I will say one thing that's missing that was present in both TBC and WotLK raid design are "gimme" fights. In TBC, you had Loot Reaver, Lurker, and Chess/Attumen to gear up on. WotLK had, well, all of Naxx, Gunship, Flame Leviathan, and the WG bosses. There's no "okay, here's some easy loot" bosses in Cata save Argaloth, and he almost exclusively drops PvP junk.
Salvation122 on
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
I will say one thing that's missing that was present in both TBC and WotLK raid design are "gimme" fights. In TBC, you had Loot Reaver, Lurker, and Chess/Attumen to gear up on. WotLK had, well, all of Naxx, Gunship, Flame Leviathan, and the WG bosses. There's no "okay, here's some easy loot" bosses in Cata save Argaloth, and he almost exclusively drops PvP junk.
I can't wait for 4.2 so I can tank again. Healing is so urggghhh. I feel so useless.
Why can't you tank now?
Guild needed me to heal. I wanted to tank, since I healed most of Wrath on a paladin. But our lack of healers at the start of raiding led me being forced into Resto. But now, we have a derth of healers and a shortage of tanks, so in 4.2 I'm switching to Feral.
I will say one thing that's missing that was present in both TBC and WotLK raid design are "gimme" fights. In TBC, you had Loot Reaver, Lurker, and Chess/Attumen to gear up on. WotLK had, well, all of Naxx, Gunship, Flame Leviathan, and the WG bosses. There's no "okay, here's some easy loot" bosses in Cata save Argaloth, and he almost exclusively drops PvP junk.
Conclave of the Wind is a pretty damn easy fight.
And a great way to farm shards, I guess, since the loot is more often than not a sidegrade to 346 pieces.
I will say one thing that's missing that was present in both TBC and WotLK raid design are "gimme" fights. In TBC, you had Loot Reaver, Lurker, and Chess/Attumen to gear up on. WotLK had, well, all of Naxx, Gunship, Flame Leviathan, and the WG bosses. There's no "okay, here's some easy loot" bosses in Cata save Argaloth, and he almost exclusively drops PvP junk.
Conclave of the Wind is a pretty damn easy fight.
And a great way to farm shards, I guess, since the loot is more often than not a sidegrade to 346 pieces.
Throne of the Four Shards
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
Wow this new guild transfer service just sounds like a problem waiting to happen. It allows the GM to transfer not only the guild name and level, but also the entire guild bank.
Not like the GM couldn't just empty the entire guild bank anyways.
I have pretty much no interesting raiding. I've only ever done Karazhan, Zul'Aman and part of Naxxramas, so raiding has never been high on my list of things to do.
Edit: Plus I have no clue what the entrance raid is even called.
I will say one thing that's missing that was present in both TBC and WotLK raid design are "gimme" fights. In TBC, you had Loot Reaver, Lurker, and Chess/Attumen to gear up on. WotLK had, well, all of Naxx, Gunship, Flame Leviathan, and the WG bosses. There's no "okay, here's some easy loot" bosses in Cata save Argaloth, and he almost exclusively drops PvP junk.
Even before the ICC buff kicked in, the Hellscream server had PUGs for ICC that almost always killed Marrowgar, and if the geese could manage to honk their way through LDW, Gunship was a given. Saurfang being killed before everything fell apart was a rarity, but still, 1-3 and sometimes 4 bosses down for a PUG was something. I don't see PUGs accomplishing anything now in 4.0, and by this point in 3.3 the ICC buff was starting up.
Naxx I always felt was a reset in terms of raid difficulty.
That it was meant to be an introduction for people who thought about raiding for the first time. The tactics of each boss could pretty much be summed up in a few lines for each boss, where someone could learn "the basics" of what you'd expect later on in more complicated raids released in later tiers.
Naxx had it's problems (25 man being easier than the 10 man version, yet giving out better loot and the release of the next tier of raiding take too long being two that come to mind), but you know, for what it was, I thought it was a success.
The new raid tiers aren't a reset. I'd almost say they've carried on with difficulty from where WotLK left off nearly. There's alot going on in each boss fight for the earlier bosses. I'd say anyone raiding for the first time in this expansion would find the step-up to it, quite rough.
