I think normal-mode guilds cannot afford to be casual anymore given the difficulty level of current tiers. Flex raiding coming in 5.4 has the potential to improve this frustration, particularly for casual guilds but it also has the potential to dramatically shrink the recruitment pool for normal-mode guilds.
This is not to say that casual players shouldn't be raiding, or any of that elitist nonsense. Of course everyone has a right to raid, as much as they have a right to access any level of content in the game. And I'm alway glad when more people get to play the way they want.
However - I feel that more and more, the content is being driven to a smaller and smaller subset of people. This sort of targeting is great, as the content is now more focused to the right audience but it comes at a pretty steep cost.
Back in the day
Let's look back at Vanilla/TBC content, when raids were linear, fights were balanced around class composition and finding attuned characters made recruiting a living hell for guilds. Wrath eased this by removing attunements, allowing for guilds to raid with 10 people, normalizing abilities and fights to "bring the player not the character" and providing a very quick catch-up mechanism though badge (now valor) gear. This worked well, but tiers were forgettable and grew old rather quickly as the new tier of badge gear invalidated the old raids immediately.
Cataclysm took this to an extreme where nobody even ran older raids once the next tier launched, and as Tier 12 and 13 both has fewer bosses than Tier 11, the whole thing was terribly lopsided. Cataclysm might been the worst raiding in WoW history. The difficulty curve for Tier 11 was very high, and while Tier 12 and 13 was normalized (re: nerfed by 20% a month in) a bit, it still felt too much for casual guilds to progress through. LFR provided the answer there, by allowing completely casual people to raid and see content.
Mists combines a lot of these ideas - there is still no attunement, valor gear is a bit more difficult to get but is less effective than current tier raiding, and there is no immediate "catch up" mechanism. Guilds that progressed first have an advantage but it's not overwhelming - players and guilds have to work pretty hard to catch up and LFR feels like it's a thing on the side, another gearing avenue, and normal/heroic raids remain the benchmarking of raiding. I'm quite happy here. It feels like a good medium level of compromise between the various aspects of raiding.
Movin' on up!
One of the things I liked about LFR as compared to normal mode is that LFR introduced and inspired people to do normal raids. When I moved back to Moon Guard, I've met a few people through PUGs who have started raiding for the first time after they grew bored of LFR and they're good players. I think LFR was intended to inspire people to move up the difficulty ladder and I'm certain that these people will slowly train and become very good raiders in their own time.
This also allowed the design team to make sure fights weren't forgiving. Encounters like Horridon, Council, Durumu, Iron Qon, and Lei Shen were brutally hard in the first few weeks. I was playing with some amazing people, and we took 3 weeks to clear the tier and that was after putting in 12 hours a week, every week rather than our usual 9.
Things Cost More on the Ladder
When people move into normal modes from LFR, particularly in a group that's progressing, the difficulty and gear check can be a huge roadblock. And Blizzard has explicitly stated that they expect you to work on your gear outside of normal mode raids - i.e., through LFR, though Valor purchases, through upgrades, crafted materials, heroic scenarios... there are a lot of avenues so each week, regardless of progression, each team grows stronger. iLevel is a very real consideration with these bosses as raw throughput is the line between enrage and kill sometimes.
So - in light of all this, when an LFR player who is used to more-or-less queue and raid and kill has to move into normal modes, there is this daily maintenance involved.
You have to do a bit of research, you need to stay current with your gear, you better be hitting your weekly caps with charms and valor, and you better be practicing your class. If you aren't, it's going to be difficult for the team to progress.
That's all there is to it. I don't begrudge it, I enjoy this increased level of responsibility and I like that there is a "you must be this tall to raid" barrier and it generally only takes me a small amount of time in game to accomplish this. But it does mean that if your team isn't willing to do the work, you will have a hard time playing the game.
But Wait! There's More!
So what am I going on about? Flex raids. I know why they are coming, I support the developers in their goals of making content accessible, and I appreciate just how hard it is to raid with twelve people on your roster.
But the nature of it such that I fear it will stem that upward transition. People will go from LFR to flex rather than normal, simply because of the lower level of commitment required. Flex is designed to handle a wide variety of play-styles, particularly the casual style, and it won't require as much from raiders as normal modes by definition.
My main concern with this, is that flex-raids will cause the already
shrinking pool of raiders to contract even more. As you can gain
achievements in flex, it further strips away a reason to step up to
normal mode.
Fear is the Mind Killer
Naturally, it's a silly thing to worry about, and if people are happy doing flex-raids, so be it. And I know that greater diversity and choice is a better thing for the game in the long run, and if the commitment required to raid normal modes is so high that it infringes on people's ability to raid and enjoy the game - then so be it, let them move on.
And there is always the possibility that flex raiders will grow out of the difficulty level. If people progress from LFR to normal mode, then there's hope that people will do the same from flex. There is another rung on the ladder and the glass ceiling is really just a time commitment.
