The Weekly Marmot - The Casualization of Hardcore Raiding

So I'll try to give the opposite perspective though I doubt it will be considered. I've said this before but I think the one major issue that ties in to this more than any other is the number of bosses in DS. Imagine a situation in which the encounters were tuned as people on this thread would want. Months Behind would be e.g. just getting to 2,3,4 heroics down and guilds like mine (which just managed heroic Ultra for 3/8H last night after the 20% nerf, with the second guild I run with only being 4/8H on the much easier 10m's) would, if people on this thread had their way, never get past normal modes and would now be on say ultra or ship normal mode. So does it sound like a good model to have guilds like this, and make no mistake that this is by far the bulk of the raiding population, doing the same 4-5 encounters for 5 months? Solely so that a relatively small number of guilds wouldn't finish quite as fast?

Blizzard has and I think anyone would who is looking at the situation rationally would come to the conclusion that having a bulk of guilds stuck in the same place for 5,6,8,10 weeks at a time is not a good design. On my old, terrible server i amassed something like 14 kills of the first 4 bosses in ICC before getting anything past it down. I don't remember doing the same 4 mobs in 25's over and over as a good gaming experience and at least on servers like mine at the time that was hardly an uncommon situation. I don't think there is any great conspiracy in the 4-week intervals between debuffs. I would guess the metric is something like 'if x% of guilds have been stuck in the same place for 4 weeks or more, go for nerf'. That does seem to be a solidly depressing breakpoint of non-progression that would make sense.

More bosses ameliorates this situation to a great extent thought of course its not exactly new to Blizzard that working harder to produce more bosses is better for the playerbase. Had DS been 12 bosses then that would have allowed for the distance in terms of number of encounters completed that people on this thread ACTUALLY want (and lets not be children and persist with the 'those who want a challenge' silliness, what people actually want is of course encounters they can do that other people can't) and yet not complete stagnation for the bulk of guilds sitting and staring at hagara or Ultraxion for 2 months straight as would have to have occurred with an 8-boss DS at the level people are suggesting.

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Originally Posted by Ion

.it makes no sense to create a hardmode and then, over time, make it easier than the "normal" version was originally.

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It won't make sense to you - and that is not a criticism of your viewpoint. I actually agree and fully understand and appreciate why it makes no sense to you.

However from the business perspective it makes perfect sense.

A percentage of those clearing content (especially in the final tier) are inclined to cancel their subs until the next tier/expansion once they have cleared everything.

In the case of those finishing HC there really isn't anything left to aim for if you don't want to repeat the process on alts or do it for the hell of it. So from Blizzards perspective those subs are lost and there ain't much they can do about it.

However for those guilds that run Normal mode and kill the final boss there is the possibility that their subs can be retained by tempting them with the HC modes and the shiny rewards that come with it.

This is a major factor in those guilds that do Normal and maybe one or two HC bosses. A lot of the players in those guilds are reluctant to move onto HC mode and are happy to quit after clearing normal. They have a low tolerance when it comes to long drawn out progression battles in HC and are inclined to cancel their subs until the next tier/exp and leave their guilds in the lurch.

Providing smooth progression in HC will I believe have a significant impact on activity and subscription levels amongst this group of guilds.

Middle content patches - how about this? Let's assume that Molten Front daily hub was relesead a month or so before firelands raid. Now if you are a HC raider, you already have 372 ilvl so no incentive there for farming dailies for 365 ilvl items. YOU ARE PREPARED! But if you're a normal raider (or now lfr) you can farm those dailes and get 365 ilvl weapons and stuff just before next content hits. We have a) more crafting b) more people on dailies c) Blizz can make normal modes harder (so 372 ilvl guys wont faceroll them) becouse normal mode raiders are not that far behind. And it will be that "silent" nerf before next patch, couse ppl would have about week or two to kill "old" bosses with better gear.

I am sorry but no Lore , its not the CONTENT but the PLAYER that is not hardcore. You may make a argument that " who would not take the debuff? " like you said weeks ago on another marmot and legendary. The TRUE HARDCORE player would progress without the debuff.