Also, it might just be me, but some fights seem to go on for ages.
Indeed. And I think that was a mistake. It's a new expansion, they should have treated it as a reset. Because suddenly you have ready made burnout, exported in it's near entirety from Wrath of the Lich King.
There's a lot of issues harming PUG raids in this first tier, here's a few off the top of my head:
--Raid leaders who require having beat the entire raid before you can join their pug or require an ilvl that's only possible with raid gear because they don't want to wipe and want things as easy as possible. The amount of patient raid leaders have dwindled greatly, especially since most are now with guilds for perks instead of attempting to get pug raids off of the ground.
--The first two Blackwing bosses have raid-wiping mechanics that someone new can easily mess up and wipe the raid and the first BoT boss requires tanks and healers to know what's up so most people wouldn't feel comfortable pugging that with anyone but DPS.
--Maelstrom crystals are super-rare, so it's better to 9 man a raid and end up DEing loot for crystals than bring a pug along and have it go to them (unless you charge them 1k gold per loot they get or something).
None of those TBC fights were really gimmes compared to how easy naxx was. You could walk into naxx and sneeze at at least two wings and clear them; void reaver and lurker at least required some baseline level of raid coordination, and you only got to do chess after you'd gotten through curator and aran, neither of which was a gimme early on.
ed: besides the fact that to even get to the easymode T5 fights, you had to have cleared the entirety of T4.
People forget how little pre-raid epic gear there was in BC, too. In wrath and cata you could be wearing half epics before even setting foot in a raid. Aside from one or two pieces from crafting if you had the right professions, most folks walked into karazhan in straight blues.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Also, I don't really see why there needs to be an easymode intro raid. Maybe it made sense in wrath because everything else was so easy anyway, but in cata we had legitimately difficult heroic encounters for people to cut their teeth on. The step up in difficulty has to happen at some point.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The step up in difficulty has to happen at some point.
Like heroic modes?
I mean, there has to be a baseline cutoff of difficulty somewhere. I don't think the answer is making normal mode raids 100% faceroll and then counting on heroic modes for challenge, because then you have to balance heroic difficulty across a huge spectrum of players - then you end up in scenarios where normal mode content is way too easy for a lot of guilds, but heroic modes are way too hard. This happened to an extent in Wrath, and I don't think they were happy about it.
I think raids are in a good place right now. My guild raid group has competent players. Mind you, a lot of them are by no means great players; people do shit dps a lot of the time, people stand in bad stuff, people slack off/go afk/whatever. Yet somehow we're killing raid bosses. We're not 12/12, but we're progressing. As a guild full of half-decent, but not great, players.
I don't think shooting for puggable raids is the ideal. Raids will get easier over time as they add tiers and make the previous tier of gear available on the JP vendor, there's no reason to nerf them into the ground right now.
The step up in difficulty has to happen at some point.
Like heroic modes?
Raids will get easier over time as they add tiers and make the previous tier of gear available on the JP vendor
That right there is the problem. Telling a quite significant portion of the playerbase to "hang in there" while the hardcores have their fun is just horseshit of the highest order. That's what a lot of people aren't getting. This was the issue in Vanilla and to an extent in TBC: when you say "X" is the cutoff for raid difficulty/accessibility, you exclude a huge portion of players for your game. When people have nothing left to do, they get bored and quit.
Blizzard foolishly relied on their (admittedly impressively) revamped 1-60 to placate the non-hardcores/raiders until these new raid tiers are developed, and in my opinion that is working to their detriment, as many players (not most, not half, maybe not even 10%, but a large number) are getting bored/burned out and are quitting/just not playing as often. It was a bad gamble. Wrath had it right for the most part, because whatever you thought about entry level raids, the hard modes existed (from Ulduar forward) for those who felt the normal modes weren't challenging enough. You had the content to please both groups of people, those who primarily crave raiding, and those who may not have raided otherwise but finally got to do so because the barrier of entry was finally lower than "fuck you, find a good raiding guild".
