Incidentally, has anyone tried to solo a timed ZA at 90? I would think I could do it with my dk, but bosses would be the slow point, dps wise. Trash would give so much vengeance that they'd just go down super fast I think?
EDIT: Also I just learned that you can do LFD while in queue for LFR.
Not terribly useful, since LFD queues for DPS are similar to LFR ones; and healers have super fast queues for both.
But I can, for instance, queue for LFR as DPS on my DK then get instant LFD queues as a tank; get my VP for the day out of the way while waiting for LFR.
I knew you could with scenarios, but for some reason I thought LFD/LFR were mutually exclusive queues. Were they not in 4.3?
I tried ZA the other day. First boss was fine, and being solo negates some of the mechanics - no birds come to take you away and he automatically uses you for the storm point, so you don't have to worry about getting underneath him. Second boss, Nalorakk (sp?) I couldn't do, he had some mechanics which made it impossible for me (as a Guardian Druid). I started towards the third boss, but then decided I couldn't be bothered working out the trash, I think a proper kill order is required for some of them due to mechanics as well. Fourth boss is probably easy, but I was getting frustated at the time and couldn't be bothered.
ZG I have done all of except Mandokir, as mechanically he is impossible. He has an instakill move as part of the encounter, and once you are the only target you are screwed.
Fucking knew it. Increased drop rates for 5.0 LFR when 5.2 hits -- hopefully it stops all the incessant whining about peoples 3rd alts not being able to raid ToT a week after hitting L90....
I am thinking when my sub runs out in march, that's it. Going, going, gone from the game for my part.
Its the fucking grind. Don't get me wrong I like grinding, I grinded a winterspring frostsaber before the nerf and way before the current quest system. Running the same q over and over again for 50 rep? That was me. Still use that saber too.
But all the fucking rep grinds, all the fucking Valor grinding. I don't need any loot from either heroics, scenarios or raids, but I still do them because they are the fastest way to get valour without having to do dailies I have already done a 100 times each. The thought of doing that with an alt? Fuck that noise. Even with boosts its too much like work.
Is this what EQ felt like?
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So I know we have Icy Veins acting as the '<class><spec> for Dummies' for raiding. Anything like that for pvp?
My DK is like a couple million xp from 90 and I should hopefully have a full contender's revenant set at that point. At the very least he has 4 pieces right now so he would get the 2 bonuses. But I've been playing blood and all the rest of my gear is tanky as hell.
Basically I need someone to tell me how to play frost (unless blood is doing well in pvp?) in pvp and I'm asking if anyone has seen any up-to-date guides out there.
I am thinking when my sub runs out in march, that's it. Going, going, gone from the game for my part.
Its the fucking grind. Don't get me wrong I like grinding, I grinded a winterspring frostsaber before the nerf and way before the current quest system. Running the same q over and over again for 50 rep? That was me. Still use that saber too.
But all the fucking rep grinds, all the fucking Valor grinding. I don't need any loot from either heroics, scenarios or raids, but I still do them because they are the fastest way to get valour without having to do dailies I have already done a 100 times each. The thought of doing that with an alt? Fuck that noise. Even with boosts its too much like work.
Is this what EQ felt like?
From what I recall, no. But I am comfortable saying that it could be rose colored glasses. Pretty much the only time you quested in Everquest was when you had something big to do. Most of the time you were just grinding mobs for xp and drops, but you were parked at a certain point in a certain zone instead of wandering all over creation.
I tried ZA the other day. First boss was fine, and being solo negates some of the mechanics - no birds come to take you away and he automatically uses you for the storm point, so you don't have to worry about getting underneath him. Second boss, Nalorakk (sp?) I couldn't do, he had some mechanics which made it impossible for me (as a Guardian Druid). I started towards the third boss, but then decided I couldn't be bothered working out the trash, I think a proper kill order is required for some of them due to mechanics as well. Fourth boss is probably easy, but I was getting frustated at the time and couldn't be bothered.
ZG I have done all of except Mandokir, as mechanically he is impossible. He has an instakill move as part of the encounter, and once you are the only target you are screwed.
Mandokir is doable as certain classes, Paladins can use Ardent Defender / Hand of Protection / Divine Shield 9 seconds into the pull and survive; I've read using Ardent Defender will quickly give you a ton of vengeance and you can proceed to two shot him or something. I'll give it a go later and let you know. Prot Paladins can also solo Naloraak in ZA, using SotR to mitigate his rushes, bubbling past his debuff, and so on.
So I know we have Icy Veins acting as the '<class><spec> for Dummies' for raiding. Anything like that for pvp?
My DK is like a couple million xp from 90 and I should hopefully have a full contender's revenant set at that point. At the very least he has 4 pieces right now so he would get the 2 bonuses. But I've been playing blood and all the rest of my gear is tanky as hell.
Basically I need someone to tell me how to play frost (unless blood is doing well in pvp?) in pvp and I'm asking if anyone has seen any up-to-date guides out there.
Noxxic has some good PVP builds, but not too much in the way of strategy. Are you planning arena or bg? Because the strategy is really different between the two.
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I tried ZA the other day. First boss was fine, and being solo negates some of the mechanics - no birds come to take you away and he automatically uses you for the storm point, so you don't have to worry about getting underneath him. Second boss, Nalorakk (sp?) I couldn't do, he had some mechanics which made it impossible for me (as a Guardian Druid). I started towards the third boss, but then decided I couldn't be bothered working out the trash, I think a proper kill order is required for some of them due to mechanics as well. Fourth boss is probably easy, but I was getting frustated at the time and couldn't be bothered.
ZG I have done all of except Mandokir, as mechanically he is impossible. He has an instakill move as part of the encounter, and once you are the only target you are screwed.
Mandokir is doable as certain classes, Paladins can use Ardent Defender / Hand of Protection / Divine Shield 9 seconds into the pull and survive; I've read using Ardent Defender will quickly give you a ton of vengeance and you can proceed to two shot him or something. I'll give it a go later and let you know. Prot Paladins can also solo Naloraak in ZA, using SotR to mitigate his rushes, bubbling past his debuff, and so on.
Hrm, I don't need to worry about Mandokir myself (I was the guy who got the raptor first day it was out), but I do need to farm the panther mount. Was it done as ret or prot?
I am thinking when my sub runs out in march, that's it. Going, going, gone from the game for my part.
Its the fucking grind. Don't get me wrong I like grinding, I grinded a winterspring frostsaber before the nerf and way before the current quest system. Running the same q over and over again for 50 rep? That was me. Still use that saber too.
But all the fucking rep grinds, all the fucking Valor grinding. I don't need any loot from either heroics, scenarios or raids, but I still do them because they are the fastest way to get valour without having to do dailies I have already done a 100 times each. The thought of doing that with an alt? Fuck that noise. Even with boosts its too much like work.
Is this what EQ felt like?
None of it is too terribly bad, looking back at EQ. EQ was abysmal, and soloing (if you were one of the few classes that could) was mind numbingly boring. There were times where EQ felt like it was openly abusive to players. Rep in Pandaria feels trivial. I'm exalted everything. Every area has different dailies, so at least it isn't the same thing every single day. The reduced valor gain is a headscratcher, I cap each week but I don't see why they scaled it back from Cataclysm. Some of the dailies are obnoxious, like the bug island for Shado Pan, and Golden Lotus felt more repetitive than any of the others. That said, it's all much easier than it ever was before where gaining reputation was concerned. With boosts, I think you're revered Klaxxi before you even do your first daily.
Because I made the mistake of accidentally clicking on a link to the WoW forums instead of just a blue post...
In case anyone was curious, we're all wrong. We should be thrilled that we have the privledge to see any content at all, and shouldn't complain about LFR loot drop rates, linear progression, or ilvl requirements (whatever it ends up being) for 5.2 raids. In fact LFR ruins the game for 'real raiders' and the fact that it gives plebs any loot at all is also ruining the game. Ruining!
So says the official forums!
I'm not sure if I should start this again, but: I hear that opinion a lot and I can understand it. I'm not saying it's right, or my opinion, but it's certainly not far out from any serious argument like you make it out to be. It is a fact that 'real raids' are dying. Even world-first raids (see paragon going 10man), but more importantly the mass of mediocre or weak raids. There are certainly more servers with like 1 or 2 progressing 25man raids per side than servers where there is a healthy raid scene. And a big reason (but not the only reason) for that is that people can progress without 'real raids' and see all the content through LFR. So from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', and they are decidedly different than LFR, LFR kills his game.
It's really no different than people complaining about the removal of rep-tabards: They prefer one way to play and Blizz made it worse.
This is a long fucking post. Just a warning. Putting parts behind spoilers because seriously. Long. EDIT: Also all the 'you's are in the larger sense, not directed at you@Grobian
Re: Raiding is dying because of LFR:
Nope. Wrong.
LFR 'kills' the game in the same way 5mans 'kill' the game.
I.E. it doesn't. They are entirely different beasts than actual raids and whether or not actual raiding is a fading thing, I don't think you have any actual numbers to back up at all and I'd suspect you are incorrect. The move to 10m raids vs 25m raids is up to individual guilds and isn't any sort of indication of the state of raiding. That EQ had big ass huge raids and that's what some people equate to 'raiding' doesn't mean that 10m raiding isn't 'real' raiding. If you think otherwise that's just a stupid opinion and isn't actually indicative of anything any more than people crying when raids went to 25m instead of 40m as if there was some universal rule in MMO's that a 'raid' was something you needed a convention center to fit all the members in.
If there are people, and I know there are; I'm one of them, who will skip normal raiding because of LFR, they probably didn't actually want to raid in the first place...they just wanted to see content. Raiding was just a necessary evil in order to do so. Now that there's a method to see said content without doing the things you must do to actually raid, folks like me can't be assed with it because we don't find it fun. People that still enjoy raiding? Yeah, right there, still there, always has been, go at it. No problem at all.
