If you are not near a bubble when targeted, you don't have enough time to run in anyways. The problem was always the shadows overwhelming the healer. Either because they weren't being targeted at all, or because people weren't breaking the chains free.
I'd tell them that before the pull, too. "Be ready and near a bubble, but don't wait ON a bubble because then the Shadow Crash bolt will land on it." The Gurubashi Spirit will usually glare in the direction of the one person not paying attention anyway.
Like I've always said, once Wrath let the difficulty cat out of the bag there was nothing they could do to get it back. GC fucking hated that he ruined the game's difficulty with Wrath and so he resolved to fix it and ended up going too way far in the opposite direction. Fortunately that overcompensation means in MoP they can lower the difficulty from where it is some but still keep it higher than Wrath and not have near as many people alienated by it since the majority of people deal in relatives so to them it's "easier."
I think the current difficulty of everything rout now is about perfect. Launch heroics are challenging up to iLvL 340. T11 is challenging up to 353 iLvL. T12 is challenging up to 373 iLvL. HoT 5 man's are challenging up to 370 iLvL. T13 is challenging up to 388 iLvL. The only outliers are the zulroics(too hard for intended audience) and LFR(too easy, but that's by design).
An guild of players that has enough people that log on can complete 4/8 normal DS with not much trouble. An organized guild with dedicated players can get 6/8 with no trouble. An organized guild of players that put thought and little research into the game can go 8/8 with not much trouble. An organized guild with players that research everything and optimize their characters will get heroic content down with the desired amount of challenge.
The difficulty right now is perfect. The LFR automatically gives MoP its Naxxramas, which is what Cata was missing, an entry level raid. At the same time it provides its Ulduar level raid in the form of normals, and its heroic tier. I think MoP will see an increase in subs over the first 3 months instead of catas dramatic decrease.
Like I've always said, once Wrath let the difficulty cat out of the bag there was nothing they could do to get it back. GC fucking hated that he ruined the game's difficulty with Wrath and so he resolved to fix it and ended up going too way far in the opposite direction. Fortunately that overcompensation means in MoP they can lower the difficulty from where it is some but still keep it higher than Wrath and not have near as many people alienated by it since the majority of people deal in relatives so to them it's "easier."
I think the current difficulty of everything rout now is about perfect. Launch heroics are challenging up to iLvL 340. T11 is challenging up to 353 iLvL. T12 is challenging up to 373 iLvL. HoT 5 man's are challenging up to 370 iLvL. T13 is challenging up to 388 iLvL. The only outliers are the zulroics(too hard for intended audience) and LFR(too easy, but that's by design).
An guild of players that has enough people that log on can complete 4/8 normal DS with not much trouble. An organized guild with dedicated players can get 6/8 with no trouble. An organized guild of players that put thought and little research into the game can go 8/8 with not much trouble. An organized guild with players that research everything and optimize their characters will get heroic content down with the desired amount of challenge.
The difficulty right now is perfect. The LFR automatically gives MoP its Naxxramas, which is what Cata was missing, an entry level raid. At the same time it provides its Ulduar level raid in the form of normals, and its heroic tier. I think MoP will see an increase in subs over the first 3 months instead of catas dramatic decrease.
I love talks about game design decisions, especially one that's as well-documented as WoW's.
Warlock is right about the fundamental problem with Cataclysm - WAAAAAYYY too big of a project for the resources they had. It's insane to consider that they were hyping a shorter turn-around time for expansions and new content when they were in the process of completely redoing all of Vanilla WoW! The way the game is evolving it needed to be done, but logistically it just wasn't really possible to do it and develop the 80-85 stuff as much as it needed. I applaud them for doing it, which is why Cata is still probably my favorite expansion despite how deeply flawed it is.