Even those of you who are raiding 12/12 in Cata right now must have at least been seeing the effects of this new (old) design - people are either playing far less or are straight up quitting. Three months into the expansion, that's a bad precedent to set.
The step up in difficulty has to happen at some point.
Like heroic modes?
Raids will get easier over time as they add tiers and make the previous tier of gear available on the JP vendor
That right there is the problem. Telling a quite significant portion of the playerbase to "hang in there"while the hardcores have their fun is just horseshit of the highest order. That's what a lot of people aren't getting. This was the issue in Vanilla and to an extent in TBC: when you say "X" is the cutoff for raid difficulty/accessibility, you exclude a huge portion of players for your game. When people have nothing left to do, they get bored and quit.
Yeah, except my raid group (as I pointed out) is nowhere near hardcore, many of the players aren't great at the game, we only raid two nights a week (for 2.5 hours each night), and we're still progressing (Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak, Atremedes, Halfus, and Double Dragons all down). So I'm really not sure who you expect them to tune the raids for, since my group seems to be getting along just fine on our completely casual raid schedule.
Yeah, except my raid group (as I pointed out) is nowhere near hardcore, many of the players aren't great at the game, we only raid two nights a week (for 2.5 hours each night), and we're still progressing (Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak, Atremedes, Halfus, and Double Dragons all down). So I'm really not sure who you expect them to tune the raids for, since my group seems to be getting along just fine on our completely casual raid schedule.
If you're 6/12, you're further along than quite a lot of players. That's not really my point, though. My point is that the CMs (and by extension, the developers) have come out and blatantly stated that they want "to keep things epic for the hardcore players" and that the non-hardcores can have their fun when the new tier is released and t11 becomes more accessible, and that's a terrible way to design content.
Raiding difficulty isn't the reason I see people quitting, it's just one half of it. Lack of anything interesting to do outside of raiding or PVP is the other half. Heroics are same old shit just longer and more annoying, archaeology is the ultimate grind and there's nothing much else to do for some. Once you've done the 1-60, geared up mains and leveled alts or quit trying the only thing left is raiding or pvp.
Making raids less difficult will only help so much. You get more people into raids and maybe raiding more often in pugs with alts, etc but people will get bored with that content too. They need to offer more content that isn't a few dailies and a pair of 5 mans meant to last 3-6 months sooner and make it more interesting. Even the 1-60 and 80-85 experience got old fast.
Yeah, except my raid group (as I pointed out) is nowhere near hardcore, many of the players aren't great at the game, we only raid two nights a week (for 2.5 hours each night), and we're still progressing (Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak, Atremedes, Halfus, and Double Dragons all down). So I'm really not sure who you expect them to tune the raids for, since my group seems to be getting along just fine on our completely casual raid schedule.
If you're 6/12, you're further along than quite a lot of players. That's not really my point, though. My point is that the CMs (and by extension, the developers) have come out and blatantly stated that they want "to keep things epic for the hardcore players" and that the non-hardcores can have their fun when the new tier is released and t11 becomes more accessible, and that's a terrible way to design content.
So if my casual guild full of average players is progressing reasonably well, and that's excluding a lot of players, what's your recommendation? Balancing raids around players who are strictly bad at the game? I don't see how that's good design either.
HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Raiding difficulty isn't the reason I see people quitting, it's just one half of it. Lack of anything interesting to do outside of raiding or PVP is the other half. Heroics are same old shit just longer and more annoying, archaeology is the ultimate grind and there's nothing much else to do for some. Once you've done the 1-60, geared up mains and leveled alts or quit trying the only thing left is raiding or pvp.
Making raids less difficult will only help so much. You get more people into raids and maybe raiding more often in pugs with alts, etc but people will get bored with that content too. They need to offer more content that isn't a few dailies and a pair of 5 mans meant to last 3-6 months sooner and make it more interesting. Even the 1-60 and 80-85 experience got old fast.
Yeah, I agree with that. More content across the board definitely wouldn't have hurt, but now we're looking at, what, May/June for 4.2? Going to be interesting to see how many come back for that.
Halfmex on
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
So if my casual guild full of average players is progressing reasonably well, and that's excluding a lot of players, what's your recommendation? Balancing raids around players who are strictly bad at the game? I don't see how that's good design either.