The whole thing really has put me in two minds. One part of me is very glad and happy to see more flexibility in raiding for people, as human resources are the most complicated part of raiding. But another part of me is worried that this will make recruitment even more difficult than it already is.
Here's hoping I'm wrong.
Can you tell I'm tearing my hair out trying to find people to raid?
Showing posts with label difficulty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label difficulty. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Monday, April 16, 2012
Top 3 raid bosses in Cataclysm
I was thinking about this after reading Clara's post on Ragnaros, though a lot of people seem to be reviewing Cataclysm raids lately (Dragon Soul in particular) and it made me think about my top 3 favorite fights in Cataclysm. The thought led me to a weird place.
My favorite fight in this whole expansion is the one that gave me fits of anxiety. It was the fight that kept me awake at night, shaking with dread, the fight where I made mistakes over and over and over again wiping the raid until I learned out how to do it over a brutal, brutal 3 straight nights of raiding the same boss. A rather masochistic exercise, I think.
So, anyway. I thought it would be kind of a fun exercise to see what other people thought, so here is a call-out:
What are your top 3 raid bosses from Cataclysm?
The Rules:
Okay - so to start it off, here is my list of top 3 favorite raid bosses in Cataclysm. I wound up sticking to normal-mode bosses to try and keep it universal, though no hard-modes really stand out as being all that exceptional anyway.
This has been the hardest boss to tank pre-nerf in my career as a raid-tank. Kiting adds in Phase 3 was the do-or-die part of this fight and the responsibility of the fight's success was purely on the ability of the tank to get those resets, not to mention the positioning of the drakes and his breath, CD rotation between the healer and tank.
Did I mention the hardest part come in phase 3 after an intense 2 phases where everyone had to execute everything perfectly? DPS and interrupts on the adds in phase 2, surviving the 100k AoE every time you shaved 10% of his health, having a healer or DPS tank the adds in Phase 1 and position them correctly without getting killed...
Pre nerf - this was the most difficult thing I've done in this expansion. This was the hardest fight in all of Cataclysm, specifically for me at least, in Phase 3 and when it was nerfed, I felt really sad that no other raid would ever face up to him at that level. I suppose you could do Heroic Nefarian, but it lacks the simplicity of what made the original encounter so great that it just bit into you and didn't let go. Overall, this would be my favorite raid boss in all of WoW but for Heroic Mimmiron. Firefighter is still the most exhilarating kill I've ever had in a raid, hands down. But Nefarian is a very, very close second.
Most Memorable Moment: I don't know, the moment when Nefarian floods the arena with lava or realizing with head-smacking horror that stunning the adds in phase 3 with Holy Wrath was the biggest mistake I could have made? Either way - brilliant!
This fight was more about coordinating your own movement and cool-downs for all the individuals involved, rather than any single particular mechanic that any one person has to handle, but how each individual person helps the raid with damage both incoming and going, with adds in transition phases, and with meteors made or broke this fight. It's an elaborate, choreographed dance that everyone had to execute perfectly.
Not nearly as hard as Nefarian, it was still a worthy and memorable end-raid fight, and it took us a few nights of work to get this. Figuring out how to handle Sons and Scions, two-healing it on our first kill, figuring out positioning for the Smash with Seeds while dodging the fire on the ground, juggling Trap detonations on top of all the AoE going out... nobody was ever bored during Ragnaros (the tanking was relatively boring but I'll give it as pass on that).
Meteor juggling in phase 3, now that I can look back at it in hind-sight, was a hilarious mechanic and I've seen it deliberately knocked into people lately. Bad raiders! No biscuit! Regardless, this fight pushed healing to the limit, and required heavy DPS and demanded precise execution from every single person in the raid, and that's what I loved about it. If they had added some really hard tanking component to this fight, it might have been my favorite fight over Nefarian.
Most Memorable Moment: On our very first pull we coasted through Phase 1 and then at transition I saw the Sons land and zoom to Sulfuras wiping the confident smirk off my face in 3 seconds flat. It was an awesome, "how the hell are we going to do this?!" moment.
Deal with interrupting Worship, with fire on the ground, with debuffs on tanks, with the adds, avoiding the Shadow Crash, killing the Corrupter and then the Bloods in time, making sure everyone had very low stacks of Corruption going into Phase 2 and the massive DPS burn needed to kill it at the end - another fight where you just can't fall asleep.
If you're slow on that interrupt, the boss builds stacks and the tank get gibbed. You fail to dodge the Shadow Crash, you wind up with a ton of Corruption and get yourself killed. You fail to swap and kill tentacles in phase 2, you wind up hitting like a limp noodle. You fail to turn away to puke at high stacks of Corruption, you kill people. This fight was great, and the heroic version tuned it even better, adding the elemental mechanic to really keep DPS on the razor edge of swap/killing and pushing the meters.
Most Memorable Moment: The night we had multiple - multiple - sub1-million wipes and at least 2 sub 100k wipes. Heartbreaking. Came back the next night to one-shot it, naturally.
I'm sad that none of the Dragon Soul bosses are memorable enough to stand out in my list, and though I do like some of the Heroic mode fights (particularly Heroic Yor'Sahj and Heroic Ultraxion), I'll remember doing Dragon Soul, but I won't sigh wistfully over fights it, like I sigh over the fights listed above, or other fights from Wrath like Firefighter, or Yog or Lich King or Heroic Putricide or 3-drake Sarth or Malygos...
And while Tier-11 was a lot of hard work and fun, it was really draining on raids to attack the number of bosses at the level of difficulty they came in with. I'm hoping Pandaria finds a middle-ground. I felt Firelands had a just-about perfect level of difficulty for us to tackle but with too few bosses - and the current tier of Normal modes feels vastly under-tuned, and Heroics feels like it is tuned just about right as well, and maybe a hair over-tuned for 10s but that's okay.
My favorite fight in this whole expansion is the one that gave me fits of anxiety. It was the fight that kept me awake at night, shaking with dread, the fight where I made mistakes over and over and over again wiping the raid until I learned out how to do it over a brutal, brutal 3 straight nights of raiding the same boss. A rather masochistic exercise, I think.
So, anyway. I thought it would be kind of a fun exercise to see what other people thought, so here is a call-out:
What are your top 3 raid bosses from Cataclysm?
The Rules:
- You may only pick 3 bosses
- They must be from a Cataclysm raid
- It must be a boss you encountered pre-nerf
- Add a Most Memorable Moment from the encounter, whether a mechanic or from your own personal experience with the boss
Okay - so to start it off, here is my list of top 3 favorite raid bosses in Cataclysm. I wound up sticking to normal-mode bosses to try and keep it universal, though no hard-modes really stand out as being all that exceptional anyway.
NEFARIAN
This has been the hardest boss to tank pre-nerf in my career as a raid-tank. Kiting adds in Phase 3 was the do-or-die part of this fight and the responsibility of the fight's success was purely on the ability of the tank to get those resets, not to mention the positioning of the drakes and his breath, CD rotation between the healer and tank.
Did I mention the hardest part come in phase 3 after an intense 2 phases where everyone had to execute everything perfectly? DPS and interrupts on the adds in phase 2, surviving the 100k AoE every time you shaved 10% of his health, having a healer or DPS tank the adds in Phase 1 and position them correctly without getting killed...
Pre nerf - this was the most difficult thing I've done in this expansion. This was the hardest fight in all of Cataclysm, specifically for me at least, in Phase 3 and when it was nerfed, I felt really sad that no other raid would ever face up to him at that level. I suppose you could do Heroic Nefarian, but it lacks the simplicity of what made the original encounter so great that it just bit into you and didn't let go. Overall, this would be my favorite raid boss in all of WoW but for Heroic Mimmiron. Firefighter is still the most exhilarating kill I've ever had in a raid, hands down. But Nefarian is a very, very close second.
Most Memorable Moment: I don't know, the moment when Nefarian floods the arena with lava or realizing with head-smacking horror that stunning the adds in phase 3 with Holy Wrath was the biggest mistake I could have made? Either way - brilliant!
RAGNAROS
This fight was more about coordinating your own movement and cool-downs for all the individuals involved, rather than any single particular mechanic that any one person has to handle, but how each individual person helps the raid with damage both incoming and going, with adds in transition phases, and with meteors made or broke this fight. It's an elaborate, choreographed dance that everyone had to execute perfectly.
Not nearly as hard as Nefarian, it was still a worthy and memorable end-raid fight, and it took us a few nights of work to get this. Figuring out how to handle Sons and Scions, two-healing it on our first kill, figuring out positioning for the Smash with Seeds while dodging the fire on the ground, juggling Trap detonations on top of all the AoE going out... nobody was ever bored during Ragnaros (the tanking was relatively boring but I'll give it as pass on that).
Meteor juggling in phase 3, now that I can look back at it in hind-sight, was a hilarious mechanic and I've seen it deliberately knocked into people lately. Bad raiders! No biscuit! Regardless, this fight pushed healing to the limit, and required heavy DPS and demanded precise execution from every single person in the raid, and that's what I loved about it. If they had added some really hard tanking component to this fight, it might have been my favorite fight over Nefarian.
Most Memorable Moment: On our very first pull we coasted through Phase 1 and then at transition I saw the Sons land and zoom to Sulfuras wiping the confident smirk off my face in 3 seconds flat. It was an awesome, "how the hell are we going to do this?!" moment.
CHO'GALL
Deal with interrupting Worship, with fire on the ground, with debuffs on tanks, with the adds, avoiding the Shadow Crash, killing the Corrupter and then the Bloods in time, making sure everyone had very low stacks of Corruption going into Phase 2 and the massive DPS burn needed to kill it at the end - another fight where you just can't fall asleep.
If you're slow on that interrupt, the boss builds stacks and the tank get gibbed. You fail to dodge the Shadow Crash, you wind up with a ton of Corruption and get yourself killed. You fail to swap and kill tentacles in phase 2, you wind up hitting like a limp noodle. You fail to turn away to puke at high stacks of Corruption, you kill people. This fight was great, and the heroic version tuned it even better, adding the elemental mechanic to really keep DPS on the razor edge of swap/killing and pushing the meters.
Most Memorable Moment: The night we had multiple - multiple - sub1-million wipes and at least 2 sub 100k wipes. Heartbreaking. Came back the next night to one-shot it, naturally.
I'm sad that none of the Dragon Soul bosses are memorable enough to stand out in my list, and though I do like some of the Heroic mode fights (particularly Heroic Yor'Sahj and Heroic Ultraxion), I'll remember doing Dragon Soul, but I won't sigh wistfully over fights it, like I sigh over the fights listed above, or other fights from Wrath like Firefighter, or Yog or Lich King or Heroic Putricide or 3-drake Sarth or Malygos...
And while Tier-11 was a lot of hard work and fun, it was really draining on raids to attack the number of bosses at the level of difficulty they came in with. I'm hoping Pandaria finds a middle-ground. I felt Firelands had a just-about perfect level of difficulty for us to tackle but with too few bosses - and the current tier of Normal modes feels vastly under-tuned, and Heroics feels like it is tuned just about right as well, and maybe a hair over-tuned for 10s but that's okay.
Monday, March 12, 2012
I don't care about 25s
Harsh toke, guy!
Maybe it would be more accurate to add a suffix to my title. Maybe "...and that's okay!" or something, but the point is a very real one for me.
I have been raiding since TBC, and I remember just how difficult and harsh it was to try to get into a 25 group. After doing Karazhan and Zul'Aman, my guild had two 10 groups but were incapable of getting a 25 group together even for the rest of T4. At one point, we managed to get a group together (between three 10-person guilds) and do Magtheridon but that took an epic effort to find enough people who weren't already spoken for by the 25-person guilds. Trying to get into 25 guilds was nigh-impossible (at least on my server) as by the time I started raiding, Black Temple was the flavor of the day and nobody wanted to have to gear up a new tank through T4 and T5.
As a raid-officer during TBC, I know exactly how hard it is to put together 25s. No question there.
When Wrath came out, the idea of choice was a superficial one at best - 10s were both vastly undertuned, the gear was a hand-out and in many cases, inferior to the gear you got in 25s. How many 25s raiders do you know who ran 10s to fill in that BIS piece vs. 10s raiders who ran 25s for BIS trinkets? 10s were absolutely the red-headed-middle-step-child of raiding in Wrath, but there was a lot of potential there, and it allowed for guilds and smaller groups to see end-game content.
Cataclysm went further in consolidating the 10s and 25s by rewarding the same gear from both while providing a small incentive to do 25s over 10s. The main controversy here was that both raid sizes shared a lock-out, and trust me, this was an incredibly good thing for many of us.
In Wrath, as a competitive raiders, I had to do both 10s and 25s every week, to maximize my badge count as well as getting a shot at the BIS loot that I had no access to in 10s. This made raiding a chore, and seeing the same content multiple times in the same week was incredibly frustrating in addition to having to do daily dungeons and weekly raid challenges. Anyone who did T9 in 10s, then H:10s, then 25 remembers just how stressful, frustrating, and time consuming it was to stay competitive.
So, what do we have with Cataclysm?
- 10s and 25s share a lockout
- 10s and 25s share the same loot-tables
- 10s and 25s provide (roughly) the same difficulty level
- 10s and 25s share the same content in terms of raids, bosses, cut-scenes, etc.
In this kind of environment, there are still a few factors that matters in making a decision about whether you do 10s or 25s:
- Prestige (25s)
- Intimacy (10s)
- Competition (25s)
- Ease of organization (10s)
- Speed of gear acquisition (25s)
- Difficulty of execution (25s)
Given this - why do we still see 25s dying and 10s thriving?
Because raiding in Warcraft is driven as much by developers as it is by the open market of ideas. Blizzard created the environment, and the WoW player-base chose 10s overwhelmingly as the raiding size of choice in Cataclysm. From hard-core progression oriented 10s groups that pushed content and finished the hard-mode raids in a competitive time-frame with 25s to casual raid groups that worked for five or six months to clear a raid on normal mode, 10s was where it was at in Cataclysm.
Given that 25s are more difficult to organize and execute (issues that are Human Resource problems in nature), and 10s are easier in that sense, I have a lot of sympathy for 25s. Officers in 25s are much better at wrangling their staff together and explaining and organizing their fights than officers in 10s. I've been in both situations and I know exactly how much easier it is to build and train a 10s group.
So, do I actually care about the woes of 25s? I'll be honest: I kind of don't, but that's okay.
I'm sure 25s don't really care about 10s complaining when we complain.
- We can't class-stack as easily
- We don't have access to all the buffs and debuffs
- We wind up wasting tier tokens due to a lack of class diversification
- We have such difficult recruiting due to the number of 10s guilds raiding
- One person's performance being 10% of output makes it nigh impossible to carry on progression
They don't see these things as an issue for them, their deep rosters allow them to overcome these issues much more easily.
We can both complain about our individual raid-size issues and with the decline in the number of guilds tackling 25s, recruitment is certainly a huge, huge problem for them. You have my sympathies, but I certainly don't think 10s are the reason for it in a deliberate or malicious way - it's a market-place of ideas, and ideas sink or swim based on what people want.
If the general player consciousness says 10s is the way that a majority of raiders want to tackle content, there isn't a whole lot Blizzard or the 25s can do to make a change. This has happened before - 40s became 25s, and now are becoming 10s. Fans of the 40-player raid-size still complain about how 25s aren't like how it was, and 40s were the truly epic raids. At least 25s are still around, provide challenging content, and remain the tier of competition across the world.
As a 10s raider, I enjoy my raid-size and don't really want a whole lot more than what I have. The problems of roster management in 10s is very different, but I'm not going to blame it on the 25s - they have their own problems to deal with and I wish them the best of luck. But I do hope that they don't feel it necessary to demean and ridicule 10s in order to make their point - I'm sure that's not their intention.
I might not care about your problems, my brothers and sisters among the 25s guilds, but I still love you as fellow raiders. Even if you might scorn my affection as a lowly 10s raider. ;-) <3
Maybe it would be more accurate to add a suffix to my title. Maybe "...and that's okay!" or something, but the point is a very real one for me.
I have been raiding since TBC, and I remember just how difficult and harsh it was to try to get into a 25 group. After doing Karazhan and Zul'Aman, my guild had two 10 groups but were incapable of getting a 25 group together even for the rest of T4. At one point, we managed to get a group together (between three 10-person guilds) and do Magtheridon but that took an epic effort to find enough people who weren't already spoken for by the 25-person guilds. Trying to get into 25 guilds was nigh-impossible (at least on my server) as by the time I started raiding, Black Temple was the flavor of the day and nobody wanted to have to gear up a new tank through T4 and T5.
As a raid-officer during TBC, I know exactly how hard it is to put together 25s. No question there.
When Wrath came out, the idea of choice was a superficial one at best - 10s were both vastly undertuned, the gear was a hand-out and in many cases, inferior to the gear you got in 25s. How many 25s raiders do you know who ran 10s to fill in that BIS piece vs. 10s raiders who ran 25s for BIS trinkets? 10s were absolutely the red-headed-middle-step-child of raiding in Wrath, but there was a lot of potential there, and it allowed for guilds and smaller groups to see end-game content.
Cataclysm went further in consolidating the 10s and 25s by rewarding the same gear from both while providing a small incentive to do 25s over 10s. The main controversy here was that both raid sizes shared a lock-out, and trust me, this was an incredibly good thing for many of us.
In Wrath, as a competitive raiders, I had to do both 10s and 25s every week, to maximize my badge count as well as getting a shot at the BIS loot that I had no access to in 10s. This made raiding a chore, and seeing the same content multiple times in the same week was incredibly frustrating in addition to having to do daily dungeons and weekly raid challenges. Anyone who did T9 in 10s, then H:10s, then 25 remembers just how stressful, frustrating, and time consuming it was to stay competitive.
So, what do we have with Cataclysm?
- 10s and 25s share a lockout
- 10s and 25s share the same loot-tables
- 10s and 25s provide (roughly) the same difficulty level
- 10s and 25s share the same content in terms of raids, bosses, cut-scenes, etc.
In this kind of environment, there are still a few factors that matters in making a decision about whether you do 10s or 25s:
- Prestige (25s)
- Intimacy (10s)
- Competition (25s)
- Ease of organization (10s)
- Speed of gear acquisition (25s)
- Difficulty of execution (25s)
Given this - why do we still see 25s dying and 10s thriving?
Because raiding in Warcraft is driven as much by developers as it is by the open market of ideas. Blizzard created the environment, and the WoW player-base chose 10s overwhelmingly as the raiding size of choice in Cataclysm. From hard-core progression oriented 10s groups that pushed content and finished the hard-mode raids in a competitive time-frame with 25s to casual raid groups that worked for five or six months to clear a raid on normal mode, 10s was where it was at in Cataclysm.
Given that 25s are more difficult to organize and execute (issues that are Human Resource problems in nature), and 10s are easier in that sense, I have a lot of sympathy for 25s. Officers in 25s are much better at wrangling their staff together and explaining and organizing their fights than officers in 10s. I've been in both situations and I know exactly how much easier it is to build and train a 10s group.
So, do I actually care about the woes of 25s? I'll be honest: I kind of don't, but that's okay.
I'm sure 25s don't really care about 10s complaining when we complain.
- We can't class-stack as easily
- We don't have access to all the buffs and debuffs
- We wind up wasting tier tokens due to a lack of class diversification
- We have such difficult recruiting due to the number of 10s guilds raiding
- One person's performance being 10% of output makes it nigh impossible to carry on progression
They don't see these things as an issue for them, their deep rosters allow them to overcome these issues much more easily.
We can both complain about our individual raid-size issues and with the decline in the number of guilds tackling 25s, recruitment is certainly a huge, huge problem for them. You have my sympathies, but I certainly don't think 10s are the reason for it in a deliberate or malicious way - it's a market-place of ideas, and ideas sink or swim based on what people want.
If the general player consciousness says 10s is the way that a majority of raiders want to tackle content, there isn't a whole lot Blizzard or the 25s can do to make a change. This has happened before - 40s became 25s, and now are becoming 10s. Fans of the 40-player raid-size still complain about how 25s aren't like how it was, and 40s were the truly epic raids. At least 25s are still around, provide challenging content, and remain the tier of competition across the world.
As a 10s raider, I enjoy my raid-size and don't really want a whole lot more than what I have. The problems of roster management in 10s is very different, but I'm not going to blame it on the 25s - they have their own problems to deal with and I wish them the best of luck. But I do hope that they don't feel it necessary to demean and ridicule 10s in order to make their point - I'm sure that's not their intention.
I might not care about your problems, my brothers and sisters among the 25s guilds, but I still love you as fellow raiders. Even if you might scorn my affection as a lowly 10s raider. ;-) <3
Thursday, December 22, 2011
More Dragon Soul Impressions
Our first night in DS was very successful as we got through the first 5 bosses in two days, and then got stalled a bit of Gunship and Spine. For that reason, I didn't do the second half of LFR as I wanted to get all the content down on normal mode rather than cheese my way to the achievements.
We've spent, maybe two and a half nights on Spine to really get it down - and not for lack of effort. It is a fun fight that requires a bit of coordination and planning and the execution is solo-play dependent and at our current gear level and DPS level, we just can't 9-man it, so anytime we lost someone without a possible Rez, we'd wipe. So many wipes on the third plate, it wasn't funny.
It was one of those fights that was dead but didn't know it, and we needed one clean pull to get it done. And we got it last night without much fanfare and wound up on the platforms for Madness.
The first pull was... Madness. I didn't know where the Corruption showed up, I didn't realize there was a facing order to it till it slammed half the raid, and then the Elementium Bolt pulsed and wiped us. It looked like a long training period was necessary... so we came back in, pulled a second time... and cleared up to the third platform where we lost to the Elementium Bolt as we weren't prepared for its speed without Nozdomu. The third pulled cleaned that up as well, and we had a very sub-par DPS with us filling in, and we were 3-healing, 2-tanking it.
To say Madness will take us less time than Spine is a given, though with next week being a Holiday week, I'm not sure we'll have any progression pulls, but soon enough. My prediction of being clear through normal modes by Christmas almost came true, and if we'd been more diligent on Spine, we'd be there now.
Anyway - point being that I enjoyed the ramp-up Dragon Soul had. The first 4 were too under-tuned but they did get more difficult as the raid went on. Zon'ozz can be difficult on 10-man if you mess up the orb bouncing and there have been instances where I've gotten myself killed by not being on top of cool-downs when the orb winds up bouncing an extra time and the damage buff stacks get very high. There are some dangerous slime combinations on Yor'sahj and Hagara is supposed to be a coordination fight, though for anyone who did Ragnaros, pre-nerf Nefarian and LK, the synergy required seems quite easy.
Ultraxion was the first road-block boss - the real DPS check, though after a couple of weeks of gear, he has become very, very easy. We lost a DPS early this week to Twilight and still cleared it under 5-minutes. To be fair, people are starting to kiss the 30k mark on that fight across the board. Gunship and Spine are both much more difficult co-ordination checks, and I enjoy tanking them a lot, especially soloing Spine. The bloods get nuts at the end of the fight, I love it.
But Madness? The ultimate boss fight?
It just much easier for some reason. And it doesn't really feel like you're fighting Deathwing at any point. I get that we can't fight him, and the feeling of being in the presence of gods is there, but I don't know. There's something missing in the feel of the fight. And with how quickly we were progressing on him, with a very conservatively setup team, it seems maybe too easy.
With our A-team, we should be able to clear the 4 platforms fairly quickly. Of course, Phase 2 could kick our ass and stall us for weeks, but I'm fairly sure I can solo-tank this and if I can do that, then we have 6 DPS to eat the adds that much faster, and honestly, there wasn't that much damage going out either, I might even suggest trying a 1/2/7 combination to see if it's viable.
Anyway. Point being - the ramp up was very nice, but it seems to have dropped off right at the end. And that feels odd. Though if you look at the Heroic raids, KIN stalled on Spine for ages, then killed Madness in one or two night.
Odd to say the least.
We've spent, maybe two and a half nights on Spine to really get it down - and not for lack of effort. It is a fun fight that requires a bit of coordination and planning and the execution is solo-play dependent and at our current gear level and DPS level, we just can't 9-man it, so anytime we lost someone without a possible Rez, we'd wipe. So many wipes on the third plate, it wasn't funny.