The other issue was the hard swing over from Wrath's "herpderp casual mode" to the return of "serious business!" difficulty. Blizzard likely was aware that the majority of the player base enjoyed all that content, but it couldn't be at the expense of defaulting all encounters to "lolz, pull all and AOE faster nubz" mindset that developed at the end of Wrath. Ghostcrawler wrote several times that they wanted CC to matter again, and by extension for kiting to matter, for debuffing, interrupting, cleansing, cool-down management and other strategic parts of game play to matter again. Steamrolling content is exhilarating for the first few times, but that's comes with a very high turnover and then people get bored quickly.
I agree with Buddies that the difficulty "tiers" right now are pretty ideal, though we'll see if that holds true for the next few months. I'm more interested in how the game design will play out in MoP rather most of the new features.
how is large pulls needing CC any better? I know you didn't like running heroic SH, don't lie to me.
As a mage who ran H SH with a guild Pally tank, I had no real issues with that dungeon BUT, that does point to a flaw in Blizz's current "take the player, not the class" design - for all the adjustments they've done for dispels and buffs, CC's remain too disparate. There are some "catch all" CCs like the hunter's ice trap that will work well in all situations, but it's pretty ridiculous that Polymorph still only work on humanoids and beasts. Limit it to "organics" if you want to keep the lore of the spell intact, but please at least allow me to cast it on Dragonkin and Undead.
Effective doesn't need to be "large pulls." 4 or even 3 packs where it's in your best interest to lock down one of the mobs is perfectly fine (and the Zulroics kind of do that in a few places). What it does need is that every PUG can count on at least one viable CC even if the Dungeon Finder sticks you with 2 Warriors, a Death Knight, a Holy Priest and a Feral Druid (or whatever is the current "we have no way of CC'ing" class combination).
Technically they didn't redo all of Vanilla WoW. There are a few zones that are pretty much the same as they've been for years.
That's part of the over-reach problem though, they overlooked some zones because they ran out of time/resources, not because it wasn't part of the overall intended redesign. Silithus and Dustwallow were passed over because they already received post-Vanilla launch overhauls. Of course, they still could have greatly benefited from a Cataclysm make-over. Especially Silithus, how do you ignore a zone based around the Old Gods and Twilight's Hammer for an expansion based on the Old Gods and Twilight's Hammer? At least it sounds like Dustwallow is going to get a major revision following the pre-MoP event that razes Theramore to the ground.
Arathi Highlands is the red-headed step-child of the entire expansion. I think that zone might even have less quests than in Vanilla. However, since the EK Horde has pushed all the way from Undercity to Thoradin's wall, that zone is now the de-facto front for the Alliance - Forsaken conflict. It'd be a damn shame if they don't do a Battle for Stromgarde content patch at some point during the MoP life-cycle, since this is supposed to be all about Horde vs. Alliance. Just phase in the conflict for characters over level 85 or remove that zone from the current 1-60 level chain and block off the area from lowbies.
I think CC mostly fine as it is, although I think maybe PVE CCs should get some small tolerance for incidental aoe damage like hex has.
I was really disappointed that silithus didn't get revamped in cataclysm, or maybe even turned into one of the new leveling zones. It's such a neat zone visually and the silithid are so cool as antagonists that I hope they do something more with them at some point (especially since c'thun isn't quite dead or something.)
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
and really, only a few zones either got totally redone or had new hubs added. Most of them got some polish, but for the most part zones are really similar to what they were before.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I wouldn't say "for the most part". I did 3 characters through the "new" old zones post Cata and after having done Loremaster pre-Cata, I can say that most every zone I did was changed entirely, if not visually, at least in quest flow/progression and story.
Sure, some of them had their stories stay basically the same, but even in those ones the way you acquire the quests is improved dramatically. The starter zones, i.e. the 1-10 areas were virtually untouched. The TBC 1-20 zones were untouched. But that was to be expected.
But if you list out all the zones in the game, I think you'd see that the majority were changed quite a bit from their pre-cata status. There are touches of the old stuff here and there, but yeah...I dunno, I think some of you are seriously understating how much was changed in the 1-60 stuff.