Again, not really my point, but I think you're selling your guild (or at least the raiders in it) short if you're halfway through the current raid content and calling that average.
My solution? If it isn't broke, don't fix it. Wrath struck a near-perfect balance of accessibility and difficulty between normal and hard modes. The people who claim Wrath was 'faceroll easy mode' really are only either focusing on Naxx or 30% ICC. There was plenty of difficulty there in between those times, and I clearly remember reading even the folks here struggling with Mimiron or Putricide and others. Of course there are and will always be varying skill levels between players, but when you skew your content toward the higher-end, you inevitably exclude those at the middle and lower ends, and again, that's just bad design in my opinion.
So if my casual guild full of average players is progressing reasonably well, and that's excluding a lot of players, what's your recommendation? Balancing raids around players who are strictly bad at the game? I don't see how that's good design either.
Again, not really my point, but I think you're selling your guild (or at least the raiders in it) short if you're halfway through the current raid content and calling that average.
My solution? If it isn't broke, don't fix it. Wrath struck a near-perfect balance of accessibility and difficulty between normal and hard modes. The people who claim Wrath was 'faceroll easy mode' really are only either focusing on Naxx or 30% ICC. There was plenty of difficulty there in between those times, and I clearly remember reading even the folks here struggling with Mimiron or Putricide and others. Of course there are and will always be varying skill levels between players, but when you skew your content toward the higher-end, you inevitably exclude those at the middle and lower ends, and again, that's just bad design in my opinion.
When people talk about Wrath being faceroll they mean Naxx, ToC normal and ICC (post buff). Ulduar was a good bit harder than Naxx and aside from one annoying gimmick fight was harder in places for it's time than ToC. Thing is the latter half of Wrath encouraged lots of people to raid whenever they wanted and get reasonable success so the time thing is a big deal. They opened it up to people who had been excluded previously and then took away in Cata. That's where most of the gripes seem to come from. From that perspective content is too inaccessible. Like I said earlier, the only way that nerfing the content will work long term is if there is more content to satisfy people. It won't work otherwise and Blizz are shit at it.
Though I can see where some folk are coming from, I personally don't find normal mode raid content difficult at all so far, tho my guildies might disagree. Most cata fights boil down to keep tanks up, heal up quickly, dps really hard, switch targets quickly, don't stand in the fire and the new favorite INTERRUPT THAT SHIT NAOW! We just got to last 3 end bosses and while we haven't killed Cho'gall he doesn't really seem "hard". Nef might be a different story but we're not working on him yet. All we ask of people is to have patience, learn the fight, be willing to learn and turn up for our raid schedule. You just have to pay attention for 3 hours, which is what seems to be the trouble for most people. It was different when we first started. Magmaw scared the crap out of us and we were shit. The reason we are 9/12 is we mushed on and got better. Nothing to do with hardcore or casual. It's just attitude and time commitment.
danx on
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Meh, hardcore and casual are the 'go-to' names that most people use, so that's what I stuck with for consistency's sake, but the time commitment is indeed a big deal. Whether or not you (general 'you') feel that raiding needs to be more accessible seems to generally depend on your personal skill level and that of your guild, but again, given that so many seem not to be raiding, especially in comparison to just a few months ago (let alone two years ago), I'd say something is certainly amiss.
The hardcore/casual distinction is dumb because it obscures the scope of the design challenge blizzard has. It isn't enough for content to be either easily clearable by everybody or soulcrushingly hard; it has to satisfy a wide variety of preferences about difficulty, time commitment, etc. If they were just designing for the two extremes it'd probably be pretty easy to keep both groups happy.
I mean, my 10 man is pretty far from hardcore at this point; we run with variable composition depending on who of the 12-13 static members (and few subs) are around, raid for about seven hours a week across two nights, and don't enforce specs or even really optimal gear setups. But whatever, we're 10/12 and we'd probably be 11 if we bothered to spend any time looking at al'akir, and we'll probably kill him and nef in a couple more weeks of work. And while nothing's been particularly difficult so far, we definitely don't fit into the "hardcore" paradigm: if we had to spend 4-5 more hours per week raiding to progress meaningfully, it's unlikely we would have a raid at all.
So, the idea that normal mode raiding is "too hard" is kind of mindboggling for me. It's not like there are any mysteries in this game, really; our raid doesn't have some secret formula and neither does anyone else. Precisely how easy does content need to get before people are happy with it?
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
While I agree with your overall point, I think everyone here is forgetting the easy-mode raiding they removed: 10 man normal
Most PUGs weren't 25s in my experience. And the ones that were, were terrible or didn't make it far.
With 10 man raiding now being balanced around the idea of being as hard as 25, it has eliminated the most face-roll of raid content available.
Though frankly, I think the fact that the current dungeons are more akin to Ulduar or ICC then Naxx is the more prevelant issue. They aren't super hard, but they aren't faceroll easy either. They are like Cata Heroics compared to WOTLK heroics.
I can't figure out why I'm leveling a Death Knight. Every other class seems to either do more damage, or bring something interesting to the table.
Shame I already wasted 5k gold on epic flying. :?
I don't understand why Blizz felt that 10 man should be of the same difficulty of 25 man. Why even try for such a thing?
It's not like the WoW population would recognise 10 and 25 man normal being the same anyway, due to the logistics of runnin a 25 man guild. If anything 10 man raiding would be more prone to class composition / stacking and any class imbalance currently going on.
I think people should remember that the difficulty in WotLK was also mucked up by Blizz not really knowing how to handle itemisation until about halfway through the expansion. That's the reason we got that ICC debuff because tanks had so much avoidance.
While I agree with your overall point, I think everyone here is forgetting the easy-mode raiding they removed: 10 man normal
Most PUGs weren't 25s in my experience. And the ones that were, were terrible or didn't make it far.
With 10 man raiding now being balanced around the idea of being as hard as 25, it has eliminated the most face-roll of raid content available.
Though frankly, I think the fact that the current dungeons are more akin to Ulduar or ICC then Naxx is the more prevelant issue. They aren't super hard, but they aren't faceroll easy either. They are like Cata Heroics compared to WOTLK heroics.
The changes to 10 mans were a huge boon to my guild. We like the challenge, but more importantly, we like that gear isn't tiered.
Making 10s equivalent to 25s was basically just a recognition of the fact that, look, lots of people don't want to fuck with running a 25 man raid and the game's a lot more accessible if you can "keep up" while running 10s. In turn, 10s are a lot more compelling if they're tuned as the main event, rather than 25 man raiding's pimply 14 year old brother.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Making 10s equivalent to 25s was basically just a recognition of the fact that, look, lots of people don't want to fuck with running a 25 man raid and the game's a lot more accessible if you can "keep up" while running 10s. In turn, 10s are a lot more compelling if they're tuned as the main event, rather than 25 man raiding's pimply 14 year old brother.
I personally think they should make raids PUGable, I want to be able to raid whenever, not at a set time every week. My schedule really varies too much for me to get into a raiding guild with set raid times. I want to be able to log on and be like LFG raid, and most likely get into one.
I personally think they should make raids PUGable, I want to be able to raid whenever, not at a set time every week. My schedule really varies too much for me to get into a raiding guild with set raid times. I want to be able to log on and be like LFG raid, and most likely get into one.
Except I'm pretty sure they want raiding to be a social, guild-oriented exercise, not something you do with 9-24 random people you get together with in trade chat. I don't think this is an unreasonable goal to have in a social game, particularly if you consider everything else they've done to make guilds a bigger emphasis. I don't think raids being puggable is one of their priorities, nor do I think it should be.
Posts
even healing Arthas was pushing it with the fight being like, 12-13 minutes and if you wiped in phase 3 hurrrrgh
We just whip our Shamans and make them stack Spirit for mana tide, it works well.
Why can't you tank now?
Conclave of the Wind is a pretty damn easy fight.
Guild needed me to heal. I wanted to tank, since I healed most of Wrath on a paladin. But our lack of healers at the start of raiding led me being forced into Resto. But now, we have a derth of healers and a shortage of tanks, so in 4.2 I'm switching to Feral.
