[orcstar]

While I think the easier gearing process is a good thing I also see a danger in that I think and see it propagating poor play and even makes the gap between good players and bad players bigger.

Ho come? With the badge gear, even players who shouldn't be able to cut it will be taken along because raids are tuned to even have really poor play players in them.

While in the start of Nax decked in heroic gear 2500 dps was somewhat required and you would get kicked from the raid if you didn't manage, really good players on that gear level managed 3200-3500 dps. So the difference between a good and a bad players was relatively small.

What I see now is the TotC raids, where 3500 dps is about enough in normal mode. But with enough badge gear even with very very poor play you can get that 3500 dps, but the good player manages not 4500 dps in same level gear but more close to 5500-6000 dps.

So, for the bad players there is no incentive to improve: their dps is sufficient. For the semi to good players it makes normal mode content completely trivial because it's balanced for really bad players.
What I mean is things like killing Anub going straight from p1 to p3 without a burrow phase or managing to dps Onyxia so hard that she doesn't even do a deep breath.

I think if you can trivialize recent encounters that aren't so old in a way like this, something is wrong.

What to do about it?

[Throrik]

To me normal modes are basically easier modes yeah, but they're also there to teach you about the encounter and prepare you for the hard modes, for example if you can't move from Icehowl in Normal, then you're not going to be able to move in heroic with a buff gone.

As for DPS etc, there will always be good and bad players, a lot of people though, see that they can do it with 3,500 DPS and why do they need to improve if they're doing it, they can see it as it's pointless to improve if the bosses are still going down, thats to me the outlook of a lot of people.

[Maèl]

Umm, time and time again Blizz has gone on record that they don't want to recreate the BWL/Naxx fiasco.
In vanilla only one third of the playerbase got to kill Nef. Only a very small percentage got to kill just one boss in Naxx. People killing Kel were counted in the hundreds.

Just regard the normal modes as showcasing purely awesome content. You know, allowing everybody to participate in the story IS good. Your achievments in hard mode aren't lessened by some puggers achievement in normal mode.

Compare your achievements to your goals, not to somebody elses achievements. That's what separates the winners from the rest.

You, sir, are discussing a non-issue. Frankly I think the real problem is with your perception of the situation not the situation itsself.

I used to be harcore now I want to be as good as I can be with as little time spent as possible. The whole thing suits me. And I got to see Anub. Yay me!

[swelt]

It took me a couple of re-reads to get your point and I got distracted because you started off with "badge gear" and thought it was that old whine again... but actually it's not, so let me play it back to you in summary: Because 'normal mode' encounters are tuned to be accessible to the majority, the skilled and geared up minority find them trivial.

So my question back to you is, isn't that why we have hard modes?

I'll put it to you that you didn't DPS anub straight from p1 to p3 the first week you got there. In fact, I'll guess that you do that with a lot of gear that you acquired by raiding, and I'll further speculate that you are taking 25 man loot into a 10 man encounter? However you probably walked over each new TOC normal boss without breaking a sweat. TOC was easy. Easy enough to be puggable, and it does get pugged a lot, so in that respect it could be seen as a success. The pugs shouldn't be forced to farm Naxx ad infinitum.

I think there may be some room for the jump between normal and hard modes to be a little less steep. You only have to go over the forums to see how the huge jump from Anub normal to NR Beasts heroic in 25 man has created a brick wall for a lot of guilds.

What I hope to see is that Icecrown strikes a better balance. The first few bosses should be pretty easy. Some of the later bosses should be more challenging. We shouldn't tune Arthas to be puggable on Day 1, but a semi-casual guild that puts a bit of effort in progression should be able to get there before the cataclysm patch. I'd like to see something similar with the hard modes. There should be some hard modes which aren't going to cause a 3 day raid group to lose their hair, and there should be some which are insane. The fact you can toggle hard mode on/off at a 'per-boss' level should facilitate that.

[Throrik]

Source: swelt I'll put it to you that you didn't DPS anub straight from p1 to p3 the first week you got there. In fact, I'll guess that you do that with a lot of gear that you acquired by raiding, and I'll further speculate that you are taking 25 man loot into a 10 man encounter?

Thats something that I noticed, I came from a strict 10 man guild and downed Anub'Arak with us all being around the same DPS give or take, and then I raided ToC10 with a 25m guild and I was pretty much bottom because they had farmed Ulduar25 gear and HMs for so long that they had BiS for 3.1 going into 3.2.

[Xianth]

While it's true for ToC, i'll say ulduar was a much better model in terms of both a learning curve through the instance and a reasonable level of difficulty in normal mode to keep peopel challenged. I remember when it was soon to be released and the blurb was that Naxx was the intro to raiding like MC, with ulduar taking everything further like BWL. It's funny that like their comparisons, you had a lot of average guilds doing naxx easily and then struggling to get far in ulduar.

ToC however, is nothing like AQ and is really a step backwards from ulduar. Now, this isn't an argument amount casuals getting easy gear, but the fact is normal mode has a much lower bar in terms of gear and coupled with being able to do heroics (while outgearing them and learning nothing) you basically have a situation where people have skipped the first two raid dungeons that blizzard intended to re-teach raiding to a lot of the newer player base, so you have an even large base of inexperienced people going into toc, fudging it because they easily gear it/outgear it and the fight are not much challenge, and then because they have got through the instance it is a success and they feel that there is no area of their game they need to improve on.

If it's one thing i've learned throughout raiding and running a guild it's that people learn for themselves much better when they have to deal with failure - they are much more likely to wonder what's wrong and why. If people just roll up to an instance, do crap dps cause they arn't using the right rotation or some dps dies cause the healers don't know how to raid heal properly nobody will be bothered because the bosses will still go down. A nice anecdotal example for you: when we formed our TBC guild we didn't spend more than 6 raiding hours wiping per new boss (for the first kill) pre sunwell. When sunwell came and we spent a month of progress raid nights (about 20 hours) some people couldnt hack it - we got Kalecgos down in the end but by that point we had about 5/6 people stop playing because the loot wasnt falling into their laps and the challange of brutallus made them crap their pants even more.

So you see, an easy ride isn't always "casual" friendly cause as much as people like carrot, sometimes they need a bit of stick too. Having a balanced spectrum of players is important for the social fabric of the game rather than having those who are at the top and then everyone else.

[Mert]

I like to think the OP wasn't asking whether recent content permits poor play (on Normal mode I'll think it clearly does) but whether it encourages it and that, I think, is a rather more interesting question.

At a fundamental level, tanks need to live, DPS need to make bosses die and healers need to stop everyone else from dying. Everything else, it could be argued, is surplus to requirements. Sure you can be more elegant in what you do - you can give the healers and easier time of it or you can put out high numbers but the net effect on the loot that drops is nothing - it does not reward excellent play.

Enter Hard Modes - these are clearly intended to do just that - to reward good play. However, these aren't simply tighter-tuned versions of the same encounter (a good thing, but bear with me) but sometimes fundamentally different encounters. There still remains no reward for someone performing exceptionally in the normal version.

I've already given up flasking up for TotC, as have many of my better-geared raiders. We've supplemented our best buff food for Fish Feasts. We'll give up a few spots to our lesser-geared people and "boost" them through it. We're already sacrificing our own play because, ultimately, we know we can get away with it.

Now with any progression guild I'm sure the intention is to re-instate things like flasks, buff foods, etc for Icecrown but how long does an instance need to be up without new content before people fall into long-term bad habits?

I'd say Naxx is a prime example here - let's take an average raiding guild and say they never had more than the first trash pack in Sunwell on farm. Maybe they completed Maggy and Gruul and had done little bits of The Eye and SSC. Maybe they killed Supremus. You get the picture. Going into Naxx they were still of that TBC mindset - CC trash, take things slowly, methodically. Maybe one week your aim is to clear the Spider Quarter. Each week you build on your skills and eventually you work up to full clears.

However, by the time Ulduar had rolled around, we saw a number of these raiders caught off-guard. It was hard. Hell, even the trash was hard. First time we downed XT I had to wait while our Mages put Sheep back on their action bar for the proceeding trash. How many tanks died because the healer just couldn't get their head around needing to immediately cleanse rather than just spam clicking their flash heal?

So yes, easy content over a long period of time can generate bad habits and can promote poor play, in my opinion. I think TotC possibly came out a bit quickly after Ulduar but, due to its relative shortness, Icecrown probably can't come soon enough for many. Otherwise I can easily see a number of threads on Tankspot about how healers had set into "TotC apathy" and are making easy mistakes in ICC.

Anyway, apologies for sidelining - I think we're probably all in agreement that TotC can be completed with poor members in your group and that Hard Modes are the counterpoint to this but I'd be interested in whether people think that poor play will ever be a result of over-exposure to easy content.

[Roana]

Source: orcstar What to do about it?

Why do anything about it? I just don't see the problem.

WoW is a game. It's entertainment. If you like to treat it as a highly competitive sport, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean other players have to do it the same way. Not every golfer wants to be Tiger Woods, not every biker wants to be Lance Armstrong.

Doing something non-competitively is perfectly fine. I play board and card games with my husband all the time, with neither of us having any really strong ambition to win and neither of us focusing for hours on optimizing our strategies for a particular game. And we have fun. We would probably be considered "noobs" by those who take these games seriously, and we don't care.

As long as it doesn't affect you (and even if it does affect you, you will have to allow for different people having different preferences for what they want in return for their $14.95 a month), this is simply a non-problem. Optimizing the WoW play of the general population is not a particularly important public good that I would waste a whole lot of effort on improving.

[swelt]

I think it's also a bit dangerous to draw too many long conclusions from TOC. TOC is a filler. A placeholder raid while they build ICC. It's not perfect in design, in the progression model it uses. It was a useful experiment. The concept of the tribute run is a good one, rewarding quality of execution. The fact that hard mode is really hard, and that so very few guilds are actually capable of clearing the place in 25 man undermines it to some extent, but 10 man tributes are still there. Perhaps it would have helped to have the tribute active in both normal and heroic. Either way, Icecrown will be quite different again.

[Taei]

I blame Naxx. It was very much "My First Raid" and "look mommy, I can be raider!". Sarth3D was the only redemption for a challenge, and thus spawned the creation of Hard Modes. I do think Hard/Heroic Modes are very well tuned - it really is only the best guilds completing them. But pitching the normal modes are where Blizzard went wrong, imo.

Ulduar (normal) was a nice step up from Naxx, and isn't facerollably-puggable. But TotC normal is not a step up in difficulty from Ulduar, if anything it's easier (assuming the same relevative level of gear). Ony is on a similar level of difficulty. So with TotC Heroic being suitably tough, there's a huge gap between the hour and a half needed to clear normal Totc + Ony to get a flood of lvl245 loot while half-awake, and the agony of downing Heroic Beasts.

This gap generates the apathy mentioned in the posts above. Why should I put that much effort into heroic modes for tiny upgrades, when I can watch TV and open my bags for the normal loot to flow into? Dedicated raiders may still live for the challenge of Hard Modes, but for the average serious guild, it's an unpleasant pressure. There's no need to down heroic bosses to progress, unlike the days of vanilla and early TBC where you had to overcome the seemingly impossible boss to get to the next one. In WotLK, the work, coordination and effort required to kill normal bosses is trivial. The sense of progression is lost. There is no brick wall that needs knocking down, you can just step around it.
As for what to do about it... The gap needs shrinking. Normal mode raids need to be more difficult with each tier. People will still be able to see the content, they'll just need a suitable level of focus and understanding to get there.

[orcstar]

In short what my beef is about, ofcourse not everyone can and has to play the game at the same level.

But for every gear level there's a theoretical maximum how well you can perform.
Excellent players will reach close to 100% of the theoretical maximum. Really good players 90% and good players 80%. Poor players would reach 60% of that theoretical maximum their gear can support.

My observation from Nax is that you needed that 60% your kit could provide to be able to not be noticed as a really bad player. Would get comments about it and have an incentive to improve.

Gear has improved since Nax and with easy currently available gear my feeling about ToC is that people can perfom at 40% and still won't get commented on. So there's no reason to improve.

While I think raidcontent should be accessible, it should not go so far that instead of actually doing something a bit challenging you might as well play a cutscene of the boss being killed and give loot after people managed to sit that out.

In comparisson to Nax the bar for TotC has been lowered a lot and too much in my opinion.

[Roana]

Source: orcstar While I think raidcontent should be accessible, it should not go so far that instead of actually doing something a bit challenging you might as well play a cutscene of the boss being killed and give loot after people managed to sit that out.

The hyperbole aside, why? Just because you don't like it? Is there "one true way" to play the game (or any other game) and everyone who doesn't or doesn't aspire to is a menace to society? Is there really a problem with people having fun in the "wrong way"?

Do you cook? If so, do you cook like a 5-star chef? Why don't you try to be the best cook there is? Why not drop everything else that you are doing in order to achieve 100% performance when it comes to cooking?

Do you do ballroom dancing? If so, could you compete with professionals? If not, why not? Why don't you optimize your performance for that, too?

In practice, people have limited time and interest in pursuing any given hobby. That's not a crime, that's normal. Spending several nights a week pursuing any given interest is the exception, not the rule. If you pursued any other hobby as aggressively and commit that much of your time, people would assume that it's more than just a hobby for you, in fact.

[Fearghus]

Now, for those who aren't reading closely, this isn't about casuals getting gear. That's a non-issue here. (Besides, I love being able to gear up alts)

The issue is something I've noticed as well, there are just terrible play that pops up and doesn't matter too much to the completion of the normal ToC.

In ten man alt/casual runs in our guild, I've seen people stand in poison, die, get brezzed, die again and despite us losing half of the dps and a healer, we complete the encounter. Same with pugs for 25, standing in front of worms, poor healing, etc. So now you got a generation of players that are flush with success and gear, but don't play well. They won't take well to a harder instance AND they haven't learned that standing in fire is very very bad.

People will flock to the path of least resistance, honestly. That's why there are a ton of people who haven't cleared Ulduar and why no one (relatively) will pug that place. Ulduar has a steeper resistance to poor play, making it less attractive to spend time in for loot gotten.

Ultimately, it seems dicey on what the devs want. People don't want to do Ulduar cuz it's a wipefest, so Ulduar is not seen through completion by everyone becuase ToC is so much more attractive on time spent in relation to loot gotten...BUT they get to see the new content, even though half the raid could die to very stupid mistakes. So, if poor play is fine in the name of seeing content, I don't think anything can be done at this point.

[KnThrak]

I would blame ToC, not Naxx. Naxx was an appetizer, but everyone I know knew that back then. We could see from Malygos and Sartharion and his Drakes how the content wasn't supposed to be like Naxx, that was just feeding the once elitist instance to the masses.

So came Ulduar we knew we'll chew nails and spit glass shards. We did. It worked, but boy was that a tough place until they started at least fixing the really gross things like Ignis' incredibly hard-hitting melee attack (they twice made him attack faster but for less per swing. Same DPS but actually much much easier to handle.).


ToC is... I don't know. I lack words. It looks tossed together in 1 week, there's little story, the voiceacting is poor and spotty, the bosses get no real explanation at all (which would have been awesome), the loot is just pushing everyone up to be able to raid ICC independant of whether they could raid Ulduar or not.

Right now, Ulduar normal > ToC normal in difficulty. I'd argue much of Ulduar Hard > ToC Hard, too, currently eating nails on Firefighter.

You can notice that ToC is supposed to be the "equalizer". Even Joe Clueless Rogue can farm out ToC normal in pugs in a few weeks, getting gear of above what the elite could get prior to ToC. It's not bad - the higher ups still have the Hard Mode - but it shows what the place is meant to be. And that promotes bad play. Everyone knows that everyone knows that ToC runs itself, there's no skill required from the player. This promoted bad skill because few rant about others playing bad.



Oh and while I'm there:
Why are ToC Hard Modes the same fight as normal in +25% power? ;_;
What was so wrong with Ulduar actually having additional fights in hard modes, it made the place fun. The fight being different was part of the allure of the Hard Mode for me.

[Mert]

I think that while aesthetically similar, the Anub fight on Heroic is significantly different enough in strategy to almost be a different encounter entirely - much in the way that Firefighter is. The others are perhaps more akin to Thorim Hard - the same fight with a bit of extra "lol wtf is happening?" thrown in for good measure.

Having said that, we've been told that Blizzard "have no sympathy for people trying hard modes" in Icecrown and I have my suspicion that there will be some pretty unique fights there. If you've seen any of the PTR stuff of the Sindragosa fight, there's two named trash adds before the pull so maybe we'll see some kind of Sarth-esque "they're in the fight too" mechanic there which could be quite interesting.

Having said that, there's the skeleton mini-Supremus guy who will probably just have extra hard-hitting vocan... um... ice spikes and some magical AoE.

I can't even work out if I'm being cynical or optimistic any more. Either way, Icecrown looks fun as hell and I'm excited in a way that I wasn't especially for TotC.

[Bashal]

There are two kinds of people who play WoW: people who just play, and people who want to play well. The latter eventually acquire real skill to some degree.

You saw fewer of the former in the past, because, frankly, they were beneath your notice; they had no gear, they didn't hang around the raid instances because they had no real access to them.

But they were always there. You only notice them more now because they can get gear that isn't too far behind the current tier (or in some cases, the same tier, just takes them a bit longer to acquire).

Whenever I see a thread like this, I often wonder why it matters to everyone so much. Do that many people like to stand around in Dalaran and see how many people rubberneck as they go by? Are we raiding for...curb appeal?

I don't. And I don't really care what other people are wearing if they aren't in my guild and aren't in my raid, or how they may have got it. And if I do see something flashy and bother to inspect it to see what it is, I don't concern myself overmuch if they only got the epics because they were carried. If they were carried, I didn't carry them, so no skin off my nose.

Really...what is the problem here? I never raided in vanilla wow (started playing a couple months before TBC), if it has something to do with the (seriously flawed, imo) raiding in vanilla, I guess I just don't get it.

[orcstar]

I really don't care about what gear people can get, what I care about is with how much underperforming you can get away with. And my feeling is that you can underperform a lot more in TotC then you could in Nax without having an impact on the success.

and I think that lowering the bar too much is a bad thing. No matter if you're hardcore or casual. Even if casual there has to be some kind of challenge.

How far does accessible go? Till the point that autoattacking/wanding is enough to complete an encounter?

[Xianth]

Source: Roana Why do anything about it? I just don't see the problem. WoW is a game. It's entertainment. If you like to treat it as a highly competitive sport, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean other players have to do it the same way. Not every golfer wants to be Tiger Woods, not every biker wants to be Lance Armstrong. Doing something non-competitively is perfectly fine. I play board and card games with my husband all the time, with neither of us having any really strong ambition to win and neither of us focusing for hours on optimizing our strategies for a particular game. And we have fun. We would probably be considered "noobs" by those who take these games seriously, and we don't care. As long as it doesn't affect you (and even if it does affect you, you will have to allow for different people having different preferences for what they want in return for their $14.95 a month), this is simply a non-problem. Optimizing the WoW play of the general population is not a particularly important public good that I would waste a whole lot of effort on improving.

I know what you're saying, but the expectation isn't on every one who wants to raid to be able to raid at the top level. The main gripe is that over time, as people are challenged in the game some people develop their ability or desire to achieve naturally, some need a push, some don't care at all (and that's fine). The problem is if the people who "need" a push don't get it, you have a signifcantly lower population of players filtering to the level that they are "hard mode capable". This can be a cummulative problem for people like me and other posters here who rely on a decent player base at that level to sustain being able to play at that level themselves - people quit, get old, have kids, etc. etc. and there needs to be the opposite happening with people developing their skills or changin their goals in the game to balance the big raiding bubble.

Hell, I didnt even start wow with the ambition to raid (I didnt even know such a thing existed) but after playing the game for several months and learning the nuiances of my character I felt it would be my next game goal.

[Mert]

In order to balance an instance to be accessible to the masses (which isn't an innately bad thing in my opinion) it has to be based on the average performance from the previous tier to an extent. Sure you could say "100% peformance in full 245 gear is ~8,000 DPS" so we'll tune to 50% performance but if that's still higher than the average puglet puts out then it'll still mean an unpassable barrier to entry for ICC for that person.

Now of course Blizzard won't balance around the lowest common denominator but they will, to an extent at least, balance around the median point. Exclude the Saturday afternoon PUGs and "/w for invite" guilds and exclude the Ensidias of the world and then find some easily-attained mid point between what's left and tune the bosses accordingly.

I think the potential issue here is that if left unchecked this will eventually lead to decay in raid difficulty - as we've said here you can slack off bigtime in TotC and still complete the instance so we'll likely see that reflected in parts of Icecrown - after all, the data suggests that the guys in welfare epics and normal mode drops are the guys to make it a challenge for - fun, challenging but with mass appeal. No more 3% of people saw Sunwell right? Thing is, if the instance is balanced on data gathered from an instance where people are known to perform poorly and still complete it, then relative to gear level the amount of slack will actually be greater come Icecrown... a 10% uplift in stats might represent only a 3% increase in performance for a poorer player, so the relative difficulty goes down over time.

Now this being the last raid before Cataclysm it's probably not that big of a deal but I'd hope some serious consideration is being put into what Johnny Average can potentially achieve rather than what he does achieve when he's in TotC... if that makes sense.

[Selyndia]

My biggest issue with normal ToC is that, while it has quite a few decent mechanics that should be payed attention to, in most cases, they can be ignored or missed with little to no repercussions. Examples:

Beasts of Northrend and Icehowl’s Massive Crash/Charge. On normal, not only is the ability trivial to get away from (Thanks to the run speed boost) but even if you don’t run away, the enrage effect is removable, and the enrage timer is so long that missing the extra damage doesn’t matter at all. Even without a tranq shot, tanks can cool down through Frothing Rage and it can be healed through (Hurts like a bitch though) but the primary mechanic of that phase can be outright ignored. On heroic, we see how much tighter the mechanic can be in that not only do you lose time on the enrage timer but also if you get hit, the enrage is not removable, and his additional damage can rapidly chew through a tank that is even using cool downs.

Lord Jaraxxus’ Incinerate Flesh. On normal the amount of damage this ability does is pretty trivial when it goes off. 15k damage split up over 5 seconds is pretty laughable compared to some raid damage people have to deal with. It took weeks to get healers to actually care enough to remove incinerate consistently because the penalty was so non existent. Bringing around the hard mode, you notice that if Incinerate Flesh goes off, it likely will wipe the raid as instead of a pittance of damage, its much more substantial and will likely result in at least one person’s death (Which will likely spell a wipe by putting Portal/Volcano DPS behind).

I don’t have an issue with fights being easier; in fact, I’m perfectly alright with them being easier. I do, however think that if mechanics are there, that they shouldn’t be ignorable. It makes the learning curve from normal to heroic much harder when there are abilities that are complete non issues suddenly become raid wiping. Even Naxx had mechanics you had to actually pay attention to (Thaddius Polarity Shifts, Horseman Marks, Sapphiron Frost Bomb, Heigan’s Dance, etc) and could lead to wipes. It just seems that mistakes in ToC are much more forgivable than even tier 7 and 8 raid mechanics were.