I don't know what you think my "theories" are, but you are about as far from the truth as anyone could be. The facts are the lich king was to easy and far to many people eat the content without breaking a sweat.... long before ulduar was ready (many before that was even in production).
This thread was about lich king dungeons, heroic dungeons and how easy they are. IT IS NOT ABOUT RAID ZONES, burst damage in pvp or any other nonsense you want to bring up. It is not about the last few weeks, but since lich king released. It is about how easy the content was (by design or mistake I don't care anymore). It was too easy and that is why blizzard is tripping over itself promising how hard ulduar is going to be. You say the difficulty factor of ulduar proves something about how hard everything else is, when you miss the clear example supported by blizzards own words that they promise to make things harded. How can you not see that? Blizzard went overboard with PR about making the game harder. Now ask yourself, why do you think they did that? I and many others can tell that it was due to most everything in lich king being easy.
Now you can babble on all you want about how tough and rugged one raid zone has been for the last 3 weeks, but that changes exactly nothing about everything else in the game for the last 6 months. To little to late.
Its funny you talk about me giving links when yours does such a wonderful job. Blizzard talks about doing what with lich king? making the game easier for everyone. So ok there you have it.
P.S. I still don't understand how you come to the conclusion that I didn't have level 60 character during BC release, but not much of what you say makes sense.
Originally posted by Daffid011 Most boss fights are the same difficulty they were in the last expansion, but to the original posters point no one really shines during a boss fight so to speak. The dungeons themselves are cakewalk excluding the bosses. Just AOE through everything where it used to take group coordination and some small amount of tactics. I would argue that even most boss fights are to easy due to the insane power level of characters as a result of blizzard screwing up the balance mechanics of players dps/hps/mitigation/threat, but that is another issue all together.
Err, did you ever do heroic arcatraz back in the day when you needed it for your TK attunement? That place was so hard in blues and even Karazhan gear didn't help that much. Tried helping a friend through once. Ouch. Murmur was a pretty tough boss on heroic.
Yes I did more than my fair share of burning crusade content.
One of the major themes in this thread is about how easy the lich king heroics are compared to old world heroics. Raids also to an extent.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
5 man heroics are easy, only b/c you have the gear and experience to do it. It also opens up something for the less "devoted" gamers to do. Imagine some days where you can only spare and hour online, you can do a 5man heroics now. In the EQ days, or back in pre-BC, you can hardly enter AQ or BWL, or even MC in an hour.
Ulduar proved a point, as well elaborated by Zom. Ulduar is hard, apart from the first boss flame lev. FL is easier but still a fun fight, in which your gear counts less, and counts in a different way. The rest of the bosses are much harder. The new boss in Vault also required a lot of coordination. These new additions provide some hard stuff for those who want to go "hard" core. And remember, IC is coming, and arthalas, who knows what it will be?
This thread is not about ulduar, patch 3.1, how hard the new raid is or anything that happened in the last 3 weeks.
It is about how easy the expansion was with the content it released with. Pugs are already clearing all the original release content and have been for months. My guild which is filled with ultra casual people was already done with every thing in the expansion well before 3.1 released, where as they struggles in TK and SSC in burning crusade.
It is very easy to level to 80 on a non pre-epic character and walk into heroics and clear them.
Personally I found the expansion to easy, but that is not the point. Many people found it to easy which is why blizzard responded so loudly with promises to make the game harder. The original poster is right in his assessments. People blazed through dungeons with aoe taunts, heals and damage. The mechanic changes to the game are the cause, player dps, threat and healing. That is why blizzard is taking the tone they are now with all manner of promises about difficulty, etc.
The future may very well be hard and difficult, but that really doesn't change the last 6 months.
That's my frustration : you don't see the obvious and keep repeating non-meaningful very personal opinions. This content of heroic dungeons and FIRST raids is to be PUGGED for the next 15 months of WotLK. Your OWN words.... It is SIMPLY the basis of WotLK further progression. How in the world would a new player/character ever catch up to the end raids and the necesarry up-gear if they were confronted by a brick wall ONLY to be sloped with a perfect oiled guild team? And you still negate my views that your avatar was a parked full epic level 70 in the beginning of WotLK. So the "normal" players are having a blast with their new 69's in the Fjords. ---I KNOW because I tried --- Main = holy pala back then, second in line was a half hearted geared Rogue (and I had to vanish a LOT more than I liked to in the open world in Northrend). Luckily I had the twin lvl 70 BG's blades with me. Now I have a WL coming straight from his late 50's - via Outland - into Northrend. Tried it at lvl 68. Had to stop. Now leveling at my own levels again (71) and even the open world fights are a real challenge. ---> Guess what: the dungeons/heroics/first Raids are a necessity to build up that character with MUCH needed gear and even if I would play it full time, I would still be needing the next 4/5 months to even come to the end game with competetive gear. How am I to find a group for Nax ??? and find the MUCH needed gear if I would NOT be able to pug it ???? ---- Also if you would have read my link: you would have seen Blizzard already HAD to nerve Ulduar three times. Why ? Of course the "average Joe" doesn't have the necessary gear he CLAIMS to have. It takes at least a dozen full runs or more to gear up in a group of 25. That's .... a full 12 weeks of raiding...Nax on farm. That means you had to have Nax on farm by the end of January, which was only the case for 30% of the raiding guilds ... It is all so simple to calculate, but I guess bragging about non accomplished things is so typical for the web .....So Blizzard already had to nerve the settings in Ulduar. Simple. Just look at the armory of your "average Joe".....