Why not take the 20% off this week? I am sure you will find it more than a challenge for you and your guild and you can feel that the content is hard again.

I agree the blanket nurfs in Firelands was kinda bad since they gave it to everyone without asking if you wanted it first. But in DS , YOU have the choice to take it or not. What gets me angry is when people take the debuff and the complain that DS is too easy, like you just did.

Take off the debuff and stop the QQ.

Blizzard has given you 2 heroic modes and 2 normal modes plus raid finder. Most just play the 1 heroic mode or the 1 normal , the one with debuff. If you are deciding to not take the true hardcore mode and only play the "easy" version then dont complain about content being easy when you are playing easyier content.

So we will call it 4 levels of difficulty, 1 easy and 4 hardest, your playing on level 3 bro. Do not complain its not hard enough when you have a whole other difficulty level to go.

I said it before and I'll say it again, the issue we run into here at Tankspot is that a lot of the posters are in the top, I'll venture a guess, 5% of players in wow, so what you want and what you expect is a lot different from the rest of us riding along in steerage.

At this stage if you're not 8/8 H DS you need the nerf if you want to kill it - you can make all the excuses you want about who's not showing up, who's not ready to raid, who left the guild, but after almost 5 months of DS if Heroic DW ain't dead you need the nerf if you want to kill him. Cold reality. I dont' say this as an H 8/8 raider, I'm H 4/8 on my main having just gotten Warlord last night. As Clint Eastwood said "A man's got to know his limitations."

Be honest with yourself, after 5 months of DS do you really care that they nerf'd heroic, does it matter anymore? At this time, it's like saying "bastards they nerfed Molten Core".


Lastly, anyone not H 8/8 now and expressing outrage about nerfing content is either full of hot air or just talking phoney tough to try to fit in with the hardcore crowd.

Well Lore as a player who has played since vanilla I can see where you are coming from.
Personally like you i don't consider myself to be a top tier player and I fall into the middle ground you mentioned.

I noticed you mentioned a lot of factors about why the game is easier which were mostly related to the encounter design itself. But I feel that you are missing a very important point one factor that is always present.

That point is that players like yourself are getting better at handling mechanics thrown at them.

Now I know everyone will point to TBC and say it was hard, but when I look at the ability tables for those bosses one thing that stands out to me when i compare them to Cataclysm bosses is the sheer number of abilities bosses have developed over the years.

Blizzard is making fights hard by giving us more mechanics thrown into the mix at once to deal with. The leap to Heroic from Normal shows this as extra mechanics to worry about keep getting added, but my point here is that we have gotten so used to "don't stand in the fire", "tanks taunt on debuff" and other mechanics that form the staple of wow gameplay we deal with certain types of mechanics on autopilot now when they used to be a challenge on their own back in the day.

The other issue other people above me have mentioned is wow's population is ageing and many of us do not have the time to commit to raiding we may have done years ago. Speaking for myself I am so busy these days with non wow things in my life I can barely fit in 1 or 2 raids per week anymore when it used to be up to 5 nights during Vanilla or TBC.

This issue of people being able to clear content in the end due to nerfs and debuffs has I think kept the game alive longer than it otherwise might have. Ask yourselves this: Do you raid the same amount of days per week you did during Vanilla and TBC? Most do not right now and, if that model was still in the game a large chunk of the playerbase would possibly have been burned out by now leaving the game in a sorry state.

It is a tricky issue for blizzard to get a balance that appeals to everyone with something like this.

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Originally Posted by Ion

If you're in guilds that are like Lore's (and, to an extent, mine) then you play N amount of hours a week but are looking for a challenge...it's not FUN if it's not challenging. If those N hours mean you get in...say 50 attempts on a boss before they nerf it, but it would have taken you 60 un-nerfed attempts to kill it...you're kind of getting screwed over. If you were willing to put in a bit more time before the nerf then you would have gotten it, but because of the nature of your guild and the choice your guild has made to do N hours a week...you end up with the unsatisfying nerfed kill (and again...you can say "you can turn off the nerf", but that just never happens...you are ALSO still in competition for #2 (or whatever) through #X on your server so you can maintain a roster by being decently competitive on your server...you can't just throw the nerf out the window when the people behind you won't be).

