4th raid difficulty, Easy Mode, should it happen?

[The Ogdru Jahad]

before ilevel it was gearscore in wrath the only good raiding was in classic and bc

agreed, to an extent. I think the overall quality of raiding has improved, in terms of mechanics, art, raid environments etc. But the atmosphere and raiding community was a lot better back in classic/bc.

[Glorious Leader]

One thing that definitely training has to have is NOT ignoring key mechanics like not pushing that special ability button on Ultraxion or standing in Sha of Fear breath attack.

Absolutely agreed. Otherwise it would just be lfr. What it can't be by the opposite token is so overwhelming and punishing.

[anaxie]

Don't. mention. the NES.

hardest part of the NES was getting the game to turn on

[TBSandt]

I'm sorry but that is the worst thing I have ever heard. I mean LFR is easy mode. It can't get much easier than that. They nerf the older raids so people can catch up easier with lesser gear. It takes less time to learn with less penalty. The reason you don't have pugs like in Wrath is due to LFR. That is basically your pug group just on a more controlled easy to form process.

I don't understand how hard it is for people to understand that. Blizzard has been offering plenty of ways to do the content get gear and make it accessible to all. Why do people want things easier. You might as well ask for a vendor that you access once a day to hand you a piece of gear.

[Deleted]

Super terrific fun time raid challenge mode was something I read from this guy right here. Excellent Idea.

Ye, that could work for super terrific fun time. For heroics, we still need gear.

[Barky]

That's what LFR mode is, genius.

[Glorious Leader]

Ye, that could work for super terrific fun time. For heroics, we still need gear.

I agree but really at that point heroics just become somewhat harder tot normals. The gear inflation isn't a problem in either case. Like everything just shifts down basically.

[Djuntas]

Never. Go back to one mode, ala TBC style. Entry bosses are lootpinata's, EVEN for average guilds. Think lootreaver or that horse boss inn Karazhan.

Im tired off all these modes and shit, keep it simple - Don't split the community inn half or more. TBC worked great, everyone got to raid, just that people who werent serious about it, didn't go the end bosses, atleast not until content was dated. I didn't even step foot into Sunwell, dosen't mean I was unhappy. I worked for my progress inn MH and BT instead.

[Deleted]

Absolutely agreed. Otherwise it would just be lfr. What it can't be by the opposite token is so overwhelming and punishing.

Idd, let's say on Tortos. His breath still kills you if you don't kick turtle but if you successfully dodge falling shit you take minimal damage or no damage at all.

[Ylera]

I'm sorry but that is the worst thing I have ever heard. I mean LFR is easy mode. It can't get much easier than that. They nerf the older raids so people can catch up easier with lesser gear. It takes less time to learn with less penalty. The reason you don't have pugs like in Wrath is due to LFR. That is basically your pug group just on a more controlled easy to form process.

I don't understand how hard it is for people to understand that. Blizzard has been offering plenty of ways to do the content get gear and make it accessible to all. Why do people want things easier. You might as well ask for a vendor that you access once a day to hand you a piece of gear.

the casual player (the majority of the wow playerbase) needs achievable social raiding content. LFR certainly doesn't fit this, and normal modes in their current form don't either (guilds still stuck on horridon/tortos..).

[dokilar]

whatever happened to seeking out, finding and surrounding yourself with other like minded people to join a guild and/or group? you want a "beer league?" well seek out other people interested in that idea and make one.

the guild i have been a part of since vanilla WoW has been the very definition of a "beer league" we get together on a friday or a saturday night, drink some brews kill some stuff and not care about the gear that drops nor the amount of progression that was made. people lookin to join our guild were told from the very beginning, "we dont give a shit about the amount of bosses killed, we dont care that X person is doing twice the dps as Y person, we're just here to have fun". we started our pve adventures in ZG back in vanilla, guess what? we wiped for weeks on just about every boss. we didnt give a shit if we wiped on the bat lady for 2 hours and then left, we were drinking, chatting in vent, having a blast poking fun at each other and at the end of the raid we went and pvp'd. when TBC came out, we wiped for weeks on moroes because our healers couldnt deal with his garrote and our dps wasnt able to kill him. we didnt care, we still raided, drank and gave no fucks about the progression made because regardless of what happened we were having fun, not caring.

this mentality has been applied to every game we have played since. do members come and go? occasionally but there are always more people willing to join the guild/group because we take the initiative to actually seek out like minded players. the only thing that needs to be done, is to allow lfr to be queued for as a 10 man and as a group. or perhaps get rid of the stupid shared lockout and go back to the wrath style of raiding.

