June 2 News

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Cameron Sorden strikes again, this time musing about how to Retain Customers. This is something every MMO struggles with, and at this point, it's an interesting topic, There are several shiny new MMO's out there, and anything "new" in WoW is likely a couple of months off (most folks suspect last quarter of '08 for WotLK).

Amanda Dean takes a look at Arena Rating, and how it effects you and your team...and what can be done about it.

Matt Low takes a look at the PvP'ing Priest, and offers some suggestions and tips on how to better acclimate yourself that environment. If PvP's not your thing, Eliah Hecht has a nice article on gearing up your PvE Priest to tackle Karazhan and beyond.

One of the features I'm fast becoming fond of over at WoWInsider is the "Ask a Lore Nerd" questions. There are some really great questions in this installment, and if you are a bit of a lore geek like me, these series of articles are a great read.

Something I've been wondering about lately is a good question that is asked: Is It Too Much? It refers to hybrids, and the synergy they bring, though also wanders along synergy in general. Right now, there are some very hard and fast synergistic groups, and some folks that can't even really compete without some level of synergy (Hello WF to melee...). This can make life as an RL really hard, especially when making up a raid. There are a lot of ramifications of either reducing or increasing synergy to consider, as it's already a weighty subject.

A Tale For Guild Leaders, is a fictional work by Cathode. It's a good story, and brings about some good followup posts as well.

Oh, and Happy June! Don't forget to head over to Nagrand and have a chat with Gezhe so you can get your green gems for the month...

Oh lord, group makeup discussions. They often make my head spin in our raids, and it doesn't help we often run with a fairly "weird" composition. It gets pretty hard trying to make it all work, and one of the comments is completely correct: there's usually no perfect, awesome jig-saw solution. *sigh*

Nice comment though, Mirajj I've been trying to lobby for a GoA group (resto-feral-2x hunter-spare, usually mage) for a while now, but have yet to see it in action for us The RL's addicted to his +crit I think Keeps yanking the feral into the melee group, usually bumping a warrior for it (warrior without WF. *sigh*).

Does anybody know of a EJ-style compendium for group makeups that I can link to the RL? Sorta lay down the law, like "make this group - brief blurb why" instead of discussions like these about the merits of various hybrids. Don't get me wrong, I wrote up a pages long discussion on hybrids in the officer forum and get the sense nobody really looked at it; they might respond better to an "established" source like EJ, or a post that tells them what to do without going in depth into why, I don't know.

It took another hunter and I forever to finally convince RL's that Hunters can benefit from some group synergy over just being tossed "wherever" and usually ending up as the last floater in a 4 healer group. Sadly, it's been my experience that most folks just won't consider anything but "their" party when considering synergies.

Gurgthock started a post on the EJ forums to discuss group synergies and inviting ideas on how to minimize their effect on raid composition (the goal being to discourage raid stacking).

http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t26275-consoli..._vulnerability/

Some of the driving forces at work in high end raids, not that every raid does this to an extreme, but the forces exist and have affects:

Warlocks: Given equal gear and skill, add more raid DPS than any ranged class. Might seem obvious for the first three warlocks you add, that all drop curses to buff the raid (CoS, CoR, and CoE). However, it is interesting to note that even after the first three, the fourth warlock and beyond all get to use damage curses, and should out-dps mages at the same gear and skill levels, so there is no real reason to stop adding warlocks in favor of mages, even after three.

Shaman: Bloodlusts and more bloodlusts. Enhancement shaman is an obvious requirement for any melee group, adding ridiculous amounts of raid DPS by buffing the other four in their group. Bloodlust rotations add a lot of DPS as well though, in addition to the usefulness of totems being spread around the raid.

Add chain heal to that list, in addition to the prevelance of raid-wide damage going out in encounters where you can stack folks into groups, and you see another good reason to stack shamans.

One interesting side-note on the shaman stacking that exists is that some of it is a result of encounter make-up. If TBC raids didn't have as much raid-wide damage going around, or required a lot more spreading out, extra resto shamans would be in less demand, unless simply for totems/bloodlust. Gurgthock himself points to resto shaman as the worst healers in the game on single targets, in situations where chain heal won't be effective.

Melee Groups and the Death Knight: Note that if things don't change in WotLK, and assuming the DK needs windfury totem to be effective, and assuming he benefits greatly from attack power, there is a very real possibility that raids in WotLK might look to run two enhancement shaman as a matter of course. As is, with enh-shaman + arms warrior + ret paladin + rogue + rogue groups running around, you often have a 3rd rogue or bear in a secondary melee group. Add DK, and there is a pretty st rong driving force behind wanting not just a shaman in melee group number 2, but an enhancement shaman for the extra buffs he provides.

Thank you for this link! It's interesting discussion; I wish we had the class compositions for the groups getting tossed around. Especially in terms of # of shammies, but I'm sure you've all heard me complain quasi-bitterly about that enough in various threads



I'm not sure I agree, and for one simple reason: mage-ecute. It's substantial, especially on bosses with a tough phase near the end of their health that you want to burn through (mind you, these are becoming a rare breed). Brutallus specifically, often held up as guilty of the worst raid stacking, often has 3-4 mages because of mage-ecute, to the point where it seems to be a jump ball for warlocks versus mages in terms of the meters.

I'd still argue that warlocks have a slight edge, besides the affliction lock, but I don't think it's crippling, and it's definitely not imbalanced enough to offset skill differences between players.



Yeah, the TBC raids cater extremely well to chain heal for the most part. I do think that with Wrath blizzard is approaching things from their usual angle, namely instead of nerfing shamans they buff the other healers. Preliminary talents for other healers include a few interesting looking AoE heals for druids and priests. Poor paladins I do think this is the best way to accomplish balance, and they've had much success with it (see Shadow priests pre vs post BC, boomkin, most hybrids that have received cool synergies, etc.)

The only way I can see encounter design dictating a move away from raid healing with shaman healers is if we were required to spread out vastly, a la Archimonde, more often. Unfortunately, this would adversely affect CoH, PoM and the new hypothetical druid-AE heal before chain heal begins to suffer, so all healers would be more-or-less reduced to single target healing. Good for paladins, not good for anyone else, including but not limited to shamans. So I wouldn't count on many encounters being designed to nerf chain heal by reducing its ability to bounce around, personally.



Barring the particular need for a second enhancement shaman, I don't see running with two melee groups as necessarily a bad thing. Thinking out loud,

Melee - Rogues, Warriors, DK, Some Druids, Some Shamans, Some Paladins
Ranged - Hunters, Mages, Warlocks, Some Druids, Some Shamans, Some Priests

Hunters can roll both ways, too, in terms of group comp. Also, in general the ranged synergies are pretty bad so the ranged that don't get an "uber group" don't suffer overtly. So with your standard 15 DPS, and up to three hunters, two melee groups give anywhere from 7-10 melee and 5-8 ranged.

Ranged has had their day in the sun since the beginning of WoW, and giving melee the edge makes a certain amount of sense. How long has it been that you bring ~6 "pure" nukers between Mages and Warlocks, and yet cap out at ~3 "pure" - two rogues and a warrior, usually - melee? Wrath offers reroll opportunities, and is probably the ideal time to do such a paradigm shift in terms of which classes are most in demand for PvE endgame.

I kind of took it as a consensus around warlock vs mage DPS in raid encounters, not on experience.

If I look at my experience, we have one rogue and one mage that essentially blow the rest of our raid away on a regular basis. Higler (of many ZG deaths, as many Terenas lurkers know), regularly sits around 1580-1700 DPS on tier 6 encounters, and was at 1581 for a Lurker Below kill, while chain sheeping an add the whole fight, which is higher than most of our raid by about 100-200 dps (consistently).

Of course, by tradition as much as anything, we give preferential treatment to our mages in terms of group composition, though. Despite the fact that, in theory, a destruction warlock benefits as much or more than a mage from a Shadowpriest (due to DPS gained from not wasting globals on life tap), if we only run one SP (which is more often than not), it goes into this group: SP, elemental shaman, mage, mage, moonkin/mage.

Higler being a miracle worker influences that some though. Hitting his dps by a percentage is much worse than hitting a lot of our other ranged players' dps by the same percentage, in terms of raid DPS.

Oh, it's not personal experience for myself, either. Our mage/warlock comparison usually goes Warlock, Mage, Warlock, Warlock, Mage, Mage, which is roughly in the order of gear (besides the affliction warlock beating two mages. )

I was referring more to the in-depth WWS analysis of top-end Brutallus kills. I'm personally of the opinion that the Mage vs Warlock "consensus" thing is blown completely out of proportion, and offered anecdotal evidence as to why mages might sometimes be desirable. I seem to be in the minority though Maybe because I've played both, with relatively the same amount of success. I just find my warlock much more enjoyable

It all comes down to player skill, as you alluded to, beyond the first two required warlocks (one of them being utility and not DPS, anyways, in affliction).



Yeah when building caster groups we usually go by the player, not the class, for the same reason.

Edit: It just occurred to me, it's rather interesting that due to the nature of Windfury, we do the opposite when building melee groups. We would place a completely terrible ret paladin in the melee group before a ridiculously good dagger rogue, for example. Strange!

You mention melee synergy, and I agree, its the reverse sometimes. It made me wonder about healer synergy. Honestly, we pretty much screw our healers out of any.

As a raid, we have tended to focus on high DPS, and spread healers around however will best boost raid DPS except on a very, very small number of fights where it is all about healing...ok, the only exception for us is Najentus, where DPS is fairly irrelevant (you can either stabalize the raid after a tidal shield, or not - if you can, you can do it nearly forever).

Last night we had a strange raid make-up for vashj + gorefiend (first kill! still excited), particularly with me spec'd holy instead of my usual prot, and we had 5 healadins, one resto shaman, one tree. Group 5 was 4 paladins and one unlucky soul stuck there and destined to get no buffs. Enjoy group 5, paladins =)

Say hi to Mirajj for me!

</troll>

Congratulations on Teron! It's pretty epic the first few times, huh? Bloodboil's a lot of fun too!

Yeah I think the general consensus is DPS get synergies, healers don't unless it's something intense like Naj'entus or Twins. We usually stick the five miscellaneous healers in a group together, have one resto buffing casters and one tree in the tank group.

I think this is the correct strategy. Healers, if they're skilled, don't really need synergies to perform their tasks well. This is especially true since the regen buff. About the only benefit would be wrath of air and really that's much better on the casters anyway.

You get overgeared DPS (who know what they're doing) and you can completely trivialize some encounters (Kael, Kaz'rogal, Gruul, actually most encounters just because there's less time to make mistakes).

You get overgeared tanking and you can trivialize certain gib fights (Tidewalker, Prince)

You get way overgeared healers and you can trivialize nothing. Healers gear doesn't tend to make or break fights. All the healers have had MP5 buffs over when BT and Hyjal were released (especially priests and druids, but others have received buffs as well). I can't speak to Sunwell, but it just seems like healers don't need raid synergies. What synergies even exist? Shadow priests? We don't even use innervates. Wrath of air? small and not signifiacnt compared with DPS. Moonkin aura? lol.

Concentration aura is about the only buff that healers can use, and that can be accomodated rather easily since a healing pally is usually not necessary in any one group anyway.

Totally true. DPS is the name of the game and it's what a raid should always synergize for. Higher DPS is better healing anyway; the shorter the encounter lasts, the more healpower healers can pump out in a shorter amount of time without running out of mana (or even worry about conserving any). It has an exponential effect.

As an extreme hypothetical, if raid DPS was high enough such that any boss enounter was 2 minutes or less, a Priest could just spam Flash Heal constantly without having to worry about overheal, etc. Ok, silly, but you get my point.

If you want bear mounts, or to get out of Kara in 90 minutes or less, you want DPS DPS DPS. Take only as much healing as you need minimum. The only factor in that is that the better skilled and geared your healers are, the less you need to bring to any raid - which also boosts DPS, which makes healing easier, which...

-Bolty

We got our first Brutallus kill this week. He hits hard. Very very hard. If you're familiar with Gurtogg Bloodboil, imagine Fel Rage for 6 minutes straight. I'm spending at least a third of the fight spamming Greater Heal 7.

Because the DPS is stretching themselves to the limit to beat his enrage timer (we hit the enrage when he was at 2% health on our kill, and managed to finish him off before he one-shot his way through the raid), most of the healers get absolutely nothing in terms of synergy support (not even a resto druid). The end result was that the other holy priest and the main tank healing paladin were going OOM by the end of the fight (I had fewer problems only due to the Avatar 2pc bonus and the Blue Dragon card). The priest had to get an innervate, and we had to hot swap a shaman mid-fight for mana tide.

The caveat to Bolty's statement that more DPS is always better is that your healing team has to keep that DPS alive. If players die early, you've negated the benefit of sacrificing healers and healer synergies for DPS.

As for what synergies help healers: Concentration Aura in some fights. After that, its mostly mana (mana spring, mana tide, vampiric touch). Bonuses to healing from synergies are usually a pretty small proportion of the overall healing, and simply switching to a higher rank of spell is the most frequent way of increasing heal through-put.

My raid leader is usually receptive to giving healers support when they feel they need it. In return, I try not to ask for a resto shaman or shadow priest unless I think its essential.

Our DPS does like to have frequent arguments about who should go where though. One of our Shadow Priests wants to be in a group where most of the other members have Drums of Battle. We had a long discussion about the place to put the Ret Paladin for Brutallus. Does he go in the Windfury group, or does the third rogue? (The Ret Paladin lost that day).

Chris

June 8 News

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swirly starts up a nice Pally Spreadsheet that he's working on, looking at the various values of gear. The thread itself goes in several good directions, and is filled with excellent advice and numbers for the pallies out there.

The Blizz Podcast went live on it's raids and dungeons version this time. There is some very good news in there, and some interesting news as well. Blizz apparently quite likes the Badge of Justice system, and is looking to expand on it for WotLK. I must admit, having been too often on the wrong side of the RNG, I like this change.

June 10 News

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We open up with some good news from the Lurkers Alliance on Stormrage. They put Kael'Thas down last night.

Do manners matter in a game? Is sportsmanship expected? Who determines the baseline for 'fair' in a game? Good questions, indeed.

Koraa posts (in a rather humorous manner) some pretty big WotLK news for Shaman. Their totems will be switching to Physical, making them, in the very least, castable while silenced.

Hi,


Buzzard doesn't make us line up and 'good game' each other, but they did give us a 'friends' and 'ignore' list.

--Pete

June 11 News

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That's right, Eyonix has stated that Arena Season 4 will be starting on June 24, 2008. This season brings about some interesting changes, including among them a personal and team rating reset.

A fun site to play with, this simulates the random loot aspect of Kil'Jaeden and Illidan. I decided to see what a years worth of farming (You can refresh the page to simulate a week/lock) would get me. I ended up with 5 MH Warglaives, 4 Thori'dal's, and 0 OH Warglaives. I also noted that (as a hunter, it interests me) Illidan's bow dropped about once every other month, and (as it looks cool, and tanks would want it) Illidan's shield dropped twice only. Back to back weeks, as well. I did, finally, get an OH Warglaive, 3 weeks into the "new year".

I got one of each in less than three months.

Hah, got the OH Warglaive on my first try. I'll trade you a Thori'dal for it.

I was seeing bulwarks and black bows drop like candy, to the point that every warrior, paladin, and most of the shamans in my guild would be waving one around in three months.

June 17 News

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First and foremost, going back a bit, MEAT lets us know that the Diablo II Ladders are resetting. For a game that is nearly 10 years old, that's some pretty impressive news. But not everyone is happy about it. Indeed, even with reason. Head on over to MEAT's post to discuss it.

WoW's minimap has undergone a lot of changes in the years it's been used. Personally, I'm of the mind that the current version is quite handy, and I like it. I'm finding quests that I had missed before, and it's cleared some room off the hotbars with all the different types of tracking available at the map itself. But is it too much? Or not enough? Does it spoon feed too much to players, or are there still things that you have to find out by being an Explorer type?

Eyonix welcomes a new Community Manager to the forums, Zarhym. Well...he's got a really cool avatar, which is likely some NPC Death Knight.

As the expansion approaches, we were all prepared for Illidan. But, are you ready for Level 80?

One topic of interesting debate is the inability to transfer from a PvE server to a PvP one. That..may be changing.

EDIT: And an old feature makes it's new return!

Regarding Death Knights and professions, do you think that we'll start at 1 and have to gather or buy linen/light leather/copper/low level greens/herbs, like everyone else? (We being the Death Knights, of course)

In the same vein, what will leveling, say, leatherworking, from 1 to 376+ be like after the expansion hits? I understand that the last few levels to 375 are pretty brutal at the moment.

What was it like getting professions to 301+ when The Burning Crusade hit? Did Blizzard make it easy for players?

Thanks!

I suspect that DK's will be given professions at 275 to avoid a wave of pseudo-Goth pink-pony-tailed Gnomes infesting the low-level zones. I also think there will be recipes early on that jumpstart lagging skills, allowing a quick dodge past the 350-375 range. Bliz did make catching up in TBC easier by providing easy access to Master trainers (especially for Enchanters).

In any case, since DK's are by definition at least the second character on an account, we've got some time to save up mats for profession sprints in WotLK.

My priest resides on Aman'Thul, one of the PVE servers with free transfers to Thaurissan. *Lots* of people have made the jump including the top two guilds on the server. Combined with the transfer from Nagrand, Thaurissan went from a server where the best Alliance guild had killed Gruul to one where they are 4 guilds working on M'uru.

Apparently Alliance were so hard to find on Thaurissan pre-transfer that Horde were calling them "rare spawns", and there were "screenshot or it didn't happen" demands every time someone reported seeing one.

As a side-effect of all the moves, I'm now in the number 1 ranked guild on Aman'Thul. To quote Homer Simpson: "De-fault. The two best words in the English language."

I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts about life on a PvP server after all this time on a PvE server, after you've been there a few weeks. Was it what you expected, etc etc etc.

-Bolty

My priest is still on Aman'Thul. Several people in my guild shifted alts over to Thaurissan, but my alts are on Malygos which wasn't eligible for the free transfers.

I'm pretty much a carebear at heart, although I do a mid-40s warrior on PVP server somewhere - haven't played him in months. Lake Wintergrasp sounds like my kind of world PVP. If Blizzard is smart, they'll make the zone similar to Quel'Danas - small area, but stuffed with daily quests to give people a reason to go there.

June 18 News

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Patch 2.4.3 is live on the Test Realms today. It's got several very interesting changes in it. Chief among them:

-Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.

-When a stun wears off, the creature that was stunned will prefer the last target with the highest threat, versus the current target.

-The Eredar Twins will now award the same items regardless of which order they are killed in.

-The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds, and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds.

Head on over to Pesmerga's Thread to check out the discussion on it.

June 24 News

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Mike Schramm asks if WoW is getting or has gotten Too Easy. There is a lot of unbased whining about this topic, but when you boil it down and look at it as a whole, the question is a good one. I've been playing WoW a long time, and no one would mistake it for the game I started playing, back on Feb 11, 2005 (Man, has it been that long? Account info ftw...) but is it a WORSE game, an easier one, a dumber one? I think that one of those three is accurate, and I think that's not really a bad thing. The game, inarguably, easier. But it's easier where it needs to be. I started out as a complete and total MMO n00b, and I made some pretty big mistakes. I missed a lot of things, I did things the hardest way possible, etc. I hated herbing because even with the minimap dots, I had trouble seeing several of the plants. I missed a lot of quests that I'm finding as I slowly alt my way through thanks to some of the new minimap features as well. Now, one could say that the end game is easier, that it's been dumbed down and made accessible to the slavering hordes. I see that as somewhat of a good thing, too. I'm all about awarding those who have the time and skill to play in the top end guilds. I would have been in one of those top end guilds, but my schedule sank that. But I also feel that things should be 'nerfed' over time so that more folks can see it. That's what this game is all about in the end, really. Seeing all you can of it. So, I don't think that the game is "too easy", you don't see tons and tons of folks putting Kil'Jaeden into the ground, after all, But with their continual tweaking of several aspects, you can see where Blizz is making the game better overall.

My biggest complaint is the removal of the elite zones 1-58 (Stromgarde in Arathi, Vilebranch in Hinterlands etc). It opens up quests for solo play but it removes the most important part of WoW, in my opinion - small group content. Those areas did not need five people like an instance. Three would suffice if you were of level. They provided a somewhat challenging task that required you to branch out, stop following your leveling guide and gather a group together.

Oh, also, zones need more +5 elite wandering mobs. A sense of danger would be nice in the game that coddles you an almost embarrassing amount.

I agree the early part of the game (pre-Outlands) has gotten easier, most days I'd say it's for the better. The leveling boost was a bit overboard, as it ensured I get to see less content before moving on to the next zone. With the lowered requirements for Riding, my alts will be moving to the next zone a lot sooner at +60% speed.

I would half-heartedly agree with ima_nerd about the removal of elite zones. Would be nice to have more areas to level in tandem with my g/f's warrior or shaman & these areas were a bit too tough for a duo. Now is fine too, instead of being challenged by 1 elite mob at a time, we're instead challenged by normal mobs that spawn constantly. I'd want more wandering elites in all areas as well, silver or otherwise. I think they are a better way to disseminate more better-quality items into our inventories rather than the recent flood of greens from normal mobs.

I think the flaw with the expansion was not that it was too easy or hard but that they HAD to nerf content. The progression was not linear nor were most attunements pugable. Magtheridon was a much harder fight than anything other than Kael and Vashj in the tier 5 raids. Kael and Vashj are much harder than most of the fights in the tier 6 raids, even Archimonde. The non linear raid progression lead to guilds falling apart because they would progress smoothly then get STUCK, HARD. And the worst part about these spots you got stuck on, was that before Blizzard started removing the required attunements you *HAD* to do them to move on making these raid stops even more frustrating for most guilds. To contrast pre expansion the raid progression was more linear, one boss was (more or less) a little harder than the one before it. ALSO, no attunement required anything nastier than a trip through BRD, UBRS or to the auction house. Attunement is a great way to see if that new applicant is lazy or willing to put some effort into their character.

Additionally it looks like in WOTLK they are removing certain things like crushing blows and what not. I for one look at that and sneer because a crushing blow was the great equalizer between plate and fur. It is also a great way to measure if your tank is good or merely holding aggro.

A game needs challenge to stay interesting. By removing the amount of skill it takes to play a class and adding the ability for even casual players to see the end game, I think Blizzard is really shooting themselves in the foot (long term) with WOTLK. People will quickly "master" their class and see all there is to see in the game, then move on.

To be honest, that all depends on your server and whether you're in a guild or no. For the rest of us who just can't get access to a Party In A Can™, those elite areas were a huge levelling block. It's also no coincidence that all those blocks occur at pretty much the same level...

I remember struggling for weeks to get through the Stromgarde after finishing all the solo quests. Arathi was my alternate choice, having started the 30-40 grind in Desolace (With it's annoying centaur reputation system that's also a requirement to levelling and thus also a severe block), and once all you have left in Arathi is the Stromgarde line, you're either forced to pick up low-return green quests elsewhere or just try and power your way through.

I'm not sad to see the elite zones go. If I were in a guild, they would at least be doable, but sitting on your kiester trying to scrape together a group for Stromgarde (And then getting ganked repeatedly by a level 50+ Alliance party that had no business whatsoever there aside from, naturally, ganking lower-levelled Horde parties), to make meagre progress through one of a dozen sequential quests ("Thanks for doing that for me in Stromgarde, now here's another quest that involves you going back in there, good luck finding another party after the ad-hoc group you spent hours forming decided to call it a night."), before having to do it all again tomorrow, is just not fun.

I probably spent longer in Arathi than I did anywhere else before hitting the level cap. There were other zones, but, well, when you've got a bunch of unfinished quests in one zone, you really don't want to move on until they're resolved. And then I moved on from Arathi to Hinterlands, where the whole bloody process is copied pretty much ad verbatim.

It was in the Hinterlands where my patience finally snapped: The second any questline in any zone led me towards the elite subzones, I'd abandon it. No questions asked. Ditto for anything involving a 5-man that I would easily level past by just doing solo quests.

Group content is fine while there's groups to actually do it, but when you're in a suitably high-levelled zone such as Silithus only to see, maybe, two or three other names in /chatlist 1 and you have a few quests that demand a full and balanced group, you realise what a pain it is. Thankfully, this is something TBC got right; granted, most major questlines cap things off with a few group quests, but there's always an alternative to help you level on up to the next zone.

Hi,


Maybe, maybe not. People will leave if they get bored, true, but they will also leave if they get frustrated. Hard core gamers are usually the first to jump onto a new game, and the first to run through new content. To make end game content hard enough to slow down the hard core gamers is to make it too frustrating hard for the casual players. And there are a *lot* more casual gamers than hard core. What it looks like, to me, is that Blizzard is trying to hold the casual player by reducing the (already low) player skill requirement and hold the hard core players by adding end game content. By introducing the new content at a high difficulty, they make it interesting to the hard core players who hit it first. About the time those players are 'done' with that content, Blizzard nerfs it so the casuals can play it. Seems to be working.

What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.

--Pete

You can do most any instance with three people as it is. I almost never do instances with a full five unless it's at 70 or I think it's going to be difficult. Which it never is.

I don't think we really disagree fully if at all. I'm all for early content to be tank and spank easy. But as you move along things should get more and more complicated, not all at once like they have done in TBC ala Mags Vasj and Kael. The casual guilds will still have their content to work through but they won't hit brick walls they will just take longer and longer to kill a boss but it will still feel like "progression". What we have now is the "hard core" gamers get semi stuck on fights like the current Vasj/Kael cockblocks, get them down, then fly through content again. Every guild on my server (pre attunement removal) had the first 2 bosss in MH down their first night there. A few had the first 3. This is often after a month or more of wiping on Vashj and Kael. Obviously this is not a linear progression of boss difficulty which causes progression to quickly start and stop. IMO this puts more strain on a guild than simply slowing down as progressivly harder fights would be. Again I use the example of the pre BC raids, for the most part the fights were pretty linear in difficulty. There were still some easy and/or gimmick fights, but by and large one boss was just a bit harder than the one before it. Not everyone saw Naxx pre BC but you can (and I have) gone back to see it now you just need like minded people to take with you.

Quick edit: The cockblocks also cause people to jump guilds, causing guilds to slow down even MORE in their progression. So not only do they cause the same frustration of not being able to see further content, they exacerbate it by forcing guilds to bring new people in before they can move beyond them. Before the attunement change this could halt a guild's progression permanently as new people needed to do the difficult attunement fights before they could attend high end raids. This was a terrible design and probably the dumbest thing Blizz has yet done in wow.

Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but I'd like to see that too. Keep all the changes to talents and balance and content, but roll back the XP acceleration. Maybe top out at 60 so there's some incentive to poke around the large amounts of formerly top-end content.

On the other hand, to get the true experience, you'd have to drop half the flightpoints, move the auction houses back to SW/Org to provide a proper level of city lag, and eliminate all the meeting stones. Add more loot lag and server hiccups, and season to taste.

Oh, and make all the mobs outside the Deadmines elites.

In any case, I think you can still get some of the WoW experience now, you'll just have to twist some arms to get a group to level with you (raises arm). The levels go by faster, but the big difference is not being forced to do most or all of the zones at your level. You can still see all the content, you just are usually a bit overleveled for the area. And there's no shortage of money anymore.

You did miss the discovery phase when everyone was charging around finding things out, and the older raid instances just won't happen for you (in the style they were intended, anyway). I guess it's up to you if that's a deal-breaker.

I'm not sure how much i'd like to have things back the way they were early on where you either needed 40 people to run a dungeon or content was completely trivialized by the zerg fest.

What I would like to see is the Heroic versions expanded to a lot of the earlier dungeons so that even at 70 you could go back and experience a dungeon you may have missed before, or that you could re-experience it with added challanges. As it is most of the "leveling" dungeons are trivialized by so many things including Level/gear/group makeup/etc that there really is no way to do a dungeon "at level". There are so many well designed lowbie dungeons that i would love to go through with actual challange. I wouldn't mind seeing pre tBC raids revamped so that there are 10 man 70 and 80 versions so the people that missed out on MC-Naxx could experience that content in a decent way and for it not to go to waste.

When heroic instances were first announced thats what I hoped they were going to be. Thankfully Naxx is being re-released for wrath, since almost no one got to experience that. Hopefully they make some heroic versions of old instances rather than the letdown that are the current heroics.

I don't get this comment. The original versions of the heroics, running them in the greens and blues that people had at the time, were quite a challenge. But they had to be nerfed because some of the mechanics were just stupid. At that level of gear, pre 2.1, you needed certain group compositions to run heroic Shattered Halls (considered the hardest of them all). Heroic Arcatraz's end-boss couldn't be done with just one healer unless you got very lucky with his choices of mind flays. And there were other stupid things like Underbog Colossi literally one-shotting a tank.

Yeah, heroics now are easy. They've been nerfed, and the gear people have trivilizes them. Nowadays I run around with +2550 healing, and when I was first running heroics, I had about +1000 healing. That kind of stuff has impact.

"Easy" and "hard" are very relative. Blizzard's learned a lot from TBC, and yes the game is getting more "casual" as we go, but when TBC first came out the end-game was pretty damn hardcore. Ask any guild that ran pre-nerf Magtheridon and Gruul what it was like back then, as hardcore raiders were quitting the game in droves because it was so stupidly hard it wasn't worth it.

BTW, nice seeing STSIs back again

-Bolty

It's easy to underestimate gear-flation. It used to be a rule of thumb that a tank was ready for a heroic at 10-11k armor and life. My warrior now easily exceeds that in DPS gear and has mostly welfare gear (the warrior doesn't really raid).

Gearing has scaled to the point that current heroics are virtually obsolete.

The first heroics were quite hard. When a single mob can take your tank from full to dead inside the cast time of a single heal and the pull has two of them (Underbog, just before the first boss) completing a heroic run was something to be proud of - though that satisfaction was about all you got since the badge selection was limited and most drops were useless even then. They've since been nerfed, gear has inflated wildly and people are more experienced with the instances so they're not the challenge they once were.

I'm hoping the next expansion's version will tier the heroics so that the 5-man game keeps up a bit better - not to the point of overtaking raid drops but enough that instance drops are superior for instance use to PVP items and enough that I can take my raid gear to them and still need to pay attention.

I said nothing of the dificulty of the instances, I remember how hard they were (and I was fine with it). I just didn't like that the heroics were only the new instances. I got my fill of the new instances running them for gear once, I had no desire to do it a second time on the same toon. Whatever the difficulty level is, I want heroic SFK, deadmines, etc. Sure I can run them now with alts, but I think it would be fun to see heroic versions so they are a challenge.

You can't call them leveling blocks when the real problem is just lack of quests. You might as well be blaming SM for having problems leveling 30-40. It wasn't soloable and took gathering four other people of certain role-fillers to succeed. The fact of the matter is that there was a serious quest shortage in the old world. Blizzard took elite content and made it normal to cheese some "new" solo content. Myself and a friend are leveling new characters and would love to efficiently play together but with everything being nonelite now, it simply is a waste of time to group and do quests.

Any dearth of old world quests was completely solved (and then some) by the increase in quest experience gained.

I only hit about half the zones while going 1-60 recently, and didn't even do much instancing for experience at all.

In fact, I even skipped any quests that looked like too much running around, because leveling is so fast and easy now that you can just do the quick-hit quests in each zone you go to and you still end up skipping a lot of zones.

Converting the elites to non-elites was just overkill.

I don't see the conversion of the elites as an addition to the larger quest experience but a response to it. Like you say with the added quest experience you can pretty much soar through the 1-60 content. If they left the elite quests as is nobody would ever do them anymore. by lowering them to non elite it just makes them viable leveling quests as opposed to content gauranteed to be skipped.

I agree with that. On my priest I actually jotted up to the top Jintha'alor to complete my Mallet of zul'farak at the appropriate level, thanks to the mobs being non-elite, even though I skipped the rest of the Hinterlands altogether.

It's not guaranteed to be skipped. I would do it as a break from solo leveling, as would other people. They could make the quests have blue, or at least respectable green, rewards to make it enticing like an instance. Instances are no longer efficient for leveling but the rewards are good enough to make it worth it.

But by that reasoning, you have solo quests for solo levelling, and instances for group play and rewards. Sometimes, putting together a elite zone party together takes more effort than putting together a party for the local instance, and when you've actually got your group together it's awfully prone to interference (especially on PvP realms), which is a pretty big draw for instances. Instead of, say, doing Stromgarde, you could do Uldaman or pretty much any wing of the Scarlet Monastery, with the prospect of even better loot than the subzones.