I was going to list out all the zones and say how much was changed, but nah.
Yeah, I remember asking my friend who leveled a goblin warrior up about stuff he was doing along the way. He liked the goblin starter zone, and then about half the zones he did he said there was a lot of cool new stuff, while other areas felt samey but just more streamlined. Like Crossroads still sends you out killing various animals, but now they drop their parts 100% of the time and/or don't ask you to kill 10+ of a mob that is scattered around sparsely. Frankly that's probably good enough for most of the cases where they did it, since the new players they wanted to bring in won't notice "samey" (they haven't done it yet) and "streamlined" is really the number one thing that Azeroth was missing. Edit: I suppose some of it is going to depend on which zones you ended up playing through while leveling.
Unrelated, but as someone who plays on two lopsided servers, the blue posts, Q&As, etc. about Mists worry me with the "we want to put more focus on world PvP" talk. I hope it ends up just being lip service, because "world PvP" is laughable on servers that aren't close to 1:1.
Told you tank queues sucked for RF. If you queue as both, you're going to get pulled in as DPS.
If you want tank gear, you're going to have to suck it up and wait the 20+ minutes. I just queue up and then alt tab or do something around the house or shave or whatever while waiting. It seems if you're AFK when it pops, it just sucks you into the raid anyway after the timer to join expires, so as long as you get back to the game soon after that, you should be fine.
a nice side effect is that LFR tanks are usually people who actually want to be tanks (as opposed to people who just want the quick queue), so they're more likely to be geared correctly and know what's going on.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Usually. It's amazing the number of tanks that completely fail on Ultra though. I don't know how many times I've done him in the last two lockouts only to have every single brez used up on the tanks by the end.
Eh, I've already run into two "tanks" who clearly weren't geared as such, and then one who was obviously clueless about what he should be doing (even when told "taunt this"). And it's not like I run RF on a lot of characters or anything, just two. That said, it's usually not too tough to get them votekicked after a wipe or near-wipe.
Edit: Also, every loading screen when you're zoning around in Raid Finder should have as a tip something that mentions the 3 cap on battle rezes. Although I suppose that wouldn't stop idiots screaming for battle rezes when you've already capped. Really, though, that's a failing on the part of the UI. I know Blizzard acknowledged that when they first imposed the battle rez limit at the start of Cata, but we still haven't heard anything about it since -- not even a "we're going to try to get this in for Mists." It's just clumsy that the players are supposed to keep track of battle rezes used.
There's also things like anyone self-rezzing with Soulstones counts against the limit but Shaman self rezzing with Ankhs don't. Same thing with the 1 potion per combat rule.
locks that use their SS on themselves in groups and raids are awesome. So awesome that I have to vote to kick them so that their sheer awesomeness doesn't blind the rest of us.
So... i'm pretty geared now. On two characters. (Druid and DK)
Do you think we will get anything new between now and 11 months when MoP comes out?
supposedly dragon soul is the last raid this expansion, but I have kind of a hard time believing they won't release a ruby sanctum style one-off, just to keep everybody busy
maybe we'll get a ozumat raid after all
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yeah I could see a ruby sanctum style raid to bridge the gap. They also said after long enough time has passed they plan on nerfing dragon soul substantilly, both normal and heroic. "We want as many people as possible to be able to beat Heroic Deathwing" is something they said at one point
Saw a Mage win 3 of the same chest tokens between two bosses. I'm a bit surprised that Blizzard has not addressed this issue considering their stance on griefing. Alas, I've watched many of items go that way.
If it wasn't a week long lockout I would't care so much, but that kind of enforced looting with role bonus + lockout is kinda shitty.
Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
They redid zones to varying degrees. Like, Westfall and Redridge are almost 100% different for Alliance. They are actually extremely well done. Meanwhile Duskwood is largely the same, with a few changes, but some bad design left over. Quest flow is all over the place - sending you all across the zone for quests and such still - the most they did was move Abercrombie to just outside Darkshire but then totally ruined the Stitches event by making it a complete joke. They also added some Worgen stuff in for the Stalvan Mistmantle questline and kind of ruined it by taking out all the traveling (I get why, but *some* traveling is fun, especially in that case where it was only to Westfall and Elwynn - not far).
Arathi is the biggest problem zone I think because it's still part of the leveling progression for EK. And it's just a god-awful, shit zone now. They even removed the fun of one cool aspect of it - the hidden pirate quests - by having a big arrow pointing to them. They were fun because they were cool secret quests and you felt awesome for discovering them (likewise the little dwarf hidden inside the broken bridge on the Thandol Span where you actually needed a swiftness potion or other speed boost to reach him.. I miss that )..
That is one thing I dislike about the new questing though. They removed all the "tedium", but I think some tedium is good sometimes. Like the stuff I mentioned - yeah, it takes a couple minutes to fly to Westfall for the Stalvan quest, but it really added to the flavor of it. I remember the quest for the Bootflask trinket where you had to travel all over to find the Barley, Wheat and Rye. Or the treasure hunt where the clues were scattered all over the world (i.e. under the bridge in Swamp of Sorrows, or the raptor cave in Dustwallow, etc). Yeah it takes awhile to travel between places, but those quests are fun! I hate that they removed stuff like that, or else severely dumbed them down. Now obviously you don't want to do that all the time (good example - forcing you to travel to Wetlands for no reason to collect lightforge ore so you could kill Morbent Fel in Duskwood - p.s. that questline is so phoned in now in Cata... "Oh, we just found the rod lying around on the ground! How lucky!"). I think every so often you need the "world" quests where you actually get out of the zone and explore a little. I miss those.
How in the hell is there no role bonus for tanking for Souldrinker?
Ugh. Between that and some shitass pally taking the tanking shoulders off morchok when they had 397's I think that killed any desire I have to waste my time with LFR anymore this lockout.
Between the queues, the assholes and constant dc's tonight that was a colossal waste of my night.
Two LFR Hagara wipes to half the raid getting instant disconnects. Not lagging out, just everything freezes, "You have been disconnected from the server", and then logging back in to find the ice wall's killed you in your absence. Third attempt got her down but a few people still disconnected and got back in.
I'm betting the DCs are related to the hotfix to the instant ice they just put in. And Blizz generally only gives free time if you can't log in, not if you can't do a specific thing.
Yeah, just got disconnected during once Spine of Deathwing LFR and once during Madness.
But I won a new tanking shield off Blackhorn, and won a disenchant roll for a green that turned into a Greater Celestial Essence, so this week's LFR came up with something, at least.
Posts
and one just dropped for me
it's funny. I've killed KT probably 50 times. seen 2 mounts. seen 0 breaching comets.
I think the current difficulty of everything rout now is about perfect. Launch heroics are challenging up to iLvL 340. T11 is challenging up to 353 iLvL. T12 is challenging up to 373 iLvL. HoT 5 man's are challenging up to 370 iLvL. T13 is challenging up to 388 iLvL. The only outliers are the zulroics(too hard for intended audience) and LFR(too easy, but that's by design).
An guild of players that has enough people that log on can complete 4/8 normal DS with not much trouble. An organized guild with dedicated players can get 6/8 with no trouble. An organized guild of players that put thought and little research into the game can go 8/8 with not much trouble. An organized guild with players that research everything and optimize their characters will get heroic content down with the desired amount of challenge.
The difficulty right now is perfect. The LFR automatically gives MoP its Naxxramas, which is what Cata was missing, an entry level raid. At the same time it provides its Ulduar level raid in the form of normals, and its heroic tier. I think MoP will see an increase in subs over the first 3 months instead of catas dramatic decrease.
I love talks about game design decisions, especially one that's as well-documented as WoW's.
