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  1. #801
    Quote Originally Posted by Eranthe View Post
    instead of adapting and overcoming (cc, some small amount of organization, creative tactics like kiting or offhealing), they went to the forums in droves to have it nerfed down so they mass aoe fests were once again the most effective way to farm pre-raid gear.
    The notion that these people stampeded to the forums is obvious nonsense.

    There were net 5000 people quitting the game PER DAY in the first half of 2011. Did you see 5000 new threads each day about anything? Of course you didn't. Forum posters are a VERY tiny minority of all players.

    Most people who had trouble and quit just... quit. They didn't cry or QQ or whine or do any of the other things the hardcores like to disparage them for (as if them doing this would somehow absolve the game designers of responsibility for what the decisions had caused.)

    Difficult heroic 5 mans were not abandoned because of whining or crying. They were abandoned because huge numbers of people quit the game over them.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  2. #802
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  3. #803
    I remember doing VP hc the first day when we dinged 85... with leveling gear it was pretty hard, almost like tbc heroics imo. Tho the first boss was weirdly tuned >.< had to come up with a tactic to sacrifice our healer with a soulstone on to regain some mana in the middle of the fight Too bad the people complained so much that they ended up nerfing them :/ Would prevent people from getting burned out so fast if the dungeons lasted for longer like they used to, less spammable as well would be something possitive.
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  4. #804
    Quote Originally Posted by nowish View Post
    I remember doing VP hc the first day when we dinged 85... with leveling gear it was pretty hard, almost like tbc heroics imo. Tho the first boss was weirdly tuned >.< had to come up with a tactic to sacrifice our healer with a soulstone on to regain some mana in the middle of the fight Too bad the people complained so much that they ended up nerfing them :/ Would prevent people from getting burned out so fast if the dungeons lasted for longer like they used to, less spammable as well would be something possitive.
    They actually buffed that first boss, IIRC, since there was an unintended way to cheese one of the mechanics.

    I think they also buffed the final boss. The dragon with the wind and tornadoes got nerfed, though.
    Last edited by Osmeric; 2013-07-25 at 05:43 PM.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  5. #805
    Quote Originally Posted by nowish View Post
    I remember doing VP hc the first day when we dinged 85... with leveling gear it was pretty hard, almost like tbc heroics imo. Tho the first boss was weirdly tuned >.< had to come up with a tactic to sacrifice our healer with a soulstone on to regain some mana in the middle of the fight Too bad the people complained so much that they ended up nerfing them :/ Would prevent people from getting burned out so fast if the dungeons lasted for longer like they used to, less spammable as well would be something possitive.
    Bullhooey. You want to see people burn out, put them a seemingly insurmountable challenge and the casuals will fall off in droves. Only the hardcores believe that extra difficulty is the antidote to burnout. Since there are far far far more casuals than hardcores, that approach is wrong from a financial sense for Blizz.

  6. #806
    Quote Originally Posted by Heladys View Post
    Bullhooey. You want to see people burn out, put them a seemingly insurmountable challenge and the casuals will fall off in droves. Only the hardcores believe that extra difficulty is the antidote to burnout. Since there are far far far more casuals than hardcores, that approach is wrong from a financial sense for Blizz.
    I agree. Those who want harder content have plenty of it in the form of heroic raids. Heroic dungeons used to be goto content for people who wanted an intermediate level of difficulty. Now they've degenerated into easy mode, but in Cataclysm they were far beyond intermediate. I really didn't understand why Blizzard forced casual players to master raid-level mechanics at Cata launch.

  7. #807
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    Not to mention that INSANE idea they made where they put the final three Hour of Twilight dungeons into its own selectable isolated bracket.

    By doing that, not only did players get burnt out of those dungeons after the first 3 days of playing... but it pulled every single well-geared player OUT of the older dungeons - thus reducing the old dungeons back into the launch-day hell grinds.
    The old dungeons were already nerfed to the ground at that point, so taking out the well-geared players really did not have much impact on the older dungeons. The only impact (imho) was burn out. Same deal with the 4.1 troll dungeons before that.

  8. #808
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    Not to mention that INSANE idea they made where they put the final three Hour of Twilight dungeons into its own selectable isolated bracket.
    That was deliberate, I'm sure. "Look, you don't have to run those early ones AT ALL." You could gear up for those final three using PvP gear and just skip the 4.0/4.1 heroics entirely.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  9. #809
    Deleted
    There seems to be much misinformation about the dungeons being nerfed. First of all, there were no nerfs until a good 2 months after launch followed by a second smaller wave 3 month later when the troll dungeons hit. Turns out they weren't massively nerfed at all if you look through the patch notes. Most of them were pretty minor and more to make encounters a bit more reasonable. Some bosses were actually BUFFED.
    So yes they were nerfed, but a lot less than what people seem to believe. Also at the later stage most people already acquired at least some gear which made them less hard which is quite logical and most people knew the tactics by now.

