I could think of a whole mess of coding hurdles with scaling instances. Scaling for one is easy, but to do it for 5 different people at once...
Someone earlier posted a story on how 4 people in Ulduar gear pugged with a fresh 80 tank in not much more than dungeon blues. How would you scale that? Making the dungeon even harder due the other 4 isn't fair to the new tank, who's at no fault other than he apparently started playing too late.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
They better not put awesome gear in normal like they did for TOC (Banner of Victory, Black Heart) . I hate farming that place.
God, this. I despise doing instances that don't at least gives badges I can use for epic gems and what not just for a piece of gear that is better than raid loot. It's just trinkets too. If it was any other slot it wouldn't matter and would be easily replaced, but it had to be trinkets. On the other hand, if they want to put some sexy 232 trinkets in the new 5 man, I am totally down with that.
Hard modes require more then just gear, they require you to be good at playing THE GAME! The difference between someone that, (due to gear differences) does 4000 DPS and 3500 DPS is made mute when the 4k DPS dies to something stupid like the Heigan dance. The 3500 DPS player has used his superior WoWSkillz to keep himself alive, while the 4k dps player has proven that s/he knows how to zone out and mash buttons.
The question is, how do you translate that into a heroic 5 man?
The paladin in 5 man ToC is a good example. That blind thing he does even tells you to look away, yet every pug I see in there always stands there and takes it. If they made that blind thing 10 seconds or something and gave him a short enrage timer that if you turned away from each blind you could make, that is how you would translate that to a 5 man. Imagine if your healer didnt look away, no tank heals for 10 seconds = dead tank.
Part of the problem is that they completely underemphasized doing 5man normals. I remember there was gear that I worked on getting in TBC from normal 5mans (including an dungeon set), but there's no such situation this time around.
As a result, heroic 5mans are the "normal" 5man instances for endgame, instead of trying to have a dual layered 5man like in TBC.
So true. I never ran a single normal dungeon for all of wrath, until they added the Banner of Victory into normal ToC-5. First time I ran without the heroic setting on.
Hard modes require more then just gear, they require you to be good at playing THE GAME! The difference between someone that, (due to gear differences) does 4000 DPS and 3500 DPS is made mute when the 4k DPS dies to something stupid like the Heigan dance. The 3500 DPS player has used his superior WoWSkillz to keep himself alive, while the 4k dps player has proven that s/he knows how to zone out and mash buttons.
The question is, how do you translate that into a heroic 5 man?
Ever play Heroic Magister's terrace?
It had:
6-mob trash spawns with mixed ranged/melee mobs which were all individually dangerous and could take out a healer or dps(encouraging good cc use and/or aoe tanking skills)
Mobs which could cc the tank indefinitely and force an aggro drop, again encouraging good cc and planning (in this case either have the arms warrior/feral druid/ret pally/hunter pet offtank and burn down first with focused dps while the main tank handles the non-ccing monsters, warlock enslave demon until the end of fight, or mage chain sheep)
Bosses which were more than just tank and spanks (kael being a really good example)
Large scale critter aoe fights to force everyone to shift gears
etc.
It's not that hard to put in difficulty without making it a gear check.
Jealous Deva on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited October 2009
heroic magisters terrace was a check of two things
1) did you have a paladin tank
2) did your paladin tank have the gear to aoe tank everything with no CC
Most groups wouldn't do magisters terrace unless they fit both conditions
The thing is, there are already mobs running around right now that do things like root and run away to longer distances, throw cc and/or attacks on the 2nd target on the threat list, stun/cc tanks, etc. Its just that these encounters aren't designed in such a way that these monsters are real threats. Its like with coren at brewfest, eventually everyone would just ignore the barrels because they didn't stun long enough for the lack of healing to make a difference or the tank to lose aggro.
I remember soloing it last week. Took way too long!
I sometimes solo Heroic Magister's it just takes forever but if I get the bad combo for the third boss then I fail
In TBC I ran with more warrior tanks then paladin tanks to that place
Now it's death knights asking if they want to come
You don't need to worry about that boss. If you kill the first two trash packs (the two guards and the two mobs that pat), you can use a /target command to cycle through the mobs for the Delrissa event.
When I solo that place, I go in far enough and do a /target apoko. If he doesn't show up I go forward, if he does I step outside and reset the instance.
to make heroics challenging they need to make the challenges completely seperate from gear.
the paladin boss in ToC would be a good example. if you dont turn away, you should get majorly debuffed. maybe stunned for 10 seconds, or knocked over in a way that trinket/dispel/racial wont end it. or if it just straight out one-shotted you by doing 100k dmg.
if you give a challenege that has multiple solutions, people will be lazy and go for the "outgear and overpower the mechanics" choice. heroics need to have challeneges that can only be solved by skill and technique.