Eh, I don't like the "nerf it over time until even little Jimmy's grandma can beat it on a 4hr/week schedule". Leave hardmodes ALONE...let them CONTINUE to be hard. Jimmy's grandma can do normal modes if they're too hard for her. If they want people seeing ALL of their content...there's no equitable solution there. You can't have both...you can have "hard" content or you can have "content that everyone can see." LFR should be the "seeing the content" version...even normal modes...it makes no sense to create a hardmode and then, over time, make it easier than the "normal" version was originally.

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Those are perfectly valid views, but you have to realize that a lot of people play the game and may not have the same opinions as you. You might be willing to spend 2 months working on the same boss, but a lot of people would prefer to have the nerfs to help them over whatever hump is hindering them. There are many reasons why guilds may get stuck at a certain point and desire help. Maybe you lost a couple of players, so you're having to deal with turnover which is making it hard to take down whatever boss. That's super frustrating to everyone that has been there from the start. Progressive nerfs are nice for overcoming these types of setbacks that might otherwise cause people to just give up.

Personally I think it's unreasonable to deny them the choice to get that assistance especially when you DO have the option to turn off the debuff. I realize you may have reasons for not wanting to turn it off if it is available, but that is still a choice that you make. If you truly would have more fun by turning it off and preserving the challenge, but you would rather race to beat other guilds... again that is a choice you make.

I do think that the Firelands nerf was implemented very poorly. But I see nothing wrong with an optional, progressive nerf in small increments after the raid has been out for a couple of months.

See a few people saying to have LFR/Nerf normals but don't touch heroics. The only problem with this is it creates a really hard wall for middle of the pack guilds from clearing normal to going into heroics after the normal nerf has hit. Course not nerfing normals would solve this, just not sure if blizz is ok with that.

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Originally Posted by dimli

See a few people saying to have LFR/Nerf normals but don't touch heroics. The only problem with this is it creates a really hard wall for middle of the pack guilds from clearing normal to going into heroics after the normal nerf has hit. Course not nerfing normals would solve this, just not sure if blizz is ok with that.

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You could...get good enough to do heroics.

I don't see why this isn't an option. If you are clearing normals...why wouldn't you want to start doing harder content? If it's a challenge...step up to it.

I'm honestly confused.

I'm sorry Zoltar, but I agree 100% with Ion (and with what lore said in the video, though that's not really what we're talking about here).

If LFR people want their "okay everyone can do this on their own time without a scheduled raid" mode, and then the next echelon of people want the "okay we want to do the content in an organized fashion that still requires some effort but not a lot" group (aka normal modes), then hardcore raiders should be able to get their unnerfed hardmodes that they get to do at their own pace without nerfs.

It's a complete double standard to say "LFR (and even normal) is fine, but so is nerfing hardmoes so everyone can see them"

AND IT'S NOT OPTIONAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT IS A NON-CHOICE. It is the illusion of choice.

I think Lore and other people confuse being able to do Hardcore Mode (somehow at some point) to being hardcore raider.
Time line 24:01-24:05 is basically the whole point: you are not hardcore enough !

Also there's not only casual and hardcore, and even in at hardcore level there are more degrees of comparasion. I was watching those top 10 guilds and there are the 25-50 "hardcore" guys that go for the World First and there are the crazy no life super uber hardcore in those guilds, achievement whores that beat the game, have Gladiator title, have all mounts and pets in game etc ...

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

AND IT'S NOT OPTIONAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT IS A NON-CHOICE. It is the illusion of choice.

