I have been meaning to turn this comment into a post for a couple of weeks now, but I have been struggling to make it better by putting my words around it.
What’s worse is I know I took note of the original post, the url, the title, the blog name… I had it all. It ever appeared in the half-arsed WordPress “My Comments” section of the blog control panel, when the blog owner made a reply. Unfortunately, the half-arsed WordPress “My Comments” section is one page long. If a dozen comments appear in quick succession, well, you wont know about the older ones unless someone comments again pushing it to the top.
So I’m hoping that either the blog author, or the commenter (Feralan) stumble across this post and remind me so I can give proper credit.
Then it occurs to me, why do anything more than drag it from the obscurity of a comments thread?
So here is Feralan’s response to a post over at ___FILL_IN_THE_BLANK___
Edit: Found it just prior to post going live, and I can’t be bohered rewritting… so the credit for the post that contains this comment goes to Wildgrowth with the post No PuG Left Behind. You can’t blame a Mage for forgetting a TreeBlog’s url can you?
Feralan said:
This is really a joke.
I’m one of those much-hated “casuals”, and a roleplayer to boot. I raided a while but burned out from it and quit last autumn. And you know what? I’m PINING for the days of the TBC heroics, and so are my equally casual, roleplaying guildies. I cannot imagine how anyone could consider these constant “nerfs” to be a good thing.
If you’re going to raid later, you have to learn certain skills. You have to learn teamwork and situational awareness and how to recover from mistakes (yours or another players’). If the non-raid content can be “facerolled” with one thumb in your nose and the other in your butt, how are future raiders supposed to learn to actually play their class and role half-decently?
If you cannot or don’t want to raid — yes, people like that exist and NO we are NOT all a bunch of no-skill whiners with an entitlement complex the size of the solar system, in fact I see THAT more often in wannabe-hardcore people — then heroics are the only challenge you can look forward to. Take that challenge away and guess what? The motivation to play goes with it.
(And if you are already raiding and think heroics are for worthless n00bs and your epixxed-out uberl33t self doesn’t have to pay attention to what you’re doing or mind your aggro or whatever, then by golly I want to see you splattered all over the instance for your arrogance when you fail to move out of the cleave or the ominously colored bad stuff. Just sayin’.)
TBC heroics could be a pain, and party composition could be too restrictive if you weren’t overgeared. But they were a challenge. They kept you on your toes. That made them FUN. Now that more classes have more reliable CC, why is that CC never expected to be used anymore? (I especially feel for hunters whose prized chain trapping skills have no worth anymore. I miss watching a skilled hunter do that.)
Wrath heroics aren’t fun, overall. They are bland, uninspired, mindless AoE-fests. And the few fights that WERE fun get nerfed to hell and back to make them as boring as the rest. I bet they will remove Insanity next, or Loken’s nova, or anything that actually requires a half-second of engaging your brain instead of spamming AoE until the hotkey breaks.
Yeah, so really I didn’t have anything extra at the time to add (I could just applaud) … and I still don’t.
I think I said I was going to turn the comment into a blog post.. little did I know I was basically just going to put it in quotation marks and get you all to read it!
Gnomer and Out!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
There is a line between accessible and trivial. I think raids are at just about the perfect spot right now. Heroics: trivial. I admit that gear plays a role in it, but some heroics were just never hard.
They need some friggin 5 man hard mode content.
And someone’s post over there about just grinding-type-quests for “good” loot is actually a decent idea.
But with the upcoming push for guilds, that aint gonna happen.
If you have the Gearscore addon, take a stroll ’round Dalaran now. 2 weeks ago, three were a few folks over 5K, with a TON around 4,000-4,500, and dwindling numbers below that.
Now, (most) everyone is 5K+. And yet the Heroics aren’t really any easier. (or faster) On the “plus” side,I seem to be seeing more jerks in my daily PuGs…
I’d call it a sliding scale again – Feralan is certainly right that proper raiding skills need to be learnt somewhere.
This basically means either learning about not pulling aggro, controlling the size of your pulls and not standing in the bad in heroics – or in lower level raids. This may have been one of the ideas Blizzard was trying to follow with the weekly raid quest … which seems to have backfired horribly.
There also are tough heroic achievements – especially when you get an average group, with three dps around the 2k mark, a great healer and a capable tank. Perfectly fine for heroics and yet achievements like “Watch him die” or “Ruby/Emerald Void” will still be worth bragging about.
However, some of the TBC heroics – while pleasantly challenging for a while – also just completely lost all luster due to the fact that they still were annoying to complete after a year or two (I’m looking at you, Shattered Halls). Some sense of progress is nice – and I think back in the olden days it was saved well by adding Magisters Terrace. Tricky to pull off all the way until WotLK was released – for me, anyway.
The new Halls of Reflection goes that way. With pickup groups this is still a daily struggle. If only one of the participants is not up to the game it’ll end in a wipe or three. Not entirely surprisingly, people sometimes drop group as soon as they see the loading screen.
I wonder if this problem could be solved by just (ok, “just”) adding another level of difficulty above Heroic. Give the mobs more health, make the trash packs bigger/have more casters, make them hit harder, maybe even give the bosses some new abilities.
Naturally there would have to be some incentive for tackling these hardmode heroics – a frost emblem for downing the last boss, and/or better loot (ilevel 232).
The important thing is they need to be challenging like regular heroics were when we were all still struggling to clear Naxx.
I think Snut had a point in there too, though. The specific nerfs in question are, from my point of view, “annoyance nerfs”. As in, nerfing the annoyance factor of bosses that were hardcoded to get in their three dispersions/rifts/sacrifices/whatever before they die, no matter how OP the party fighting them is.
There’s obviously downside to the changes as Feralan made clear, but I think the root problem lies in the design of boss encounters in a way that failed to anticipate highly overpowered groups running them.
Awesome comment. I totally agree with him, and I find myself feeling the same way. I have missed BC sooo much! I am completely bored with WOTLK heroics, and most raids at that. I love BC, I suppose the next xpac, we can make one macro, hit it, and go afk for the raid.