There's a reason why Occulus is hated by so many people: it takes people out of their comfort zone and makes skill matter more than gear. Since it's a "base level" heroic, a lot of people skip it unlike with Magister's where people went there for the higher level gear even though it was a hellhole.
I do want to get a group of friends going to blaze through those achievements....but I dont know how many are willing to go...and the thought of pugging someone isn't pleasant, if I want an achievement out of it.
Jesus H Christ. WHAT did Blizzard to do WoW with 3.0.8? I've had nothing but problems running WoW since then. I've even reinstalled from scratch and on a fresh install had these issues.
-Freezing while shit loads in Dalara
-Freezing on Exit
-Random crashes
-Teh graphics engine freaking out making large swaths of the level not show up, or even just blacking out making it so I can't even see the menu to quit out.
I'm sick of it. Anyone have any idea what's going on? I've reinstalled, updated drivers.. done everything short of reformatting my entire computer.
heroic magisters terrace was a check of two things
1) did you have a paladin tank
2) did your paladin tank have the gear to aoe tank everything with no CC
Most groups wouldn't do magisters terrace unless they fit both conditions
Or, alternatively, no one without CC got to come.
"Non-Tank Warrior? Pfft, fuck off."
Heroic MgT was dependent on what class you brought more than anything else.
Occulus drakes scale with gear, now, though. The place is probably one of the easier heroics now, unless you're doing emerald void.
Emerald void is pretty easy now, after what a guild mate showed me. Clear the platform around the chest of any of the dragons. Then get your healer to dismount onto the island. Then have the other 4 people fly above the healer, and pull the boss. Provided people fly off when the boss fades, the healer can survive and heal the group easily enough.
I went in there with 2 mages, 1 lock, and a paladin tank on my resto shaman, and the place was a breeze. Went in there another time with 1 warrior tank, 1 dps warrior, 1 enhancement shaman, 1 feral druid and the difficulty went up dramatically, because we had hardly any cc, and all our dps was melee (which was a bit of a problem when it came to the pheonix).
If blizz started making heroics like that again, it would be a step backward, unless you start giving all classes a cc they can spam repeatedly. There's a reason why people asked for mages in heroics in TBC.
I don't see anything wrong with achievement screening on the armory to check for bad players.
however the key difference between me and the bad PuG raid leaders is that I don't look for the achievement for the instance we're doing. If they have it, its a plus, but I don't require it. What I do look for is other achievements, for other raid instances. Having raided basically everything in WotLK except the second half of 25man hardmode ToC, I know the relative difficulty of encounters. If I'm putting together a 10man ToC normal mode PuG, and I have a choice between two people, one of whom has great badge gear, but has only done the spider wing in Naxx10, and someone with less gear but with a full Naxx clear achievement, a few Ulduar achievements, maybe even some of the easier hardmode achievements, guess who I think is a better player?
Its not foolproof, but it doesn't suffer from the problem of "You must have the achievement for this raid to do this raid!!!!"
what if that person did kael'thas and vashj pre nerf? :P
I don't see anything wrong with achievement screening on the armory to check for bad players.
however the key difference between me and the bad PuG raid leaders is that I don't look for the achievement for the instance we're doing. If they have it, its a plus, but I don't require it. What I do look for is other achievements, for other raid instances. Having raided basically everything in WotLK except the second half of 25man hardmode ToC, I know the relative difficulty of encounters. If I'm putting together a 10man ToC normal mode PuG, and I have a choice between two people, one of whom has great badge gear, but has only done the spider wing in Naxx10, and someone with less gear but with a full Naxx clear achievement, a few Ulduar achievements, maybe even some of the easier hardmode achievements, guess who I think is a better player?
Its not foolproof, but it doesn't suffer from the problem of "You must have the achievement for this raid to do this raid!!!!"
what if that person did kael'thas and vashj pre nerf? :P
So last night, a friend and I took out some rage on a bunch of hippies.
We went into Borean Tundra, got bloodied up, and destroyed the DHETA camp.
One particular fellow rode by and /shouted "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING", followed by various "holier than thou" statements of how we're going to get "totally banned" because he just reported us.
I play on an RP server, by the way. The three other people that rode by just laughed at our comments while we killed them and went along their merry ways. I can understand if I stayed and kept killing them...
So, we had fun... and we upset a keyboard-warrior that had no sense of humor.
LOL at whoever said Oculus takes skill. Up until the last boss each drake has what, 2 abilities? Then 3 on the last boss. When I can take any random pug in there and say hit 1, then hit 2 over and over and then target somebody with low health and hit 3 and not even tell them what the abilities do and have them do it easily, that does not equate to taking skill.