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I've seen that stated many times, but never with an adequate explanation as to why it is not optional. I suspect it has to do with competition with other guilds, the race to clear before someone else. If so, than the issue of nerfs watering down the challenge isn't the real issue. If the sole objection is about the reduction of difficulty, then as already stated, turn the buff off. The only reason people would claim that it isn't an option is because other guilds won't be turning it off and will clear the content faster as a result. At that point, the challenge of clearing a raid on heroic difficulty as a priority becomes secondary to simply clearing it before the other guys do.

If there's another reason that renders a buff "non-optional" that I'm not considering, I'd love to know what it is.

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Originally Posted by Lrot

At that point, the challenge of clearing a raid on heroic difficulty as a priority becomes secondary to simply clearing it before the other guys do.

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Exactly. At that point, you have made a CHOICE to put competition above challenge. There IS a choice, and you have made it.

If you put competitive speed above challenge, then that's your choice. Period. The choice DOES exist to put challenge first.

What seems to be the real want is for someone (Blizzard) to take away the choice so one doesn't have to be made.

Edit: Before someone insists that no one will ever turn it off: Yes, people do that. Maybe they don't raid the way you do or for the same reasons, but, there are people who turn the buff off, because they raid for the challenge and don't care about who gets there first. You're no more important than they are. You made your choice, they made their own. Wanting to take away their choice so that you don't have to live with your own choice is selfish, imo.

There are several reasons, the three primary ones being, "it's sub-optimal" even if the people in guilds like Lore's and like my guild's was, we don't raid a LOT, but we like to get quality raiding time in when we do raid. We probably spend roughly (and sometimes less) total attempts than the hardest of the hardcore guilds, but it's spread out over months instead of weeks. We want the challenge of doing it without a flat blanket nerf. I agree with Lore that sometimes specific fights need specific nerfs, like SoD did, but blanket nerfs are... harsh at best.

Now, as you say "well just turn it off." The reasons why it's not a choice are as follows:

1) Homogeneity in raid philosophy. Just because *I* want to take the buff off, doesn't mean I can convince the other 9 or 24 people in my raid that it's a good idea (and they have valid reasons that will be listed below). Pissing these people off and saying "no, you can't have your goodies even though the reward system for doing it with the buff or without the buff is the exact same other than this nebulous concept of doing it "pre-nerf" which is still not really pre-nerf b/c it wasn't done in blizzard's arbitrary time frame. There's not even so much as an achievement to prove that you DID it without the nerf. You don't get better gear, you don't get an achievement, and it's significantly easier. People will follow the path of least resistance, especially in the kind of guild Lore and I describe (for the most part). It's like saying "well if you're not killing it on HC, why don't you just do it on Normal" only in this scenario "normal" gets you the exact same gear as HC. If there was zero reward for doing HC mode, almost no one would do it I'd imagine. If there was no tracking of who did HC, if there was no achievement, no loot, no NOTHING (just like turning off the debuff) you'd only get a handful of niche people that wanted to do it, and they probably wouldn't do it nearly as seriously.

2) Recruiting: If you choose to hold yourself back by continuing to do a fight without a nerf when it has been nerfed, and every other guild is 8/8 or 6/8 or whatever, and you're still back at 4/8 or 5/8 or something, it will be a lot harder to recruit. 25 mans especially have had recruiting problems unless you are on a server that can cater to it well. 10 mans have the inverse problem in that there are so many 10 man guilds that people can look for exactly the kind of guild they want. If you fall behind on the progression curve, recruiting becomes significantly harder.

3) Min/maxing: We may not raid 40-60 hours in the first 2 weeks that an instance comes out, but that doesn't mean we don't want to min/max our gear and our output on a fight. Saying "well just turn the buff off" is equivalent to saying "well fights are a lot harder if you don't use epic gems, so why don't you just use all blue quality gems". It's purposefully hindering yourself on a fight when you can gain an advantage by doing something. And epic gems even have a downside, they're expensive! And there's zero downside to keeping the buff on. Like... it doesn't flow right with the philosophy and mindset of a guild like Lore and I's (which, btw, there are a LOT of guilds like us, it's not just some niche group of only a couple of guilds) to purposefully hamstring ourselves with respect to all other guilds.

