Ah, I guess it just looks different from the plain mount. I remember it being skinnier or taller or something. Maybe it just looked weird sized to my elf.
The main problem is that upwards of half the time the zerg fails and then you get shit honor and shit rep as you can't win with half the raid going "RUSH DREK" "DREK!!!" "ZERG YOU IDIOTS" and refusing to do anything except run in a southward direction one by one
The main problem is that upwards of half the time the zerg fails and then you get shit honor and shit rep as you can't win with half the raid going "RUSH DREK" "DREK!!!" "ZERG YOU IDIOTS" and refusing to do anything except run in a southward direction one by one
This has been my experience today. Yesterday it was fine, we won ~80% of games. Today... closer to 40%.
w/r/t drek himself, each individual guard hits harder than most raid bosses. i tanked 3 with healers literally chaincasting on me and still died
so to ninja drek with a small band of brothers you by definition have to take all the towers to clear out his guards, which takes quite a bit of time, and you must stand there and babysit them to prevent back caps
so it would take like.... 15 minutes? I think? to take each tower 1 by 1 and then have a chance of engaging drek. not a winning strategy, but you'd get some nice honor trying for it
also Horde have an absolutely obscene advantage with the pre-boss GY flag being literally right in front of the door for them, where the relief hut flag is like 70 yards away and out of line of site from Drek's door
if Horde ninja the final GY, it almost cements victory for them... if alliance do the same, you don't feel good until you get 25-30 there so you can luck into always having someone watching the flag for a back cap
w/r/t drek himself, each individual guard hits harder than most raid bosses. i tanked 3 with healers literally chaincasting on me and still died
so to ninja drek with a small band of brothers you by definition have to take all the towers to clear out his guards, which takes quite a bit of time, and you must stand there and babysit them to prevent back caps
so it would take like.... 15 minutes? I think? to take each tower 1 by 1 and then have a chance of engaging drek. not a winning strategy, but you'd get some nice honor trying for it
also Horde have an absolutely obscene advantage with the pre-boss GY flag being literally right in front of the door for them, where the relief hut flag is like 70 yards away and out of line of site from Drek's door
if Horde ninja the final GY, it almost cements victory for them... if alliance do the same, you don't feel good until you get 25-30 there so you can luck into always having someone watching the flag for a back cap
Just pull the guards out one by one and they are trivial. Rushing drek is the only way alliance wins in a decent time, and winning or losing fast is the most rep possible. Killing Galvangar is pointless since horde will reach Belinda first, and thus she will die first.
I'd rather win/lose in 10 min than spend any actual time in AV in it's current form. It's an abysmal mess of different things, and the only reason I'm there is since the exalted rewards are bonkers.
Shit there are min-maxers in every pen and paper RPG I've ever played. Just make encounters that have no real gear checks and enrage timers.
I'd be 100% fine with MMO endgame being dumb as shit easy/accessible. I have no need to be challenged and don't much like co-op with those who do. Taking 90 people to a dragon's tower and autoattacking for 20 minutes while we joke around in chat and collect some loot is more than sufficient for my experience and makes for a more mellow breed of community, but them days is gone (and I'm sure had their own issues).
+1
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
i think the fine line between interesting mechanics and stupid gear checks is one where devs need to err more often on the side of making things accessible
catering content to the hardest core just drives away players
on the other hand, riding a motorcycle around as you click from quest to quest was maybe a bit too far in the direction of accessible but
making encounters where it's about the quality of your teamwork i think is better than it being about the quality of your mim/max
i think the fine line between interesting mechanics and stupid gear checks is one where devs need to err more often on the side of making things accessible
catering content to the hardest core just drives away players
on the other hand, riding a motorcycle around as you click from quest to quest was maybe a bit too far in the direction of accessible but
making encounters where it's about the quality of your teamwork i think is better than it being about the quality of your mim/max
Yup - I don't know how you do it, but if you can split the difference where you reward good play but do not punish bad play, that's a sweet spot that's hella hard to find.
i think the fine line between interesting mechanics and stupid gear checks is one where devs need to err more often on the side of making things accessible
catering content to the hardest core just drives away players
on the other hand, riding a motorcycle around as you click from quest to quest was maybe a bit too far in the direction of accessible but
making encounters where it's about the quality of your teamwork i think is better than it being about the quality of your mim/max
Yup - I don't know how you do it, but if you can split the difference where you reward good play but do not punish bad play, that's a sweet spot that's hella hard to find.