Nothing about me never really enjoying raiding and stopping it, but still being allowed to access the content, hurts anyone who enjoys raiding and wants to continue doing it. So 'real' raiders have a smaller pool of players to build their raid teams out of? So? Tell me how it's a bad thing that instead of filling spots on a raid with people who don't actually want to be there, aren't going to put in any more than minimal effort because they don't actually enjoy it much but want to see the content; you get a smaller pool of people who actually want to be there and take part in all the aspects of raiding? When I was doing ICC10 for real (the last real raiding I did), there were about 6 or 7 of us who wanted to be there. As I said I didn't really enjoy raiding much but I really wanted to do ICC for real because to me that was Warcraft. I came in to WoW from WCII and WCIII and downing Arthas was a big fucking deal. So I put aside my distaste for raiding and went all in in order to do it 'right'. But those last spots? People who didn't really care that much, it was just something they were doing. They'd cause wipe after wipe after wipe on fights like sindy and not even care about how much time they were wasting of everyone elses. At no point did any of them step up and say "uh...yeah this is our fault, let me step out so you can get someone to do this right", and 9/10 times when we finally did do said bosses it was when those players were out for whatever reason.
The point of that little anecdote? Those players who didn't really care? LFR is for them. Maybe you're in a hardcore guild who doesn't blink at booting someone from a raid team to do it better; but many guilds like mine are people who have known each other for years, people with kids and families and they know each other in real life or from other games, etc; no one wants to hurt someones feelings like that, as frustrating as it can be. But if we had LFR at that point, those players would have just done LFR for ICC and we could have filled those last slots with people who wanted to be there and gave it their all, and no one would have been hurt.
And again, 'raiding is dying' is the most asinine thing in the world. No. it. is. not. Raiding is dying like Wow is dying. Oh noes instead of 14million players they only have 10million (or whatever the fuck). Oh noes, instead of there being 4 progression guilds on my server there are only 2. But there are still a couple dozen other guilds who are still raiding, they're just not hardcore about it; but guess what? They're still raiding. They're just not doing it how you like. Not doing it your way != not doing it.
On lootwhores and that being the real issue with the 'lfr is killing raiding' asshats on the official forums:
If one can bear the anguish it causes the soul to actually read a lot of threads like the one I was referring to, one thing that quickly stands out is that when people on the official forums spout "LFR is killing raiding" nonsense, it doesn't have anything really to do with populations of raiders, but is almost entirely from the perspective of "LFR is killing raiding because the plebs are getting pixels that look like my pixels and that makes my epeen shrink", though obviously not in those words.
The obvious blaring thing implied here is that these so-called 'real raiders' care more about the loot they're getting from raids instead of the raids themselves. And more specifically, how that loot makes them 'better' than non-raiders. That somehow that dude having a LFR set of T14 diminishes their Heroic set of T14. Which is patently idiotic and I won't even waste my time rationalizing or giving any sort of credence so don't even bother using it as a point. Anyone who actually feels that is the case is not worth the time it'd take for me to try to understand or accommodate. If you would seriously stop raiding because someone else has a 'baby' version of your gear and that makes you butthurt too fucking bad. The door is to your left.
Also I'll spare you the dalliance into real world politics and equating this to arbitrary class distinctions in real life and how damaging those are to society; but trust me, there are plenty of links and comparisons to be made. What I will say, though, is that like in the real world, catering to the highest class, those who already have the most (regardless of how hard they did or didn't work for it) at the cost of everyone else, with the idea behind it being that those are truly the driving force behind 'things' has proven to be a monumentally bad move in every instance, and, like in Cataclysm, doing so in such an overt manner, usually results in losing the support of the 'masses'. We've seen, specifically from GC, but from other devs, since the release of MoP, a cavalcade of remarks that show, without any shadow of any doubt, that they completely misread the problems with Cataclysm and what led players to leave the game in very large numbers. Instead of seeing the successes of accessibility and how that benefited the overall game greatly in WoTLK (and even at the tail end of Cata with 4.3), they went back to the EQ/Vanilla mode of thinking that everything must be 1) holding the hands of the players lest they 'hurt' themselves, we can't have them playing how they want because that might endanger how we want them to play and 2) catered toward the 'elite' in the game, the hardcore raiders/pvpers who are the 'true' WoW players. Which, as many of us around here feel, is obviously the wrong direction to take and is what is actively 'killing' the game; at least for the vast playerbase and not the 'hardcorez'; you know, the people who pay the bills at blizzard.
You'll notice that I have little to no respect for players who care more about their epeen than the health and happiness of the playerbase at large, who would take away content from others so they can keep it to themselves so they can feel like pretty little snowflakes. Yeah. I don't. And I won't, because I can't. I can't even feign to give that sort of person any sort of credence or respect. I am not even going to pretend I can look at this impartially, and I don't feel like I have to.
So, having said all that; and I won't hold it against anyone to not want to read it and trudge through my shit....
I think the more important question, that both Blizzard and the 'real' raiders are either unable or afraid to ask: What is it, precisely, about raiding, that is so adverse to the majority of players...even some raiders, that LFR doesn't have that makes it so those same players who don't want to, or can't, raid, do LFR? Because the answer to that is gonna be what keeps players playing; the larger playerbase, those who they can't get to raid no matter how pretty the loot, no matter what rare mounts drop.
Because, lets face it, LFR is wildly successful. And if fewer people are doing real raids because they can do LFR...why. It's not because of the loot, at least not fundamentally. It's widely accepted, to the point of it being almost comical, how bad the loot system is in LFR, or at the very least how incredibly rare it is to get something that 1) is an actual upgrade and 2) isn't something you already have gotten a dozen times. LFR lacks the friendliness and cozyness of 5mans; you likely aren't doing it much with groups of friends/guildies like you would a 5man, so it's not the 'community' so much...LFR chat is barely on par with Barrens chat of old in its badness.
I said yesterday, and I'll say again; I won't be at all surprised if there's a huge player falloff after 5.2 like there was in Cataclysm. Those masses of players happily eating up content in 5.0/5.1? When they suddenly don't have access to any new instanced content with 5.2 because, again, what casual player is going to have the ilvl required for the 5.2 LFR's even if they're doing the current ones now?
"it's about the content, stupid" to alter a commonly used political phrase. People quit in Cata because they couldn't access content. Yes, the content was right there; but it was over the head of most players. It did absolutely no good to please a small subset of hardcore players that the Cata heroics were so difficult off the bat when the vast majority of players could barely struggle through any of them, and when they did they were often wipefests and took 2 hours. That average player who had access to all sorts of content at the end of WotLK, to the point of much of ICC being decently puggable for casual players, suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them and told "this is not for you". So they left. Rightfully so, I should say. Then 4.3 rolls around, and suddenly all the new content is accessible to every player. And players, at least in part, came back, they ate it up again, contentcontentcontent woooooooo. There was still aspects of the game they 'couldn't' access (i.e. real raiding), but all the core content was there for everyone to experience; and chances are they didn't want to raid anyway. Raiding is like Arenas or RBG's; they're not for everyone, it's great that they're there, but you shouldn't hide content behind those barriers because you need everyone to see what there is to the game, all the time; give the people who do those higher end things special loot rewards; fine, because I think you'll find that the playerbase at large doesn't care as much as you'd think about the quality of their loot; it's the 'real' raiders (so-called, as mentioned here and elsewhere, the actual hardcore raiders in their own progression worlds don't care as much as the wannabe hardcore raiders) who care about what loot other people get.
Turn up your nose to those players all you want, but here is the core, profound, unchanging truth that the 'real' raiders refuse to see: The game, existing at all, is at the pleasure of those 'bads'. Those 'bads' pay the vast sub fees that keep the game running. WoW wouldn't exist if only the 'real' raiders played because the amount of players would be so small as to barely support running an MMO for. Hate it all you want, but when 9/10 players (at least), no matter how bad that you think they are, are the ones who keeps the game there for you to play at all, you have to realize that if they can't access the game they're paying for, there won't be a game to pay for at all.
That absolutely isn't to say that the game should be dumbed down across the board, for it; and it hasn't. Things like Challenge modes for folks who loved the difficulty of the Cata heroics out of the gate, heroic raids, elite versions of boss fights, Arenas, RBG's, and all the other top 'tier' content is great for players who want and need those hardcore challenges. But at the same time, LFD being faceroll is good for the playerbase at large. Nerfing LFR bosses specifically while leaving alone the real versions (i.e. garalons ICD for Crush for example), that allows the majority of the players to still see all the content, even if they're not getting into certain aspects of the game, is also a really good thing.
MoP has, at its core, really really really good balance in accessibility of all of its content for players, while at the same time having a ton of aspects for the really hardcore to do. There are stupid decisions like VP gain, ilvl wonkiness with JP gear etc; but fundamentally, at least for 5.0 and 5.1, MoP works.
But I honestly feel like that balance is going to fall apart with 5.2, and just get worse with subsequent patches with the course Blizzard is treading with linear progression. It will return that universal access of content back to those who are going to put in hardcore levels of time and commitment to the game in order to access that content. When 5.3 rolls around and is tuned around people having 5.2 gear, that the average player didn't get because they couldn't access 5.2 LFR's, and then 5.4 rolls around with new LFR's that require 5.2 LFR gear ilvls (or higher :rotate: ), and even fewer people can access said content...players are going to leave again, in large numbers, just like they did in Cata when the content was suddenly not for them.
Anyway, that's enough. I gotta get my kid up and I've already wrote a fucking book. Yeah, this went way off the topic of "raiding is dying", but I think that is so profoundly false, but kinda glances actual issues, that I went with them.
mandokir hits for like a million, so probably not survivable even for most tanks. Which is really too bad because I'd like to solo for the raptor.
and naxx may or may not have been defensible back at 60, but by the time wrath rolled around it was obviously terrible. Some of the bosses were okay (although lots were awful), but the trash was just abysmal, especially compared to the stuff their were designing fresh at the time.
The Naxx trash got a THOROUGH redesign.
Trust me, to quote myself, having done it at both 60 (1.x) and 80, "Holy crap, this is SO MUCH BETTER."
Damnit people. When I plant those mushrooms off in some random place, I did it so my alt can pick them quickly. They're not for you. :P
At least have the courtesy to plant yours where you picked mine.
*stupid question time* Is this some form of farming other than with the Tillers on 'my' farm? Only just came back, so there are many things I'm not aware of.
mandokir hits for like a million, so probably not survivable even for most tanks. Which is really too bad because I'd like to solo for the raptor.
and naxx may or may not have been defensible back at 60, but by the time wrath rolled around it was obviously terrible. Some of the bosses were okay (although lots were awful), but the trash was just abysmal, especially compared to the stuff their were designing fresh at the time.
The Naxx trash got a THOROUGH redesign.
Trust me, to quote myself, having done it at both 60 (1.x) and 80, "Holy crap, this is SO MUCH BETTER."
Yeah, the Naxx40 trash were like boss fights unto themselves.
Except without loot.
Just the occasional Servo Arm which all went to the rogue that was... ahem... "pleasuring" the nether regions of the raid leader.
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Damnit people. When I plant those mushrooms off in some random place, I did it so my alt can pick them quickly. They're not for you. :P
At least have the courtesy to plant yours where you picked mine.
*stupid question time* Is this some form of farming other than with the Tillers on 'my' farm? Only just came back, so there are many things I'm not aware of.
One of the Tillers/Cooking dailies has you plant 8 mushrooms as well as pick 8 mushrooms. The mushrooms you plant mature after a bit so then they are pickable by anyone. If no one has planted mushrooms lately then you have to pick the naturally growing ones instead. It's a really clever quest mechanic and one I hope they mimic in more quests in the future.
None of it is too terribly bad, looking back at EQ. EQ was abysmal, and soloing (if you were one of the few classes that could) was mind numbingly boring. There were times where EQ felt like it was openly abusive to players.
EQ could be brutal to its players when it felt like it. And often was. In fact, in one of the Discord expansions, SOE included bosses in a couple of instances that could *only* be safely tanked by Warriors. Paladins and Shadowknights could get hit by a quad attack that did so much damage that it one-shotted them even at full health (there was a warrior discipline that mitigated damage). And the problems with soloing that many classes had were well-known at the time. On the other hand, groups were *much* more social than they are in modern games. Though the developers apparently didn't intend it (the developers appear to not have intended a lot of things that became standard practices... the first raid in response to player frustration over trying to kill one of the dragons with a single group apparently caught them off guard), your typical experience grind group would settle into a location (typically a "safe" spot with few patrolling enemies in a wilderness area, or an easily cleared room in a dungeon with lots of mobs nearby) and start pulling stuff to kill. And because there was downtime between kills when the party was recovering or the puller was off grabbing new mobs, people do what they usually do when they're stuck with other people for long periods of time - they start chatting. You might not know any of the people in your group. You might very well never see them again. But you'd talk about all sorts of different stuff.
FFXI had that too. It's something that I miss.
Unfortunately, the only way that I can think of to get it back is to force grind groups again. If people can solo, they won't group (can't blame 'em; there was many a time when my non-solo-capable characters stood around in the city for hours on end looking for a group that I never got that day). If people have to be constantly on the move, they can't chat because they're too busy using the keyboard (or gamepad, in some cases) to move. And if a group is only together for twenty minutes or so (say, your LFD group that's currently clearing one of Blizzard's now standard super-short five man instances), then they won't chat.
mandokir hits for like a million, so probably not survivable even for most tanks. Which is really too bad because I'd like to solo for the raptor.
and naxx may or may not have been defensible back at 60, but by the time wrath rolled around it was obviously terrible. Some of the bosses were okay (although lots were awful), but the trash was just abysmal, especially compared to the stuff their were designing fresh at the time.
The Naxx trash got a THOROUGH redesign.
Trust me, to quote myself, having done it at both 60 (1.x) and 80, "Holy crap, this is SO MUCH BETTER."
Yeah, the Naxx40 trash were like boss fights unto themselves.
Except without loot.
Just the occasional Servo Arm which all went to the rogue that was... ahem... "pleasuring" the nether regions of the raid leader.
We saw exactly 1 Servo Arm. Our chief rogue thought anyone using anything other than a dagger was defective, so didn't let you in the melee group unless you were specced boring daggers, then proceeded to justify that decision with "well look at your DPS", and ignoring the lack of any melee buffs whatsoever on the rogue in question. (He REALLY hated it if you beat someone in the melee group then...)
Of course, he also thought the offhand-hit energy regen talent was useless when it came out. So if that tells you anything...
No.. not quite, I played from release through about the the first 4? years of Everquest and there wasn't even really quests during that time. Unless you knew a keyword to ask an npc, and continue on with some crazy quest system. Which most of them involved you trading them a random item, and if you gave them the wrong item oh well.. you still lose it from your inventory. Solo character progression was almost impossible, most of the min/maxers I knew would play 2-4 accounts to even progress on any of them. Wow comparatively is the most streamlined gaming experience ever imagined. What you want to raid? Just click a button, you want to do a 5 man? Here you go please wait 7 minutes.
Because I made the mistake of accidentally clicking on a link to the WoW forums instead of just a blue post...
In case anyone was curious, we're all wrong. We should be thrilled that we have the privledge to see any content at all, and shouldn't complain about LFR loot drop rates, linear progression, or ilvl requirements (whatever it ends up being) for 5.2 raids. In fact LFR ruins the game for 'real raiders' and the fact that it gives plebs any loot at all is also ruining the game. Ruining!
So says the official forums!
I'm not sure if I should start this again, but: I hear that opinion a lot and I can understand it. I'm not saying it's right, or my opinion, but it's certainly not far out from any serious argument like you make it out to be. It is a fact that 'real raids' are dying. Even world-first raids (see paragon going 10man), but more importantly the mass of mediocre or weak raids. There are certainly more servers with like 1 or 2 progressing 25man raids per side than servers where there is a healthy raid scene. And a big reason (but not the only reason) for that is that people can progress without 'real raids' and see all the content through LFR. So from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', and they are decidedly different than LFR, LFR kills his game.
It's really no different than people complaining about the removal of rep-tabards: They prefer one way to play and Blizz made it worse.
This is a long fucking post. Just a warning. Putting parts behind spoilers because seriously. Long. EDIT: Also all the 'you's are in the larger sense, not directed at you@Grobian
Re: Raiding is dying because of LFR:
snip
this is kind of hilariously overwrought
stuff is more accessible than pretty much any other previous time; gearing up is probably even faster than it has been in previous expansions, it just feels different because you have to do something other than grind five mans over and over (which you actually can still do, I guess, it just isn't a very efficient way to get VP.) Your continuous complaint seems to ultimately boil down to gear not dropping fast enough for you, but that's pretty much always been how it is. The game is about grinding; buy the ticket, take the ride.
What is it, precisely, about raiding, that is so adverse to the majority of players...even some raiders, that LFR doesn't have that makes it so those same players who don't want to, or can't, raid, do LFR?
the organizational requirement
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
So I know we have Icy Veins acting as the '<class><spec> for Dummies' for raiding. Anything like that for pvp?
My DK is like a couple million xp from 90 and I should hopefully have a full contender's revenant set at that point. At the very least he has 4 pieces right now so he would get the 2 bonuses. But I've been playing blood and all the rest of my gear is tanky as hell.
Basically I need someone to tell me how to play frost (unless blood is doing well in pvp?) in pvp and I'm asking if anyone has seen any up-to-date guides out there.
Noxxic has some good PVP builds, but not too much in the way of strategy. Are you planning arena or bg? Because the strategy is really different between the two.
back when I was still pretending to care about pvp, arenajunkies was the go-to forum/resource compendium. I don't really know if there is still a good community there though
I have looked at noxxic from time to time and I've never found anything there that I thought was particularly useful. Most of the information is either extremely basic, wrong, or straight cribbed from EJ. Pretty pictures though
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Because I made the mistake of accidentally clicking on a link to the WoW forums instead of just a blue post...
In case anyone was curious, we're all wrong. We should be thrilled that we have the privledge to see any content at all, and shouldn't complain about LFR loot drop rates, linear progression, or ilvl requirements (whatever it ends up being) for 5.2 raids. In fact LFR ruins the game for 'real raiders' and the fact that it gives plebs any loot at all is also ruining the game. Ruining!
So says the official forums!
I'm not sure if I should start this again, but: I hear that opinion a lot and I can understand it. I'm not saying it's right, or my opinion, but it's certainly not far out from any serious argument like you make it out to be. It is a fact that 'real raids' are dying. Even world-first raids (see paragon going 10man), but more importantly the mass of mediocre or weak raids. There are certainly more servers with like 1 or 2 progressing 25man raids per side than servers where there is a healthy raid scene. And a big reason (but not the only reason) for that is that people can progress without 'real raids' and see all the content through LFR. So from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', and they are decidedly different than LFR, LFR kills his game.
It's really no different than people complaining about the removal of rep-tabards: They prefer one way to play and Blizz made it worse.
This is a long fucking post. Just a warning. Putting parts behind spoilers because seriously. Long. EDIT: Also all the 'you's are in the larger sense, not directed at you@Grobian
Re: Raiding is dying because of LFR:
snip
this is kind of hilariously overwrought
stuff is more accessible than pretty much any other previous time; gearing up is probably even faster than it has been in previous expansions, it just feels different because you have to do something other than grind five mans over and over (which you actually can still do, I guess, it just isn't a very efficient way to get VP.) Your continuous complaint seems to ultimately boil down to gear not dropping fast enough for you, but that's pretty much always been how it is. The game is about grinding; buy the ticket, take the ride.
What is it, precisely, about raiding, that is so adverse to the majority of players...even some raiders, that LFR doesn't have that makes it so those same players who don't want to, or can't, raid, do LFR?
the organizational requirement
As someone who used to raid A LOT, it's "I don't feel like devoting X amount of hours per week to a video game involving the concept of 'attendance' or 'dkp' or 'performance' and so on". If I don't want to play that game on a Thursday night, I don't want to. Enough waiting lists, enough cat-herding, enough farming this and that.
Nothing against killing something big in a group, it's just all the OTHER crap.
Noxxic has some good PVP builds, but not too much in the way of strategy. Are you planning arena or bg? Because the strategy is really different between the two.
back when I was still pretending to care about pvp, arenajunkies was the go-to forum/resource compendium. I don't really know if there is still a good community there though
I have looked at noxxic from time to time and I've never found anything there that I thought was particularly useful. Most of the information is either extremely basic, wrong, or straight cribbed from EJ. Pretty pictures though
It is quite pretty. I haven't seen much that was outright wrong, at least not for my spec, but it's definitely not advanced. I've just found it to be a nice place to start. I haven't been to arenajunkies in a while, but they had some really good bg strategies that still hold up today (with a few tweaks). I really should check it out again for some Silvershard Mine strats... I always feel like I have no idea what to do in there.
http://www.danreviewstheworld.com
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi 3DS: 3136-6586-7691
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None of it is too terribly bad, looking back at EQ. EQ was abysmal, and soloing (if you were one of the few classes that could) was mind numbingly boring. There were times where EQ felt like it was openly abusive to players.
EQ could be brutal to its players when it felt like it. And often was. In fact, in one of the Discord expansions, SOE included bosses in a couple of instances that could *only* be safely tanked by Warriors. Paladins and Shadowknights could get hit by a quad attack that did so much damage that it one-shotted them even at full health (there was a warrior discipline that mitigated damage). And the problems with soloing that many classes had were well-known at the time. On the other hand, groups were *much* more social than they are in modern games. Though the developers apparently didn't intend it (the developers appear to not have intended a lot of things that became standard practices... the first raid in response to player frustration over trying to kill one of the dragons with a single group apparently caught them off guard), your typical experience grind group would settle into a location (typically a "safe" spot with few patrolling enemies in a wilderness area, or an easily cleared room in a dungeon with lots of mobs nearby) and start pulling stuff to kill. And because there was downtime between kills when the party was recovering or the puller was off grabbing new mobs, people do what they usually do when they're stuck with other people for long periods of time - they start chatting. You might not know any of the people in your group. You might very well never see them again. But you'd talk about all sorts of different stuff.
FFXI had that too. It's something that I miss.
Unfortunately, the only way that I can think of to get it back is to force grind groups again. If people can solo, they won't group (can't blame 'em; there was many a time when my non-solo-capable characters stood around in the city for hours on end looking for a group that I never got that day). If people have to be constantly on the move, they can't chat because they're too busy using the keyboard (or gamepad, in some cases) to move. And if a group is only together for twenty minutes or so (say, your LFD group that's currently clearing one of Blizzard's now standard super-short five man instances), then they won't chat.
Discord raiding and such was bad because they broke one expansion into two - the idea was you'd level up to 70 and then raid, but what happened was they shipped the first "half" of the expansion as Gates of Discord with no level cap raise - you were still 65 - so you were fighting mobs you had no chance of beating. The entire thing was a disaster. I remember doing testing and they were throwing 100s of AA points at us to see what it would take to beat the content. Of course, at the same time WoW was in beta and most of us who were heavy into EQ managed to get in and that was that. As an amusing anecdote, during raid testing they invited Furor - Alex Afrasiabi, who would later go on to work at Blizzard. Wow, what a complete tool. He was just a shrieking, whining bitch the entire time. It was embarassing to listen to him go on and on. The next night we did some more testing, and oddly enough they didn't invite him - and testing went quite a bit smoother.
I remember raiding early on in WoW, having to farm mats for fire resist potions, nature resist potions - all of which meant killing someone's quest mobs over and over and over. Or running Mauradon over and over to farm level 45 gear for a level 60 raid. Or just plain farming to pay for repairs. This was so I could throw myself at a broken C'thun for weeks on end before they relented and actually fixed the encounter. Or Loatheb, and so on. As much as people bitch the game has come a long ways; I can log in and raid each week in addition to running LFR at my leisure, having to wait a whopping what, 30 minutes or so to get into a raid. I bitch about not getting my 4pc set sure, but it's leaps and bounds better than it was back in the day.
Because I made the mistake of accidentally clicking on a link to the WoW forums instead of just a blue post...
In case anyone was curious, we're all wrong. We should be thrilled that we have the privledge to see any content at all, and shouldn't complain about LFR loot drop rates, linear progression, or ilvl requirements (whatever it ends up being) for 5.2 raids. In fact LFR ruins the game for 'real raiders' and the fact that it gives plebs any loot at all is also ruining the game. Ruining!
So says the official forums!
I'm not sure if I should start this again, but: I hear that opinion a lot and I can understand it. I'm not saying it's right, or my opinion, but it's certainly not far out from any serious argument like you make it out to be. It is a fact that 'real raids' are dying. Even world-first raids (see paragon going 10man), but more importantly the mass of mediocre or weak raids. There are certainly more servers with like 1 or 2 progressing 25man raids per side than servers where there is a healthy raid scene. And a big reason (but not the only reason) for that is that people can progress without 'real raids' and see all the content through LFR. So from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', and they are decidedly different than LFR, LFR kills his game.
It's really no different than people complaining about the removal of rep-tabards: They prefer one way to play and Blizz made it worse.
This is a long fucking post. Just a warning. Putting parts behind spoilers because seriously. Long. EDIT: Also all the 'you's are in the larger sense, not directed at you@Grobian
Re: Raiding is dying because of LFR:
snip
this is kind of hilariously overwrought
stuff is more accessible than pretty much any other previous time; gearing up is probably even faster than it has been in previous expansions, it just feels different because you have to do something other than grind five mans over and over (which you actually can still do, I guess, it just isn't a very efficient way to get VP.) Your continuous complaint seems to ultimately boil down to gear not dropping fast enough for you, but that's pretty much always been how it is. The game is about grinding; buy the ticket, take the ride.
What is it, precisely, about raiding, that is so adverse to the majority of players...even some raiders, that LFR doesn't have that makes it so those same players who don't want to, or can't, raid, do LFR?
the organizational requirement
Hooray for responding to a post you didn't read! Because it really had nothing to do with loot drops. But anyway...
I have said many times in the past; I wouldn't care at all if LFR didn't drop loot with stats, but simply dropped skinnable items (Lets be real, it has to drop something or people will only run it a few times). I am perfectly fine with my performance on my characters for stuff that I have ready access to (5mans, lfr, dailies, questing, old raids, and if I'm really bored, PvP) with gear from 5 mans. Playing my dk right now, he has 2 things from LFR. Actually, one, the other is from Sha. The rest is 450's and 463's. And I can do everything I want, as well as I want. And I imagine I'll continue to be able to do so with non instanced content for the rest of the xpack. But there's going to be plenty (dare I say most) of new content that will be instanced and have ilvl requirements.
The only reason I care about shit not dropping? Because that magic ilvl requirement that will let me access new content when a new patch rolls around.
I don't actually care that I've gone 8 weeks with gold/gold from Sha in Terrace because of the quality of the axe; I cared because up until Tuesday I didn't have the ilvl that would let me get into the 5.2 LFR's (on my pally) and the major stopping point was my 5man weapon which was bringing down my overall ilvl even though I had several 489's and 497's; but replacing my belt with the 5.1 VP one put me over the 486 mark.
Will I stop worrying so much about running LFR on my pally now? Yep. I'm going to finish out the 6k VP I need for the next Wrathion quest, probably via LFR; but after that I'm good until 5.2 on him. I'll still run terrace in case that axe ever does drop, just to bump up my ilvl so I can continue to see more content; but it's not because it's "zomg epicz" or because I'll top meters with it. It's because it is how Blizzard has decided that I should be 'allowed' to see future stuff they put out. Maybe I'll start running LFR for tank gear, probably not though.
But the problem I have with the drops in LFR, again, has has nothing to do with being more powerful or 'teh hardcorez'; it's that even though I've reached that ilvl threshold on my pally, I haven't on my DK, or any future character I'll want to level and do stuff with. Because, *shocker*, I like playing different classes because different classes are different. Doing content as a Hunter is a different experience than as Pally or a DK or whatever. It doesn't really do me any good to get my Hunter to 90 and then just park him because I can't get that magic number in order to play the game I pay for; without spending months trying to get LFR to drop enough items to get to the current content.
Straight up, the only time I actually care about loot is when it's purdy. I'm not speaking for anyone else, just myself. With transmog, if I see a set I like, yeah, I'll work my ass off for it because I like to play pretty pretty dressup. Luckily I don't like much of T14 and the previews of T15, to me, were hilariously bad; so for the most part, I can play to experience the content and not worry too much about driving for loot; and that's how I'd prefer it always honestly.
EDIT: Actually, and another thing; I think a decent option that Blizzard should consider is having LFR have a flat gear requirement. Make the 5.2 stuff have the same core difficulty as the 5.0 stuff and so on. Change the loot to a flat ilvl, or no ilvl at all and go with skinnable items mentioned above.
That way alts can get into new content as soon as they can access LFR at all, it moves it completely outside of gear progression for raiders so they don't have to worry about it and it doesn't effect them should they choose to not run it, and it moves it back to what it was originally invisioned as: a way for the players at large to see and experience content. Make it still a source for VP, make the bosses give JP per kill, and just have the items be skins; or be tokens you can use to buy a skin for your class, even better.
They'd still need some way to figure out a way for raiders to catch up on gear progression, but it would solve the problem of 'progression' for most of the playerbase. Lets be honest, your average person isn't going to notice much if they're not getting that incremental DPS increase every tier, when numbers are already so damn high right now.
Discord raiding and such was bad because they broke one expansion into two - the idea was you'd level up to 70 and then raid, but what happened was they shipped the first "half" of the expansion as Gates of Discord with no level cap raise - you were still 65 - so you were fighting mobs you had no chance of beating.
Unfortunately, the fights that I mentioned (where Paladins and Shadowknights could get one-shotted) were found early on in the expansion. And were single-group only content. So even if the expansion hadn't been split in two, I'm not sure how much it would have helped unless the Knights leveled up past everyone else before going in (though given my experience as a tank in some PoP exp groups, that might not have been much of a change...).
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GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
TDWH, to your latest post first: I think GC has stated multiple times that gear progression is a big part of how they define RPG, so it's probably staying in LFR.
To your longer post: In that spoiler about LFR killing 'real raids' you're not really disagreeing with me, you just come to other conclusions. Yes, the pool of 'real raiders' (this also includes 10mans) is also shrinking due to other reasons. But for everyone like you or the other people you mentioned there are at least as much that now can't find enough warm bodies to fill their raids so they also go to LFR instead. Warm bodies do have an important role, because they make the raid take place, even if you don't progress that week. A raid that has to be cancelled due to low attendance a lot dies pretty fast. Like I said, from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', that you aren't forced to do them makes it harder for him to play how he wants. You can call him a silly goose for wanting to force you to do something so that he has more fun, but my original point was that I think it's understandable.
