The death of resistance-based gating.

[Deleted]

You know that less than 10% of the raiding population has even cleared the normal mode version of the raid, right?
Heck, less than half the raiding population has even killed Council.

To say that Blizzard can't create difficult normal mode content is bullshit.

Normal mode is not difficult at all nowadays. What makes it difficult is the fact that people get to practice their skills less before entering normal raid and this is because heroic dungeons are just too easy. It's not about the difficulty of the raid, but about the incompetence of most people due to lack of practice and/or common sense.

[Tychus]

I really like the concept, or at least what it could be used for; if not so much the past implementation.

If you had (say) a half-dozen raids, all the "same tier", but having their own tiered progression and differing gear requirements (resistances, enchantments, unique effects, etc), you then have a flatter meta-game; and I certainly would like to see more horizontal content vs vertical.

Instead of having one vector of raid progression what if you would have multiple... I like the idea of the whole Icecrown zone being involved in ICC progression, with tiers 7-10. A set of Ulduar tiers 7-10 in Storm Peaks. SMV holding a 4-6 set of BT tiers. Etc. Gear would only cross-pollinate to a limited degree due to whatever is unique to that zone/raid set (resistance requirements, specialized enchantments, imbue/attunement of gear, etc.) I guess that would be quite a bit of content to make, however...

[Maelstrom51]

Normal mode is not difficult at all nowadays. What makes it difficult is the fact that people get to practice their skills less before entering normal raid and this is because heroic dungeons are just too easy. It's not about the difficulty of the raid, but about the incompetence of most people due to lack of practice and/or common sense.

Astrophysics is easy, just most people are too incompetent.

[Zdrasti]

I personally loved building sets to do specific things. So I missed this aspect when they effectively removed it post TBC. However, I do see the logic in avoiding having your guilds progression tied to one person who may jump ship. I would think having guild bound resist gear would be an appropriate solution that preserves some of the better parts of this process. You jump ship, the guild resist gear goes right back into the vault, ready to be handed out to someone else.

[Takeada]

Oh the fun to MC mobs in LBRS to buff the raid for 30 mins with Fire res and then wipe on a crappy pull at Raggy....
Oh the fun to know you must defeat Lucifron for 4 weeks before you have a tranq shot rotation for Mag.
Oh the fun to skip Hydross for weeks until you had the res gear

Really? Already in BT ppl were buying the HoD from other guilds at insane prices to get past Mother Shaz...gueyy Blizz should have made those BoP to delay the guilds artificially more. You really think that builds community? I say it frustrates...

This on top of the fact that it practically promoted the poaching of players from lesser progressed guilds is a big reason why it no longer exists. It's weird how a lot of players think of BC as the glory days of raiding when anyone outside the server 1 or 2 guild struggled not just because of progression issues but because top guilds took their players because of silly gating holding up guilds.

[barackohmama]

I liked it. instead of just steamrolling through content and getting better gear for teh big numberz, ppl actually had to consider other things for a change. I loved how good resistance gear scaled and how much it affected the dmg taken. Sad it's not used anymore tbh

[Arkamedis]

Glad it died, would not wanna see it return.

[Adramalech]

Normal mode is not difficult at all nowadays. What makes it difficult is the fact that people get to practice their skills less before entering normal raid and this is because heroic dungeons are just too easy. It's not about the difficulty of the raid, but about the incompetence of most people due to lack of practice and/or common sense.

You're full of crap and you know it. You can't just look at the picture and claim people are incompetent without a second thought. I bet you sure as hell wouldn't admit it if people told you the raids were easy and you were incompetent back in Classic or TBC. Which is hypocritical as hell. People fail on a boss today, your reply is "that boss is easy, the raiders are just incompetent". People failed on a boss back in TBC "man, that sure is a crazy hard boss". Turn the tables for a bit and think.

[Najja]

If it had any chances of resurfacing it would need to be drastically overhauled. Something like the guild collects specific items to unlock a guild wide feature to allow members to purchase the gear from a vendor. Now as to if this would have something connected to it to disallow guild hopping to grab the gear or from higher guilds selling invites to other guilds for access would be something that would need to be decided. While I hated having to wait to get all the gear for those fights in a way it was exciting to find each mat and then finally engage the boss. Also there was the aspect of deciding, Do I wear all of the gear to offer maximum protections? Do I wear some of it, do more dps/healing but stress the healers? Or do I wear almost none of it and go balls to the wall since our team can handle it? It was interesting finding that balance.