I mean it's hella hard to find because they're saying opposites just in a different point of view.
Blizzard: EXHAUSTION! When you grind too much XP you'll take a penalty to further XP gains. This encourages moderate play and helps people keep up somewhat.
Players: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Blizzard: Uhhhh.... RESTED! When you stop playing you'll earn rested XP that gives you bonus to XP gains. This encourages moderate play and helps people keep up somewhat.
Players: YAY BONUS SHIT! TY BLIZZ
It was mechanically the same just a switch in dressing.
If you "reward" good play then you're "punishing" the players who aren't doing good play.
If the game just automatically gave me shit for showing up and being subscribed for X days I would not be playing it nor would a lot of people.
Shit there are min-maxers in every pen and paper RPG I've ever played. Just make encounters that have no real gear checks and enrage timers.
I'd be 100% fine with MMO endgame being dumb as shit easy/accessible. I have no need to be challenged and don't much like co-op with those who do. Taking 90 people to a dragon's tower and autoattacking for 20 minutes while we joke around in chat and collect some loot is more than sufficient for my experience and makes for a more mellow breed of community, but them days is gone (and I'm sure had their own issues).
This is basically the LFR experience with a competent group.
It's not what I come to the game for at all.
I still feel the LFR should be 25 people fighting the 1/2 content so you would learn how the fight went just the boss does 1/2 the usual damage it would
I still feel the LFR should be 25 people fighting the 1/2 content so you would learn how the fight went just the boss does 1/2 the usual damage it would
That's kind of what the first iteration of LFR was, right? I remember Deathwing was legit difficult still for LFR to finish unless people knew what they were doing.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
While it would be better to teach pugs the mechanics, they all quit after a single wipe. I remember doing LFR G'huun runs, and I would spend time teaching everyone the fight, we'd go, we'd wipe, 90% of the raid would quit, and I'd be teaching everyone the fight again.
Can't imagine that shit with 100% of the mechanics in play.
I'm surprised it's possible to wipe on LFR. Seems like if healers were just paying attention you could heal through 99% of most fights crazy damage.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I'm surprised it's possible to wipe on LFR. Seems like if healers were just paying attention you could heal through 99% of most fights crazy damage.
The only time you wipe in LFR is if you must do the mechanics right to succeed and people just have not fuckin clue what to do or if you just have like, the pittiest dinkiest dps.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
I'm surprised it's possible to wipe on LFR. Seems like if healers were just paying attention you could heal through 99% of most fights crazy damage.
So, if you've never done the G'huun fight, here's how it works:
He's a big hard-hitting guy, and he spreads debuffs and dots around willy nilly. These are pretty much un-cleansable. You're stuck with them. And they stack.
He has a bunch of hard-hitting adds that spawn throughout the fight who are doing the same shit.
But you're doing the fight in what is essentially a G'huun containment facility. So there is a big fucking holy laser in the middle of the room that will fuck G'huun's shit right up when it's activated, and you get to activate it twice before G'huun destroys it and you're on your own. But it also cleanses all those debuffs and dots and shit and your healers heal everyone to full, and your dps goes apeshit crazy bananas. So you want that laser activated, and if people delay in activating it, the raid will absolutely wipe.
But activating it requires two teams of two players each, on the wings (and out of the fight proper), who take turns spawning a ball on their side, and then playing catch while running from the ball's spawn point to the end of the lane. But if you hold the ball too long, you slow down and stop, and you can't throw it to yourself. Once the ball gets dunked on both sides, laser fires, everyone converges next to the laser and earns catharsis from how much G'huun hurts.
Now, guess what 99% of pugs do, after you've explained how the orb passing works, and the fight has started?
Your average dps in an LFR is well below half the damage of someone who raids on normal regularly. Pugs in LFR frequently do less damage than decent tanks, so fights take much longer than they should.
+3
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I should mention that you can't even deal damage to g'huun at all until the first laser fires.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
I should mention that you can't even deal damage to g'huun at all until the first laser fires.
You can, but it's 99% reduced. It's literally a buff he has that the laser removes.
I think they did it that way instead of full immunity because you do have to tank him and there are a bunch of threat mechanics that are damage based.
Smrtnik on
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
the audience that's queuing for LFR doesn't want to like, learn how mechanics work and adjust to them in interative fashion; they want to push their buttons, look at some pretty pictures, and collect loot after 20 or 30 minutes. And that's fine! There's nothing wrong with having a 'tourist mode' for people who don't want to raid the other difficulties for whatever reason.
a big area where blizzard improved from vanilla to cataclysm or so is consistency of difficulty; if you queue or zone into a particular instance you probably have a pretty good idea of how difficult it's going to be, and that difficulty is probably relatively consistent across the experience. They've mostly done away with the kind of thing they'd do in vanilla, where 90% of the instance/raid/whatever would be dead simple but there'd be a couple things that could trip you up and/or required some esoteric knowledge to handle
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
the audience that's queuing for LFR doesn't want to like, learn how mechanics work and adjust to them in interative fashion; they want to push their buttons, look at some pretty pictures, and collect loot after 20 or 30 minutes. And that's fine! There's nothing wrong with having a 'tourist mode' for people who don't want to raid the other difficulties for whatever reason.
a big area where blizzard improved from vanilla to cataclysm or so is consistency of difficulty; if you queue or zone into a particular instance you probably have a pretty good idea of how difficult it's going to be, and that difficulty is probably relatively consistent across the experience. They've mostly done away with the kind of thing they'd do in vanilla, where 90% of the instance/raid/whatever would be dead simple but there'd be a couple things that could trip you up and/or required some esoteric knowledge to handle
Yeah it's nice for people who want to see storylines/quests to completion but not deal with raiding mechanics/etc, or just would never make the cut in a raiding guild to do it normally anyway.
I don't mind LFR existing, sorta. I think it brings down the overall competence of the playerbase and makes finding people to do shit for real harder a bit.
It's like the Mythic+ woes, people aren't prepared by the game any longer because you don't need to learn your class or skills to be able to succeed on all the casual content, and then you hit a brick wall and no one is happy and it is a good bit of blame on Blizzard's part there.
At this point I think it's not fine. They need to reign LFR back to how it used to be, and if people just want to see story let them watch a cinematic or something.
Because what happens, as mentioned above, is an LFR group will just fail until they have an ungodly amount of stacks of the buff and that is extremely unfun for what should be rather brain-dead content.
What’s less fun is wiping over and over and over again because the audience that wants a public queue is largely not the audience that’s any good at raiding
Every time they’ve put like, a mildly challenging boss in LFR it’s been a huge shit show for this exact reason; people in LFR don’t want challenging content, that’s not why they’re there, and generally they just leave rather than struggle through it
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
+2
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
it's a self-reinforcing problem
not everyone who wants to raid is a highly knowledgeable, highly engaged player
some people just play the game for fun and eventually get to that content
if you make the raids difficult to the point they can't attempt them, you discourage people on the edge of that line from wanting to attempt them either, and that spirals out. the more people you have complaining the raids are too hard and tuned only to the abilities and gear of the elite players, the more people will simply not try to engage the content in the first place. this is what happened to everquest
but you don't have to make things so easy they're no more complicated than tank and spank. even people who "just want to have fun" will rise to a reasonable challenge as long as they feel it's possible to and the challenge is fair and worth the effort
Allegedly a voice of reason.
+3
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
not everyone who wants to raid is a highly knowledgeable, highly engaged player
some people just play the game for fun and eventually get to that content
if you make the raids difficult to the point they can't attempt them, you discourage people on the edge of that line from wanting to attempt them either, and that spirals out. the more people you have complaining the raids are too hard and tuned only to the abilities and gear of the elite players, the more people will simply not try to engage the content in the first place. this is what happened to everquest
but you don't have to make things so easy they're no more complicated than tank and spank. even people who "just want to have fun" will rise to a reasonable challenge as long as they feel it's possible to and the challenge is fair and worth the effort
I feel like a lot of the long-term design issues WoW has struggled with are matters of trying to strike the right balance between conflicting interests. Unfortunately it seems like they overshoot the mark pretty often.
I mean, normal mode is pretty dang easy; it is absolutely targeted at new/learning/etc players
100% agreed, but I think the issue is still that until they hit a mythic dungeon or hit their first Heroic/Mythic Raid, those players don't know they are playing with training wheels on.
Posts
Having 800 Honor vs horde with 10,000 Honor is completely meaningless because all alliance are getting that same 800.
That said, most of the games I've been in have been in the 1700 range with the horde +25%
And yeah, the rep rewards are the primary goal.
WSG is where decent PvP lives right now.
This has been my experience today. Yesterday it was fine, we won ~80% of games. Today... closer to 40%.
so to ninja drek with a small band of brothers you by definition have to take all the towers to clear out his guards, which takes quite a bit of time, and you must stand there and babysit them to prevent back caps
so it would take like.... 15 minutes? I think? to take each tower 1 by 1 and then have a chance of engaging drek. not a winning strategy, but you'd get some nice honor trying for it
also Horde have an absolutely obscene advantage with the pre-boss GY flag being literally right in front of the door for them, where the relief hut flag is like 70 yards away and out of line of site from Drek's door
if Horde ninja the final GY, it almost cements victory for them... if alliance do the same, you don't feel good until you get 25-30 there so you can luck into always having someone watching the flag for a back cap
Just pull the guards out one by one and they are trivial. Rushing drek is the only way alliance wins in a decent time, and winning or losing fast is the most rep possible. Killing Galvangar is pointless since horde will reach Belinda first, and thus she will die first.
I'd rather win/lose in 10 min than spend any actual time in AV in it's current form. It's an abysmal mess of different things, and the only reason I'm there is since the exalted rewards are bonkers.
~10 minutes later~
but I do openly wonder what kind of game you could possibly design around Vanilla's concepts that wouldn't be instantly min-maxed to the grave
I'd be 100% fine with MMO endgame being dumb as shit easy/accessible. I have no need to be challenged and don't much like co-op with those who do. Taking 90 people to a dragon's tower and autoattacking for 20 minutes while we joke around in chat and collect some loot is more than sufficient for my experience and makes for a more mellow breed of community, but them days is gone (and I'm sure had their own issues).
catering content to the hardest core just drives away players
on the other hand, riding a motorcycle around as you click from quest to quest was maybe a bit too far in the direction of accessible but
making encounters where it's about the quality of your teamwork i think is better than it being about the quality of your mim/max
Yup - I don't know how you do it, but if you can split the difference where you reward good play but do not punish bad play, that's a sweet spot that's hella hard to find.
I mean it's hella hard to find because they're saying opposites just in a different point of view.
Blizzard: EXHAUSTION! When you grind too much XP you'll take a penalty to further XP gains. This encourages moderate play and helps people keep up somewhat.
Players: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Blizzard: Uhhhh.... RESTED! When you stop playing you'll earn rested XP that gives you bonus to XP gains. This encourages moderate play and helps people keep up somewhat.
Players: YAY BONUS SHIT! TY BLIZZ
It was mechanically the same just a switch in dressing.
If you "reward" good play then you're "punishing" the players who aren't doing good play.
If the game just automatically gave me shit for showing up and being subscribed for X days I would not be playing it nor would a lot of people.
This is basically the LFR experience with a competent group.
It's not what I come to the game for at all.
Don't get me wrong, I think lfr existing in retail is a good thing. But I am at least partly coming to the game to overcome challenges with friends.
That's kind of what the first iteration of LFR was, right? I remember Deathwing was legit difficult still for LFR to finish unless people knew what they were doing.
While it would be better to teach pugs the mechanics, they all quit after a single wipe. I remember doing LFR G'huun runs, and I would spend time teaching everyone the fight, we'd go, we'd wipe, 90% of the raid would quit, and I'd be teaching everyone the fight again.