And yes, I don't have statistics on the number of 'real raids', I only have my personal observations. And both on my server and on all German servers (this is then second-and third-hand anecdotes) the number of raids has noticeably dropped. And the raids that exist often struggle to fill their slots. There's probably more raids looking for raiders than the other way around. I agree, that the general decline of subscriber numbers probably also plays a big part here. Also I would be interested to see if the age of the wow population has grown with the game, this touches on the organisational aspect someone mentioned.
As someone who used to raid A LOT, it's "I don't feel like devoting X amount of hours per week to a video game involving the concept of 'attendance' or 'dkp' or 'performance' and so on". If I don't want to play that game on a Thursday night, I don't want to. Enough waiting lists, enough cat-herding, enough farming this and that.
Nothing against killing something big in a group, it's just all the OTHER crap.
And this is why I'll never go back to "real" raiding ever again.
This was my average day as an officer of a heroic guild:
Hop on WoW forum, bump recruitment post. Not that we necessarily needed anyone right that second, but a 25 man is *constantly* recruiting. Shower, head to work. Bump recruitment post. Do some work. Breaktime, check guild apps, bump recruitment post. Check mobile AH for cheap herbs/meat for flasks/pots/food for guild. Check guild AH alt for sales, repost if necessary. Bump recruitment post. Back to work. Lunchtime, bump recruitment post, check mobile AH. Work, break, work, home.
Home time! Bump recruitment post. Log in to game; guild AH alt. Collect money from item sales, collect herbs/meat/fish from purchases, send to appropriate alts to craft potions/flasks/food in bulk. Hop around characters, make stuff, deposit in guild bank. Check guild forum for the last minute HEY I FORGOT I HAVE TO PICK MY GF UP AT THE AIRPORT TONIGHT I CANT RAID. + 3 other posts along those lines, because tonight is a "farm" night and what a coincidence, these people that didn't need loot from the bosses had emergencies come up last minute. Text your "backups" to see if they can be on. Bump recruitment post.
Other officers have logged in, hooray. Talk to them regarding the apps we got, set up follow up vent talks with anyone that seems decent. Discuss schedule for the week. Discuss not releasing schedule to the guild the try to avoid the farm night issues. Bump recruitment post. Text from one more person saying they can't make it. Listen to someone complain about why they didn't get loot over the guy who's had 100% attendance for 3 years. Diffuse situation. Bump recruitment post. Oh hey, Scott wants to stop playing his Hunter and reroll a Shadow Priest, that's cool right? OK now we have 15 people on Conq tokens, no he cant swap. OK now Scott wants to quit. Don't care, he can quit. Well if he's going to quit now Greg wants to quit. Well fuck both of them, I'm not dealing with this nonsense. Bump recruitment post to replace 2 jackasses.
15 minutes to raid time! Send out invites, start passing out flasks/food/pots because god forbid we trust people with taking things out of the guild bank and run the risk of things getting ninjaed so that there could be the LOL WAI U GIVE PEOPLE ACCESS STUPID. Start heading out to the raid so we can summon the people that just pain don't feel like being on time. Bump recruitment post. Text the people that are late. OK they'll be on soon, can we pull trash please? And we wipe because half the people went afk with no warning. Perfect.
FINALLY get the raid on track. Get to boss, kill boss, loot drops. Check wishlist. Distribute loot. Listen to whinig regarding loot distribution. (This was actually minimal due to the way we loot counseled) Repeat X 8 bosses. Bump recruitment post.
Progression boss time: Have 4 people on vent offer suggestions, deal with 8 other people in tells talking about why the vent people are wrong. Tell everyone to STFU and post on the forum post for the boss if they don't agree with the strat we're using. Bump recruitment post.
After raid: Talk to apps. Talk to other officers about promising apps. Bump recruitment post.
So sure, I could do 10 man. That would reduce the idiots we carry from like 8 to 2. I still have to deal with idiots. Or I could not be an officer. Except one of the officers always burns out and I can't let things fall apart! Except I'm the one that's way too nice and tries to make everyone happy, which makes more stress for me.
So now I'm doing LFR and I don't give a flying fuck about "progression." And fo the first time in like 7 years, I can actually play the game.... For fun.
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
edited January 2013
You forgot to mention the Tank who ragequits the guild every couple of days but then begs to be re-invited an hour later. And the GM's girlfriend who is a total flake but heaven forbid the raid officers take any action against her. And the immature idiot who gives the guild a bad name by spamming racist comments in Ogrimmar trade chat on Saturday afternoons. And the player who you're pretty sure is really three people because he never, never chats and shows up for everything but about 1/3 of the time has no idea how to properly play the character class.
I was a raid officer, and at the end of that experience, I just didn't care anymore. About wow, about the people, about the egos I was supposed to manage.
This was before 10m raiding. 10m raiding was a beast of a different sort because X person wants to raid with That Group because The Other Group never does anything progressive. Now, even though I'd like to continue our casual raid, I'm no longer in the business of cajoling people to do things they don't want to do, so I see the content in the LFR and play when I feel like playing.
The big one is "I am a grown god damn man and I am doing things for fun, I will be DAMNED if I worry about an 'attendance percentage' ever again in my life."
Or decide between "spontaneous bbq with my friends on a gorgeous summer evening" and "... Welp, gotta log in."
Or sit staring at a portal because tonight I'm sitting for some reason, so I'm actually now paying 15 bucks a month and worrying about attendance and farming and whatnot for the privilege of STARING AT A WALL AND NOT PLAYING A GAME.
This is why I never raided in Cata, and it took a supreme effort on the part of my guild to convince me to try LFR. I find it's enough for me.
Then again I've pretty much stopped caring about loot. Once I hit the point I could confidentially tank heroics, I just ignored it. If I stumble into something better, great! Otherwise who cares.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
Solid post Ish. Dead on.
It just occurred to me that I've spent all of six months of my total time in WoW in a non-official role. The rest of my time has been exactly as you described. Less so now since we've lost so many, but we still have the odd personnel issue to defuse now and then.
Honestly, I enjoy the challenge of "real" raids, which is why I've gotten back into raiding this xpac. But I don't think I'm going to worry too much about maximizing my attendance this time around.
Then it tried to load me into Shado-pan Monastary (I'm assuming from the loading screen), and it gets stuck; probably because, you know, it's not a scenario. It sits at the loading screen for a few minutes and then boots me back to the login screen.
I would absolutely love to raid normal raids rather than LFR because I like the challenge normals provide, but both my server and my guild has completely died with this expansion so the best I can get are raiding guilds needing replacements for people who can't make it. I don't want to spend money to move servers nor do I want to switch guilds (I'm the guildmaster of the oldest running guild on Mannoroth) so I just stick with LFR and what scraps I get. What Blizzard really needs to fucking do is allow cross-realm raiding for the current raid so then I could get an Openraid group or potentially go along with the SE++ guild or something.
But yeah, in my rant note how there was zero time spent chilling on the bank steps to show off my Purps over the plebes. Or worrying about how Johnny Casual was able to get a Benediction 18 months after I did. I know some people cared, I don't get it. I don't need to be better than someone else to feel good about myself; I need to be better than I was yesterday.
Man, some of my fonder memories over the years has been bringing "casuals" into raid content for the first time. It's like hanging out with a little kid watching Star Wars for the first time. (you know, except lamer) BEST THING EVER was bringing pugs/F&F into MC in vanilla, because yeah, we were running it well into Naxx for crap like Priest/Druid regen 3p bonuses, whee. But no really, in vanilla the first time someone would see Rag pop up, that was such a HOLY SHIT moment for a first timer.
Oh OH and one more thing:
I can guaranfuckingtee you the people that think casual 5m heroic running catch up is a bad thing: Those are the geese that say things like "Oh no, it's cool. I don't need any gear from there, you can bring the new guy in my place!" Oh fuck you. Thanks for the "favor." No that's cool, I'll run BT until my eyes fall out, that's just fucking great. You just chill over there with your gear boner until we get to the next boss you need loot from.
/twitch
My buddy a work was trying to get me to server xfer and heal for his 10m, I was just giggling while he was telling me about loot drama. So now I'm going to go look for a Sha group, maybe have a glass of wine, do some LFR, collect some welfare epics, and go to bed whenever the fuck I feel like it, IN YOUR FACE PROGRESSION RAIDERS.
No, I'm just teasing, I you guys. I absolutely know the level of effort it takes for 2/3rds of the raid to carry the other 1/3rd on their coattails through heroics, and I promise I don't assume you're Donald.
Oh, and go thank your raid leader/officers tonight for all the work they do that nobody sees.
Then it tried to load me into Shado-pan Monastary (I'm assuming from the loading screen), and it gets stuck; probably because, you know, it's not a scenario. It sits at the loading screen for a few minutes and then boots me back to the login screen.
Over and over.
I can't get to my DK now.
WTF?
There's a scenario that has a loading screen like that, unfortunately I can't place it....part of me thinks its Brewing Storm.
Nah, Brewing Storm has the thunderstorm and the panda house in Jade Forest as the loading screen; just did that one earlier. Looking at the list I can't think of any that would share the loading screen with Shado-pan; even Arena of Annihilation, the only one in Kun-lai has the White Tiger temple as its loading screen.
It eventually let me into my DK; it had teleported me to the shrine since I don't think the game could even figure out what was going on. I should have left my ticket open, maybe they could have told me wtf happened.
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I tried ZA the other day. First boss was fine, and being solo negates some of the mechanics - no birds come to take you away and he automatically uses you for the storm point, so you don't have to worry about getting underneath him. Second boss, Nalorakk (sp?) I couldn't do, he had some mechanics which made it impossible for me (as a Guardian Druid). I started towards the third boss, but then decided I couldn't be bothered working out the trash, I think a proper kill order is required for some of them due to mechanics as well. Fourth boss is probably easy, but I was getting frustated at the time and couldn't be bothered.
ZG I have done all of except Mandokir, as mechanically he is impossible. He has an instakill move as part of the encounter, and once you are the only target you are screwed.