[Deleted]

You're full of crap and you know it. You can't just look at the picture and claim people are incompetent without a second thought. I bet you sure as hell wouldn't admit it if people told you the raids were easy and you were incompetent back in Classic or TBC. Which is hypocritical as hell. People fail on a boss today, your reply is "that boss is easy, the raiders are just incompetent". People failed on a boss back in TBC "man, that sure is a crazy hard boss". Turn the tables for a bit and think.

I like the fact that you answer your questions yourself. It saves time from trying to argue with you. Also I like the fact that you take so seriously the opinion of a stranger that you start calling him various names. If I were a troll, I would be winning right now. Fortunately for you, I am just a man expressing his opinion. Just for your information, I have accepted the fact that I am no pro in this game. However, let me tell you this. If a player cannot memorize the 3-4 key mechanics of a fight and respond accordingly after 50 tries in normal, then he is either incompetent, or doesn't play seriously. Bosses have patterns. It's not that difficult to learn them. Sorry if I offended you, in case you haven't finished normal yet.

[Gondlem]

If you haven't done heroic raiding in minimal gear, you really shouldn't bother commenting on how hard or easy it is. The difficulty of raiding isn't in the raw mechanics in the sense that you have to be highly skilled to avoid dying to something, it's in discipline, in the sense that you have to concentrate for 8-12 minutes on multiple things without making mistakes, adapt to new situations on the fly while continuing to do what you were already doing etc. Dodging Anima Font on Heroic Animus is fairly easy, but 25 people dodging Anima Font for 6 minutes while maintaining good throughput, micromanaging add positioning, using CDs for jolt etc is a good deal harder.

Ask anyone who has raided consistently since Vanilla/TBC at somewhere near the high end (ie not someone who quit during level 80 Naxx and has been casual since) and they will tell you that from a mechanics/strat standpoint raiding is as hard or harder today than it ever has been. You have to be pretty good to be in a top guild.

[Kazgrel]

Resistance gear was farmed in raids, so it's not like tanks were doing tons of extra work. At least that's the way it was for most of BC and the end of vanilla. MC and BWL had some fuckery going on there, and gearing a warlock tank for fire resist for Leotheras was stupid.

I don't mind resist gear. If they brought it back I would be ok with that as long as it was more like Naxx/BT where the important mats drop in the raid.

I recall having to farm Mauradon for pieces of nature resist gear, as well as whatever it was for the libram enchants (although to be fair, there were non-resist enchants people had to farm too). BRD also had several fire resist pieces, along with the Black Forge needed to make some of those items.

As annoyed as I am about memories of resistance gear, that isn't to say that dailies haven't gotten to the point of annoyance. There are more than enough of them available, IMO, that no more new ones need to be added this expansion, but I would not be shocked one bit if they do add more. Granted, at this point, dailies are optional.

[Slummish]

If you haven't done heroic raiding in minimal gear, you really shouldn't bother commenting on how hard or easy it is. The difficulty of raiding isn't in the raw mechanics in the sense that you have to be highly skilled to avoid dying to something, it's in discipline, in the sense that you have to concentrate for 8-12 minutes on multiple things without making mistakes, adapt to new situations on the fly while continuing to do what you were already doing etc. Dodging Anima Font on Heroic Animus is fairly easy, but 25 people dodging Anima Font for 6 minutes while maintaining good throughput, micromanaging add positioning, using CDs for jolt etc is a good deal harder.

Ask anyone who has raided consistently since Vanilla/TBC at somewhere near the high end (ie not someone who quit during level 80 Naxx and has been casual since) and they will tell you that from a mechanics/strat standpoint raiding is as hard or harder today than it ever has been. You have to be pretty good to be in a top guild.

What's changed about raiding THEN versus NOW, is the need for movement and environmental awareness. Once upon a time, a raid would position themselves prior to the pull or be required to position themselves quickly right after the pull in order to establish safe-spots. Now, raiders are required to be able to fight and move, fight and move. There's nothing wrong with this; in fact, it's really stepped up the sorts of encounters we face and has allowed Blizz to evolve into better (more interesting) developers. But no one with any experience will tell you modern raiding is harder today than it was "back then." No modern single encounter takes 6 hours a night, 6 nights a week for 2 months to down.

[eschatological]

Except the reason those fights took that long was because they were massively bugged, ridiculously overtuned, and artificial gear checks. Not because they required a requisite equal amount of skill. They just were near impossible to do without the proper setup.

[Deleted]

Being able to decimate a raid tier within days of its release might be fun for a week for .001% of the WoW community as they race to world-first, but in the end, it really means very little and adds nothing to the spirit of the MMO when the only thing keeping you from killing a boss is the fact that Blizzard hasn't opened the door to his parlor just yet.

This is only the case for extremely high end raiding guilds, for other guilds it can take a couple of months at least to even clear normal, same goes for heroic mode guilds not being as pro as the bleeding edge guilds.

[Gondlem]

What's changed about raiding THEN versus NOW, is the need for movement and environmental awareness. Once upon a time, a raid would position themselves prior to the pull or be required to position themselves quickly right after the pull in order to establish safe-spots. Now, raiders are required to be able to fight and move, fight and move. There's nothing wrong with this; in fact, it's really stepped up the sorts of encounters we face and has allowed Blizz to evolve into better (more interesting) developers. But no one with any experience will tell you modern raiding is harder today than it was "back then." No modern single encounter takes 6 hours a night, 6 nights a week for 2 months to down.

Okay well, I feel like I have "some experience". I'm not the biggest authority out there or anything, but I'm a raider in a top 10 world guild and I've been in the same guild since Sunwell. And I'm telling you that raiding is at least as hard today as it was "back then", maybe harder. Difficulty is positioned differently though, like for example in Sunwell if you stopped healing the tank for a second they were dead. A holy paladin for instance literally spam healed the tank the entire fight and if they ever stopped or went oom it was done. I remember our paladins calling GCDs back then for example, like "I am using a GCD on something other than holy light" was a relevant thing to say over vent. These days tanks have CDs, can heal themselves, other healers are just as capable of stepping in to heal the tank as the "tank healer" and so on. There are many similar things in other roles too. For example, a ranged DPS moving unnecessarily or a key buffer dying back then was a massive DPS loss. You had a rotation, usually a pretty simple one, and a correct way to play any encounter, and if you did it wrong or didn't have the right tools, like a rogue without an enhancement shaman in your group, you pretty much sucked. Now you can do more or less whatever you want and the loss in throughput for making an error is minimal because Blizzard don't want the gap between "good" and "average" players to be 50% in the same gear. The game used to have reaction checks of a sort too, which are mostly gone.

These days fights are way more complicated and require far more individual attention and group coordination than they used to. I was actually talking to people last night about how funny the idea of a boss as complex as Lei Shen, Durumu or Animus existing during TBC seems. The most complex fight in TBC was probably Kael'thas, and by comparison with today's fights it's pretty simple. There were four adds, each with a set of abilities, and you killed them, then they all ressed and you killed them again while being buffed by special items, and you killed the boss while using items to counter his abilities. It was a very hard fight for sure but in terms of complexity it wasn't anything like the complex fights of the last two expansions. At the time it felt like absolute chaos, but comparing it to organising the downstairs rotation on Valiona & Theralion or marking the invisible adds on Durumu or coordinating add death times on Animus it simply doesn't stand up at all.

Mechanics overall are more punishing, fights are more complex and there's fewer gimme bosses that any good guild rolls over in a few pulls, largely because everything has a heroic mode that is tuned only for good players, and Blizzard knows players have gotten a lot better over the years. You have to concentrate every second of the fight on the harder bosses, you don't just organise things correctly, assign the right jobs to the right people and try not to make a mistake for 10 minutes. Fights are far more unpredictable and have a lot more going on in them. I'm a better player than I was five years ago and so are the people I raid with. We also know the game better and solve problems much faster. To counter that, fights are simply far more demanding, even if the game itself has been streamlined a lot and every class and spec is capable of doing a lot more.

[Aleksej89]

Gear based resistance should die and stay dead.

[blackyfrost]

people don't want to do anything to get epics, that's why they do LFR

that's also why every fight is being reduced to a dps race

you can't be creative and keep the majority happy anymore

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

It was a pain in the ass in classic and tbc, and it would be a pain in the ass nowadays too.

[HardCoder]

While I believe that having to farm gear mats was annoying and slowed progression and having to do it all again when a raid member left and someone new took his place was tedious; it also added to the building of community and the cohesiveness of the guild and made players work together to help gear up their teammates. And more importantly, it gave the group something to strive for together that would give them an edge as a reward for their dedication week after week.

What raiders often proudly call "community" is a kind of exclusion that is the reason that the raiding community is dying.