It was one of those fights that was dead but didn't know it, and we needed one clean pull to get it done. And we got it last night without much fanfare and wound up on the platforms for Madness.
The first pull was... Madness. I didn't know where the Corruption showed up, I didn't realize there was a facing order to it till it slammed half the raid, and then the Elementium Bolt pulsed and wiped us. It looked like a long training period was necessary... so we came back in, pulled a second time... and cleared up to the third platform where we lost to the Elementium Bolt as we weren't prepared for its speed without Nozdomu. The third pulled cleaned that up as well, and we had a very sub-par DPS with us filling in, and we were 3-healing, 2-tanking it.
To say Madness will take us less time than Spine is a given, though with next week being a Holiday week, I'm not sure we'll have any progression pulls, but soon enough. My prediction of being clear through normal modes by Christmas almost came true, and if we'd been more diligent on Spine, we'd be there now.
Anyway - point being that I enjoyed the ramp-up Dragon Soul had. The first 4 were too under-tuned but they did get more difficult as the raid went on. Zon'ozz can be difficult on 10-man if you mess up the orb bouncing and there have been instances where I've gotten myself killed by not being on top of cool-downs when the orb winds up bouncing an extra time and the damage buff stacks get very high. There are some dangerous slime combinations on Yor'sahj and Hagara is supposed to be a coordination fight, though for anyone who did Ragnaros, pre-nerf Nefarian and LK, the synergy required seems quite easy.
Ultraxion was the first road-block boss - the real DPS check, though after a couple of weeks of gear, he has become very, very easy. We lost a DPS early this week to Twilight and still cleared it under 5-minutes. To be fair, people are starting to kiss the 30k mark on that fight across the board. Gunship and Spine are both much more difficult co-ordination checks, and I enjoy tanking them a lot, especially soloing Spine. The bloods get nuts at the end of the fight, I love it.
But Madness? The ultimate boss fight?
It just much easier for some reason. And it doesn't really feel like you're fighting Deathwing at any point. I get that we can't fight him, and the feeling of being in the presence of gods is there, but I don't know. There's something missing in the feel of the fight. And with how quickly we were progressing on him, with a very conservatively setup team, it seems maybe too easy.
With our A-team, we should be able to clear the 4 platforms fairly quickly. Of course, Phase 2 could kick our ass and stall us for weeks, but I'm fairly sure I can solo-tank this and if I can do that, then we have 6 DPS to eat the adds that much faster, and honestly, there wasn't that much damage going out either, I might even suggest trying a 1/2/7 combination to see if it's viable.
Anyway. Point being - the ramp up was very nice, but it seems to have dropped off right at the end. And that feels odd. Though if you look at the Heroic raids, KIN stalled on Spine for ages, then killed Madness in one or two night.
Odd to say the least.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Dragon Soul Difficulty And What I Want From It
I've been trying to articulate my feelings about Dragon Soul and it is very conflicted.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, the bosses are just falling over each other to cough up their loot. We finished our second night of raiding with Ultraxion going down, netting us a genuine realm first kill of all things. We were having a bit of trouble on that fight with DPS not being able to kill him in time, so we swapped one of the healers to DPS, switched out one DPS who wasn't quite pushing the numbers we needed and bang. Purples.
That put us at 5/8 and I fully expect us to clear through all that content on our first night next week, kill Gunship and be working on Spine by the end of our raid week.
On the one hand, the new content is fun, and I really wanted to go back in last night to clear Gunship and start poking at Spine but a lot of folks couldn't make it and a few of them wanted to slow down and savor the content. But on the other hand, this doesn't even seem like content worth doing over and over. If the next two bosses are as easy as the rest of the raid has been, we'll be facing hard modes at Christmas.
Now, to be fair, if I look at Firelands, once we killed Shannox, Beth and Rhyolith, the rest of the dungeon kind of fell in our laps. Baleroc only took about a night or two, we killed both Alys and Domo the same week we pulled them. After that Ragnaros was the only issue. This was pre-nerf. Ragnaros, took us about 2.5 nights to kill, and the nerf hit in the middle of that, which meant he went down fairly quickly after that. This was the first time we failed to kill all the normal modes pre nerf and I still grumble about it.
So, our progression in Dragon Soul has surprised me, as we didn't even have all that much heroic gear, we were only in the 379/380 iLevel range when we walked in on Tuesday, none of us had done the fights on the PTR, it was as new as content gets. We really went off of the Dungeon Journal for the most part, supplementing Icy Veins when necessary. And still, in about 5 hours over two days, killed 5 brand new bosses.
We know the next 3 bosses aren't going to stonewall us. Nearly a thousand guilds killed Madness this week. In three days. I don't foresee these bosses being much of an issue. So, even pessimistically, two weeks to kill Madness, by Christmas, we're done with normal modes.
I'm worried.
Really, there's not much you can say or do at this point, this is what's going to happen, we're not going to see these guys being buffed at this point. But what we don't know, is what's going to happen after normal modes. And this is my hope for Heroics:
I don't mind if I can kill the first boss or two in the first week. That's fine. You have to start gearing somewhere. But I want us to stall on the third boss for a full week.
