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[WOW] Servers are up, Patch 8.2 ahoy ! When did Azshara grow three extra eyes ?

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Posts

  • KamarKamar Registered User regular
    Smrtnik wrote: »
    Are you sure you're in the right thread?

    The first sentence was the giveaway.

  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

  • Kai_SanKai_San Commonly known as Klineshrike! Registered User regular
    When you can immediately tell its a FF14 post because its actually positive >_>

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

    Because you can't make the same skips and time savers you made before?

    I haven't actually played the new affix yet, but on paper it sounds fine. It sounds like it will shake up the meta. And I don't see that as a bad thing.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Lucascraft wrote: »
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

    Because you can't make the same skips and time savers you made before?

    I haven't actually played the new affix yet, but on paper it sounds fine. It sounds like it will shake up the meta. And I don't see that as a bad thing.

    Maybe finally they'll remove the time constraint on it.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • CaedwyrCaedwyr Registered User regular
    Kamar wrote: »
    Smrtnik wrote: »
    Are you sure you're in the right thread?

    The first sentence was the giveaway.

    Bleh, I was posting in both and didn't check which tab I had open. Sorry about that.

  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    Lucascraft wrote: »
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

    Because you can't make the same skips and time savers you made before?

    I haven't actually played the new affix yet, but on paper it sounds fine. It sounds like it will shake up the meta. And I don't see that as a bad thing.

    It's boring, un-fun garbage that was added because Reaping was "too easy" and is almost explicitly something done for the sake of the MDI.

  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    Lucascraft wrote: »
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

    Because you can't make the same skips and time savers you made before?

    I haven't actually played the new affix yet, but on paper it sounds fine. It sounds like it will shake up the meta. And I don't see that as a bad thing.

    It's not shaking up the meta, it's literally just a copy and paste of season one except more annoying. None of the emissaries require thought, strategy, or anything else to deal with - you deal with each one the same way every time and they do nothing interesting. There's no counterplay to any of them, there's no room for interesting approaches or clever tactics to minimize their impact. You just bash your face into them as you reach them one at a time, and skip as many of them as possible.

    maybe go and play the new affix before you simplify my objections to "wah wah I can't do the same strategies as before"

    I couldn't do my Infested strategies with Reaping but that didn't have me coming here complaining that I had to learn new skips and new time saves. I relished that. Optimizing your route around Reaping was enormously satisfying, getting things killed in a clump so that the Reaping waves spawned in clumps, finding clever places to line of sight the caster mobs to group them up easily, or finding places to do Reaping waves with bosses or other trash to save time were all incredibly good feelings to get right.

    The problem with Beguiling is that there's no granularity to any of the mechanics. There's no sliding scale where you can trade off making a pull harder for making it quicker, or do the reverse and make a pull easier/safer but at the cost of speed. There's no room to approach the mobs differently, no nuance to them. A mob that reflects 150% of your damage back to you and can only be moved around by someone hitting it does not leave any room for interpreting how to deal with it. You assign someone to punt it in the face for twenty seconds and that is the only way to deal with it. A mob that provides CC & interrupt immunity to everything around it, and can only be CC'd for 8 seconds at a time per spell leaves no room for interpreting how to deal with it. You get it out of the group and use spammable CC on it. Hope you've got a mage for Polymorph or a Druid for Entangling Roots, because otherwise you don't even have the CC option and your only possible strategy is to zerg it down.

    And then of course the worst offender, the Void-Touched, which is literally the most boring mob in existence. Kill it before it kills you is the only way to actually deal with it.

  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    edited July 2019
    At least with Infested there was a certain finesse to picking apart a dungeon and calculating how to do big pulls. You had to carefully work out which Infested mobs you needed to CC all at once, while pulling everything else, then finish off the Infested mobs together. That felt really good to get right - to do big pulls in spite of a difficult affix. There's no room for that with Beguiling, there's no ability to deal with that many emissaries at once, you just have to deal with them one at a time. Combining them is impossible because, in the case of the Void-Touched emissaries, they don't move, so you fight them where they stand and that's it.

    Beguiling doesn't just make big pulls difficult, it makes them impossible, and big pulls are what makes M+ fun and challenging. What makes M+ challenging is rationing limited interrupts, crowd control, and on-the-fly stuns to control a large pack of mobs and ride the razor's edge where missing a single kick will wipe you. That's exhilarating and challenging, and Reaping gave us that.

    Doing a dungeon where you only ever pull one pack at a time is a boring experience because the only thing that makes you fail is when the sheer health and damage numbers get too high to deal with. There's no challenge to running through a dungeon pulling one pack at a time because you have far more mob control than there are mobs to be controlled. What challenge is there in coordinating spell interrupts when you have four interrupts and only two mobs that need to be interrupted?

    I fully expect many of you here to really not understand where I'm coming from with this, and to scoff at everything I'm saying, as if all I want is to run through a dungeon mindlessly AOEing massive pulls. This is because;
    1. Many of you seem to have no interest in going fast, and the existence of the timer itself offends you, and anything that makes us wild M+ers slow down and smell the roses is good in your books
    2. Because of the aforementioned disinterest in going fast for the sake of the challenge of doing so, those of you with the above opinion have no experience in doing large pulls, and so you have no appreciation for the precision of execution or the level of coordination required to make those pulls work. When you've never tried big pulls, they just look like a mass of AOE spells with everybody padding their DPS as hard as they can as they stomp their way through the dungeon. You don't see the razor's edge balance being struck during those pulls, you don't see the hundred plates being juggled at once.

    Slowing dungeons down and reducing pull size doesn't make dungeons harder, or more interesting. By definition, it is the exact opposite, because when you slow dungeons down, you give people more time to think, and when you reduce pull sizes, you give them less to think about.

    With more time to think and less time to think about it, dungeons are easier, not harder.

    M+ is challenging and exciting because it's about juggling as many plates as your group can possibly juggle, to go as fast as possible and as high as possible. Affixes like Infested and Beguiling are not fun, because they artificially limit how many plates you can juggle at one time. You're not limited by your ability to think on your feet and coordinate with your group, you're simply limited by a binary check like "you're dead now" or "the mobs are healing now". That's not interesting, that's just an artificial reduction of complexity and it's idiotic.

    Dhalphir on
  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
  • DissociaterDissociater Registered User regular
    During one of the cut scenes, I forget which one, N'zoth says something about the Light being the real baddies. So there can be one more panel on that comic soon!

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    Lucascraft wrote: »
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    the new affix sucks and M+ is ruined.

    Because you can't make the same skips and time savers you made before?

    I haven't actually played the new affix yet, but on paper it sounds fine. It sounds like it will shake up the meta. And I don't see that as a bad thing.

    It's not shaking up the meta, it's literally just a copy and paste of season one except more annoying. None of the emissaries require thought, strategy, or anything else to deal with - you deal with each one the same way every time and they do nothing interesting. There's no counterplay to any of them, there's no room for interesting approaches or clever tactics to minimize their impact. You just bash your face into them as you reach them one at a time, and skip as many of them as possible.

    maybe go and play the new affix before you simplify my objections to "wah wah I can't do the same strategies as before"

    Let me try my question again, but from a different approach.

    Blizzard analyzes the paths players take in dungeons, what skips they are making, and which packs they are CCing to win. Blizzard decides that for this season, they don't want people making those exact skips or CCing those exact packs of mobs.

    Skips and CCs are still possible. Just not on those exact packs that they attach emissaries to.

    (Yes, I'm ignoring void touched because you're right, that one is stupid. Even on paper it's stupid.)

    You want to juggle a ton of plates at once? The packs of mobs that are immune to CC sound literally exactly like what you're looking for in a challenge. How do you deal with this difficult pack of mobs when CC isn't an option? That is what I meant by shaking up the meta. You cannot approach this pack the same way you have approached it in previous seasons because now it is immune to CC.

    Nowhere in my previous post did I say anything about slowing you down or forcing you to stop and smell the roses.

    Yes, I personally think the timer is a dumb and artificial way to increase the difficulty. But that's not what I'm talking about here. The timer remains the same. It isn't going anywhere. Only now that huge pack of 6 dudes that has 3 super annoying casters in it can no longer be skipped. This is forcing you to attack groups of enemies that you might have otherwise skipped. This is forcing you to change your route from the path you have been running for the last 4-5 months during season 2.

    And I say again... shaking up the meta doesn't seem like a bad thing. You want to juggle plates? Here's completely new plates for you to juggle because you've been skipping them for the entire past season.

  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    Lucascraft wrote: »
    . How do you deal with this difficult pack of mobs when CC isn't an option?

    You die. You can't fight any of these packs of mobs for any length of time without CC. The only way to deal with it is try to burst down the Tides emissary fast enough before you die to the other uncontrolled mobs.

    There's no strategy here. It's binary.
    And I say again... shaking up the meta doesn't seem like a bad thing. You want to juggle plates? Here's completely new plates for you to juggle because you've been skipping them for the entire past season.

    You have missed the point entirely. The emissaries aren't plates to be juggled, they're hard barriers in place with only one way to deal with them.

    There's no strategizing around CC immunity. You get rid of the immunity as fast as possible or you die. That isn't a plate to be juggled, that's just being forced to slam your head into predictable obstacles in boring and uninteresting ways, while pulling much slower and smaller overall throughout the dungeon.

    Beguiling would be fine if there were a handful of emissaries in each dungeon, forcing you to think about pulls carefully and perhaps requiring you to adjust how you approach a few key places in the dungeon.

    That isn't what the affix is. Instead, there's an emissary every second pull for the entire dungeon. They dominate the entire dungeon and prevent you actually playing the dungeon because you're spending the entire time playing emissaries.

    There's no clever and new strategies out of this, no new ways to use your abilities to overcome challenges. The emissaries are, conceptually, trivial to deal with. There's no requirement of thought ot intelligent strategy in how to deal with them, because the correct strategy is blatantly obvious in each case. The only reason they provide difficulty is because they are hard obstacles in your path that provide binary immunity.

    Because there's only one way to deal with each of them and the dungeon contains so many of them, they don't allow you to explore new options or new strategies. They define every interaction you have with the dungeon and limit every other strategy. That would be fine if they were themselves strategically interesting, but because they're not, they ruin the entire overall experience.

    It's not a matter of Beguiling forcing us to throw out our old strategies. That would be fine. The problem is that Beguiling forces you to throw out the concept of strategy itself because the nature of the affix itself only allows for one strategy.

  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    Beguiling was very clearly designed to make M+s play out the same for all groups, presumably for the sake of the MDI. It's a bad affix.

  • EncEnc A Fool with Compassion Pronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered User regular
    Whelp, 6 months of content boiled down to about 3 days of play time split over a few weeks. Time to unsub again.

  • TryCatcherTryCatcher Registered User regular
    edited July 2019
    3clipse wrote: »
    Beguiling was very clearly designed to make M+s play out the same for all groups, presumably for the sake of the MDI. It's a bad affix.

    Yep. The things that Dhalpir describes are just too hard for most of the playerbase that just sees people AoE'ing all the mobs with their high ilvl gear, so Blizzard decided to just put a hard skill ceiling to the dungeon and be done with it. From a business perspective, you want your high level play to be relatable to the low end play, so instead of people trying and failing to do MDI pulls (a big source of missed timers and failed runs), you just nerf MDI pulls to be on the same level as your average run, where people pull packs slowly because the tank and the healer have high performance anxiety thanks to all the toxicity.

    I'm not defending anything, just explaining a likely thought process. What I think is that Blizzard should really examine why every time that they try to push the e-sport angle, their communities end up becoming toxic shitholes.

    TryCatcher on
  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    edited July 2019
    TryCatcher wrote: »
    I'm not defending anything, just explaining a likely thought process. What I think is that Blizzard should really examine why every time that they try to push the e-sport angle, their communities end up becoming toxic shitholes.

    Not even just toxic shitholes. So far Blizzard's attempts at "legitimizing" eSports and competitive gaming have ended in total failure. Nobody gives any shits at all about the Overwatch League. Overwatch was miles more popular when the community ran and organized its own high level play. And many would argue that Overwatch's game balance went down the drain and became measurably less fun when they started balancing the game for the Overwatch League and the top 1% players. Most normals enjoyed the game way more in the 1st year of the game than they do now.