    From a healer perspective they were probably the hardest. I remember healing Stonecore normal at 82 and I thought it was quite nice. Then I healed it at 83 and it was like: huh? where did my mana go?!. 85 hc: please shoot me. I almost threw in the towel at that point, but I stayed with it and once you got the right mindset it was sooo much more rewarding than before. I loved triage healing and the fact I was actually using ALL my spells. Also because of the hard hc's I've never met any bad healer when raiding at that time. The big difference was that you couldn't heal stupid any more. Everyone had to be on the ball. Fights like Throngus and Siamat (stands out a lot for me as I often got randomed right into that boss) are perfect examples of needing to heal efficiently and not stand in stuff and dps giving everything.
    The whole reason I forgave Blizzard for Grim Batol not being a raid was because it felt like a raid.

  10. #810
    Quote Originally Posted by Tyandor View Post
    There seems to be much misinformation about the dungeons being nerfed. First of all, there were no nerfs until a good 2 months after launch followed by a second smaller wave 3 month later when the troll dungeons hit. Turns out they weren't massively nerfed at all if you look through the patch notes. Most of them were pretty minor and more to make encounters a bit more reasonable. Some bosses were actually BUFFED.
    So yes they were nerfed, but a lot less than what people seem to believe. Also at the later stage most people already acquired at least some gear which made them less hard which is quite logical and most people knew the tactics by now.

    From a healer perspective they were probably the hardest. I remember healing Stonecore normal at 82 and I thought it was quite nice. Then I healed it at 83 and it was like: huh? where did my mana go?!. 85 hc: please shoot me. I almost threw in the towel at that point, but I stayed with it and once you got the right mindset it was sooo much more rewarding than before. I loved triage healing and the fact I was actually using ALL my spells. Also because of the hard hc's I've never met any bad healer when raiding at that time. The big difference was that you couldn't heal stupid any more. Everyone had to be on the ball. Fights like Throngus and Siamat (stands out a lot for me as I often got randomed right into that boss) are perfect examples of needing to heal efficiently and not stand in stuff and dps giving everything.
    The whole reason I forgave Blizzard for Grim Batol not being a raid was because it felt like a raid.
    Stonecore heroic was "hard" to heal mostly because of people standing in shit or not interrupting the dudes that turn into elementals. Didn't interrupt the elemental dudes? Probably a wipe. Dude standing in front of the flayers while they do their slashing attack? Dead dude. Dude falling behind and getting aggro on the shale spider patrol? Probably dead or wasting your mana. Dude didn't stand behind a rock on the dragon boss? Dead. So much trash there has AoE or easily avoidable directional shit that people didn't move out of. And as a paladin, I had to bring the beers from the grim guzzler to have a reliable DoT on me to break me from his CC instantly and keep healing. Oh and the room before Ozruk... people almost always got aggro on at least one of the groups there.
    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
    Also, it's should HAVE. NOT "should of". "Should of" doesn't even make sense. If you think you should own a cat, do you say "I should of a cat" or "I should have a cat"? Do you HAVE cats, or do you OF cats?

  11. #811
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    They've never given us the details of the process that led up to Cataclysm. It would still be very interesting to know what constraints and preconceptions led them to that design. That might also tell us what else they might have done instead, if those initial conditions had been tweaked.

    I'm going to be paying close attention to what any of the top WoW devs say after they leave Blizzard. They have their nondisclosure agreements, I'm sure, but those shouldn't last forever.
    I imagine, given what a mess it was, that there had to be almost a spaghetti-like division over it - people who followed the accessibility at any price ideology, folks who really wanted a hard game and were going to push this, and folks who might like a hard game but really thought LFD was going to make it unworkable, and said so or were persuaded to support anyway?

    and of course 'an argument' could have been made about rate of content consumption - the tbc heroics certainly were content for many players for a long, long time, and hard to beat for most players up till the end or close. I would think such an argument was indeed made, about heroics and raids. the fact blizzard then moved completely to the disposible content model where each new raid makes the old one completely irrelevant after this may say something about this too.

    all this said, they cannot have not had people saying LFD would have made TBC heroics unplayable, even people who would have preferred to tune the game that way. I just cringe at the idea of applying an avg ilvl of say 110 or 115 during TBC to an LFD blind system and thinking of the likely results in heroics. at least revered keys functioned as sort of a gatecheck on players who were incapable of even finishing lvl 70 instances on normal.

    other folks must have said that the playerbase had been running instances where 1 brain cell was usually not even needed and they were gonna flip out when they had to actually learn to use more than 2 or 3 aoe abilities.

