hit a wall like Horridon. I'll give yer' that. But I've been waiting for a raid like this in ages. We've had a big chunk of our core raiding roster leave, but none of them left because of this piece of amazing raid. I haven't heard of anyone quitting because of the difficulty of a raid.
If you're having difficulty dealing with a raid, then overcome it. If you can't overcome this raid on normal difficulty, then I'd advice you to quit normal raiding. Oh, you don't want to quit? Well then stop complaining. Spend your time improving in-game, instead of bitching about the difficulty.

I'll regret posting this tomorrow, oh well.

[pallyopness]

Similar to how the average raider generalizes those in higher guilds, there is other generalizations too....I personally have tried helping people learn basic fundamentals they lacked whether its class basics or raid mechanics, I have done this for the past 2 years of my wow gaming.....i went from a top 200 world guild to nothing DUE TO THESE EXACT MORALS that we are discussing....I personally sacrificed raiding high end to try and HELP those wishing to get help. To give players the ability to see content that they might have never seen. This is not fiction, this is fact. This is what my goal was and had been due to the "elitest attitude" in the guild I was in. They treated people like shit and I personally didnt agree with that atmosphere of raiding or guild environment. People as a whole (yes generalizing) that cannot do regulars, don't have the drive, competitive nature that it takes to do what others do. I have given so many people lessons and opportunities to get better that it is straight ridiculous. an easy 75% of the people i tried to help, straight gave up...not because i was harsh or mean or rude, but because it took too much effort. People that are in heroic bosses like heatherrae or any other guild put in more time and effort than anyone complaining about difficulty. Whether it was this tier or a diff tier I can guarantee a mass amount of work was done at some point and players nowadays refuse to do it,

[Osmeric]

once again, a lot of the issue is players not WANTING to get better....i have seen a crapload of players who have the desire to raid and clear normal raids yet will not take advice or try to better themselves...it starts with the PLAYER itself....if a player refuses to learn what are you supposed to do?

I have a theory about this.

As I've said before, I think the central value proposition of WoW is gratification of the ego. Now, successfully downing challenging content buffs the ego, but failure damages it. So, when a player is confronted with content they (subconsciously) fear they will not be able to handle, they create a defense mechism: they don't put in full effort. Of course this means they DO fail, but they have plausible deniability. They can tell themselves they failed because they didn't make their maximum effort, that it just "wasn't worth it". If they had put in maximum effort and still failed it would have been devastating.

You might find this attitude reprehensible, but I think it's quite real and quite common. And I don't think the devs understand it at all.

[TirielWoW]

How did you get better? Did you call for the raids to get easyer and for evertyhgin to be toned down? Did you keep makign the same mistakes over and over?

I rememerb when I was new it was week 1 of launch and I was lost... wsa lost most of MC and BWL and only really started to get a grasp during aq40! Same with this toon I still think I'm rather avg on my war as I swapped to it as my main at the beginign of Firelands and previously had been Mage only for all those years!

Instead of tossing my hands up saying active mitigation and priority system was too hard I read up, fixed my UI to display the needed information and to this day keep going over my WOL and asking much much better wars to go over my logs to point out flaws I need to fix.

Making things easyer will have more people kill shit granted but then it's the same problem LFR is creating in people are not getting better everythign around them is just getting simpler...where will you recruit from if there is no push to be better to get further?

The normal version of ToT is harder than most of the raiding was - you know, the "hard" raiding - in BC. Yet we had guilds flourishing at that time.

It's definately harder than instances like Naxx. Yet, somehow we had raiding coming out of our eyeballs back then.

In your pursuit of having an e-peen big enough to say, "Yeah, I cleared Normal, and that's important because all of those SCRUBS couldn't do it," you're destroying the guilds that are giving you the chance to do just that.

[Huehuecoyotl]

The devs said it best : " If we don't care about small minorities, then we should stop supporting trolls and dwarves."

which would be a sensible response if they spent a significant amount of development effort of quests that were only for trolls and dwarves every patch. which they dont. so its just a flippant response to a serious business question that their investors should be asking....

"why do you spend such a large portion of your budget on content that is only enjoyed by 1% of your paying customers?"

if it was done fairly, then on current numbers for every 100 bosses created, 90 of them should be LFR bosses, 9 should be normal, and only 1 heroic. but heroic raiders seem to think that "fairness" only applies when its a question of who gets to see the content; apparently its only fair that the more talented and hard working players get to see heroic raids. but its apparently also "fair" that they get an unfair portion of the developer effort.

that always seemed an odd way to run a business, to me.

[TirielWoW]

I have a theory about this.

As I've said before, I think the central value proposition of WoW is gratification of the ego. Now, successfully downing challenging content buffs the ego, but failure damages it. So, when a player is confronted with content they (subconsciously) fear they will not be able to handle, they create a defense mechism: they don't put in full effort. Of course this means they DO fail, but they have plausible deniability. They can tell themselves they failed because they didn't make their maximum effort, that it just "wasn't worth it". If they had put in maximum effort and still failed it would have been devastating.

You might find this attitude reprehensible, but I think it's quite real and quite common. And I don't think the devs understand it at all.

It kind of explains, too, why a boss will seem so freaking hard the first time you down it, but then once you have, it's like you've overcome that instinctive self-doubt and it's no longer scary and confusing.

[Odina]

it isn't sustainable in the long run for humanity either...

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 08:52 PM ----------



The average joe wasn't able to complete that content for a wealth of reasons, none of them being that the bosses were actually to hard. I mean we could go back to vanilla and Baron Geddon the easiest boss in the universe but most average joes didn't raid then because gettign 40 other people together was a pain the ass. The game has done alot to remove barriers to entry for players but in it's wake it has erected a new one in terms of difficulty.

So if you got 40 raiders (not just avg player but geared, know there lcass etc) togethere the bosses were easy in TBC? Is that what you are trying to say? If that is the case then there should be a metric fucton of people running around with hand of adal and champion of the naru!

Guess what...not many got those and allot more would never have gotten into BT or MH had the attunements not been lifted becuase TK and SSC were freaking hard as hell when they were current content in the apropriate gear!

[underdogba]

-snip-

In all fairness, you're going out of your way to count as much as possible as some measure of the "number of mechanics".

You forgot that the bosses all autoattack, and most will follow the player with aggro if it moves! Those are two more you can add to your laundry list there.

[Hubbl3]

So if you got 40 raiders (not just avg player but geared, know there lcass etc) togethere the bosses were easy in TBC? Is that what you are trying to say? If that is the case then there should be a metric fucton of people running around with hand of adal and champion of the naru!

Guess what...not many got those and allot more would never have gotten into BT or MH had the attunements not been lifted becuase TK and SSC were freaking hard as hell when they were current content in the apropriate gear!

Haha, yeah. Vashj und Kael

[Glorious Leader]

So if you got 40 raiders (not just avg player but geared, know there lcass etc) togethere the bosses were easy in TBC? Is that what you are trying to say? If that is the case then there should be a metric fucton of people running around with hand of adal and champion of the naru!

Guess what...not many got those and allot more would never have gotten into BT or MH had the attunements not been lifted becuase TK and SSC were freaking hard as hell when they were current content in the apropriate gear!

It's not just the 40 raiders, it's bugs being fixed and wealth of mods and all kinds of crap that made the bosses SEEM more difficult than they actually were compared to now when all that stuff is fixed and in place. In other words raiding was at it's least accessible but the bosses themselves and encounters were easy as opposed to now where encounters are just hard and overwhelming. Getting hand of adal and champion of naru was more about commitment and time than actual difficulty. Hyjal is the easiest instance ever made. Coordinating the trash was harder than the bosses even archimonde is a joke compared to tot. If we got to the boss wave we were good in that place.

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 09:04 PM ----------

Haha, yeah. Vashj und Kael

Durumu is far more complicated than either vash or kael. Hell Lei Shen is 10x the fuckign challenge. Let's compre end bosses to bosses. The rest of those instances are piss easy.

[TirielWoW]

Haha, yeah. Vashj und Kael

The other bosses in there weren't bad, though, even before the Attunements for BT and Hyjal were lifted. Like I said, I never downed Kael'thas and Vashj. My guild at the time was terrrrible.

But damn if I didn't have fun farming the REST of the instances.

Also: I never finished one of the title quests because you had to pay gold at the end.

[pallyopness]

so you are 9/12 normal tot and complaining about it being too hard....wtf....seriously

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 03:07 PM ----------

doesnt that jsut prove the point that you dont want to work for it? this proves everything about the amount of effort people want to put in...

[Hubbl3]

It's not just the 40 raiders, it's bugs being fixed and wealth of mods and all kinds of crap that made the bosses SEEM more difficult than they actually were. Getting hand of adal and champion of naru was more about commitment and time than actual difficulty.

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 09:04 PM ----------



Durumu is far more complicated than either vash or kael. Hell Lei Shen is 10x the fuckign challenge. Let's compre end bosses to bosses. The rest of those instances are piss easy.

I don't see how Leishen is harder than Vashj or more complicated. Vashj P2 required more coordination then anything at Leishen. Leishen is basically 1 mechanic in 4 iterations. ^.^

[Odina]

The main issue agian is not that normals are too hard now it's that there is a gap in the raiding platform that has not been filled due to "LFR" being pushed as that filler!

Previously there would be the small raids ZG,AZ,Kara etc that would cater more to the avg joe wanting to do something. They would do those for decent gear and maybe toss a pug for previous tier togethere. These are the raids id join on my alts ..now... LFR or GTFO!

In wrath they came up with another solution and tossed out 10 mans! Now they were tuned lower provided similar gear just less powerfull. 25 man guilds could plow through it but the avg joe had a hard time with it and over time with gear etc they cleared it.

then Cata came out... 10 man guilds started asking for a challenge and wanted to be on par with there 25 man countre parts. Thus 10 and 25 were normalized!

THIS is where the gap is as that 10 man or half raid development is now all lumped into LFR and the groups that were doing the easy organised raids are left grasping at the air with nothing to do but LFR or wipe to content that is harder than they ever saw previously!

Nerfing normals is not the way to fix it as then you also kill that group and kill the "training ground for heroics" but leaving the groups that previously had WOTLK 10 mans with nothing but LFR was a huge fucking fail move that should be fixed asap but not at the detriment to others!