Can't imagine that shit with 100% of the mechanics in play.
The only time you wipe in LFR is if you must do the mechanics right to succeed and people just have not fuckin clue what to do or if you just have like, the pittiest dinkiest dps.
So, if you've never done the G'huun fight, here's how it works:
He's a big hard-hitting guy, and he spreads debuffs and dots around willy nilly. These are pretty much un-cleansable. You're stuck with them. And they stack.
He has a bunch of hard-hitting adds that spawn throughout the fight who are doing the same shit.
But you're doing the fight in what is essentially a G'huun containment facility. So there is a big fucking holy laser in the middle of the room that will fuck G'huun's shit right up when it's activated, and you get to activate it twice before G'huun destroys it and you're on your own. But it also cleanses all those debuffs and dots and shit and your healers heal everyone to full, and your dps goes apeshit crazy bananas. So you want that laser activated, and if people delay in activating it, the raid will absolutely wipe.
But activating it requires two teams of two players each, on the wings (and out of the fight proper), who take turns spawning a ball on their side, and then playing catch while running from the ball's spawn point to the end of the lane. But if you hold the ball too long, you slow down and stop, and you can't throw it to yourself. Once the ball gets dunked on both sides, laser fires, everyone converges next to the laser and earns catharsis from how much G'huun hurts.
Now, guess what 99% of pugs do, after you've explained how the orb passing works, and the fight has started?
but at the same time, lol pugs accomplishing that
You can, but it's 99% reduced. It's literally a buff he has that the laser removes.
I think they did it that way instead of full immunity because you do have to tank him and there are a bunch of threat mechanics that are damage based.
Ok you effectively cannot do damage to G'huun until the first laser pops.
a big area where blizzard improved from vanilla to cataclysm or so is consistency of difficulty; if you queue or zone into a particular instance you probably have a pretty good idea of how difficult it's going to be, and that difficulty is probably relatively consistent across the experience. They've mostly done away with the kind of thing they'd do in vanilla, where 90% of the instance/raid/whatever would be dead simple but there'd be a couple things that could trip you up and/or required some esoteric knowledge to handle
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yeah it's nice for people who want to see storylines/quests to completion but not deal with raiding mechanics/etc, or just would never make the cut in a raiding guild to do it normally anyway.
I don't mind LFR existing, sorta. I think it brings down the overall competence of the playerbase and makes finding people to do shit for real harder a bit.
It's like the Mythic+ woes, people aren't prepared by the game any longer because you don't need to learn your class or skills to be able to succeed on all the casual content, and then you hit a brick wall and no one is happy and it is a good bit of blame on Blizzard's part there.
At this point I think it's not fine. They need to reign LFR back to how it used to be, and if people just want to see story let them watch a cinematic or something.
Because what happens, as mentioned above, is an LFR group will just fail until they have an ungodly amount of stacks of the buff and that is extremely unfun for what should be rather brain-dead content.
Every time they’ve put like, a mildly challenging boss in LFR it’s been a huge shit show for this exact reason; people in LFR don’t want challenging content, that’s not why they’re there, and generally they just leave rather than struggle through it
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
not everyone who wants to raid is a highly knowledgeable, highly engaged player
some people just play the game for fun and eventually get to that content
if you make the raids difficult to the point they can't attempt them, you discourage people on the edge of that line from wanting to attempt them either, and that spirals out. the more people you have complaining the raids are too hard and tuned only to the abilities and gear of the elite players, the more people will simply not try to engage the content in the first place. this is what happened to everquest
but you don't have to make things so easy they're no more complicated than tank and spank. even people who "just want to have fun" will rise to a reasonable challenge as long as they feel it's possible to and the challenge is fair and worth the effort
I feel like a lot of the long-term design issues WoW has struggled with are matters of trying to strike the right balance between conflicting interests. Unfortunately it seems like they overshoot the mark pretty often.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
100% agreed, but I think the issue is still that until they hit a mythic dungeon or hit their first Heroic/Mythic Raid, those players don't know they are playing with training wheels on.