    THen someone else said 'hey lets kill 25m guilds and cause a negative social domino effect and combine lockouts'.....but that is another story I hope to hear about one day.
    Last edited by Deficineiron; 2013-07-25 at 08:30 PM.
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  12. #812
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    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    That was deliberate, I'm sure. "Look, you don't have to run those early ones AT ALL." You could gear up for those final three using PvP gear and just skip the 4.0/4.1 heroics entirely.
    There has never been a time in WoW when I wanted to solo queue and wind up in front of Heroic Corla. Just too much damn drama.

  13. #813
    They we're great fun on launch, as everything else early into Cataclysme. But then the ship sank completely.
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  14. #814
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    Not to mention that INSANE idea they made where they put the final three Hour of Twilight dungeons into its own selectable isolated bracket.

    By doing that, not only did players get burnt out of those dungeons after the first 3 days of playing... but it pulled every single well-geared player OUT of the older dungeons - thus reducing the old dungeons back into the launch-day hell grinds.
    This content burn out was one of the reason GC gave to why they didnt want to introduce five mans along with it competing with the previous LFR. Blizzard made a number of changes that only further facilitated dungeon burn out and instead of resolving a number of these changes they go nope fuck you five man lovers go do LFR.
    Quote Originally Posted by Biske View Post
    Stonecore heroic was "hard" to heal mostly because of people standing in shit or not interrupting the dudes that turn into elementals. Didn't interrupt the elemental dudes? Probably a wipe.
    Cant heal stupid is my motto. If something was made to be unhealable then I am not going to fret over it and say that healing is hard. I am supposed to be a hero and not a god and Cata reflected that.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tyandor View Post
    There seems to be much misinformation about the dungeons being nerfed. First of all, there were no nerfs until a good 2 months after launch followed by a second smaller wave 3 month later when the troll dungeons hit. Turns out they weren't massively nerfed at all if you look through the patch notes. Most of them were pretty minor and more to make encounters a bit more reasonable. Some bosses were actually BUFFED.
    So yes they were nerfed, but a lot less than what people seem to believe. Also at the later stage most people already acquired at least some gear which made them less hard which is quite logical and most people knew the tactics by now.
    It was a combination of the slight buff, gear, mental trickery, and players actually L2P a bit. Just take a look at LFR, we have these players who cried they couldnt get out of the fire in Cata and here they are navigating a maze and pulling off some mechanics they bitched about being impossible for "casuals" back in Cata.
    Last edited by nekobaka; 2013-07-25 at 11:57 PM.

  15. #815
    Quote Originally Posted by Biske View Post
    Stonecore heroic was "hard" to heal mostly because of people standing in shit or not interrupting the dudes that turn into elementals. Didn't interrupt the elemental dudes? Probably a wipe. Dude standing in front of the flayers while they do their slashing attack? Dead dude. Dude falling behind and getting aggro on the shale spider patrol? Probably dead or wasting your mana. Dude didn't stand behind a rock on the dragon boss? Dead. So much trash there has AoE or easily avoidable directional shit that people didn't move out of. And as a paladin, I had to bring the beers from the grim guzzler to have a reliable DoT on me to break me from his CC instantly and keep healing. Oh and the room before Ozruk... people almost always got aggro on at least one of the groups there.
    Stonecore heroic was "hard" simply because the trash was god awful and there was way too much of it:

    First three packs: Incredibly annoying. Had to CC one of the berzerkers, had to have a dedicated interrupt on the Earthshaker or w/e his name was (guy who turned into an elemental) and possibly Milhouse Manastorm because he just AOEs everyone. Pretty much needed to mark a kill order.

    Stone Golem: Loved these guys because people are dumb and can't jump to avoid earthquakes
    Rock Flayers: Loved these guys too

    Room before Ozruk: Can die in a fire. Way too much trash, and extremely annoying as well. You could easily be screwed if you didn't have a Shaman to lock down the fire elementals. The big ogre guys could easily oneshot a healer if RNG was bad, since their shockwave attack or whatever didn't give you enough time to move away, and they jumped around. The summoner usually had to be CC'd just so he wouldn't spawn a million imps.

    Similar thing goes for the other two "terrible" dungeons: Deadmines (also way too long, and the gauntlet was shit) and Grim Batol. They weren't hard, the trash was just garbage. Honorable mention goes to the packs with the healing Naga in Throne of Tides, the groups with Twilight Borers in BRC, the guys with the lightning grounding field in Vortex Pinnacle (some of the worst trash ever) and the groups in Lost City with the Plaguebringer and the Darkcaster.

    As for the bosses, they were fine other than Ozruk having that stupid "Have to dot yourself to break" shield and the bugginess of Shatter before the graphic outlining where it would hit was added, and the idiocy on the last boss with the rocks where it could clip you even without you being in the impact zone.
    Last edited by Nobleshield; 2013-07-26 at 02:05 AM.