Warlock is right about the fundamental problem with Cataclysm - WAAAAAYYY too big of a project for the resources they had. It's insane to consider that they were hyping a shorter turn-around time for expansions and new content when they were in the process of completely redoing all of Vanilla WoW! The way the game is evolving it needed to be done, but logistically it just wasn't really possible to do it and develop the 80-85 stuff as much as it needed. I applaud them for doing it, which is why Cata is still probably my favorite expansion despite how deeply flawed it is.
The other issue was the hard swing over from Wrath's "herpderp casual mode" to the return of "serious business!" difficulty. Blizzard likely was aware that the majority of the player base enjoyed all that content, but it couldn't be at the expense of defaulting all encounters to "lolz, pull all and AOE faster nubz" mindset that developed at the end of Wrath. Ghostcrawler wrote several times that they wanted CC to matter again, and by extension for kiting to matter, for debuffing, interrupting, cleansing, cool-down management and other strategic parts of game play to matter again. Steamrolling content is exhilarating for the first few times, but that's comes with a very high turnover and then people get bored quickly.
I agree with Buddies that the difficulty "tiers" right now are pretty ideal, though we'll see if that holds true for the next few months. I'm more interested in how the game design will play out in MoP rather most of the new features.
As a mage who ran H SH with a guild Pally tank, I had no real issues with that dungeon
Effective doesn't need to be "large pulls." 4 or even 3 packs where it's in your best interest to lock down one of the mobs is perfectly fine (and the Zulroics kind of do that in a few places). What it does need is that every PUG can count on at least one viable CC even if the Dungeon Finder sticks you with 2 Warriors, a Death Knight, a Holy Priest and a Feral Druid (or whatever is the current "we have no way of CC'ing" class combination).
That's part of the over-reach problem though, they overlooked some zones because they ran out of time/resources, not because it wasn't part of the overall intended redesign. Silithus and Dustwallow were passed over because they already received post-Vanilla launch overhauls. Of course, they still could have greatly benefited from a Cataclysm make-over. Especially Silithus, how do you ignore a zone based around the Old Gods and Twilight's Hammer for an expansion based on the Old Gods and Twilight's Hammer? At least it sounds like Dustwallow is going to get a major revision following the pre-MoP event that razes Theramore to the ground.
Arathi Highlands is the red-headed step-child of the entire expansion. I think that zone might even have less quests than in Vanilla. However, since the EK Horde has pushed all the way from Undercity to Thoradin's wall, that zone is now the de-facto front for the Alliance - Forsaken conflict. It'd be a damn shame if they don't do a Battle for Stromgarde content patch at some point during the MoP life-cycle, since this is supposed to be all about Horde vs. Alliance. Just phase in the conflict for characters over level 85 or remove that zone from the current 1-60 level chain and block off the area from lowbies.
I was really disappointed that silithus didn't get revamped in cataclysm, or maybe even turned into one of the new leveling zones. It's such a neat zone visually and the silithid are so cool as antagonists that I hope they do something more with them at some point (especially since c'thun isn't quite dead or something.)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Sure, some of them had their stories stay basically the same, but even in those ones the way you acquire the quests is improved dramatically. The starter zones, i.e. the 1-10 areas were virtually untouched. The TBC 1-20 zones were untouched. But that was to be expected.
But if you list out all the zones in the game, I think you'd see that the majority were changed quite a bit from their pre-cata status. There are touches of the old stuff here and there, but yeah...I dunno, I think some of you are seriously understating how much was changed in the 1-60 stuff.
I was going to list out all the zones and say how much was changed, but nah.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Unrelated, but as someone who plays on two lopsided servers, the blue posts, Q&As, etc. about Mists worry me with the "we want to put more focus on world PvP" talk. I hope it ends up just being lip service, because "world PvP" is laughable on servers that aren't close to 1:1.
Maybe I should just queue as both; I just want the roll bonus on tank gear.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
If you want tank gear, you're going to have to suck it up and wait the 20+ minutes. I just queue up and then alt tab or do something around the house or shave or whatever while waiting. It seems if you're AFK when it pops, it just sucks you into the raid anyway after the timer to join expires, so as long as you get back to the game soon after that, you should be fine.
No biggie. I'll just wait and do it later tonight. Don't want to start a LFR 20m before dinner is supposed to be here.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Edit: Also, every loading screen when you're zoning around in Raid Finder should have as a tip something that mentions the 3 cap on battle rezes. Although I suppose that wouldn't stop idiots screaming for battle rezes when you've already capped. Really, though, that's a failing on the part of the UI. I know Blizzard acknowledged that when they first imposed the battle rez limit at the start of Cata, but we still haven't heard anything about it since -- not even a "we're going to try to get this in for Mists." It's just clumsy that the players are supposed to keep track of battle rezes used.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Do you think we will get anything new between now and 11 months when MoP comes out?
supposedly dragon soul is the last raid this expansion, but I have kind of a hard time believing they won't release a ruby sanctum style one-off, just to keep everybody busy
maybe we'll get a ozumat raid after all
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
So many weeks late to the party
If you guessed that the Prot pally that already had the shoulders won both tokens and then immediately hearthed, then pat yourself on the back.
If only I could E-Punch people right in the fucking nose.
Saw a Mage win 3 of the same chest tokens between two bosses. I'm a bit surprised that Blizzard has not addressed this issue considering their stance on griefing. Alas, I've watched many of items go that way.
If it wasn't a week long lockout I would't care so much, but that kind of enforced looting with role bonus + lockout is kinda shitty.
Weak.
As.
Shit.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Arathi is the biggest problem zone I think because it's still part of the leveling progression for EK. And it's just a god-awful, shit zone now. They even removed the fun of one cool aspect of it - the hidden pirate quests - by having a big arrow pointing to them. They were fun because they were cool secret quests and you felt awesome for discovering them (likewise the little dwarf hidden inside the broken bridge on the Thandol Span where you actually needed a swiftness potion or other speed boost to reach him.. I miss that
That is one thing I dislike about the new questing though. They removed all the "tedium", but I think some tedium is good sometimes. Like the stuff I mentioned - yeah, it takes a couple minutes to fly to Westfall for the Stalvan quest, but it really added to the flavor of it. I remember the quest for the Bootflask trinket where you had to travel all over to find the Barley, Wheat and Rye. Or the treasure hunt where the clues were scattered all over the world (i.e. under the bridge in Swamp of Sorrows, or the raptor cave in Dustwallow, etc). Yeah it takes awhile to travel between places, but those quests are fun! I hate that they removed stuff like that, or else severely dumbed them down. Now obviously you don't want to do that all the time (good example - forcing you to travel to Wetlands for no reason to collect lightforge ore so you could kill Morbent Fel in Duskwood - p.s. that questline is so phoned in now in Cata... "Oh, we just found the rod lying around on the ground! How lucky!"). I think every so often you need the "world" quests where you actually get out of the zone and explore a little. I miss those.
Ugh. Between that and some shitass pally taking the tanking shoulders off morchok when they had 397's I think that killed any desire I have to waste my time with LFR anymore this lockout.
Between the queues, the assholes and constant dc's tonight that was a colossal waste of my night.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Actually, looks like Frost DK's DO get a Role Bonus. lol.
Any DCs to fights that aren't Hagara?
I remember back in the day when we had problems like this, Blizzard would give us 200% rest or a free day of playtime. Do they still do that?
A lot of people are claiming it's happening in different fights, but it seems the BIG problem is the Hagra fight. I suspect it will be resolved today.
But I won a new tanking shield off Blackhorn, and won a disenchant roll for a green that turned into a Greater Celestial Essence, so this week's LFR came up with something, at least.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget