Do you miss natural gatekeepers?
I know I do.
Of course at this point, you have no idea what I’m talking about.
This thought occurred to me while I was chatting to SlikRX/Balthazario, who has become a regular, like a real guildy, in Armaggedon’s Coming.
How regular?
He brought his wife as well!
Anyway, I was chatting to Balth while I was running VoA. The raid leader clearly stated from the outset that it was a whole clear.
That was when I discovered that the raid I had joined, the one committed to clearing VoA was 1/2 full of one-wipe pansies.
Back in the good Old days
Which got me thinking and chatting to Balth.
He’s young enough, (/wink) in game terms anyway, that he didn’t experience the joys of gatekeepers in the Burning Crusade.
Kara is the perfect example of this.
We will ignore the attunement process, we will call that an un-natural gate keeper. Well go straight to the 1st boss.
Attumen the Huntsman
He was fundamentally a dps race, but there were enough twists that you had to keep it together avoid wipes and earn the right to go beyond him.
You could only afford one wipe, maybe two if you were a bit overgeared – and that was just on the trash leading to the boss.
You had 30 minutes to clear the trash and take down the boss before the trash reset.
I know people scoff at trash these days, but I was in plenty of Kara raids where the group couldn’t jump this 1st hurdle.
In many cases people wouldn’t pass this gate for 2 or 3 weeks, or if they did they would fail at the next one.
Imagine that, 3 weeks to get past the trash leading to the 1st boss! These days we need Blizzard programmed gates to ensure an entire raid instance isn’t one-shot on the first night.
Moroes
Even if your raid made it past Attumen in those 1st few weeks, the next gatekeeper was ready to douse you in a cold shower of humility.
Sure some people got him on their 1st night, some even one-shot him, but for a long time he was the one that was likely to break the spirit of the raid.
Just because you got him once didn’t mean you would get him the next time. “On Farm” didn’t mean we had killed him once.
A bit of random boss selection, classes expected to use their skills, a defined kill order AND target switching mixed in with a fair dose of self survival skills made this a challenging, often frustrating, but always great encounter to finish.
The Curator
The Curator was easy, once you knew how, once you learned to quickly change targets and burn down the adds, once you could pump out the damage at the right time, at the right target (Mmm sounds like Emalon) and as long as you didn’t have a Hunter (for some unknown reason, Hunters always pulled The Curator early and could never understand the instructions on how to not pull Curator).
There was a reason I wrote so frequently about the Post-Curator black hole (PCBH). The natural gatekeepers did their job and often people just didn’t want to go another step further.
These days we have loot Pinatas
WoLK doesn’t have natural gatekeepers, it has loot pinatas. The reality is if you don’t have the achievement for a boss kill in the 1st week of it’s release you are a nub.
Unfortunately it has breed a entitlement culture.
I’m entitled to fight the final boss and if you can’t dumb it down enough for me to get through, then you better make it optional & skippable.
Emalon
Which brings me back to Emalon. This guy is a natural gate keeper, but Blizzard forgot to give him the keys!
Why is it that we can beat the new “hard bosses” but can’t beat him?
Why are we allowed to fight the new hard bosses without going through this natural gatekeeper?
I’ts good to fail… sometimes
I honestly believe the occasional wipe is good for a person. RL is not a series of one-shots, it’s a mix of close calls, one-shots and wipes.
I believe the true measure of a person is the ability to take a few knocks, scrape yourself off the floor and face the challenge again.
Some will suggest that this is a human nature problem, not a design problem. The thing is, I didn’t see this human nature before WoLK, so really the only design issue is that we can have a hissy fit and get bosses that are so easy that when we meet a natural gatekeeper we take our bat and ball and go home.
Gnomer and Out!
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/02/09/natural-gatekeepers
i agree. my guild wipes pretty constantly on new material, but we also LEARN from each one. it’s sort of becoming a raid team rule of thumb that “first we wipe a time or two to figure out how the fight goes, then the next time we take ‘em down like pros.”
case in point, this past weekend we took down ignis and the constructor in ulduar, both in that exact same pattern. we had never been to either of those fights as a guild group before. some people had been there, most hadn’t. we talked out the parts of the fight that the veterans knew about, tried it, failed, tried again, maybe failed, maybe didn’t. and it was a helluva lot of fun, and we felt like rock stars at the end. good times.
i think i read this over at The Grumpy Mage’s blog (http://thegrumpymage.wordpress.com/), and it’s stuck with me so i will repeat it: “if you’re not wiping, you’re not challenging yourself.”
excellent, excellent words.
I think it’s a side effect of what Blizzard is trying to do: get more people to end content and gearing via PuGs.
They have been moderately successful, except for one thing: there is hardly any “end game” (aka – hard) 5 man content stuff to do. Yes, FoS, PoS and HoL are tough, but they are still (apparently) only intended to be “gearing fodder” and are not intended to be long, arduous multi -week (or day?) fights.
This in turn keeps the heroics (even the tough ones) as exclusively farm content. Suitable ONLY for PuGs and n00bs. And because they ARE such loot pinatas, pretty much everyone overgears even HoR now.
“Serious” content is reserved for the 10 & 25 man runs.
And if you don’t have a large guild, or a pretty active guild, you’re screwed.
Maybe Bliz could release TOUGH 5 man versions of the ICC raids? Nerf the loot/drops from there as much as they want, to prevent farming, but at least offer a “real” raiding experience that forces people to learn, practive and pay attention.
I find that comparing the early raid bosses from Burning Crusade through to the new raid bosses (especially the more accessible, early in the instance) in Wrath comes down to collective effort, as opposed to individual jobs.
The new boss in VoA – Toralon – requires that all your ranged DPS make an effort. Because they want groups to succeed you don’t need to have 8 ranged DPS doing the right thing. You need about 5 doing the right thing. The rest of the raid can be pretty hopeless and still you will win.
Attumen required more coordination (as did the trash – remember Shackle Undead? Frost Traps? These were a requirement to get through). From memory you needed 2 coordinated tanks (not just 2 dudes to stand and share cleave damage), you needed people to dispel or decurse (can’t remember which tbh) and you needed all your DPS to meet a decent DPS requirement too. You needed people to stand in the right position and you needed them to DPS the correct target at all times.
I feel that most of the new bosses have 3 rules: This is what melee have to do, this is what ranged have to do, this is what tanks have to do. You can have like 80% of each group doing the right thing.
Moroes required 4 players to CC while DPSing. Healers had to heal more and more bleed damage if you took too long. Tanks had to keep stuff under control. 1 person not doing their job, or sucking at CC, meant you would wipe.
The first boss that I believe this is true of in Icecrown is The Blood Prince Council which is a true test of individual environmental awareness and control. All it takes is for 1 Hunter to SUCK at pet control and a Kinetic Bomb will go off. Any person standing in the wrong place at the wrong time can nearly kill off another player during empowered shock vortex, a player can get themselves killed if they get (or stand instead of moving) in the range of one of those swirly white 30 yards force field things.
Watching your fellow raiders get themselves and the players around them killed in Blood Princes can make you doubt the skill of your raiders. And there are not many fights (Mimiron maybe? Yogg?) that make it so apparent when one person fails.
Ah, the old gate keepers.
In kara, we got Attuman first night.
Moroes took about 4-5 weeks.
Next cockblock was a few weeks at Curator.
Then about another month at Shade of Aran.
In SSC, the fucking water giant banged our drum too many times to count. First time we downed him, I was there on my Warlock. Took about a month to down him the first time. And another month to down him the second time.
“You Rang!” – Moroes.
I remember these guys, Lets go further back yet. You had Razorgore in BWL, and a bunch of keepers in Molten Core.
I can’t believe how we even got together 40 people to be on the same page, and now it’s tough to get 25.
[...] Gnomey was talking Gatekeepers, and others around the blogosphere are talking Immersion, or the lack there [...]
Good post.
The guild I’m in is fairly accomplished (only Anub hard-mode and Algalon haven’t been downed), and as such, we’ve come to expect good performance and achievable clears. Then last week we got our asses handed to us for an entire night by Valithria, and it did take me right back to Curator. Not in the fight mechanics, but in remembering when my guild back then would spend a week on each boss, and hope we could put it together faster the next week. To be fair, we had similar experiences with Patchwerk & Grobbulus in Naxx, but that could have been an affect of trying to raid too fast with minimal gear.
To counter the argument, though, while I like hard-fights, I don’t want to go back to raiding 20-30 hours a week just to clear. Those days got old quick….