  16. #816
    I remember CC was actually used for instances again in Cata. First few weeks they were definitely a challenge with pugs.

  17. #817
    Quote Originally Posted by Biske View Post
    And as a paladin, I had to bring the beers from the grim guzzler to have a reliable DoT on me to break me from his CC instantly and keep healing. Oh and the room before Ozruk... people almost always got aggro on at least one of the groups there.
    Ok 1. you keep judging your dotting seal... voila no stuns?!?!?
    2. you destroy the other pack before pulling the boss....???!! (atleast in pugs)

    Woah....

    On another note: strangely enough no one said anything about jumping at the right time to avoid 50% health loss by those giant thingies after the first boss in stonecore. Not that it wasn't easily avoidable, but thats were a lot of people died due to not knowing (or caring) when to jump

  18. #818
    at the very start. the release.. heroics were kinda hard.. i remmeber trying heroic karsh steelbender.. for some reason when he was dipped into the flames his dmg went up insanely high.. 1k 2k.. 5k.. 10k.. 20k aoe.. 40k.. 80k.. .. the fire pools left by mobs didnt help much either. it took a lil while to get used to the positions. trash wasnt very helpful either and most people Failed at corla not knowing how to move out of the beam in time.

    Stonecore: ozruk was easy to take once u learned his movements.. but at the start his smash would easily 1shot anyone.. i think it did like 400k or so.. anyway

    the Sky palace dungeon wasnt bad.. the healing trash was kinda annoying though if u had no ccs..

    the worst was proly grim batol.. even if ur raid was competent at killing mobs via the dragons.. (most pugs werent) the forgemaster and Valiona were hard for people to get used to.. and Erudax at the end.. trash+ terrible bosses= bad dungeon.

    some trash was nasty in deadmines too if u didnt have proper cc.

    so ya cata heroics were hard at the start.

  19. #819
    Scarab Lord Tyrgannus's Avatar
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    I have been playing this game since Christmas of 2004 and have tanked, healed, meleed, and ranged.

    I have cleared over half the tiers at current tier and raided all but 2 raids at current expansion (Naxx40 and SWP).

    I am nowhere near the best player in the world, but I am quite experienced and definitely know how to play on a somewhat competent level.

    In terms of dungeons, I did Blackrock Spire, Stratholme, Dire Maul, Scholomance, H-Shattered Malls, H-Magister's Terrace, and many other dungeons that were considered difficult with current gear when they were released.

    I can honestly say I was SHOCKED when Cataclysm hit. Shocked. Flabbergasted. These dungeons were the hardest dungeons this game has ever had. Period.

    Now, most everyone will point to Burning Crusade Heroics being hard or Vanilla, but I will contest that there were no real tricks or mechanics that truly bothered people (except maybe healers for the first boss in H-Auchenai Crypts). They wiped due to tuning. They CC'd on the adds, used healthstones/bandages/defensive cool downs, healed up between packs, and soldiered through progressing on the sheer knowledge of how to masterfully work their class. That was it. I don't like when old players pretend it was much of anything else. BC raids had awesome mechanics, but BC Heroics? not so much. Vanilla dungeons? Almost none at all. Wrath was grossly under tuned, but then...

    Cataclysm probably had some of my favorite dungeons if I'm honest with myself, but they were heavily tuned to that of BC standards but had the heavier mechanics from the "newer" style of play that started in Wrath. Oh, Wrath was chalk full of mechanics, but they were so grossly under tuned that they were often ignored. Here, there were mechanics AND tuning that made a bunch of strangers that never worked together rarely typing much strategy a real roadblock. Communication was mandatory, and communication is not entirely common in lfg, especially after being used to Wrath. Bosses had dodging, instant kills, intense damage spikes on tank, adds with ludicrous hp that were REQUIRED to be slowed at low gear level, mandatory kiting, precision positioning, effective healing, dispels, creative group pulls (like Vortex Pinnacle), or just ludicrous raid damage to be expected to be healed by a newly 85 ilvl329 healer. Was it impossible? No. I got through the first 9 Heroics long before the first nerfs came out. Was it challenging? I guess that word is subject and relative, but relative to ANYTHING else in WoW, I'm simply not convinced that any 5 man content has really been harder, at least for that first couple weeks. Was it rewarding if you got through it and did you feel proud? Absolutely. I miss the difficulty to be honest, but it is arrogant to falsely remember it not being there

  20. #820
    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    Ok 1. you keep judging your dotting seal... voila no stuns?!?!?
    2. you destroy the other pack before pulling the boss....???!! (atleast in pugs)

    Woah....

    On another note: strangely enough no one said anything about jumping at the right time to avoid 50% health loss by those giant thingies after the first boss in stonecore. Not that it wasn't easily avoidable, but thats were a lot of people died due to not knowing (or caring) when to jump
    The jump to dodge was awesome and I loved it!

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