I want us to wipe, I want us to sit and discuss strategies, look at our team and evaluate what to do with our resources. I want us to reforge gear for specific stats, re-gem, re-enchant, move talent points around. I want to struggle and when the boss keels over, I want vent to be indecipherable with all the cheers of relief earned after winning a hard fought kill.
The fourth and fifth boss need to be on a similar level, if not a bit harder. Ultraxion is a well tuned fight even on normal, we had to 2 heal it, but I want us to have to 2 heal and solo tank it just to make the enrage and come up with creative ways of letting someone tank the boss while I'm dropping off Fading Light.
I want lootship to add more mechanics instead of just an add priority with positioning challenges.
Spine and Madness should both be very difficult, they need to last us weeks, they need to make us gnash our teeth and shake our heads, they need to make us struggle and anguish about whether or not we push our lockouts because we're so close to a kill, but wouldn't another week of heroic gear help.
That's what I want.
But even then, eight bosses, we're talking about, pessimistically, March? April? Before everything is done even on hard modes? And we'll still have four months to go at the least before expecting MoP. I can't see the expansion before July/August. And a cynical voice in my head wonders if that's why the Beta was included in the year long plan, as a way to get us content even in its incomplete state...
Anyway. I'm worried. But I'm having a lot of fun at the same time.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, the bosses are just falling over each other to cough up their loot. We finished our second night of raiding with Ultraxion going down, netting us a genuine realm first kill of all things. We were having a bit of trouble on that fight with DPS not being able to kill him in time, so we swapped one of the healers to DPS, switched out one DPS who wasn't quite pushing the numbers we needed and bang. Purples.
That put us at 5/8 and I fully expect us to clear through all that content on our first night next week, kill Gunship and be working on Spine by the end of our raid week.
On the one hand, the new content is fun, and I really wanted to go back in last night to clear Gunship and start poking at Spine but a lot of folks couldn't make it and a few of them wanted to slow down and savor the content. But on the other hand, this doesn't even seem like content worth doing over and over. If the next two bosses are as easy as the rest of the raid has been, we'll be facing hard modes at Christmas.
Now, to be fair, if I look at Firelands, once we killed Shannox, Beth and Rhyolith, the rest of the dungeon kind of fell in our laps. Baleroc only took about a night or two, we killed both Alys and Domo the same week we pulled them. After that Ragnaros was the only issue. This was pre-nerf. Ragnaros, took us about 2.5 nights to kill, and the nerf hit in the middle of that, which meant he went down fairly quickly after that. This was the first time we failed to kill all the normal modes pre nerf and I still grumble about it.
So, our progression in Dragon Soul has surprised me, as we didn't even have all that much heroic gear, we were only in the 379/380 iLevel range when we walked in on Tuesday, none of us had done the fights on the PTR, it was as new as content gets. We really went off of the Dungeon Journal for the most part, supplementing Icy Veins when necessary. And still, in about 5 hours over two days, killed 5 brand new bosses.
We know the next 3 bosses aren't going to stonewall us. Nearly a thousand guilds killed Madness this week. In three days. I don't foresee these bosses being much of an issue. So, even pessimistically, two weeks to kill Madness, by Christmas, we're done with normal modes.
I'm worried.
Really, there's not much you can say or do at this point, this is what's going to happen, we're not going to see these guys being buffed at this point. But what we don't know, is what's going to happen after normal modes. And this is my hope for Heroics:
A progression with a gradually sloping,
linear scaling of difficulty.
I don't mind if I can kill the first boss or two in the first week. That's fine. You have to start gearing somewhere. But I want us to stall on the third boss for a full week.
I want us to wipe, I want us to sit and discuss strategies, look at our team and evaluate what to do with our resources. I want us to reforge gear for specific stats, re-gem, re-enchant, move talent points around. I want to struggle and when the boss keels over, I want vent to be indecipherable with all the cheers of relief earned after winning a hard fought kill.
The fourth and fifth boss need to be on a similar level, if not a bit harder. Ultraxion is a well tuned fight even on normal, we had to 2 heal it, but I want us to have to 2 heal and solo tank it just to make the enrage and come up with creative ways of letting someone tank the boss while I'm dropping off Fading Light.
I want lootship to add more mechanics instead of just an add priority with positioning challenges.
Spine and Madness should both be very difficult, they need to last us weeks, they need to make us gnash our teeth and shake our heads, they need to make us struggle and anguish about whether or not we push our lockouts because we're so close to a kill, but wouldn't another week of heroic gear help.
That's what I want.
But even then, eight bosses, we're talking about, pessimistically, March? April? Before everything is done even on hard modes? And we'll still have four months to go at the least before expecting MoP. I can't see the expansion before July/August. And a cynical voice in my head wonders if that's why the Beta was included in the year long plan, as a way to get us content even in its incomplete state...
Anyway. I'm worried. But I'm having a lot of fun at the same time.
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