[Frost1129]

Why are easier raids the solution to level cap content problems?

I honestly don't think Normal Mode raiding is very hard. But that doesn't matter, I think the problem is that there is not enough to do outside of raiding. Don't get me wrong. I love raiding. I've loved it since I did my first MC raid back in Vanilla, and I still love it today. But so much emphasis is put on it that people normally gravitate towards it, focus on it, and then maybe blizzard does the same and ignores too much of the overall world building. Maybe blizzard should just do a better job with the actual world. Make professions not feel hollow and unrewarding. Expand on the professions, make them interesting again (where is my flying magic carpet panda style?!?)

Make reputation grinds more than just dailies. Less boring solo-play dailies in general. More stuff like warbringers / scouts / the war god. Those are some cool things that can be done by a random group of 2-5 people to kill time and get some decent rewards. (Well, the bags are useless outside of raiding since professions are so. BAD. right now). Bring back actual heroic 5-mans, not the derp that we have today. Make it like with raids. Normal 5man = LFR raid style dungeon difficulty, heroic = normal mode raid difficulty (or lower. lower is cool, just not so low that people can blow through it without actually being engaged. These should engage the player base, reward them for it, and generally feel better than normal mode runs. They currently do not.), challenge modes = heroic tier raid difficulty (or again, lower, but harder than "heroic" 5mans).

Stop gating everything with rep grinds that center around solo play dailies. Jesus I don't know why this was ever put into place. I had more fun farming warbringers / warscouts with my friends competing against other groups for their spawns than I ever did doing dailies all by my self day after day after day for rep.

Anyways, kind of OT, kind of on topic. My bad. But still, another raid difficulty is not the solution

[Temp name]

As someone in an "only" 3/13h (or 12/12n, depends on which character you look at..) guild, I agree with Anaxie..
We don't need any more dificulties, we have LFR for the casuals, the start of normal modes for pugs, the rest of normals / early heroics for non-hardcore guilds, and then the end of heroic modes for the hardcores.

[Odina]

What we do need is normals closer to the tuning your talking about.

No real need to make normal easier and have another harder hardcore as then you need to develop another tier of gear. Having an easier than normal 10 can keep the 3 tiers of gear we have now, not incur more work for the art team to come up with a 4th color set etc etc!

As well normal modes are fine atm...

4 hours of raiding a week, for the second time this tier we were down a player but this time was one of our main healers...9 manned everythign up to and including Ji-kun last night
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/7ci94v8qwvgwrfaq/


We are not a hard core guild we dont even have lei shen dead yet... again 4 hours of raiding as a group total each week and we can 9 man 50% of the current normal mode tier... IT IS NOT HARD people just need to go back to the knowing there class and learning how to play it properly! "normals are hard" ... no there not ... want proof look at the WOL link I posted and tell me how normals are hard when we can 9 man 50% of it in our gear when we were down one of our main healers on a 4 hour a week raid scheduel?

[dokilar]

hardest part of the NES was getting the game to turn on

if the game wouldnt work there was only a few things you needed to do

1) spring the cartridge up and down a few times
2) remove the cartridge and blow in the NES
3) remove the cartridge and blow on the game itself
4) tap the console a few times

they dont make them like they used to

[jax]

I

t most certainly does affect me. I'd like newer players to be asked to gain some level of skill.

But here is where your disconnect from the real world comes into play... your breed: the hard core, study vidoes, play PTR to learn fights before release, spend 40 hours a week on a game type player is vanishing. This type player has never been over 1/2 of 1% of the WoW population and with Exodus closing its doors... the death knell has been heard.

Recruitment never ends.

It does end, it ends when the player base becomes so casual that you dont have people like you interested in raiding any longer... IE: thats what WoW is now. The evolution of the game as with most everything in society is: Instant gratification... not many ever wanted to spend hours playing and farming to raid, and that number is dwindling faster and faster everyday.

I personally try to improve the skillbase among my spec. Take a look at the Paladin forums sometime doubt you miss my thread.

Again with the ego... no one here cares what you do or do not do, they care about what 99% of the player base does... having fun.
Sorry but spending several hours to watch videos, read write ups, take notes, perfect a spell rotation on a dummy, downloading 15 addons, changing settings on those addons, switching specs, switching glyphs, running dailies for coins... etc etc etc... is not what people want to do or consider fun.

You also sound mad, I'm going to prescribe you some Chill-Out

No one is mad, the only way you could make me mad is if I cared what you thought, clearly I dont.
What I am is confused as to why your here in a discussion that has no bearing on your playstyle... saying that you want people to have skill so you can recruit them on the surface is a nice thought.
In reality its just a smoke screen so you can come here and lord over the lessers... You have no ability to recruit out of the 99% because none of them will ever be good enough to do progression raiding. Your recruitment comes from skilled players that do have time to spend hours and hours doing the above... and those few people are disapearing from the game and the genre as a whole.

Your time is past as is the competitive raiding envirment as a whole, keep your heroic modes and be happy Blizz caters to your very very miniscule percentage of players... as for the rest of us, we would like what we ask for. Numbers never lie... you can rant and rail against it all you want but it is what it is... and speaking down to others that arent up to snuff for progression raiding may make you feel important, but it just shows us how impotent you are.

[Glorious Leader]

Idd, let's say on Tortos. His breath still kills you if you don't kick turtle but if you successfully dodge falling shit you take minimal damage or no damage at all.

Yea the turtle shells are key on that one so that mechanic has to stay but dodging shit left right and center should net you no dmg. Megara green crap should be the same.

Theirs a larger point to all of this though. A couple of days ago or like a week ago I read something on the official forums that I found particularly illuminating. I'll post it here again because it's worth noting I think.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...46?page=13#246

Certain types of mechanics tend to be particularly difficult for lower-skilled groups, and they're not usually the mechanics you're looking at.

Target-switching is one of the biggest issues. I'm really not sure why - this one is purely observational. Beginning raiders are very bad at target-switching.

Interrupts are another issue. They're highly timing-sensitive and they require monitoring an additional UI element. Interrupts that involve target-switching are probably the single most difficult single mechanic in the game for them.

They also tend to struggle with keeping up DPS while moving to a much greater extent than more skilled players do. For them, it's not just a matter of the game's restrictions on what you can do while moving; it's a matter of them having trouble doing anything at all while moving because of physical coordination/mental multitasking shortfalls. Navigating the game world - especially if they have to strafe - is itself a relatively complex task.

Multitasking in general is a big issue. Whereas more skilled players have, to one degree or another, automated and 'chunked' common basic tasks like doing their rotation and watching for/moving out of fire, less-skilled players still consciously manage those basic functions. That conscious management leaves less working memory available for higher-order tasks.

And they tend to have trouble with complex priority systems. Simple stimulus-response type mechanics don't tend to be a big issue, but complex mechanics like long target priority chains, conditional responses, etc. are messy and often produce much slower reaction times and lower accuracy.

When a higher-skilled player tries to evaluate encounter difficulty, you'll usually look at things like healing requirements. You might also consider raid coordination requirements (e.g. Mahourai's comment on Empress - it's true, Empress does require a relatively high level of coordination for a normal mode, and that might increase the learning curve by a pull or two). You'll consider the sorts of things that make encounters difficult for good players.

But base healing requirements and coordination don't actually matter that much to less-skilled players. They add about the same amount of difficulty regardless of skill level. (Actually, perversely, phases with high healing requirements often reduce overall encounter difficulty at lower skill levels because they're not usually coupled with other high-difficulty mechanics. Rampages are the easiest part of the Megaera encounter, and Primordius is easier with the zerg strat.)

So basically, you're looking at the wrong things. You're not seeing what makes these encounters so difficult for newer or weaker raiders, and so you're not seeing just how tremendous the jump in difficulty is from t14 to t15 for players who struggled with t14.

It's a bit wordy but it makes total sense. Rampage is the easiest part to heal on megara because well all you do is stand their and heal. In fact we one shot that boss on a weekly basis now because well we pop blood lost on the last rampage and burn through his head so damn fast because everybody is standing still just dpsing raw output right. Whatever they decided to do with normal mode raiding I'd like to see them address those weaknesses in newer or bad raiders. I think the biggest ones are dps on the move. Targeting and interrupts I don't think are that bad but normal raids can faciliate that in alot of ways. How you teach players to handle dps on the move, especially with complex rotations and the boss abilities being thrown at their way I don't know. I honestly don't. I think class design should play a roll in this to. I love the mage spec that gives you dmg when you CS. That's good. That's rewarding. You can bring this to boss design to where an interruptable mechanic is detrimental if it isn't interrupted BUT the faster you switch target and interrupt it you get some better buff from doing it to make the fight easier. Game needs more positive reinforcement. Oh and one other thing they gotta make it clear for players what you should stand in and what you shouldn't. Like I hear it often from players who I try and take to raid that it's not clear why hey should be standing in this green puke on the ground but that other green puke on the ground is bad. Also in general I'd like less crap on the ground. That's not really a difficulty request (although it certainly can be on bosses like dumuru where you can't see shit) it hurts my eyes to have to strain. Man I'm getting old.

[anaxie]

if the game wouldnt work there was only a few things you needed to do

1) spring the cartridge up and down a few times
2) remove the cartridge and blow in the NES
3) remove the cartridge and blow on the game itself
4) tap the console a few times

they dont make them like they used to

If anyone walks into the living room while you are on the last level of mario you tell that asshole to stand still so the game doesn't freeze or you will choke them out with the controller.

You know you did it.

[celinamuna]

Let's make 10 difficulty levels so we can accommodate everyone......
No.

[anaxie]

But here is where your disconnect from the real world comes into play... your breed: the hard core, study vidoes, play PTR to learn fights before release, spend 40 hours a week on a game type player is vanishing. This type player has never been over 1/2 of 1% of the WoW population and with Exodus closing its doors... the death knell has been heard.

Here is your disconnect sir. I havn't installed a PTR or beta since Ulduar. I Raid 20 hours a week MAX and no alt raids. And I'm still one if not the leading theorycrafter on rets in this game.

So why don't you get a reality check heroics and especially normal modes aren't out of reach for any player. If they are it's because the player doesn't care and is happy being drug around like a bag of trash. The best thing for trash and leaches is to get rid of them. Thankfully that happens quite often.

There are plenty of players doing normal mode content who are perfectly happy and don't bitch and moan for a chance to do heroics. There are plenty of players who do LFR content and are happy to not bitch and moan about normal modes.

Full clearing heroic guilds may be the minority. But the avid crybaby forum poster is an even bigger minority. Newsflash some people quit the game for real life commitments even if they are still enjoying the game.

It does end, it ends when the player base becomes so casual that you dont have people like you interested in raiding any longer... IE: thats what WoW is now. The evolution of the game as with most everything in society is: Instant gratification... not many ever wanted to spend hours playing and farming to raid, and that number is dwindling faster and faster everyday.

I know you are trying to prop yourself up like blizzard is catering to you but they aren't MoP has been one of the more difficult expansions just because of Sheer length of content u take in so much at once with minimal gaps inbetween. It's a heroic raiders dream.

Btw I like instant gratification too so I choose to do heroic 25s. It means I will gear faster, Hit BiS, and generally always finiish gearing 100% while you are still begging for LFR drops that are inferior to the previous tier.

Are you aware I will be clearing the entire zone in under 4 hours. That is about the time it takes to clear LFR entirely not counting qued time.

Again with the ego... no one here cares what you do or do not do, they care about what 99% of the player base does... having fun.
Sorry but spending several hours to watch videos, read write ups, take notes, perfect a spell rotation on a dummy, downloading 15 addons, changing settings on those addons, switching specs, switching glyphs, running dailies for coins... etc etc etc... is not what people want to do or consider fun.

Again this illusion world you live in. I'd say 500k Views means quite a few people care about improving their character. You may not and that is totally ok. Btw videos, write ups, notes, dummy training, 15 addons? You don't need that shit for normals, and you most certainly don't need to do all that if you spend 2 minutes looking at dungeon journal and use common sense after seeing the ability in combat if you have any remote concept of what situational awareness is. If you don't or praise not having that I wouldn't brag because awareness of ones surroundings is a fundamental life skill.

No one is mad, the only way you could make me mad is if I cared what you thought, clearly I dont.
What I am is confused as to why your here in a discussion that has no bearing on your playstyle... saying that you want people to have skill so you can recruit them on the surface is a nice thought.
In reality its just a smoke screen so you can come here and lord over the lessers... You have no ability to recruit out of the 99% because none of them will ever be good enough to do progression raiding. Your recruitment comes from skilled players that do have time to spend hours and hours doing the above... and those few people are disapearing from the game and the genre as a whole.

Your time is past as is the competitive raiding envirment as a whole, keep your heroic modes and be happy Blizz caters to your very very miniscule percentage of players... as for the rest of us, we would like what we ask for. Numbers never lie... you can rant and rail against it all you want but it is what it is... and speaking down to others that arent up to snuff for progression raiding may make you feel important, but it just shows us how impotent you are.

As skilled as I am I havn't perfected cloning yet so until then we still need new recruits to learn to play the game. People don't just appear out of thin air. Although sometimes an extra hunter pet could be more useful then your run of the mill auto attacking afk LFR player. There are always a few.

Hours and Hours? 16-20 hours a week no weekends. Not hard to ask really how much time do you watch TV a week, play other video games or hobbies. Exactly.