And a great way to farm shards, I guess, since the loot is more often than not a sidegrade to 346 pieces.
Throne of the Four Shards
Not like the GM couldn't just empty the entire guild bank anyways.
Edit: Plus I have no clue what the entrance raid is even called.
Indeed. And I think that was a mistake. It's a new expansion, they should have treated it as a reset. Because suddenly you have ready made burnout, exported in it's near entirety from Wrath of the Lich King.
--Raid leaders who require having beat the entire raid before you can join their pug or require an ilvl that's only possible with raid gear because they don't want to wipe and want things as easy as possible. The amount of patient raid leaders have dwindled greatly, especially since most are now with guilds for perks instead of attempting to get pug raids off of the ground.
--The first two Blackwing bosses have raid-wiping mechanics that someone new can easily mess up and wipe the raid and the first BoT boss requires tanks and healers to know what's up so most people wouldn't feel comfortable pugging that with anyone but DPS.
--Maelstrom crystals are super-rare, so it's better to 9 man a raid and end up DEing loot for crystals than bring a pug along and have it go to them (unless you charge them 1k gold per loot they get or something).
ed: besides the fact that to even get to the easymode T5 fights, you had to have cleared the entirety of T4.
People forget how little pre-raid epic gear there was in BC, too. In wrath and cata you could be wearing half epics before even setting foot in a raid. Aside from one or two pieces from crafting if you had the right professions, most folks walked into karazhan in straight blues.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I mean, there has to be a baseline cutoff of difficulty somewhere. I don't think the answer is making normal mode raids 100% faceroll and then counting on heroic modes for challenge, because then you have to balance heroic difficulty across a huge spectrum of players - then you end up in scenarios where normal mode content is way too easy for a lot of guilds, but heroic modes are way too hard. This happened to an extent in Wrath, and I don't think they were happy about it.
I think raids are in a good place right now. My guild raid group has competent players. Mind you, a lot of them are by no means great players; people do shit dps a lot of the time, people stand in bad stuff, people slack off/go afk/whatever. Yet somehow we're killing raid bosses. We're not 12/12, but we're progressing. As a guild full of half-decent, but not great, players.
I don't think shooting for puggable raids is the ideal. Raids will get easier over time as they add tiers and make the previous tier of gear available on the JP vendor, there's no reason to nerf them into the ground right now.
Blizzard foolishly relied on their (admittedly impressively) revamped 1-60 to placate the non-hardcores/raiders until these new raid tiers are developed, and in my opinion that is working to their detriment, as many players (not most, not half, maybe not even 10%, but a large number) are getting bored/burned out and are quitting/just not playing as often. It was a bad gamble. Wrath had it right for the most part, because whatever you thought about entry level raids, the hard modes existed (from Ulduar forward) for those who felt the normal modes weren't challenging enough. You had the content to please both groups of people, those who primarily crave raiding, and those who may not have raided otherwise but finally got to do so because the barrier of entry was finally lower than "fuck you, find a good raiding guild".
Even those of you who are raiding 12/12 in Cata right now must have at least been seeing the effects of this new (old) design - people are either playing far less or are straight up quitting. Three months into the expansion, that's a bad precedent to set.
Yeah, except my raid group (as I pointed out) is nowhere near hardcore, many of the players aren't great at the game, we only raid two nights a week (for 2.5 hours each night), and we're still progressing (Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak, Atremedes, Halfus, and Double Dragons all down). So I'm really not sure who you expect them to tune the raids for, since my group seems to be getting along just fine on our completely casual raid schedule.
Making raids less difficult will only help so much. You get more people into raids and maybe raiding more often in pugs with alts, etc but people will get bored with that content too. They need to offer more content that isn't a few dailies and a pair of 5 mans meant to last 3-6 months sooner and make it more interesting. Even the 1-60 and 80-85 experience got old fast.
So if my casual guild full of average players is progressing reasonably well, and that's excluding a lot of players, what's your recommendation? Balancing raids around players who are strictly bad at the game? I don't see how that's good design either.
My solution? If it isn't broke, don't fix it. Wrath struck a near-perfect balance of accessibility and difficulty between normal and hard modes. The people who claim Wrath was 'faceroll easy mode' really are only either focusing on Naxx or 30% ICC. There was plenty of difficulty there in between those times, and I clearly remember reading even the folks here struggling with Mimiron or Putricide and others. Of course there are and will always be varying skill levels between players, but when you skew your content toward the higher-end, you inevitably exclude those at the middle and lower ends, and again, that's just bad design in my opinion.
When people talk about Wrath being faceroll they mean Naxx, ToC normal and ICC (post buff). Ulduar was a good bit harder than Naxx and aside from one annoying gimmick fight was harder in places for it's time than ToC. Thing is the latter half of Wrath encouraged lots of people to raid whenever they wanted and get reasonable success so the time thing is a big deal. They opened it up to people who had been excluded previously and then took away in Cata. That's where most of the gripes seem to come from. From that perspective content is too inaccessible. Like I said earlier, the only way that nerfing the content will work long term is if there is more content to satisfy people. It won't work otherwise and Blizz are shit at it.
Though I can see where some folk are coming from, I personally don't find normal mode raid content difficult at all so far, tho my guildies might disagree. Most cata fights boil down to keep tanks up, heal up quickly, dps really hard, switch targets quickly, don't stand in the fire and the new favorite INTERRUPT THAT SHIT NAOW! We just got to last 3 end bosses and while we haven't killed Cho'gall he doesn't really seem "hard". Nef might be a different story but we're not working on him yet. All we ask of people is to have patience, learn the fight, be willing to learn and turn up for our raid schedule. You just have to pay attention for 3 hours, which is what seems to be the trouble for most people. It was different when we first started. Magmaw scared the crap out of us and we were shit. The reason we are 9/12 is we mushed on and got better. Nothing to do with hardcore or casual. It's just attitude and time commitment.
I mean, my 10 man is pretty far from hardcore at this point; we run with variable composition depending on who of the 12-13 static members (and few subs) are around, raid for about seven hours a week across two nights, and don't enforce specs or even really optimal gear setups. But whatever, we're 10/12 and we'd probably be 11 if we bothered to spend any time looking at al'akir, and we'll probably kill him and nef in a couple more weeks of work. And while nothing's been particularly difficult so far, we definitely don't fit into the "hardcore" paradigm: if we had to spend 4-5 more hours per week raiding to progress meaningfully, it's unlikely we would have a raid at all.
So, the idea that normal mode raiding is "too hard" is kind of mindboggling for me. It's not like there are any mysteries in this game, really; our raid doesn't have some secret formula and neither does anyone else. Precisely how easy does content need to get before people are happy with it?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Most PUGs weren't 25s in my experience. And the ones that were, were terrible or didn't make it far.
With 10 man raiding now being balanced around the idea of being as hard as 25, it has eliminated the most face-roll of raid content available.
Though frankly, I think the fact that the current dungeons are more akin to Ulduar or ICC then Naxx is the more prevelant issue. They aren't super hard, but they aren't faceroll easy either. They are like Cata Heroics compared to WOTLK heroics.
Shame I already wasted 5k gold on epic flying. :?
It's not like the WoW population would recognise 10 and 25 man normal being the same anyway, due to the logistics of runnin a 25 man guild. If anything 10 man raiding would be more prone to class composition / stacking and any class imbalance currently going on.
I think people should remember that the difficulty in WotLK was also mucked up by Blizz not really knowing how to handle itemisation until about halfway through the expansion. That's the reason we got that ICC debuff because tanks had so much avoidance.
The changes to 10 mans were a huge boon to my guild. We like the challenge, but more importantly, we like that gear isn't tiered.
LoL: failboattootoot
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Exactly.
LoL: failboattootoot
Except I'm pretty sure they want raiding to be a social, guild-oriented exercise, not something you do with 9-24 random people you get together with in trade chat. I don't think this is an unreasonable goal to have in a social game, particularly if you consider everything else they've done to make guilds a bigger emphasis. I don't think raids being puggable is one of their priorities, nor do I think it should be.