just wanna add my 2 cents that i love this fight and blizz should keep doing creative things like it. i always hope that i get shrunk and yell colors.
I mean in p1 you can just outheal someone dropping his bomb in raid, you can take a buster cannon to the face if you are full hp and even fucking up the bots doesn't wipe you. Trampling a shrunk player isn't lethal either.
The concept of the encounter is something fresh and engaging, but what they made out of it is a disappointment.
Your problem is that you are working off exclusively your own experience, and applying a black-and-white approach to boot. Yes, it worked for you. That does not make it the best approach for the general case, and your results aren't directly applicable to others.
Taking on a challenge you're not ready for and failing is likely to make the phobia worse.
No, you shouldn't simply take the easy way out for every challenge, but trying to take them all on head-first isn't wise, either. That's why you absolutely need to get professional help with any serious phobias, so you can figure out which challenges to take and when, and to have a safety net if it doesn't work.
If you think that the best approach for the majority of sufferers is to let them believe there is no way to control their anxiety I have absolutely no words for you.
Also kindly stop trying to dismiss my own experience and trying to educate me on how social anxiety works. It's ignorance of astronomical levels.
Getting wildly off topic anyway so keeping it back to WoW:
But the thing is it's only heroic and beyond that people that struggle with this will notice and even then there are alternatives (even if they aren't quite as effective). Honestly it's great that people empathise with these players but that should result in the community supporting those who are inconvenienced by it, not neccessarily getting Blizzard to redesign the encounter.
It's the combination that makes it great, not a single mechanic.
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I prefer a fight with a multitude of punishing but non-lethal mechanics over a fight with a few mechanics that if fucked up by even one person results in a complete raid wipe.
I'd agree with that. Being in a European guild the aptitude of English varies greatly, they all know enough English to communicate the colours but you can very much hear specific individuals translating the words in their head rather than speaking it more naturally which often results in more seconds consumed during the comms. That's not a dig at them, I'd have to be a complete asshole to hold it against them, but going into Mythic mode it's something to at least consider to make sure we're saving extra second we can. In those cases we might experiment with macros and stuff just to make sure we're absolutely nailing it.
I sort of get the frustration: up until a certain point, you were able to do things in a certain way and now you can't.
On the other hand, I'm on the other end of the spectrum. When I need to coordinate and people won't talk I wanna rip their heads off - for example in Mythic+ it happens when we need properly coordinated interrupt sequences in high level Shrine or the absorb in Sethraliss.
This reminds me of this one Challange Mode in WoD. Upper Blackrock Spire. The start packs had mobs that planted a banner that needed to be killed immediately. One of our dpses wasn't killing them and he said it was hard for him to see the banner inbetween the 20 mobs we were pulling. For the rest of us it was easy because we used nameplates addons and the banners were a different color. The player didn't use addons for personal reasons - what do you do? Do you get angry because he's holding you back or get angry Blizz didn't design the fight in a way that doesn't rely on addons.
Anyway - what CAN you do? I know people who don't talk even though they have a working mic and even talk sometimes, but still don't really want to talk. Do you start judging people - if they have a valid reason for not doing it? Like voice issues, sleeping baby, no mic?
At this point, I suppose heroic or above raiding isn't for them and should settle for normal. And if that normal group doesn't have even ONE man capable of talking, then LFR is the only thing left. Gaming industry evolved, not being able to talk during a raid is almost a disability.
As a side note, I wouldn't oppose to changing things to better fit people without a mic - but you have to be aware that it's not just that one fight. Anything above dead casual requires voice nowadays.
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I'm not sure how to tackle this without sounding like a shit person.
I'm a woman too - a woman tank. Apparently being this kind of dominant woman attracts all sort of weirdos. I avoided talking at the start. The moment I started talking, I got so many people hitting on me with ages from 14 to 39. It was insane. I even got to the point where I got harassed and rape threatened because I didn't support a guy's application to my guild (we had been doing pvp together up to the point he decided to apply).
It was pretty hard but in the end I started getting thick skinned and I feel like the community as a whole grew up. I also put a sort of front as a very dominant no bullshit tank, with a very serious voice, so people stopped hitting on me. If someone does, I cut them right off by ignoring them and they stop. The guild I'm in now has very decent people with a great gm and I don't feel threatened at all.
I sometimes pug and I have no fear whatsoever of talking. I've actually made quite a few "guild friends" (guilds I help out when they don't have a tank) - and after their raid ends I sometimes spend some time on chat with them. All of them have been very civilized, no one hit on me. The only comment I've ever received in the past few years was some guy that thought I was a 12-year old boy based on my feminine voice and my role (tank) but that's all.
So... I don't know. I think it's also a mentality thing, once you stop being afraid you'll see it's actually not that bad.
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It's not necessarily lack of empathy. It's just... how should I put this. It's an MMO - at its soul it assumes you like interacting with other people. Or the will to, even though it's hard.
I know that a lot of peple play it as "alone together" but that doesn't mean it's any easier for me to understand. I find the game very boring and, well, bad, without the interaction and I think there are so many awesome single player games out there that I fail to see the appeal. So it's not lack of empathy, but mostly a question I can't have a pertinent answer to: which is "why are you here if you can't deal with people?". I'm obviously excluding people who don't talk because they can't, have voice issues, have babies they can't wake up, have no mic etc.
This just might be a limiting factor on my part, the inability to understand why someone really wants to participate in group activities but fears fully participating.
The cross talking kills it for me. Nothing more annoying then a bunch of people trying to make call outs at the same time. It should be two at a time, but more often. Also the mechanics are annoying a hell for melee. Run in. Run out. Run around bots. Run behind the rock. Get small and stand off in a corner doing nothing. Do anything but the damage you are supposed to be doing.
What's the point of mythic raiding if you can simply outheal failed core mechanics and a few dead people are no biggie? It's one thing to design entry bosses like that, but in BFD this applies to the third and second to last boss and you get this very flat difficulty curve that suddenly shoots up at Jaina.
I mean that's just a mistake by your raid. You need calls from two people to play any number of robots, one who calls every robot but their own and another player who calls the "leader's" colour.
Last edited by Alphatorg; 2019-02-20 at 10:15 AM.
malygos 25 required tons of communication until everyone figured out how the drakes worked, i would argue that heroic 25 putricide took more communication than this boss does, sindragosa and lich king both took immense communication, so no i don't think it's the most 'communication intensive' fight ever seen, not even close, and if you aren't willing to communicate in a TEAM BASED game mode, then you shouldn't be in that game mode.
Yea I've heard about the addon a few times but I'll admit I haven't really looked into it much. I might install it this week and see how it is, if it's as you say then it might be worth recommending to some guildies to at least try and see if it helps. Cheers for the suggestion though.
Spare me that bullshit about 'golden years'. I have done all those fights in a guild where less than half of the people used a microphone. It was just the raid leader yelling, and some other guy singing. That was 10 years ago, microphones were not as common as they are now. I didn't even have a set of headphones, was listening through speakers. Simply because no other game i played before that required any of that, and neither did WoW.
I think it's fairly bad. You have no feeling of progressing the encounter. You do a couple of pulls and then it's "ok, you've seen the whole encounter, you know what to do. Just play heroic mechanics and he's dead". There's no figuring out stuff, no challenging moment, no depth to the encounter - just "don't be retarded", which also makes every death and every wipe feel super annoying and the eventual kill hollow.
Last edited by Alphatorg; 2019-02-20 at 11:38 AM.