People don't like Oculus because they didn't roll a Warrior, Rogue, Shaman or whatever to ride a stupid dragon and hit a couple buttons. Vehicles were a cool idea for just regular quests to change things up, but it was a stupid decision to put them in instances and raids. I thought Malygos p1 and p2 was a really fun designed encounter, but p3 was just retarded. It was so anti climactic to finish a boss fight that way, and Oculus is the same thing on a smaller scale.
Occulus drakes scale with gear, now, though. The place is probably one of the easier heroics now, unless you're doing emerald void.
Can you explain ruby void to me? I have no idea how to do this one... and it's one of 6 I need for my drake... fortunately less-rabi is no longer on the list
Ruby void you take 5 amber drakes, for the strategy I've seen done.
The amount of damage output with 5 amber drakes is inconceivable, and you can usually force him to phase by the time he's done being stunned if you chain time stops. It's hard, but not impossible.
HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
edited October 2009
S'true though, Oculus really doesn't take any more skill than playing your character; in fact it takes less, unless you're only hitting 1-2 buttons on your character at any time.
The problem with Oculus is the same problem I have with any vehicle encounter - I simply don't like being forced to use vehicles in place of my character. I wouldn't mind having the option, just as with the last boss in the ring of blood thing in ZD; you can choose to hop on the mammoth and deal damage that way or you can stay off.
I respect the devs for trying something different, but I really hope this is the last we see of (forced) vehicle encounters.
Any pointers on how to do Watch Him Die? We gave it a few tries last night but didn't have much success.
1. Pull the left named add with his friends. Kill the two unnamed adds.
2. While still tanking the first named add, pull the middle group. Repeat in killing the two unnamed adds.
3. While still tanking the first two adds, pull the right group and kill the unnamed adds. At this point you are tanking all 3 named npcs.
4. If you have a pally in the group, have him holy wrath the npcs, and pull the boss. Bloodlust if you've got it. Pop cooldowns if you've got them up (the fight may not last longer than needing the first one if your group is high T8 level/T9 geared).
Depending on gear level, you may be able to mop up the remaining named adds, or you can just wipe to them and let them reset.
Posts
Someone earlier posted a story on how 4 people in Ulduar gear pugged with a fresh 80 tank in not much more than dungeon blues. How would you scale that? Making the dungeon even harder due the other 4 isn't fair to the new tank, who's at no fault other than he apparently started playing too late.
God, this. I despise doing instances that don't at least gives badges I can use for epic gems and what not just for a piece of gear that is better than raid loot. It's just trinkets too. If it was any other slot it wouldn't matter and would be easily replaced, but it had to be trinkets. On the other hand, if they want to put some sexy 232 trinkets in the new 5 man, I am totally down with that.
The paladin in 5 man ToC is a good example. That blind thing he does even tells you to look away, yet every pug I see in there always stands there and takes it. If they made that blind thing 10 seconds or something and gave him a short enrage timer that if you turned away from each blind you could make, that is how you would translate that to a 5 man. Imagine if your healer didnt look away, no tank heals for 10 seconds = dead tank.
So true. I never ran a single normal dungeon for all of wrath, until they added the Banner of Victory into normal ToC-5. First time I ran without the heroic setting on.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
In vanilla, I used to make it a point on my druid to face in random direction.
Also, I wish gaze worked like radiance. Cast time is so much less annoying than a channel.
Ever play Heroic Magister's terrace?
It had:
6-mob trash spawns with mixed ranged/melee mobs which were all individually dangerous and could take out a healer or dps(encouraging good cc use and/or aoe tanking skills)
Mobs which could cc the tank indefinitely and force an aggro drop, again encouraging good cc and planning (in this case either have the arms warrior/feral druid/ret pally/hunter pet offtank and burn down first with focused dps while the main tank handles the non-ccing monsters, warlock enslave demon until the end of fight, or mage chain sheep)
Bosses which were more than just tank and spanks (kael being a really good example)
Large scale critter aoe fights to force everyone to shift gears
etc.
It's not that hard to put in difficulty without making it a gear check.
1) did you have a paladin tank
2) did your paladin tank have the gear to aoe tank everything with no CC
Most groups wouldn't do magisters terrace unless they fit both conditions
This was mainly a loophole with paladin tanks in BC, though, and would be easy enough to fix/design around.
But I remember having to CC. Enslaving those succubus bitches was awesome.
I sometimes solo Heroic Magister's it just takes forever but if I get the bad combo for the third boss then I fail
In TBC I ran with more warrior tanks then paladin tanks to that place
Now it's death knights asking if they want to come
You don't need to worry about that boss. If you kill the first two trash packs (the two guards and the two mobs that pat), you can use a /target command to cycle through the mobs for the Delrissa event.
When I solo that place, I go in far enough and do a /target apoko. If he doesn't show up I go forward, if he does I step outside and reset the instance.
the paladin boss in ToC would be a good example. if you dont turn away, you should get majorly debuffed. maybe stunned for 10 seconds, or knocked over in a way that trinket/dispel/racial wont end it. or if it just straight out one-shotted you by doing 100k dmg.
if you give a challenege that has multiple solutions, people will be lazy and go for the "outgear and overpower the mechanics" choice. heroics need to have challeneges that can only be solved by skill and technique.
Fortunately its often sufficient to just have less blinding radiances occur, to use that example.
Or, alternatively, no one without CC got to come.
"Non-Tank Warrior? Pfft, fuck off."
Mostly because:
1) drakes require a modicum of actual skill to use properly
2) lots of flying around in 3D leads to people getting lost or side-tracked
That means the whole thing takes ages to do unless you've got a good group.
I kinda wanna get the heroic achievement someday, though...
which fucking sucked.
My server had one week where Occulus was the Heroic Daily for 6 out of 7 days.
By the 4th time, you'd log on early in the day and trade chat would be full of "FUCK YOU BLIZZARD!!!!!!!! NOT OCCULUS AGAIN!!!".
And if it's not the Daily, no one will do it. Like, NO ONE, Full Stop.
-Freezing while shit loads in Dalara
-Freezing on Exit
-Random crashes
-Teh graphics engine freaking out making large swaths of the level not show up, or even just blacking out making it so I can't even see the menu to quit out.
I'm sick of it. Anyone have any idea what's going on? I've reinstalled, updated drivers.. done everything short of reformatting my entire computer.
Heroic MgT was dependent on what class you brought more than anything else.
Emerald void is pretty easy now, after what a guild mate showed me. Clear the platform around the chest of any of the dragons. Then get your healer to dismount onto the island. Then have the other 4 people fly above the healer, and pull the boss. Provided people fly off when the boss fades, the healer can survive and heal the group easily enough.
I went in there with 2 mages, 1 lock, and a paladin tank on my resto shaman, and the place was a breeze. Went in there another time with 1 warrior tank, 1 dps warrior, 1 enhancement shaman, 1 feral druid and the difficulty went up dramatically, because we had hardly any cc, and all our dps was melee (which was a bit of a problem when it came to the pheonix).
If blizz started making heroics like that again, it would be a step backward, unless you start giving all classes a cc they can spam repeatedly. There's a reason why people asked for mages in heroics in TBC.
I don't mind the skill since the people I roll with have the skill to do it.
No, I skip Oculus because the manner in which you need to use your skill is just plain boring.
there are unfortunately no ways to track that
We went into Borean Tundra, got bloodied up, and destroyed the DHETA camp.
One particular fellow rode by and /shouted "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING", followed by various "holier than thou" statements of how we're going to get "totally banned" because he just reported us.
I play on an RP server, by the way. The three other people that rode by just laughed at our comments while we killed them and went along their merry ways. I can understand if I stayed and kept killing them...
So, we had fun... and we upset a keyboard-warrior that had no sense of humor.
People don't like Oculus because they didn't roll a Warrior, Rogue, Shaman or whatever to ride a stupid dragon and hit a couple buttons. Vehicles were a cool idea for just regular quests to change things up, but it was a stupid decision to put them in instances and raids. I thought Malygos p1 and p2 was a really fun designed encounter, but p3 was just retarded. It was so anti climactic to finish a boss fight that way, and Oculus is the same thing on a smaller scale.
Can you explain ruby void to me? I have no idea how to do this one... and it's one of 6 I need for my drake... fortunately less-rabi is no longer on the list
LOL at people that begin sentences with LOL.
Man, I feel like a tard just writing that.
The amount of damage output with 5 amber drakes is inconceivable, and you can usually force him to phase by the time he's done being stunned if you chain time stops. It's hard, but not impossible.
The problem with Oculus is the same problem I have with any vehicle encounter - I simply don't like being forced to use vehicles in place of my character. I wouldn't mind having the option, just as with the last boss in the ring of blood thing in ZD; you can choose to hop on the mammoth and deal damage that way or you can stay off.
I respect the devs for trying something different, but I really hope this is the last we see of (forced) vehicle encounters.
Please, don't hurt my feelings. :P I forgot the internet is serious business and proper grammar must always be used while visiting video game forums.
You may wish to read the rules.
1. Pull the left named add with his friends. Kill the two unnamed adds.
2. While still tanking the first named add, pull the middle group. Repeat in killing the two unnamed adds.
3. While still tanking the first two adds, pull the right group and kill the unnamed adds. At this point you are tanking all 3 named npcs.
4. If you have a pally in the group, have him holy wrath the npcs, and pull the boss. Bloodlust if you've got it. Pop cooldowns if you've got them up (the fight may not last longer than needing the first one if your group is high T8 level/T9 geared).
Depending on gear level, you may be able to mop up the remaining named adds, or you can just wipe to them and let them reset.