Its the fucking grind. Don't get me wrong I like grinding, I grinded a winterspring frostsaber before the nerf and way before the current quest system. Running the same q over and over again for 50 rep? That was me. Still use that saber too.
But all the fucking rep grinds, all the fucking Valor grinding. I don't need any loot from either heroics, scenarios or raids, but I still do them because they are the fastest way to get valour without having to do dailies I have already done a 100 times each. The thought of doing that with an alt? Fuck that noise. Even with boosts its too much like work.
Is this what EQ felt like?
My DK is like a couple million xp from 90 and I should hopefully have a full contender's revenant set at that point. At the very least he has 4 pieces right now so he would get the 2 bonuses. But I've been playing blood and all the rest of my gear is tanky as hell.
Basically I need someone to tell me how to play frost (unless blood is doing well in pvp?) in pvp and I'm asking if anyone has seen any up-to-date guides out there.
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From what I recall, no. But I am comfortable saying that it could be rose colored glasses. Pretty much the only time you quested in Everquest was when you had something big to do. Most of the time you were just grinding mobs for xp and drops, but you were parked at a certain point in a certain zone instead of wandering all over creation.
Mandokir is doable as certain classes, Paladins can use Ardent Defender / Hand of Protection / Divine Shield 9 seconds into the pull and survive; I've read using Ardent Defender will quickly give you a ton of vengeance and you can proceed to two shot him or something. I'll give it a go later and let you know. Prot Paladins can also solo Naloraak in ZA, using SotR to mitigate his rushes, bubbling past his debuff, and so on.
Noxxic has some good PVP builds, but not too much in the way of strategy. Are you planning arena or bg? Because the strategy is really different between the two.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi 3DS: 3136-6586-7691
G&T Grass Type Pokemon Gym Leader, In-Game Name: Dan
Hrm, I don't need to worry about Mandokir myself (I was the guy who got the raptor first day it was out), but I do need to farm the panther mount. Was it done as ret or prot?
None of it is too terribly bad, looking back at EQ. EQ was abysmal, and soloing (if you were one of the few classes that could) was mind numbingly boring. There were times where EQ felt like it was openly abusive to players. Rep in Pandaria feels trivial. I'm exalted everything. Every area has different dailies, so at least it isn't the same thing every single day. The reduced valor gain is a headscratcher, I cap each week but I don't see why they scaled it back from Cataclysm. Some of the dailies are obnoxious, like the bug island for Shado Pan, and Golden Lotus felt more repetitive than any of the others. That said, it's all much easier than it ever was before where gaining reputation was concerned. With boosts, I think you're revered Klaxxi before you even do your first daily.
This is a long fucking post. Just a warning. Putting parts behind spoilers because seriously. Long. EDIT: Also all the 'you's are in the larger sense, not directed at you @Grobian
Re: Raiding is dying because of LFR:
LFR 'kills' the game in the same way 5mans 'kill' the game.
I.E. it doesn't. They are entirely different beasts than actual raids and whether or not actual raiding is a fading thing, I don't think you have any actual numbers to back up at all and I'd suspect you are incorrect. The move to 10m raids vs 25m raids is up to individual guilds and isn't any sort of indication of the state of raiding. That EQ had big ass huge raids and that's what some people equate to 'raiding' doesn't mean that 10m raiding isn't 'real' raiding. If you think otherwise that's just a stupid opinion and isn't actually indicative of anything any more than people crying when raids went to 25m instead of 40m as if there was some universal rule in MMO's that a 'raid' was something you needed a convention center to fit all the members in.
If there are people, and I know there are; I'm one of them, who will skip normal raiding because of LFR, they probably didn't actually want to raid in the first place...they just wanted to see content. Raiding was just a necessary evil in order to do so. Now that there's a method to see said content without doing the things you must do to actually raid, folks like me can't be assed with it because we don't find it fun. People that still enjoy raiding? Yeah, right there, still there, always has been, go at it. No problem at all.
Nothing about me never really enjoying raiding and stopping it, but still being allowed to access the content, hurts anyone who enjoys raiding and wants to continue doing it. So 'real' raiders have a smaller pool of players to build their raid teams out of? So? Tell me how it's a bad thing that instead of filling spots on a raid with people who don't actually want to be there, aren't going to put in any more than minimal effort because they don't actually enjoy it much but want to see the content; you get a smaller pool of people who actually want to be there and take part in all the aspects of raiding? When I was doing ICC10 for real (the last real raiding I did), there were about 6 or 7 of us who wanted to be there. As I said I didn't really enjoy raiding much but I really wanted to do ICC for real because to me that was Warcraft. I came in to WoW from WCII and WCIII and downing Arthas was a big fucking deal. So I put aside my distaste for raiding and went all in in order to do it 'right'. But those last spots? People who didn't really care that much, it was just something they were doing. They'd cause wipe after wipe after wipe on fights like sindy and not even care about how much time they were wasting of everyone elses. At no point did any of them step up and say "uh...yeah this is our fault, let me step out so you can get someone to do this right", and 9/10 times when we finally did do said bosses it was when those players were out for whatever reason.
The point of that little anecdote? Those players who didn't really care? LFR is for them. Maybe you're in a hardcore guild who doesn't blink at booting someone from a raid team to do it better; but many guilds like mine are people who have known each other for years, people with kids and families and they know each other in real life or from other games, etc; no one wants to hurt someones feelings like that, as frustrating as it can be. But if we had LFR at that point, those players would have just done LFR for ICC and we could have filled those last slots with people who wanted to be there and gave it their all, and no one would have been hurt.
And again, 'raiding is dying' is the most asinine thing in the world. No. it. is. not. Raiding is dying like Wow is dying. Oh noes instead of 14million players they only have 10million (or whatever the fuck). Oh noes, instead of there being 4 progression guilds on my server there are only 2. But there are still a couple dozen other guilds who are still raiding, they're just not hardcore about it; but guess what? They're still raiding. They're just not doing it how you like. Not doing it your way != not doing it.
On lootwhores and that being the real issue with the 'lfr is killing raiding' asshats on the official forums:
The obvious blaring thing implied here is that these so-called 'real raiders' care more about the loot they're getting from raids instead of the raids themselves. And more specifically, how that loot makes them 'better' than non-raiders. That somehow that dude having a LFR set of T14 diminishes their Heroic set of T14. Which is patently idiotic and I won't even waste my time rationalizing or giving any sort of credence so don't even bother using it as a point. Anyone who actually feels that is the case is not worth the time it'd take for me to try to understand or accommodate. If you would seriously stop raiding because someone else has a 'baby' version of your gear and that makes you butthurt too fucking bad. The door is to your left.
Also I'll spare you the dalliance into real world politics and equating this to arbitrary class distinctions in real life and how damaging those are to society; but trust me, there are plenty of links and comparisons to be made. What I will say, though, is that like in the real world, catering to the highest class, those who already have the most (regardless of how hard they did or didn't work for it) at the cost of everyone else, with the idea behind it being that those are truly the driving force behind 'things' has proven to be a monumentally bad move in every instance, and, like in Cataclysm, doing so in such an overt manner, usually results in losing the support of the 'masses'. We've seen, specifically from GC, but from other devs, since the release of MoP, a cavalcade of remarks that show, without any shadow of any doubt, that they completely misread the problems with Cataclysm and what led players to leave the game in very large numbers. Instead of seeing the successes of accessibility and how that benefited the overall game greatly in WoTLK (and even at the tail end of Cata with 4.3), they went back to the EQ/Vanilla mode of thinking that everything must be 1) holding the hands of the players lest they 'hurt' themselves, we can't have them playing how they want because that might endanger how we want them to play and 2) catered toward the 'elite' in the game, the hardcore raiders/pvpers who are the 'true' WoW players. Which, as many of us around here feel, is obviously the wrong direction to take and is what is actively 'killing' the game; at least for the vast playerbase and not the 'hardcorez'; you know, the people who pay the bills at blizzard.
You'll notice that I have little to no respect for players who care more about their epeen than the health and happiness of the playerbase at large, who would take away content from others so they can keep it to themselves so they can feel like pretty little snowflakes. Yeah. I don't. And I won't, because I can't. I can't even feign to give that sort of person any sort of credence or respect. I am not even going to pretend I can look at this impartially, and I don't feel like I have to.
So, having said all that; and I won't hold it against anyone to not want to read it and trudge through my shit....
I think the more important question, that both Blizzard and the 'real' raiders are either unable or afraid to ask: What is it, precisely, about raiding, that is so adverse to the majority of players...even some raiders, that LFR doesn't have that makes it so those same players who don't want to, or can't, raid, do LFR? Because the answer to that is gonna be what keeps players playing; the larger playerbase, those who they can't get to raid no matter how pretty the loot, no matter what rare mounts drop.
Because, lets face it, LFR is wildly successful. And if fewer people are doing real raids because they can do LFR...why. It's not because of the loot, at least not fundamentally. It's widely accepted, to the point of it being almost comical, how bad the loot system is in LFR, or at the very least how incredibly rare it is to get something that 1) is an actual upgrade and 2) isn't something you already have gotten a dozen times. LFR lacks the friendliness and cozyness of 5mans; you likely aren't doing it much with groups of friends/guildies like you would a 5man, so it's not the 'community' so much...LFR chat is barely on par with Barrens chat of old in its badness.
I said yesterday, and I'll say again; I won't be at all surprised if there's a huge player falloff after 5.2 like there was in Cataclysm. Those masses of players happily eating up content in 5.0/5.1? When they suddenly don't have access to any new instanced content with 5.2 because, again, what casual player is going to have the ilvl required for the 5.2 LFR's even if they're doing the current ones now?
"it's about the content, stupid" to alter a commonly used political phrase. People quit in Cata because they couldn't access content. Yes, the content was right there; but it was over the head of most players. It did absolutely no good to please a small subset of hardcore players that the Cata heroics were so difficult off the bat when the vast majority of players could barely struggle through any of them, and when they did they were often wipefests and took 2 hours. That average player who had access to all sorts of content at the end of WotLK, to the point of much of ICC being decently puggable for casual players, suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them and told "this is not for you". So they left. Rightfully so, I should say. Then 4.3 rolls around, and suddenly all the new content is accessible to every player. And players, at least in part, came back, they ate it up again, contentcontentcontent woooooooo. There was still aspects of the game they 'couldn't' access (i.e. real raiding), but all the core content was there for everyone to experience; and chances are they didn't want to raid anyway. Raiding is like Arenas or RBG's; they're not for everyone, it's great that they're there, but you shouldn't hide content behind those barriers because you need everyone to see what there is to the game, all the time; give the people who do those higher end things special loot rewards; fine, because I think you'll find that the playerbase at large doesn't care as much as you'd think about the quality of their loot; it's the 'real' raiders (so-called, as mentioned here and elsewhere, the actual hardcore raiders in their own progression worlds don't care as much as the wannabe hardcore raiders) who care about what loot other people get.
Turn up your nose to those players all you want, but here is the core, profound, unchanging truth that the 'real' raiders refuse to see: The game, existing at all, is at the pleasure of those 'bads'. Those 'bads' pay the vast sub fees that keep the game running. WoW wouldn't exist if only the 'real' raiders played because the amount of players would be so small as to barely support running an MMO for. Hate it all you want, but when 9/10 players (at least), no matter how bad that you think they are, are the ones who keeps the game there for you to play at all, you have to realize that if they can't access the game they're paying for, there won't be a game to pay for at all.
That absolutely isn't to say that the game should be dumbed down across the board, for it; and it hasn't. Things like Challenge modes for folks who loved the difficulty of the Cata heroics out of the gate, heroic raids, elite versions of boss fights, Arenas, RBG's, and all the other top 'tier' content is great for players who want and need those hardcore challenges. But at the same time, LFD being faceroll is good for the playerbase at large. Nerfing LFR bosses specifically while leaving alone the real versions (i.e. garalons ICD for Crush for example), that allows the majority of the players to still see all the content, even if they're not getting into certain aspects of the game, is also a really good thing.
MoP has, at its core, really really really good balance in accessibility of all of its content for players, while at the same time having a ton of aspects for the really hardcore to do. There are stupid decisions like VP gain, ilvl wonkiness with JP gear etc; but fundamentally, at least for 5.0 and 5.1, MoP works.
But I honestly feel like that balance is going to fall apart with 5.2, and just get worse with subsequent patches with the course Blizzard is treading with linear progression. It will return that universal access of content back to those who are going to put in hardcore levels of time and commitment to the game in order to access that content. When 5.3 rolls around and is tuned around people having 5.2 gear, that the average player didn't get because they couldn't access 5.2 LFR's, and then 5.4 rolls around with new LFR's that require 5.2 LFR gear ilvls (or higher :rotate: ), and even fewer people can access said content...players are going to leave again, in large numbers, just like they did in Cata when the content was suddenly not for them.
Anyway, that's enough. I gotta get my kid up and I've already wrote a fucking book. Yeah, this went way off the topic of "raiding is dying", but I think that is so profoundly false, but kinda glances actual issues, that I went with them.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
The Naxx trash got a THOROUGH redesign.
Trust me, to quote myself, having done it at both 60 (1.x) and 80, "Holy crap, this is SO MUCH BETTER."
At least have the courtesy to plant yours where you picked mine.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
*stupid question time* Is this some form of farming other than with the Tillers on 'my' farm? Only just came back, so there are many things I'm not aware of.
Yeah, the Naxx40 trash were like boss fights unto themselves.
Except without loot.
Just the occasional Servo Arm which all went to the rogue that was... ahem... "pleasuring" the nether regions of the raid leader.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
One of the Tillers/Cooking dailies has you plant 8 mushrooms as well as pick 8 mushrooms. The mushrooms you plant mature after a bit so then they are pickable by anyone. If no one has planted mushrooms lately then you have to pick the naturally growing ones instead. It's a really clever quest mechanic and one I hope they mimic in more quests in the future.
EQ could be brutal to its players when it felt like it. And often was. In fact, in one of the Discord expansions, SOE included bosses in a couple of instances that could *only* be safely tanked by Warriors. Paladins and Shadowknights could get hit by a quad attack that did so much damage that it one-shotted them even at full health (there was a warrior discipline that mitigated damage). And the problems with soloing that many classes had were well-known at the time. On the other hand, groups were *much* more social than they are in modern games. Though the developers apparently didn't intend it (the developers appear to not have intended a lot of things that became standard practices... the first raid in response to player frustration over trying to kill one of the dragons with a single group apparently caught them off guard), your typical experience grind group would settle into a location (typically a "safe" spot with few patrolling enemies in a wilderness area, or an easily cleared room in a dungeon with lots of mobs nearby) and start pulling stuff to kill. And because there was downtime between kills when the party was recovering or the puller was off grabbing new mobs, people do what they usually do when they're stuck with other people for long periods of time - they start chatting. You might not know any of the people in your group. You might very well never see them again. But you'd talk about all sorts of different stuff.
FFXI had that too. It's something that I miss.
Unfortunately, the only way that I can think of to get it back is to force grind groups again. If people can solo, they won't group (can't blame 'em; there was many a time when my non-solo-capable characters stood around in the city for hours on end looking for a group that I never got that day). If people have to be constantly on the move, they can't chat because they're too busy using the keyboard (or gamepad, in some cases) to move. And if a group is only together for twenty minutes or so (say, your LFD group that's currently clearing one of Blizzard's now standard super-short five man instances), then they won't chat.
We saw exactly 1 Servo Arm. Our chief rogue thought anyone using anything other than a dagger was defective, so didn't let you in the melee group unless you were specced boring daggers, then proceeded to justify that decision with "well look at your DPS", and ignoring the lack of any melee buffs whatsoever on the rogue in question. (He REALLY hated it if you beat someone in the melee group then...)
Of course, he also thought the offhand-hit energy regen talent was useless when it came out. So if that tells you anything...
Yeah, I ran combat before it was cool.
No.. not quite, I played from release through about the the first 4? years of Everquest and there wasn't even really quests during that time. Unless you knew a keyword to ask an npc, and continue on with some crazy quest system. Which most of them involved you trading them a random item, and if you gave them the wrong item oh well.. you still lose it from your inventory. Solo character progression was almost impossible, most of the min/maxers I knew would play 2-4 accounts to even progress on any of them. Wow comparatively is the most streamlined gaming experience ever imagined. What you want to raid? Just click a button, you want to do a 5 man? Here you go please wait 7 minutes.
this is kind of hilariously overwrought
stuff is more accessible than pretty much any other previous time; gearing up is probably even faster than it has been in previous expansions, it just feels different because you have to do something other than grind five mans over and over (which you actually can still do, I guess, it just isn't a very efficient way to get VP.) Your continuous complaint seems to ultimately boil down to gear not dropping fast enough for you, but that's pretty much always been how it is. The game is about grinding; buy the ticket, take the ride.
the organizational requirement
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
back when I was still pretending to care about pvp, arenajunkies was the go-to forum/resource compendium. I don't really know if there is still a good community there though
I have looked at noxxic from time to time and I've never found anything there that I thought was particularly useful. Most of the information is either extremely basic, wrong, or straight cribbed from EJ. Pretty pictures though
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
As someone who used to raid A LOT, it's "I don't feel like devoting X amount of hours per week to a video game involving the concept of 'attendance' or 'dkp' or 'performance' and so on". If I don't want to play that game on a Thursday night, I don't want to. Enough waiting lists, enough cat-herding, enough farming this and that.
Nothing against killing something big in a group, it's just all the OTHER crap.
It is quite pretty. I haven't seen much that was outright wrong, at least not for my spec, but it's definitely not advanced. I've just found it to be a nice place to start. I haven't been to arenajunkies in a while, but they had some really good bg strategies that still hold up today (with a few tweaks). I really should check it out again for some Silvershard Mine strats... I always feel like I have no idea what to do in there.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi 3DS: 3136-6586-7691
G&T Grass Type Pokemon Gym Leader, In-Game Name: Dan
Discord raiding and such was bad because they broke one expansion into two - the idea was you'd level up to 70 and then raid, but what happened was they shipped the first "half" of the expansion as Gates of Discord with no level cap raise - you were still 65 - so you were fighting mobs you had no chance of beating. The entire thing was a disaster. I remember doing testing and they were throwing 100s of AA points at us to see what it would take to beat the content. Of course, at the same time WoW was in beta and most of us who were heavy into EQ managed to get in and that was that. As an amusing anecdote, during raid testing they invited Furor - Alex Afrasiabi, who would later go on to work at Blizzard. Wow, what a complete tool. He was just a shrieking, whining bitch the entire time. It was embarassing to listen to him go on and on. The next night we did some more testing, and oddly enough they didn't invite him - and testing went quite a bit smoother.
I remember raiding early on in WoW, having to farm mats for fire resist potions, nature resist potions - all of which meant killing someone's quest mobs over and over and over. Or running Mauradon over and over to farm level 45 gear for a level 60 raid. Or just plain farming to pay for repairs. This was so I could throw myself at a broken C'thun for weeks on end before they relented and actually fixed the encounter. Or Loatheb, and so on. As much as people bitch the game has come a long ways; I can log in and raid each week in addition to running LFR at my leisure, having to wait a whopping what, 30 minutes or so to get into a raid. I bitch about not getting my 4pc set sure, but it's leaps and bounds better than it was back in the day.
Hooray for responding to a post you didn't read! Because it really had nothing to do with loot drops. But anyway...
I have said many times in the past; I wouldn't care at all if LFR didn't drop loot with stats, but simply dropped skinnable items (Lets be real, it has to drop something or people will only run it a few times). I am perfectly fine with my performance on my characters for stuff that I have ready access to (5mans, lfr, dailies, questing, old raids, and if I'm really bored, PvP) with gear from 5 mans. Playing my dk right now, he has 2 things from LFR. Actually, one, the other is from Sha. The rest is 450's and 463's. And I can do everything I want, as well as I want. And I imagine I'll continue to be able to do so with non instanced content for the rest of the xpack. But there's going to be plenty (dare I say most) of new content that will be instanced and have ilvl requirements.
The only reason I care about shit not dropping? Because that magic ilvl requirement that will let me access new content when a new patch rolls around.
