Patch 5.2 Raid Loot Changes Feedback
Crithto, will using the 5.2 equivalent of Elder Charms grant a chance at Thunderforged Loot or will it be exclusively limited to drops?
Yes, bonus rolls in 10- and 25-player raids will also afford you a chance to receive a Thunderforged item.
Hypothetically speaking, say a boss had 13 items that can drop from him. He doesn't drop any tier. How many of those 13 items would be marked that they can be thunderforged? All 13? only 4 of those 13? etc.
Hypothetically, yes, all 13 of those non-tier items would have a chance to be Thunderforged.
Why must you introduce an artificial incentive that promotes a less favorable format for the majority of players? And by less favorable, I mean by simply looking at how many guilds raid 10 vs 25.
Getting better loot has always been a part of this game and in Patch 5.2 the variety is being increased. We think this is a good thing. However, calling 25-player raids less favorable in unfounded and an unfair assessment. Tons of players would love to do 25s, but the coordination and effort to do so is more difficult with very little additional reward. 10s aren't more popular because the entire community agreed they're more fun, it's just a simple case of effort versus reward.
There are two main points we're trying to address with this change:
- Raiding in 10- and 25-player dungeons already provides the same item level rewards for everyone. Engaging in the logistics of the larger raid format, however, we feel should be rewarded and the slight increase in chances to receive a Thunderforged item in 25-player is our effort to strike a better balance between both raid sizes.
- The addition of Thunderforged items also have benefits for both 10- and 25-player raids. For instance, if a raid group is stuck on boss #5 and their members have all the viable upgrades from previous bosses, going through those bosses again to work on #5 can now bring added bonuses. We think this makes these efforts much more fun and rewarding.
Will there be a visual to indicate you're wearing Thunderforged gear or just the iLvl difference?
There won't be any visual effects, Thunderforged is a tag much like "Heroic" and indicates that the item is slightly better than its Normal/Heroic counterpart.
We're still going through your feedback and really do appreciate the things you've shared. Please keep it coming. (
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Patch 5.2 Rogue Feedback
Due to a miscommunication, I included some incorrect information in my opening post in this thread, Shuriken Toss shouldn't be proccing
non-lethal poisons like Crippling or Paralytic. It will continue to activate damaging poisons.
Can you clarify if you mean Shuriken Toss the actual ability or are you just talking about the auto-attack?
The active ability and its auto-attack component will behave the same way.
Is the auto attack portion really set in stone? I rather keep Shuriken toss the way it is, and still allowing those poisons to proc without giving them some ridiculous ranged attack with nearly full uptime.
Nothing is set in stone, per se, but Shuriken Toss hasn't proven to be very popular in its current live incarnation. (
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Content Difficulty Feedback
Skill has nothing to do with it imo. It's the mentality of most players.
People who are terrible at something think they deserve to see all the content, because they pay as much as us. Blizzard gives in to these players, by giving them epics for doing dailies or LFR, or the 'Heroic' dungeon, or nerfing content down,... so why should they bother to try and get better in the game?
Well, those "terrible players" do pay as much as you do, so that much is true and can not really be used as an argument. But you seem to correlate the presence of epic rewards on certain areas of the game with mentality of these players, which is not necessarily the case. A player can be incredibly hardcore in mentality and just not have the time to devote on his life to get into the content tailored to the hardcore audience. It's not mutually exclusive.
It's also these kind of people that don't achieve as much in life, cause life doesn't get 'nerfed' for them. those people think they should earn as much pay as a guy who works 10 times as hard as them because they wear the same uniform. Lazy people are lazy
By this definition, we can assume that Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim are very skilled hardcore raiders with all content on farm since day 1...
It doesn't make much sense, does it? That's the issue with these kind of arguments, it's just demeaning for the sake of it. One could argue the exact opposite and it'd be just as bad (successful in a game = failure in real life), so, please,
please, store this arguments somewhere safe, cast them into the depths of the sea, and never use them again.
As stated wow has something for all: farmville and heroic raids, to put it bluntly. But why nerf hc raids when there is farmville for those that don't want to have a hardcore gaming experience? That's what bothering me. As I said before, some nerfs are justified, but having the last raid of an expansion nerfed through the bottom so that 'everyone can see it' while LFR was invented for that is what's beating me.
Perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong perspective? I mean, it sounds like you believe it's the players that are interested on doing just The Tillers and taking care of Sunsong Ranch the ones that want to do heroic raiding and have issues with it. Why not think about those players that are progressing through heroic raids and just can't overcome a particular boss? Would you prefer they'd rather quit altogether if they become blocked somewhere? What benefit do you get of it in that case? (assuming you have progressed through that boss, of course).
Most people in today's WoW don't care about the epic challenges, don't care about becoming better at the game, they just want to hop in and play and smack some enemies.
Do you think most of the players back in vanilla wanted to become better at the game?
example of flawed logic: player B fails in certain challenge. player B cares not to improve. player B says content is too hard and requests nerf. blizzard checks. player A has completed it. blame is laid to player A to being selfish.
First, you assume "player B cares not to improve". You just can't know. You assume it's not the case because in your opinion, if he cared, he'd take down the boss. The fact is, it's much more complex than that. Even if player B wants to improve, he may not be able to devote the amount of time he'd need to improve.
Then you mention "blame is laid to player A to being selfish", which is not the case, at all. Why would player A be blamed at all in the first place? What's been said, though, is that, more often than not, player A will go and say "No! Don't nerf it! Make them climb the same rope I had to!", despite player B indicating that he just can't.
But lets step away from myself and see the bigger picture of nerfing content. From what I understand from the blogpost Draztal posted, Blizzard consider "nerfing" content when they see dips in the rate of how guilds progress. I can understand the reasoning behind this, but I cant see why it would be a good thing in the long run. Because what you essentially do then is killing motivation. There is no need to nerf heroics. Eventually people will outgear it so much that the "fail threshold" is so high that most people will kill it. It might take a content patch or two, but just wait!
Let's imagine you have 50 raid groups, and you are designing 10 bosses per raid, 1 raid per tier, for 5 consecutive tiers. On your first raid, 47 groups clear all bosses, 3 quit because they got stuck in boss 7 and after weeks of trying, they've got the memo: with the current gear, they don't have the skill for this game, and they'd rather spend their time elsewhere doing something fun than wait weeks to be behind others anyways.
On your second raid, since it went so well (47 out of 50) you decide to tune content a bit tighter, and 39 out of those 47 clear all bosses. On your third ray, again, you tune content a bit tighter than before, 26 out of 39 clear it all. On your fourth raid, one notch more in difficulty, and 12 out of 26 clear everything. By your fifth raid, your original audience (50 groups) has been reduced to 12, and the time invested in each raid, has been increasingly wasted.
If you look at it that way, it might be easier to see what the negative effect would be in the long run if people get left behind; which is kind of what happened in The Burning Crusade with Sunwell Plateau or Naxxramas in Classic, as raid groups were encountering walls on a given boss, they were unable to progress at all or for extended periods of time, so, by the time the 4 Horsemen first kill was achieved, most of the raiding groups hadn't even stepped into the instance.
What I don't agree with here is that you seem to indicate that every guild that can not clear a said instance on heroic mode while it's the main active content vanishes. That's most definitly not true. As a semi-hardcore raider with 10-12h raiding a week, I would never expect to clear an entire raid instance on heroic, especially not with optional heroic bosses at the end. Ulduar and the first tier in Cataclysm are perfect examples. There was always a boss to progress on that was only a little bit more difficult than the previous one, yet nothing was completely dumbed down while it was still active content. They were my two absolute favourite tiers and I didn't end up clearing them completely on Heroic mode until the tier after.
Perhaps it was an example a bit too simple, you're definitely right, not every guild that can't clear an instance in heroic while it's current content vanishes. It wasn't an example related to WoW though, but rather on why one could have an interest in revisiting fights and lowering the difficulty of some of its aspects.
Well, I surely felt like more people were up for exploring, and stuff like that than nowadays. It feels like it's much more about "must cap this, must do this, must blabla must blabla". The overall feeling of some kind of rush, that's what I feel is much more dominant in the playerbase nowadays.
When we play a new game (which WoW was to all of us in vanilla) there is a sense of discovery, of confusion/lack of familiarity and so on, that slowly fades over time as we get familiar with the game. It's certainly a feeling that I miss myself from time to time.
That is something people seem not to understand including the blue here. They have given us the content - and regardless how much everyone pays they do not need/deserve same reward just because they pay the monthly fee.
The "they do not need" part might be easier to discuss. Some players just don't need PVP content at all (in fact they wouldn't mind if it was entirely removed from the game, the same aplies to PVE content from the perspective of some PVP players).
But... they do not deserve? That's a really tall claim. By what order? What gaming principle does make a player worthy of completing something?
Monthly fee means access to servers and content, and it should be players OWN Actions that reward you not just getting rewarded for logging in and existing as entity.
But this hyperbole, as much as it gets thrown around when these topics come out, is just not true. Noone is rewarded just for logging in. The only thing a nerf does is set a lower bar, you still have to overcome a certain level of challenge and perhaps diminish the sense of achievement of players that defeated a boss on its harder incarnation. But that's quite far away from "being rewarded just for existing as an entity".
So basically what this teaches them is that you dont have to work for things in life.
So when they actually get sick of sitting at home infront of their computer all day and want to enjoy life instead they are so very brainwashed by the "OMG HARD!! Nerf!" mentallity that they cant grasp the fact that you have to work for what you want to acomplish in life.
How about we let the parenting of kids to... their parents? No, seriously, World of Warcraft is a videogame. Gaming it's supposed to be a fun activity (if you have that fun through challenges, social interactions, etc is completely up to you). Not some kind of "School of Hard Knocks about the Real World".
while you might have a point, you totally disregard the fact that guilds keep forming, disbanding, merging, splitting, re-forming etc. there's a constant stream of players between guilds. so in your example, some players of guilds that stopped raiding might have left for another, still raiding guild, or founded a new one.
Yeah, you're totally right. As I said, it's a simplistic example that didn't take into consideration many things to avoid making it overly (and unnecessarily) complex.
If a guild has full (100%) gear from NHC and can't beat every boss in HC, then so be it. It means the guild either hits that brick wall and can't continue and has to accept this as fact, or the guild will push past its limits and eventually break that wall.
Not every guild has the will to keep hitting that wall, neither accepting as a fact that "here's how far you can go" is a very appealing reason to play.
"Hey, we've got to this boss, and we can't progress any further. It's all good!" In most cases, those players will just stop playing to have their fun somewhere else.
What was the point again of normal modes or LFR?
Normal modes and LFR don't exist so nothing has to be tweaked ever again.
LFR is tailored towards players that can't participate in organized raiding, and therefore, it's tuned accordingly (25 complete strangers, with little to no team play in most cases, and wildly different skill levels and gear). Of course, if you regularly play in organized raiding, LFR does not present a challenge. at. all. If you consistently raid Heroic bosses, then probably LFR looks just hilariously easy to you. Because you're not the target player.
Normal modes are for players that participate in organized raiding, and Heroic for those guilds that want to put their skill to test, but, this doesn't mean that even on its own scale, a particular boss might need tweaking in the opinion of the developers, or simply, they just feel it's time to tone something down so players that have been stuck on him for some time can progress.
In reality, what seperates most players is the amount of time available to play. Levelling up to max, farming mats (or farming something to pay for mats), running dailies for valor points and rep, learning new encounters and gearing up in either 5man or LFR takes time.
It's not just time. Interest and investment into the game is also important. Take a theorycrafter for example. That kind of player will devote a big amount of time trying to understand how the mechanics of a class work so they can get the maximum DPS/Survivability/Healing out of his character. In turn, this becomes a guide that helps players with less time to dedicate to better play with their characters.
So, it's not about just dismissing those with more time either. If I had to guess, I'd say that what separates players is how important to them is what they do in the game. (
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Incentive for 25 Player Raids
It is still a chance. There will be cases where a 10-player raid will have more Thunderforged items than a 25-player raid.
Bashiok its not so much a slap in the face as OP says, but this is something that is going to be HIGHLY annoying to both 10 and 25 man. Its going to cause the mind set of if I upgrade my heroic (insert slot here) and then next week the Heroic Thunderforged weapon drops I will have wasted 1500 valor upgrading that item possibly.
Making a choice to spend currency and then receiving an upgrade soon afterward that makes that choice sub-optimal was not created with Thunderforged items, and will continue long after they're no longer viable.
I think the types of conversations taking place, if nothing else, show that it's at least an engaging change that could mean... something. We'll have to see how it works out, and maybe some day we look back and all laugh at that stupid Thunderforged idea, or maybe we all forget about the forums posts we're making right now because it becomes a solid and accepted part of the game's itemization. In the meantime, your feedback, and back-and-forths, and thoughts, are helpful. (
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