    Likewise, HotS was in a much better place when 3rd party event organizers and the community itself ran the events. When Blizzard made the HotS thing official, that's when it started to go downhill. (Very quickly).

    Specifically with WoW, I don't enjoy watching the MDI for several reasons. 1, because it's too hard to see what's going on from the player level. All those super granular decisions that Dhalphir talks about as being so important. All the blow by blow decision making, you can't see any of that in the MDI. All you see is big AOE pulls and controlled pandemonium. The level of minutiae that separates the top tier players from us normals is completely lost in translation. 2, because I don't particularly even find M+ fun to play, and why would I want to watch other people play a game mode that I don't like. 3, because frankly I find the strategies employed by the top teams to beat the timer to be super boring to watch. Skipping packs of dudes and drinking invis potions or using rogues' group stealth just seems cheap. Play the dungeon the way it was meant to be played. Don't skip it because of a timer. If you can't beat the standard path without skipping things, you are playing too high a level of a key.

    Likewise, the Arena Invitationals are soooooooo boring to watch because it's literally just people running around pillars and line of sighting each other for like 5-10 minutes, waiting on big cooldowns. It isn't engaging PVP. It's just jab and feint dancing and it's super uninteresting.

    I'd rather watch high-level Battlegrounds because at least with Battlegrounds there are map objectives that a player can track that helps the average viewer keep up with the action. But for whatever reason, Blizzard eSports doesn't seem to care about high level competitive Battleground play like they do with Arenas.

    Lucascraft on
  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    Are the only ways to access the new raid to do a couple weeks of daily rep grinding, or hope you have at least 2 other raiders in your group who have done the grind so they can get to the meeting stone and summon everyone else? That seems like a brand new kind of real bad design decision. Even when "entering the raid" was part of the story before, the instance portal was still there and usable for people who hadn't done the quests yet. Seems almost like a new form of attunement quest, a concept that was rightfully sworn off in vanilla.

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Are the only ways to access the new raid to do a couple weeks of daily rep grinding, or hope you have at least 2 other raiders in your group who have done the grind so they can get to the meeting stone and summon everyone else? That seems like a brand new kind of real bad design decision. Even when "entering the raid" was part of the story before, the instance portal was still there and usable for people who hadn't done the quests yet. Seems almost like a new form of attunement quest, a concept that was rightfully sworn off in vanilla.

    yeah but vanilla is getting a lot of attention, surely a mechanic like attunement, but worse, is a good idea, right?

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    The venn diagram of "players who can't be bothered to do enough Nazjatar dailies to get the 3000 bodyguard XP needed to complete the questline" and "players who are geared enough to raid and really want to try content when it's new" is two completely separate circles. For folks who don't play a lot and don't have the gear for normal Eternal Palace, LFR shouldn't require this questline.

    It's also nothing like attunements from Vanilla or TBC. Those would take weeks of work even literal years after the content premiered, you can bang this one out in less than a week completely by yourself for less than an hour a day.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    I mean attunements in vanilla if you were horde were fucking garbage

    alliance was ezpz

    go into brd, click a shiny, return quest, congrats you're attuned to onyxia or mc

    or go into ubrs and click another shiny

    congrats now you're attuned to bwl

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    To be blunt about it, if someone can't or won't play enough just to get through that Nazjatar questline (which, again, requires an hour or less of questing spread across 6 or 7 non-consecutive days, and a few hours to do the non-daily stuff), they are in no way going to have the gear or time to do Eternal Palace on a difficulty above LFR. It's a moot point.

  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    bowen wrote: »
    I mean attunements in vanilla if you were horde were fucking garbage

    alliance was ezpz

    go into brd, click a shiny, return quest, congrats you're attuned to onyxia or mc

    or go into ubrs and click another shiny

    congrats now you're attuned to bwl

    I only played Horde so my recollection is pain, yeah. Attunements in TBC were a nightmare for everyone.

This discussion has been closed.