First off, where do you get this information that the original release content was designed to be pugged for 15 months? Please point out your source, because if it was designed to be pugged that just means lich king was released incomplete. Far to many people were clearing everything lich king had to offer far to soon. There just was not much difficulty outside a few "hard modes". Either way you slice it there is a problem. You can't release content that is so easy that almost everyone blows through it in a couple of months and not have anything left for them to look forward to for months. Pick your poison I don't care, either the expansion was incomplete or the content was unintentionally to easy. Rationalize it however you want, but there is an issue and most people see it.
As for my character being over geared and that is the reason why heroics are to easy, please tell me which character was over geared? One second you say I obviously never raided epic level in burning crusade, then you say I'm over gearing instances with gear I camped for months on end in burning crusade. Which is it? It can't be both, so please pick one.
Let me spell it out for you. I did dungeons and heroics in 100% northrend level gear. Not one single piece of BC gear and do you know why? Of course you don't, because you are to busy inserting blind speculation as facts. Let me tell you why, because first off I switched from my BC raiding horde character to my original alliance character and leveled my character from 60 to 70 just prior to lich king opening to play with some real life friends who were coming back. Second I changed specs in lich king so I had almost no appropriate gear to begin with, let alone any raid level gear. Sure I had some epics from the original expansion, so I guess you are technically right that I had some epic Tier 1,2,3 gear. So yes I can very much say that heroics are far to easy even for characters without epic gear from the previous expansion.... Not that T5-6 gear wasn't designed to be replaced prior to and including heroic dungeon gear in lich king, so I fail to see how anyone could overgear the content in the first place.
4-5 months to gear up? Are you serious? I don't know how it is even remotely possible not to have full epics within 2 months of entering naxx, let alone lich king. Heroics only speed that up. It just throws so much gear at the players that is only slightly varied in stats you can't possibly take that long unless you just don't play much. To be clear, you don't need all of naxx to be on farm status for 12 weeks to gear up. The majority of the gear is latteral upgrades or only slightly better. You don't need all 4 wings on farms status, because the volume of gear it throws at players is overwhelming. I bet most groups start sharding epic gear after 1 month of raiding or doing heroics.
You are making extreme comparisons to make points that don't really translate into actual gameplay. One moment you claim that the content is only easy for people who somehow overgear the content and the next you talk about it being easy enough for pugs to gear up, but somehow think it will take 4-5 months? Which is it?
Prior to 3.1 lich king is to easy. Everyone else including blizzard seem to be able to admit this except for you. *shrug*
you didnt bring anything up. you blindly stated your trollish and innacurate opinions without base. besides, what I said is true, blizzard ISNT interested in catering to the very hardcore sorry but this is a fact. Things arnt handed to me, get your facts straight. And people wonder why wow fanboys get so annoyed at pseudo-elitists who wish they knew something about the game.
You make out the game to be easy - disregarding hard modes. You make out the game to lack CC - disregarding hard modes. You also make out the game to lack specific tanking methods etc - oh oh I got this one - disregarding hard modes.
So you want a hard game yet refuse to play it on hard mode. Gotcha
LOL hard mode, oh no what is that? Its jsut the same shit but the boss has more HP and Armor and more minions.......Does that really coun't as harder? To me it just seems like it would take them longer to kill a boss. Harder to me would be, they changed how the boss fights and he has more intelligent AI.
This game is becoming more and more of a joke, Id have to say I agree with the OP. Ive been playing this game off and on for 4 or so years now and each time I come back the game gets easier and easier and holds my attention for less and less.
Blizzard caters to the 'majority', as others have posted. The OP is one of 1-3% out of the 13,000,000 customers that would want 40-man raid content back in the game. Blizzard will 'consider it', but it will be a back-burner dev project and receive little attention.
Blizzard will consider this type of content 'niche' and will probably be fine letting other games address these types of needs. They feel the rest of their games portfolio of offerings are strong enough to keep you playing WoW without having such features.
Blizzard wants MORE of the 'average' customer base to experience their content. Naxx was a prime example of puggable 25 man content for the average player. I know quite a bit of keyboard rolling mouth-breathing-window-licking players were carried through Naxx without issue.
WoW does offer 'heroic' modes for dungeons and hard modes for bosses. Continuing on with that, there will be 10 and 25 man options for raids, too. I think that certain fights are more demanding in 10-man than 25-man, tbh... OS, for example.
To the OP's point:
I think the OP wants more 'refined' action, however. I think they want to see more situations where all hell could potentially break-loose without the proper CC's, burst DMG/aoe's, etc.,.. They want to see more utilization of the 'utilities' from classes. I think they want raids that really squeeze out everything from a class that a player can possibly squeeze out... rather than just rotating/spamming the same 4-5 buttons over and over again. (In most raids, I have a 4 spell rotation... period.)
Example: Why should every single Mage or Rogue use the same cookie-cutter 'max-dps' template for every RAID? I think the OP would like to see the return of the need for the lesser chosen spec's... such as Frost, for raiding/cc.
I do feel your pain. I think other portions of WoW have had their standards lowered so that more people could participate. The range goes from 40-man RAIDs/pve all the way down to the 19/29 BG brackets/pvp (which have also recently seen nerfs so that 'more' players wouldn't feel significantly overwhelmed or outgeared).