I don't actually care that I've gone 8 weeks with gold/gold from Sha in Terrace because of the quality of the axe; I cared because up until Tuesday I didn't have the ilvl that would let me get into the 5.2 LFR's (on my pally) and the major stopping point was my 5man weapon which was bringing down my overall ilvl even though I had several 489's and 497's; but replacing my belt with the 5.1 VP one put me over the 486 mark.
Will I stop worrying so much about running LFR on my pally now? Yep. I'm going to finish out the 6k VP I need for the next Wrathion quest, probably via LFR; but after that I'm good until 5.2 on him. I'll still run terrace in case that axe ever does drop, just to bump up my ilvl so I can continue to see more content; but it's not because it's "zomg epicz" or because I'll top meters with it. It's because it is how Blizzard has decided that I should be 'allowed' to see future stuff they put out. Maybe I'll start running LFR for tank gear, probably not though.
But the problem I have with the drops in LFR, again, has has nothing to do with being more powerful or 'teh hardcorez'; it's that even though I've reached that ilvl threshold on my pally, I haven't on my DK, or any future character I'll want to level and do stuff with. Because, *shocker*, I like playing different classes because different classes are different. Doing content as a Hunter is a different experience than as Pally or a DK or whatever. It doesn't really do me any good to get my Hunter to 90 and then just park him because I can't get that magic number in order to play the game I pay for; without spending months trying to get LFR to drop enough items to get to the current content.
Straight up, the only time I actually care about loot is when it's purdy. I'm not speaking for anyone else, just myself. With transmog, if I see a set I like, yeah, I'll work my ass off for it because I like to play pretty pretty dressup. Luckily I don't like much of T14 and the previews of T15, to me, were hilariously bad; so for the most part, I can play to experience the content and not worry too much about driving for loot; and that's how I'd prefer it always honestly.
EDIT: Actually, and another thing; I think a decent option that Blizzard should consider is having LFR have a flat gear requirement. Make the 5.2 stuff have the same core difficulty as the 5.0 stuff and so on. Change the loot to a flat ilvl, or no ilvl at all and go with skinnable items mentioned above.
That way alts can get into new content as soon as they can access LFR at all, it moves it completely outside of gear progression for raiders so they don't have to worry about it and it doesn't effect them should they choose to not run it, and it moves it back to what it was originally invisioned as: a way for the players at large to see and experience content. Make it still a source for VP, make the bosses give JP per kill, and just have the items be skins; or be tokens you can use to buy a skin for your class, even better.
They'd still need some way to figure out a way for raiders to catch up on gear progression, but it would solve the problem of 'progression' for most of the playerbase. Lets be honest, your average person isn't going to notice much if they're not getting that incremental DPS increase every tier, when numbers are already so damn high right now.
Just a thought.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Unfortunately, the fights that I mentioned (where Paladins and Shadowknights could get one-shotted) were found early on in the expansion. And were single-group only content. So even if the expansion hadn't been split in two, I'm not sure how much it would have helped unless the Knights leveled up past everyone else before going in (though given my experience as a tank in some PoP exp groups, that might not have been much of a change...).
To your longer post: In that spoiler about LFR killing 'real raids' you're not really disagreeing with me, you just come to other conclusions. Yes, the pool of 'real raiders' (this also includes 10mans) is also shrinking due to other reasons. But for everyone like you or the other people you mentioned there are at least as much that now can't find enough warm bodies to fill their raids so they also go to LFR instead. Warm bodies do have an important role, because they make the raid take place, even if you don't progress that week. A raid that has to be cancelled due to low attendance a lot dies pretty fast. Like I said, from the perspective of someone who likes 'real raids', that you aren't forced to do them makes it harder for him to play how he wants. You can call him a silly goose for wanting to force you to do something so that he has more fun, but my original point was that I think it's understandable.
And yes, I don't have statistics on the number of 'real raids', I only have my personal observations. And both on my server and on all German servers (this is then second-and third-hand anecdotes) the number of raids has noticeably dropped. And the raids that exist often struggle to fill their slots. There's probably more raids looking for raiders than the other way around. I agree, that the general decline of subscriber numbers probably also plays a big part here. Also I would be interested to see if the age of the wow population has grown with the game, this touches on the organisational aspect someone mentioned.
This was my average day as an officer of a heroic guild:
Hop on WoW forum, bump recruitment post. Not that we necessarily needed anyone right that second, but a 25 man is *constantly* recruiting. Shower, head to work. Bump recruitment post. Do some work. Breaktime, check guild apps, bump recruitment post. Check mobile AH for cheap herbs/meat for flasks/pots/food for guild. Check guild AH alt for sales, repost if necessary. Bump recruitment post. Back to work. Lunchtime, bump recruitment post, check mobile AH. Work, break, work, home.
Home time! Bump recruitment post. Log in to game; guild AH alt. Collect money from item sales, collect herbs/meat/fish from purchases, send to appropriate alts to craft potions/flasks/food in bulk. Hop around characters, make stuff, deposit in guild bank. Check guild forum for the last minute HEY I FORGOT I HAVE TO PICK MY GF UP AT THE AIRPORT TONIGHT I CANT RAID. + 3 other posts along those lines, because tonight is a "farm" night and what a coincidence, these people that didn't need loot from the bosses had emergencies come up last minute. Text your "backups" to see if they can be on. Bump recruitment post.
Other officers have logged in, hooray. Talk to them regarding the apps we got, set up follow up vent talks with anyone that seems decent. Discuss schedule for the week. Discuss not releasing schedule to the guild the try to avoid the farm night issues. Bump recruitment post. Text from one more person saying they can't make it. Listen to someone complain about why they didn't get loot over the guy who's had 100% attendance for 3 years. Diffuse situation. Bump recruitment post. Oh hey, Scott wants to stop playing his Hunter and reroll a Shadow Priest, that's cool right? OK now we have 15 people on Conq tokens, no he cant swap. OK now Scott wants to quit. Don't care, he can quit. Well if he's going to quit now Greg wants to quit. Well fuck both of them, I'm not dealing with this nonsense. Bump recruitment post to replace 2 jackasses.
15 minutes to raid time! Send out invites, start passing out flasks/food/pots because god forbid we trust people with taking things out of the guild bank and run the risk of things getting ninjaed so that there could be the LOL WAI U GIVE PEOPLE ACCESS STUPID. Start heading out to the raid so we can summon the people that just pain don't feel like being on time. Bump recruitment post. Text the people that are late. OK they'll be on soon, can we pull trash please? And we wipe because half the people went afk with no warning. Perfect.
FINALLY get the raid on track. Get to boss, kill boss, loot drops. Check wishlist. Distribute loot. Listen to whinig regarding loot distribution. (This was actually minimal due to the way we loot counseled) Repeat X 8 bosses. Bump recruitment post.
Progression boss time: Have 4 people on vent offer suggestions, deal with 8 other people in tells talking about why the vent people are wrong. Tell everyone to STFU and post on the forum post for the boss if they don't agree with the strat we're using. Bump recruitment post.
After raid: Talk to apps. Talk to other officers about promising apps. Bump recruitment post.
So sure, I could do 10 man. That would reduce the idiots we carry from like 8 to 2. I still have to deal with idiots. Or I could not be an officer. Except one of the officers always burns out and I can't let things fall apart! Except I'm the one that's way too nice and tries to make everyone happy, which makes more stress for me.
So now I'm doing LFR and I don't give a flying fuck about "progression." And fo the first time in like 7 years, I can actually play the game.... For fun.
Not that I was ever a raid officer or anything.
This was before 10m raiding. 10m raiding was a beast of a different sort because X person wants to raid with That Group because The Other Group never does anything progressive. Now, even though I'd like to continue our casual raid, I'm no longer in the business of cajoling people to do things they don't want to do, so I see the content in the LFR and play when I feel like playing.
Or decide between "spontaneous bbq with my friends on a gorgeous summer evening" and "... Welp, gotta log in."
Or sit staring at a portal because tonight I'm sitting for some reason, so I'm actually now paying 15 bucks a month and worrying about attendance and farming and whatnot for the privilege of STARING AT A WALL AND NOT PLAYING A GAME.
Then again I've pretty much stopped caring about loot. Once I hit the point I could confidentially tank heroics, I just ignored it. If I stumble into something better, great! Otherwise who cares.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
It just occurred to me that I've spent all of six months of my total time in WoW in a non-official role. The rest of my time has been exactly as you described. Less so now since we've lost so many, but we still have the odd personnel issue to defuse now and then.
Steam: pazython
I queued for a Scenario on my DK.
Then it tried to load me into Shado-pan Monastary (I'm assuming from the loading screen), and it gets stuck; probably because, you know, it's not a scenario. It sits at the loading screen for a few minutes and then boots me back to the login screen.
Over and over.
I can't get to my DK now.
WTF?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Man, some of my fonder memories over the years has been bringing "casuals" into raid content for the first time. It's like hanging out with a little kid watching Star Wars for the first time. (you know, except lamer) BEST THING EVER was bringing pugs/F&F into MC in vanilla, because yeah, we were running it well into Naxx for crap like Priest/Druid regen 3p bonuses, whee. But no really, in vanilla the first time someone would see Rag pop up, that was such a HOLY SHIT moment for a first timer.
Oh OH and one more thing:
I can guaranfuckingtee you the people that think casual 5m heroic running catch up is a bad thing: Those are the geese that say things like "Oh no, it's cool. I don't need any gear from there, you can bring the new guy in my place!" Oh fuck you. Thanks for the "favor." No that's cool, I'll run BT until my eyes fall out, that's just fucking great. You just chill over there with your gear boner until we get to the next boss you need loot from.
/twitch
My buddy a work was trying to get me to server xfer and heal for his 10m, I was just giggling while he was telling me about loot drama. So now I'm going to go look for a Sha group, maybe have a glass of wine, do some LFR, collect some welfare epics, and go to bed whenever the fuck I feel like it, IN YOUR FACE PROGRESSION RAIDERS.
No, I'm just teasing, I
Oh, and go thank your raid leader/officers tonight for all the work they do that nobody sees.
There's a scenario that has a loading screen like that, unfortunately I can't place it....part of me thinks its Brewing Storm.
It eventually let me into my DK; it had teleported me to the shrine since I don't think the game could even figure out what was going on. I should have left my ticket open, maybe they could have told me wtf happened.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand