are challenge modes a fail?

[Deleted]

Remove potion use and some trash skipping class mechanics and than I'd say it is succesfull. Atm some groups have such a major advantage by just bringing 1 class.

I'm not that interested in it as there is no reward in it for me next to a crap looking transmoq (shaman). Add a 5-10% chance to get a epic weapon (the ones from heroic dungeons) and it would pull me in instantly.

[Deleted]

Just 2 questions to everyone.

1) Do you know who has the top challenge mode records on your realm?
2) Do you know what guild has the highest heroic raiding progress on your realm?

Can answer those easily;
1) Mine
2) Mine

I've really been enjoying having challenge modes, they're a great way to have challenging content to do without requiring significant scheduling. Something to do out of raid time, late at night / during the day. Rewards are attractive enough to want to succeed (to me) but not powerful enough to be a requirement.
Having no repair bill was a good touch. I think removing the use of all consumables would be another good step. Besides balancing the playing field a little more it would be nice to bring the cost of wiping down a little. Either that or add super cheap vendor consumables only usable in CMs, much like there are (or used to be) for BGs.

[mvaliz]

Remove potion use and some trash skipping class mechanics and than I'd say it is succesfull. Atm some groups have such a major advantage by just bringing 1 class.

I'm not that interested in it as there is no reward in it for me next to a crap looking transmoq (shaman). Add a 5-10% chance to get a epic weapon (the ones from heroic dungeons) and it would pull me in instantly.

...and so would all the other "casuals" be pulled in, sighting it as an avenue for stat-progression.

...and THEN you'll hear the screams of wanting/needing challenge modes nerfed. Ever notice they aren't asking for Challenge modes to be nerfed right now? ^_^

[Libretto]

I really don't get some of the further replies in this thread.

"I'll do them when melee aren't punished for being melee"

My full gold group was 2 melee 1 ranged tank healer. Melee are great when they're not idiots.

"If I could get gear I'd do them"

They're not meant for you obviously. Some people who play this game (and others) enjoy doing things that are difficult for the challenge. I killed heroic Spirit Kings earlier today, it drops more or less no gear of any use to me, why did I participate in killing a raid encounter that rewards me no gear? Duh.

"No healer groups are viable this is stupid"

We used a healer for everything except the last boss of Stormstout Brewery, and that's because that boss does no damage and is best burned down quickly. There's no groups I'm aware of that ran with no healer in entirety, they just had a healer who specced a DPS spec for certain bosses or pulls because it made the run go faster.

"Invis potting trash is stupid / requires no skill"

Really? Because I'm pretty sure that there's generally only one particular trash pull per dungeon which you can successfully invis pot past to get gold, and it's a 10 minute cooldown which puts all other pots on 10 minute cooldown, meaning once you use it you probably have no DPS pots for the remainder of the instance. Thus it actually requires thought to properly use. And invis pots cost next to nothing to make. You can also still get gold without doing this, most of our times were 20+ seconds faster than necessary so pulling one additional pack wouldn't have been gamebreaking.

"Class stacking"

Look at leaderboards. I've seen pretty much every single class represented. Many oddball comps. Some classes are better right now but no class is "nonviable". I got Shado-Pan Monastary gold with ~45 sec to spare with the comp: Resto shaman, Frost mage, Shadow priest, Ret paladin, Brewmaster.

[Hypro]

I personally like them a lot...

[Lumpriest]

I completed my Challenge Conqueror: Gold this week.

It seems to me that a lot of people who are likely to go after these golds are people who perform well in PvE content, specifically raiding. Challenge modes are like little 5-man raids that require intimate knowledge of your class and role.

So, at the moment, I think people who do participate in and are good at PvE content are more preoccupied with the 16 raid bosses raining down upon them.

[Temp name]

Just 2 questions to everyone.

1) Do you know who has the top challenge mode records on your realm?
2) Do you know what guild has the highest heroic raiding progress on your realm?

Yes.
1) A guild called League of Shadows (with 1 gold run)
2) KonKi (top 100 world I believe)

[Aceshigh]

Probably because you're what I'm describing. -_-

Had no problems with EQ2 and their groups, because they rather socialize. Some of my fondest MMO memories are the long chats after dungeons/raids, that came possible as we actually TALKED in our dungeons/raids not type. In WoW it's typical being in a group of thugs, nasty thugs.

Oh, you're talking about LFR/LFG groups then? You can't do those as challenge modes, you actually have to talk to people to get these groups together. Public groups just doesn't make very much sense IMO lol.

You also have no idea how I play the game or if I talk to "public people", but that's another discussion.

[anisadora]

I think theyre a great success... at showing how many people love to talk shit and yet cant back it up.

[vian]

Since challenge mode is mostly about the setup, I say it's a fail. "Bring the player not the class"

[Dasani]

I think challenge modes are a bad idea in their current implementation.

Personally i'd rather something like this disable things like potions, and any "fishy" use effect items and such.

As it stands right now, to have the best time on the server, you have to buy it by purchasing all these items (mostly old school content too) that have various little advantages that you have to use to beat everyone else's time.

I'd rather challenge modes were just pure skill. Instead of the whole "downgrading" your gear and trying to run your current stats through an equation to normalize them, they should just make everyone of a certain class/spec that walks in there have the exact same stats and remove the costly abilities to enhance them like potions as well as the other little gimmicky items that let you bypass trash you normally couldn't and so on.

Make it about actual skill. I mean yeah, sure, you do need a degree of skill to do these dungeons already, but a couple of folks from my raid team and I got silvers the first week of release and golds not long after. And while we had server best times on a few of these for a while, we don't anymore, and never will again, because other people will sink ludicrous amounts of money into running multiple attempts over and over to beat our time.

I'd be all for running it multiple times to re-secure our position, but to have to throw away that much money to do so is pretty dumb.

When your strategy for running the dungeon revolves more around "what items can i use to speed this up" instead of "how can I best play my class to help my team get through this faster" it is a design failure in my opinion. Feel free to disagree.

Furthermore, the difficulty of the "instance" may not be nerfed, but the actual classes we play are nerfed and screwed with constantly. You can have people get record times now, that would never be able to beat or have anyone else come close to in the future because several classes in that comp got nerfed.

You would have to have everything, literally everything, equal and set in stone in a challenge mode in order to have some meaningful competition that is skillbased. Otherwise it isn't.

[Zka]

so i checked on another of the servers I play on
there are 0/9 at gold
only 2/9 are even have silver
yeah, no one is getting it on that realm

I'm playing casually, but my guild is one of the top guilds on our server. We are yet to venture deeply into CMs, because the first priority is raiding. Outside of raiding, people grind reps. But this grind is coming to an end soon, after that they will have time to look into CMs. Hopefully I can join them, because this is finally challenging content which can be played without a strict schedule.
So yeah, top guilds may have been busy with something else, but when raids will not take all their time, they will start CMs in my opinion.

[ringpriest]

IMHO, they need better armor design. The challenge mode armors look neat, but somehow they don't have the je ne sais quoi that, say, the original Paladin Judgement set did. And without that "omg, he's got that" aspect to the gear, I think the drive to get it and the prestige of having it, is going to be much less.

[Ater]

I don't see them as a failure, I just think there is so much content in the game right now that a lot of people haven't had the time to do any serious CM progress, at least that's the case for people in my guild. To me that's a good thing, I love the amount of content in game right now and I know there will be time to do CM-progress further on in the expansion and I'm looking forward to it. Had a blast during that short try we did at one of them and got bronze, will be a lot of fun fighting our way up to gold.

[HeedmySpeed]

The few CMs I've ran I've had fun. They're far more interesting than farming Heroics over and over.

The problem is finding players!

I don't really have time to add in more things to do when we're over burdened with raid content.
And it seems like if you can't set a regular schedule for CMs you won't be getting Gold times.

People think it's an "all or nothing" type gig which really holds back players like myself who are happy to PuG each instance with different players.

I don't want them nerfed but I'd wish there was an easier way to find players who are interested since my realm is full of fail.

[zshikara]

I personally love the challenge modes. I don't play them to get a gold time. I play them to challenge myself and the people I'm grouped with. Its hard, and I love it. I love being challenged in content with less than 10 people. So yeah, I love challenge modes and am working on them a bit every weekend.

[Guyon]

I find em very nice.
A nice way to improve the skill for raids and to check trials

[Deleted]

You do something hard and you get the best looking armor in the game isnt that how it was in vanilla ? And according to ppl on these forums classic wow was the peaks of their lives , no not a fail

[cFortyfive]

Don't know. Wasn't really interested getting them done and don't see that changing any time soon. Was "forced" one evening to help out and got two golds and a silver and will maybe get around it some time to get the gear set but this "speed running" thing lacks any kind of allure to me. Matter of taste I suppose but I didn't see the challenge in cheesing a bit of trash.

[nnelson54]

I might be more inclined to care about them if the Paladin set weren't so goddamn hideous. Why would they take a great idea - giant wings, sword emblems on the chest and belt - and cover it with giant un-Paladin-like crystals? That set looks like it should be a quest reward set from Deepholme.