So, the 1-3%'ers may get bored with WoW and roam to other games. Again, I don't think Blizz is overly concerned with losing those customers. Moreover, I think that's what allows for other games to survive.
LOL hard mode, oh no what is that? Its jsut the same shit but the boss has more HP and Armor and more minions.......Does that really coun't as harder? To me it just seems like it would take them longer to kill a boss. Harder to me would be, they changed how the boss fights and he has more intelligent AI.
This game is becoming more and more of a joke, Id have to say I agree with the OP. Ive been playing this game off and on for 4 or so years now and each time I come back the game gets easier and easier and holds my attention for less and less.
Actually yes the hard modes are much more difficult. They don't just slap more health and armor onto a boss and label it hard. The minions usually bring some new ugly situations that must be dealt with in specific ways. The bosses have more abilities to use. While the encounters are fundamentally the same, there is enough that changes that the strategies change a good deal.
It isn't just making the encounter last longer through more health at all. It is a nice system of compromise for casual/hardcore that should not be scoffed at and I suspect we will see more of this type of design in future games.
I completely agree with your sentiment. In Vanilla raiding was made quite exclusive outside ZG and AQ20 and 5-mans got nothing after Dire Maul was released. This is an example of raid design that needs to be more open. In early TBC the 5-man heroics were too hard, Kara was brilliant but on the hard side (before the tuning) and the entry level 25-man encounters were too hard. Half-way through TBC Blizzard got it right in my opinion. Heroics became a tad easier, the tuned version of Kara was pure brilliance and the tuned versions of TK/SSC/BT and MH were good for many players of the game. Sunwell came with both quest zone, a 5-man and a raid (so something for all players).
Now...the problem with WotLK is that everything became so easy that the average player ran out of content (or close thereof) very fast after release. This is the problem Daffid, others and myself is pointing out and that Zorn is not agreeing with. The progression curve has become very fast and flat. If Blizzard came out with new 5-man and raid content every 2-3 months this would only be a minor problem (as Daffid pointed out). However, Ulduar showed that Blizzard is adhering to its golden standard release-when-ready (which I love btw) but this will result in lack of content for the majority of the player base and hence we have a problem.
And Zorn can scorn us but when the casual guilds on my server are complaining on the lack of content and that gear comes to easily I am darn sure the pendulum has come to far in the easy direction.
Originally posted by Zorndorf First off, where do you get this information that the original release content was designed to be pugged for 15 months? Please point out your source, because if it was designed to be pugged that just means lich king was released incomplete. I can't help it you do NOT want to read what I posted already 3 times here; Here I'll put it AGAIN: ... "Therefore, PUGs should continue to "have some level of success" in Wrath raids.
As the beginning dungeons and raids are clearly there to help new characters up to the level of the next encounters, it is of course necessary that this content can be PUGGED Source: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/05/02/ulduar-nerfs-and-blizzards-new-raid-philosophy/ -------- 4-5 months to gear up? Are you serious? I don't know how it is even remotely possible not to have full epics within 2 months of entering naxx, let alone lich king. Heroics only speed that up. The 4-5 months reasoning was for my alt green WL at ... level 70. See the picture? And yes you DO need to run at least a dozen times NAX 25 to have the chance to have the full Tier gear. Guess what ? .... after having done about a dozen times NAX 25 myself, just last week we had a fantastic healing mace drop. First drop ever for our 25 Raid group. GM kept it for him at ... 300 DKP. Of course my 120 DKP wasn't enough .... Nor the other healers got that mace ... yet. A dozen times = 12 weeks. So the stats showed that only 28% of the active raiding guilds downed the last bosses in NAx at the end of Jan...That thing has a name : ON FARM. Count + 12 weeks. And you have the launch date of patch 3.1 Ulduar. Curious isn't it? Prior to 3.1 lich king is to easy. Everyone else including blizzard seem to be able to admit this except for you. *shrug* Again Blizzard did NOT say it was "too easy". Read their version here: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/05/02/ulduar-nerfs-and-blizzards-new-raid-philosophy/
Your link is once again talking about....wait for it... wait for it... ULDUAR and RAIDS. This thread is not about ulduar and raids. How many times can that be said?
You are taking what blizzard is saying about... ULDUAR.. and inferring meaning into it that you somehow twist into meaning dungeons. It is talking about 10/25 man raids... NOT DUNGEONS.
The last 3 weeks don't change the fact that most people had already eaten up most of the games content months before the second raid was put in. So that leaves two possibilities.
1) the game was to easy for what blizzard predicted and people completed all of the content before they could make more.
2) blizzard released lich king before it was fully ready and to many people completed all of the content before blizzard could make more.
Take your pick I really don't care which, because personally I think both are true.
No you do not need to run naxx a dozen times to get tier gear. In fact you do not need to get one single piece of tier gear at all to be filled with epics as I stated (and not what you are trying to twist it into). Anyone will do just fine without tier pieces, because many other pieces are just as good or better.
Your stat shows nothing. 12 times clearing naxx is litterally hundreds and hundreds of epics. Just think about how many epics you get in one clear of the zone. Be consistant in your discussion, we are not talking about dream pieces, best in slot items or full tier sets, because that is just luck of the loot tables. People are FULL EPIC long before they have the zone on farm status. My entire raid was full epic before we had 2 wings on farm.
Again your link is talking about... drum roll... Ulduar and 10/25 man raids! Please let me know when you want to talk about what is being discussed in this topic, which is dungeons and heroic dungeons. Talking about ulduar doesn't make those dungeons any harder.
you didnt bring anything up. you blindly stated your trollish and innacurate opinions without base. besides, what I said is true, blizzard ISNT interested in catering to the very hardcore sorry but this is a fact. Things arnt handed to me, get your facts straight. And people wonder why wow fanboys get so annoyed at pseudo-elitists who wish they knew something about the game.
You make out the game to be easy - disregarding hard modes. You make out the game to lack CC - disregarding hard modes. You also make out the game to lack specific tanking methods etc - oh oh I got this one - disregarding hard modes.
So you want a hard game yet refuse to play it on hard mode. Gotcha
LOL hard mode, oh no what is that? Its jsut the same shit but the boss has more HP and Armor and more minions.......Does that really coun't as harder? To me it just seems like it would take them longer to kill a boss. Harder to me would be, they changed how the boss fights and he has more intelligent AI.
This game is becoming more and more of a joke, Id have to say I agree with the OP. Ive been playing this game off and on for 4 or so years now and each time I come back the game gets easier and easier and holds my attention for less and less.
Really? or are you playing WoW?
There are options to hard mode. That is one.
The new bosses do not have more HP than thaddius. But they are not easy, because they are unique, and they each present a different combination of special skills, which many guilds are learning and adapting. As a game, it presents fresh opportunities for people to talk in vent and try out different ways to kill a boss. Team work, coordination and lots of repair money.
That is all about the game. Play, enjoy and forget. I am not going to get a salary raise or promotion, or new clients from WoW. So long as I enjoy the hours I am online, its good enuf. Log on enjoy, log off and forget. What joke is there? unless you feel the need to achieve something in the game that I do not understand or see.
To daff: I am not picking a fight, but there are opinions down in the next paragraphs.
I know some guilds clear 25man naxx a month into Wotlk. I know one player in such a raid guild, telling me stories about what naxx is, when I am still mid 70s, soloing the quests, a few per session.
I know the first 10man completion of naxx happened the next day after launch.
Those were the superman, I am not. Many of my colleagues, who now play WoW as after hours, are not.
We are the slow ones, playing 2-10 hours a week and not always active even during online. We actually use the ingame mail as a way to communicate business secrets, because no spies from our competitors will be able to find us in WoW. So for us 25man naxx is still not on farm. We still have less than half of our gear from there.
Ulduar is a hard case for us, that adds to the level of enjoyment.
For us, slowpokes, Blizz's pace is ok. For my secretary, Blizz is too hard on her. She needs us to log on our best alt to help her thru Heroic AN, and that, as well as heroic Gundrak, did cause us some troubles back then. The first bosses of both AN and Grun suz till we worked out the tactics. Oh well, we are too lazy to use mods and read tactics on web.
So for the big boys Blizz looks too slow, for the slow pokes, Blizz is too fast. For the majority, I dunno, ask them.
It just happens that a few big boys have too much time to write and spam the forum chasing blizz for more. Blizz, on the other hand, got a lot of statistics from their game engine, so they have a better picture on how well the rest of the community is going. So they won't fall for the fanatic vocal few. According to my friend who plays in the test server, ulduar is actually coded quite a while ago. Blizz timed the release, possibly indicating that from their statistics, they see enough people with the right gear to try 25man ulduar.
It is also likely that IC is already being developed, but they withhold it, till they see enough ppl with gear from ulduar. Till then, releasing IC will only please a few big boy, but overly stress the majority which are still catching up.
I do notice that the majority tends to be quiet, a they are busy catching up. The few vocal ones on message boards are more likely the few big boys. Blizz have to satisfy the majority. That is business.
The core of your argument is that your gaming experience would be less good if Ulduar was released in early February than when it actually was released. To be frank I do not understand how that can be. The same goes for if 5-mans (normal and heroic) were more staggered in terms of diffculty (and drops). I do not see the conflict between someone playing 4 hours a week and 20 hours if that was the case.
The case of a conflict only exists if there is too little content and Blizzard would release a hard-core dungeon only (Naxx release Vanilla style). At least I have never advocated that.
And the core of at least my argument is that even the so called casuals on my server got frustrated with WotLK due to lack of content/easy content (these two are connected) meaning that Blizzard got the difficulty tuning or content release schedule wrong.
To daff: I am not picking a fight, but there are opinions down in the next paragraphs. I know some guilds clear 25man naxx a month into Wotlk. I know one player in such a raid guild, telling me stories about what naxx is, when I am still mid 70s, soloing the quests, a few per session. I know the first 10man completion of naxx happened the next day after launch. Those were the superman, I am not. Many of my colleagues, who now play WoW as after hours, are not. We are the slow ones, playing 2-10 hours a week and not always active even during online. We actually use the ingame mail as a way to communicate business secrets, because no spies from our competitors will be able to find us in WoW. So for us 25man naxx is still not on farm. We still have less than half of our gear from there. Ulduar is a hard case for us, that adds to the level of enjoyment. For us, slowpokes, Blizz's pace is ok. For my secretary, Blizz is too hard on her. She needs us to log on our best alt to help her thru Heroic AN, and that, as well as heroic Gundrak, did cause us some troubles back then. The first bosses of both AN and Grun suz till we worked out the tactics. Oh well, we are too lazy to use mods and read tactics on web. So for the big boys Blizz looks too slow, for the slow pokes, Blizz is too fast. For the majority, I dunno, ask them. It just happens that a few big boys have too much time to write and spam the forum chasing blizz for more. Blizz, on the other hand, got a lot of statistics from their game engine, so they have a better picture on how well the rest of the community is going. So they won't fall for the fanatic vocal few. According to my friend who plays in the test server, ulduar is actually coded quite a while ago. Blizz timed the release, possibly indicating that from their statistics, they see enough people with the right gear to try 25man ulduar. It is also likely that IC is already being developed, but they withhold it, till they see enough ppl with gear from ulduar. Till then, releasing IC will only please a few big boy, but overly stress the majority which are still catching up. I do notice that the majority tends to be quiet, a they are busy catching up. The few vocal ones on message boards are more likely the few big boys. Blizz have to satisfy the majority. That is business.
I think this thread got fairly derailed and ended up with ulduar being the focal point.
The topic was mainly about the ease of dugeons. For example: most non-boss complexity of dungeons has been replaced by a tank spamming whatever area effect threat ability they have, 3 dps classes spamming their area effect damage spells and a healer tossing out a few heals to keep the tank up. The huge volumes of threat that tanks put out make holding agro on everything fairly easy so the dps have little to worry about. The danger factor has been almost completely removed.
Clearing trash is a rather mind numbing experience now, where it used to take some sort of tactics, even if just a little. Most boss fights are still engaging, but again the amount of threat the tank puts out, endless mana, full throttle dps all make it rather easy. It really isn't an issue until dps start getting heavily equiped that they can really compete with tanks for threat generation. Not to say that everything is cake walk as there is still some difficult encounters, but overall everything is easier.
To a degree that same thing applies to naxx. Gather up all the trash, area effect it down and move on. Nothing much to worry about.
I understand that there are plenty of people who only play a few hours a week and are still progressing through the release content of lich king. People in that category are not going to notice much since the playtime is the biggest obstacle to progression. However I don't think blizzard strategy was to release content that would only withstand the playtimes of their most casual market while leaving another sizable segement with nothing to do, because it was so easily conquered. Comparing lich king progress 3 months after release to burning crusade and you see what I mean.
You are right that blizzard has more access to data about who is doing what. That is why I think they have been heavily advertising how things are going to be harder starting with patch 3.1 and acknowledging how easy things from release are. you can see this echoed in the patches since then and the steady nerfs to the game, the mana regeneration model being a large one.
Also, your friend is right that ulduar has been in the works for a while, but that does not mean it was delayed for any reason. Again back to the point of it not making sense for blizzard to withhold content while there are plenty of people who have run out of things to do.
Blizzard said they didn't even start working on it ulduar until well after lich king released. Personally I think they released it as soon as it was ready and by the looks of how much is getting patched each day I would speculate that they rushed it out before it was ready.
The ability to transfer characters you spent years playing on the EU servers to the Oceanic servers because you emigrated to Aus and the ping makes anything other than solo questing a joke. Quite why that's such an impossibility I'll never understand.
And I'd make all instances, and their associated loot, scale somehow to the level of the group entering.
The ruptured capillaries in your nose belie the clarity of your wisdom.
Er... nope. Meant to say 'ability', as in 'I would come back if I had the ability to transfer characters from EU servers to Oceanic servers'.
I agree that banging low level dungeons is entertaining but it would be more entertaining, for me, to find Van Cleef's as big a pain for my 80 rogue as he is for my 72 priest as he is for my 35 mage or whatever and that the majority of the equipment that drops there is useful to them all too.
Yeah, there's a ton of drawbacks but there's some great stuff in Azeroth that's now triviliased by low levels paying for boosts to get through them as quick as possible in order to get to the (new) endgame.
The ruptured capillaries in your nose belie the clarity of your wisdom.
Comments
I don't know what you think my "theories" are, but you are about as far from the truth as anyone could be. The facts are the lich king was to easy and far to many people eat the content without breaking a sweat.... long before ulduar was ready (many before that was even in production).
This thread was about lich king dungeons, heroic dungeons and how easy they are. IT IS NOT ABOUT RAID ZONES, burst damage in pvp or any other nonsense you want to bring up. It is not about the last few weeks, but since lich king released. It is about how easy the content was (by design or mistake I don't care anymore). It was too easy and that is why blizzard is tripping over itself promising how hard ulduar is going to be. You say the difficulty factor of ulduar proves something about how hard everything else is, when you miss the clear example supported by blizzards own words that they promise to make things harded. How can you not see that? Blizzard went overboard with PR about making the game harder. Now ask yourself, why do you think they did that? I and many others can tell that it was due to most everything in lich king being easy.
Now you can babble on all you want about how tough and rugged one raid zone has been for the last 3 weeks, but that changes exactly nothing about everything else in the game for the last 6 months. To little to late.
Its funny you talk about me giving links when yours does such a wonderful job. Blizzard talks about doing what with lich king? making the game easier for everyone. So ok there you have it.
P.S. I still don't understand how you come to the conclusion that I didn't have level 60 character during BC release, but not much of what you say makes sense.
Yes I did more than my fair share of burning crusade content.
One of the major themes in this thread is about how easy the lich king heroics are compared to old world heroics. Raids also to an extent.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
5 man heroics are easy, only b/c you have the gear and experience to do it. It also opens up something for the less "devoted" gamers to do. Imagine some days where you can only spare and hour online, you can do a 5man heroics now. In the EQ days, or back in pre-BC, you can hardly enter AQ or BWL, or even MC in an hour.
Ulduar proved a point, as well elaborated by Zom. Ulduar is hard, apart from the first boss flame lev. FL is easier but still a fun fight, in which your gear counts less, and counts in a different way. The rest of the bosses are much harder. The new boss in Vault also required a lot of coordination. These new additions provide some hard stuff for those who want to go "hard" core. And remember, IC is coming, and arthalas, who knows what it will be?
This thread is not about ulduar, patch 3.1, how hard the new raid is or anything that happened in the last 3 weeks.
It is about how easy the expansion was with the content it released with. Pugs are already clearing all the original release content and have been for months. My guild which is filled with ultra casual people was already done with every thing in the expansion well before 3.1 released, where as they struggles in TK and SSC in burning crusade.
It is very easy to level to 80 on a non pre-epic character and walk into heroics and clear them.
Personally I found the expansion to easy, but that is not the point. Many people found it to easy which is why blizzard responded so loudly with promises to make the game harder. The original poster is right in his assessments. People blazed through dungeons with aoe taunts, heals and damage. The mechanic changes to the game are the cause, player dps, threat and healing. That is why blizzard is taking the tone they are now with all manner of promises about difficulty, etc.
The future may very well be hard and difficult, but that really doesn't change the last 6 months.
First off, where do you get this information that the original release content was designed to be pugged for 15 months? Please point out your source, because if it was designed to be pugged that just means lich king was released incomplete. Far to many people were clearing everything lich king had to offer far to soon. There just was not much difficulty outside a few "hard modes". Either way you slice it there is a problem. You can't release content that is so easy that almost everyone blows through it in a couple of months and not have anything left for them to look forward to for months. Pick your poison I don't care, either the expansion was incomplete or the content was unintentionally to easy. Rationalize it however you want, but there is an issue and most people see it.
As for my character being over geared and that is the reason why heroics are to easy, please tell me which character was over geared? One second you say I obviously never raided epic level in burning crusade, then you say I'm over gearing instances with gear I camped for months on end in burning crusade. Which is it? It can't be both, so please pick one.
Let me spell it out for you. I did dungeons and heroics in 100% northrend level gear. Not one single piece of BC gear and do you know why? Of course you don't, because you are to busy inserting blind speculation as facts. Let me tell you why, because first off I switched from my BC raiding horde character to my original alliance character and leveled my character from 60 to 70 just prior to lich king opening to play with some real life friends who were coming back. Second I changed specs in lich king so I had almost no appropriate gear to begin with, let alone any raid level gear. Sure I had some epics from the original expansion, so I guess you are technically right that I had some epic Tier 1,2,3 gear. So yes I can very much say that heroics are far to easy even for characters without epic gear from the previous expansion.... Not that T5-6 gear wasn't designed to be replaced prior to and including heroic dungeon gear in lich king, so I fail to see how anyone could overgear the content in the first place.
4-5 months to gear up? Are you serious? I don't know how it is even remotely possible not to have full epics within 2 months of entering naxx, let alone lich king. Heroics only speed that up. It just throws so much gear at the players that is only slightly varied in stats you can't possibly take that long unless you just don't play much. To be clear, you don't need all of naxx to be on farm status for 12 weeks to gear up. The majority of the gear is latteral upgrades or only slightly better. You don't need all 4 wings on farms status, because the volume of gear it throws at players is overwhelming. I bet most groups start sharding epic gear after 1 month of raiding or doing heroics.
You are making extreme comparisons to make points that don't really translate into actual gameplay. One moment you claim that the content is only easy for people who somehow overgear the content and the next you talk about it being easy enough for pugs to gear up, but somehow think it will take 4-5 months? Which is it?
Prior to 3.1 lich king is to easy. Everyone else including blizzard seem to be able to admit this except for you. *shrug*
LOL hard mode, oh no what is that? Its jsut the same shit but the boss has more HP and Armor and more minions.......Does that really coun't as harder? To me it just seems like it would take them longer to kill a boss. Harder to me would be, they changed how the boss fights and he has more intelligent AI.
This game is becoming more and more of a joke, Id have to say I agree with the OP. Ive been playing this game off and on for 4 or so years now and each time I come back the game gets easier and easier and holds my attention for less and less.
Blizzard caters to the 'majority', as others have posted. The OP is one of 1-3% out of the 13,000,000 customers that would want 40-man raid content back in the game. Blizzard will 'consider it', but it will be a back-burner dev project and receive little attention.
Blizzard will consider this type of content 'niche' and will probably be fine letting other games address these types of needs. They feel the rest of their games portfolio of offerings are strong enough to keep you playing WoW without having such features.
Blizzard wants MORE of the 'average' customer base to experience their content. Naxx was a prime example of puggable 25 man content for the average player. I know quite a bit of keyboard rolling mouth-breathing-window-licking players were carried through Naxx without issue.
WoW does offer 'heroic' modes for dungeons and hard modes for bosses. Continuing on with that, there will be 10 and 25 man options for raids, too. I think that certain fights are more demanding in 10-man than 25-man, tbh... OS, for example.
To the OP's point:
I think the OP wants more 'refined' action, however. I think they want to see more situations where all hell could potentially break-loose without the proper CC's, burst DMG/aoe's, etc.,.. They want to see more utilization of the 'utilities' from classes. I think they want raids that really squeeze out everything from a class that a player can possibly squeeze out... rather than just rotating/spamming the same 4-5 buttons over and over again. (In most raids, I have a 4 spell rotation... period.)
Example: Why should every single Mage or Rogue use the same cookie-cutter 'max-dps' template for every RAID? I think the OP would like to see the return of the need for the lesser chosen spec's... such as Frost, for raiding/cc.
I do feel your pain. I think other portions of WoW have had their standards lowered so that more people could participate. The range goes from 40-man RAIDs/pve all the way down to the 19/29 BG brackets/pvp (which have also recently seen nerfs so that 'more' players wouldn't feel significantly overwhelmed or outgeared).
So, the 1-3%'ers may get bored with WoW and roam to other games. Again, I don't think Blizz is overly concerned with losing those customers. Moreover, I think that's what allows for other games to survive.
I'd actually like to go back to WoW but 2 things would get me back quicker
1. make the starting area quests give just a little better armor than currently
2. in game browser (not a big need but would be nice. EQ 2 has that)
Actually yes the hard modes are much more difficult. They don't just slap more health and armor onto a boss and label it hard. The minions usually bring some new ugly situations that must be dealt with in specific ways. The bosses have more abilities to use. While the encounters are fundamentally the same, there is enough that changes that the strategies change a good deal.
It isn't just making the encounter last longer through more health at all. It is a nice system of compromise for casual/hardcore that should not be scoffed at and I suspect we will see more of this type of design in future games.
@Blackwatch
I completely agree with your sentiment. In Vanilla raiding was made quite exclusive outside ZG and AQ20 and 5-mans got nothing after Dire Maul was released. This is an example of raid design that needs to be more open. In early TBC the 5-man heroics were too hard, Kara was brilliant but on the hard side (before the tuning) and the entry level 25-man encounters were too hard. Half-way through TBC Blizzard got it right in my opinion. Heroics became a tad easier, the tuned version of Kara was pure brilliance and the tuned versions of TK/SSC/BT and MH were good for many players of the game. Sunwell came with both quest zone, a 5-man and a raid (so something for all players).
Now...the problem with WotLK is that everything became so easy that the average player ran out of content (or close thereof) very fast after release. This is the problem Daffid, others and myself is pointing out and that Zorn is not agreeing with. The progression curve has become very fast and flat. If Blizzard came out with new 5-man and raid content every 2-3 months this would only be a minor problem (as Daffid pointed out). However, Ulduar showed that Blizzard is adhering to its golden standard release-when-ready (which I love btw) but this will result in lack of content for the majority of the player base and hence we have a problem.
And Zorn can scorn us but when the casual guilds on my server are complaining on the lack of content and that gear comes to easily I am darn sure the pendulum has come to far in the easy direction.
Your link is once again talking about....wait for it... wait for it... ULDUAR and RAIDS. This thread is not about ulduar and raids. How many times can that be said?
You are taking what blizzard is saying about... ULDUAR.. and inferring meaning into it that you somehow twist into meaning dungeons. It is talking about 10/25 man raids... NOT DUNGEONS.
The last 3 weeks don't change the fact that most people had already eaten up most of the games content months before the second raid was put in. So that leaves two possibilities.
1) the game was to easy for what blizzard predicted and people completed all of the content before they could make more.
2) blizzard released lich king before it was fully ready and to many people completed all of the content before blizzard could make more.
Take your pick I really don't care which, because personally I think both are true.
No you do not need to run naxx a dozen times to get tier gear. In fact you do not need to get one single piece of tier gear at all to be filled with epics as I stated (and not what you are trying to twist it into). Anyone will do just fine without tier pieces, because many other pieces are just as good or better.
Your stat shows nothing. 12 times clearing naxx is litterally hundreds and hundreds of epics. Just think about how many epics you get in one clear of the zone. Be consistant in your discussion, we are not talking about dream pieces, best in slot items or full tier sets, because that is just luck of the loot tables. People are FULL EPIC long before they have the zone on farm status. My entire raid was full epic before we had 2 wings on farm.
Again your link is talking about... drum roll... Ulduar and 10/25 man raids! Please let me know when you want to talk about what is being discussed in this topic, which is dungeons and heroic dungeons. Talking about ulduar doesn't make those dungeons any harder.
I think I'll never come back to WoW and I was having much fun on the horde @launch against overwhelming alliance players!
But well if Blizzard did the following I would come back:
The grind fest is just lame as is the utter lack of choices in character customization.
LOL hard mode, oh no what is that? Its jsut the same shit but the boss has more HP and Armor and more minions.......Does that really coun't as harder? To me it just seems like it would take them longer to kill a boss. Harder to me would be, they changed how the boss fights and he has more intelligent AI.
This game is becoming more and more of a joke, Id have to say I agree with the OP. Ive been playing this game off and on for 4 or so years now and each time I come back the game gets easier and easier and holds my attention for less and less.
Really? or are you playing WoW?
There are options to hard mode. That is one.
The new bosses do not have more HP than thaddius. But they are not easy, because they are unique, and they each present a different combination of special skills, which many guilds are learning and adapting. As a game, it presents fresh opportunities for people to talk in vent and try out different ways to kill a boss. Team work, coordination and lots of repair money.
That is all about the game. Play, enjoy and forget. I am not going to get a salary raise or promotion, or new clients from WoW. So long as I enjoy the hours I am online, its good enuf. Log on enjoy, log off and forget. What joke is there? unless you feel the need to achieve something in the game that I do not understand or see.
To daff: I am not picking a fight, but there are opinions down in the next paragraphs.
I know some guilds clear 25man naxx a month into Wotlk. I know one player in such a raid guild, telling me stories about what naxx is, when I am still mid 70s, soloing the quests, a few per session.
I know the first 10man completion of naxx happened the next day after launch.
Those were the superman, I am not. Many of my colleagues, who now play WoW as after hours, are not.
We are the slow ones, playing 2-10 hours a week and not always active even during online. We actually use the ingame mail as a way to communicate business secrets, because no spies from our competitors will be able to find us in WoW. So for us 25man naxx is still not on farm. We still have less than half of our gear from there.
Ulduar is a hard case for us, that adds to the level of enjoyment.
For us, slowpokes, Blizz's pace is ok. For my secretary, Blizz is too hard on her. She needs us to log on our best alt to help her thru Heroic AN, and that, as well as heroic Gundrak, did cause us some troubles back then. The first bosses of both AN and Grun suz till we worked out the tactics. Oh well, we are too lazy to use mods and read tactics on web.
So for the big boys Blizz looks too slow, for the slow pokes, Blizz is too fast. For the majority, I dunno, ask them.
It just happens that a few big boys have too much time to write and spam the forum chasing blizz for more. Blizz, on the other hand, got a lot of statistics from their game engine, so they have a better picture on how well the rest of the community is going. So they won't fall for the fanatic vocal few. According to my friend who plays in the test server, ulduar is actually coded quite a while ago. Blizz timed the release, possibly indicating that from their statistics, they see enough people with the right gear to try 25man ulduar.
It is also likely that IC is already being developed, but they withhold it, till they see enough ppl with gear from ulduar. Till then, releasing IC will only please a few big boy, but overly stress the majority which are still catching up.
I do notice that the majority tends to be quiet, a they are busy catching up. The few vocal ones on message boards are more likely the few big boys. Blizz have to satisfy the majority. That is business.
@Orthedos:
The core of your argument is that your gaming experience would be less good if Ulduar was released in early February than when it actually was released. To be frank I do not understand how that can be. The same goes for if 5-mans (normal and heroic) were more staggered in terms of diffculty (and drops). I do not see the conflict between someone playing 4 hours a week and 20 hours if that was the case.
The case of a conflict only exists if there is too little content and Blizzard would release a hard-core dungeon only (Naxx release Vanilla style). At least I have never advocated that.
And the core of at least my argument is that even the so called casuals on my server got frustrated with WotLK due to lack of content/easy content (these two are connected) meaning that Blizzard got the difficulty tuning or content release schedule wrong.
I think this thread got fairly derailed and ended up with ulduar being the focal point.
The topic was mainly about the ease of dugeons. For example: most non-boss complexity of dungeons has been replaced by a tank spamming whatever area effect threat ability they have, 3 dps classes spamming their area effect damage spells and a healer tossing out a few heals to keep the tank up. The huge volumes of threat that tanks put out make holding agro on everything fairly easy so the dps have little to worry about. The danger factor has been almost completely removed.
Clearing trash is a rather mind numbing experience now, where it used to take some sort of tactics, even if just a little. Most boss fights are still engaging, but again the amount of threat the tank puts out, endless mana, full throttle dps all make it rather easy. It really isn't an issue until dps start getting heavily equiped that they can really compete with tanks for threat generation. Not to say that everything is cake walk as there is still some difficult encounters, but overall everything is easier.
To a degree that same thing applies to naxx. Gather up all the trash, area effect it down and move on. Nothing much to worry about.
I understand that there are plenty of people who only play a few hours a week and are still progressing through the release content of lich king. People in that category are not going to notice much since the playtime is the biggest obstacle to progression. However I don't think blizzard strategy was to release content that would only withstand the playtimes of their most casual market while leaving another sizable segement with nothing to do, because it was so easily conquered. Comparing lich king progress 3 months after release to burning crusade and you see what I mean.
You are right that blizzard has more access to data about who is doing what. That is why I think they have been heavily advertising how things are going to be harder starting with patch 3.1 and acknowledging how easy things from release are. you can see this echoed in the patches since then and the steady nerfs to the game, the mana regeneration model being a large one.
Also, your friend is right that ulduar has been in the works for a while, but that does not mean it was delayed for any reason. Again back to the point of it not making sense for blizzard to withhold content while there are plenty of people who have run out of things to do.
Blizzard said they didn't even start working on it ulduar until well after lich king released. Personally I think they released it as soon as it was ready and by the looks of how much is getting patched each day I would speculate that they rushed it out before it was ready.
The ability to transfer characters you spent years playing on the EU servers to the Oceanic servers because you emigrated to Aus and the ping makes anything other than solo questing a joke. Quite why that's such an impossibility I'll never understand.
And I'd make all instances, and their associated loot, scale somehow to the level of the group entering.
The ruptured capillaries in your nose belie the clarity of your wisdom.
Er... nope. Meant to say 'ability', as in 'I would come back if I had the ability to transfer characters from EU servers to Oceanic servers'.
I agree that banging low level dungeons is entertaining but it would be more entertaining, for me, to find Van Cleef's as big a pain for my 80 rogue as he is for my 72 priest as he is for my 35 mage or whatever and that the majority of the equipment that drops there is useful to them all too.
Yeah, there's a ton of drawbacks but there's some great stuff in Azeroth that's now triviliased by low levels paying for boosts to get through them as quick as possible in order to get to the (new) endgame.
The ruptured capillaries in your nose belie the clarity of your wisdom.