That a good enough explanation for you? That's three very solid reasons why you almost never see anyone take the debuff off for a first kill. Sometimes people will go back through and do it afterwards... you know when they have gear from the boss already and sometimes even more powerful gear from bosses further on... That hardly counts, imo.

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Originally Posted by mavfin

Edit: Before someone insists that no one will ever turn it off: Yes, people do that. Maybe they don't raid the way you do or for the same reasons, but, there are people who turn the buff off, because they raid for the challenge and don't care about who gets there first. You're no more important than they are. You made your choice, they made their own. Wanting to take away their choice so that you don't have to live with your own choice is selfish, imo.

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I don't get it... if they raid without the debuff... and we want to raid without the debuff... how is that different? What's the point of having a debuff for HARD MODE FIGHTS.

They are supposed to be hard. It's like saying "well call of duty should slowly nerf their hardest mode in single player so people can do it." What!?

Give me one good reason why getting better shouldn't be what you do, you should get the nerf handed to you by blizzard.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

I don't get it... if they raid without the debuff... and we want to raid without the debuff... how is that different? What's the point of having a debuff for HARD MODE FIGHTS.

They are supposed to be hard. It's like saying "well call of duty should slowly nerf their hardest mode in single player so people can do it." What!?

Give me one good reason why getting better shouldn't be what you do, you should get the nerf handed to you by blizzard.

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The nerfs are there for the playerbase that gets brick-walled and would otherwise quit, whoever they may be. Blizzard has the logs and knows who they are. Taking this stance now seems disingenuous.

My post was in reference to the "there isn't a choice, we *have to* run with the buff on" line of thinking. I maintain that your lack of choice is only an illusion, and that's because, as Lrot put out there, you made the CHOICE to put competitive speed above challenge. Your choice. Also, if the want for challenge is so universal, why can't you convince your guildies to turn it off? Maybe it's not as universal as you insist in this thread?

However, I will say this: I agree that they should leave heroic alone, other than bugfixing impossible stuff. If it takes you two months to get a boss down, fine. Normal is there and nerfed progressively for the guilds who need a little help over time for whatever reason. By definition, none of you should care at all that normal gets nerfed, because it's just a speedbump on the way to 'your' content: heroic.

Is there a point where any of those who don't like the nerf to hardmodes believe that it's okay to nerf them? Is there a point where turning it off is a choice? And I mean pior to the next expansion or patch dropping. Because, I do believe that if people really are in it for the challange, then turning off the debuff is an absolute option. I also believe that if it's about beating the competetion, then you have have the option to race your race and when the race is done and the hardmode cleared, you can go back and turn it off.

One thing the nerfs end up being greater than what Blizzard says - damage and health of the mobs go down, and player power goes up as they gear up from clearing content. So, does a 20% debuff really equate to a 30% with a well geared group?

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Originally Posted by mavfin

However, I will say this: I agree that they should leave heroic alone, other than bugfixing impossible stuff. If it takes you two months to get a boss down, fine. Normal is there and nerfed progressively for the guilds who need a little help over time for whatever reason. By definition, none of you should care at all that normal gets nerfed, because it's just a speedbump on the way to 'your' content: heroic.

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I have never argued against nerfing normals, I am specifically talking about nerfing heroic mode.

Also:re:nerfing normals. I'd like to get someone's opinion on the difficulty of the normal raids, because from my perspective they seemed like a joke, but I was also in a very high-end guild that had killed H-Rag, so we were probably "supposed" to steamroll normals. Were they hard and do they need a nerf?

Should normals start out harder to begin with and then be slowly nerfed to make the content last longer for the "non-hardcore" players? Like I feel like that's one of the problems, they clear normal modes and go "okay well we're supposed to do heroics now" and they get maybe one of the easy ones down like Shannox in T12, Morchok in T13, and Atramedes or whatever that first boss in BoT was... and then after that just kinda brick wall on HMs and go "zomg this sucks" because it's not content catered for them. Just like LFR isn't content catered for HC players, just in the opposite direction.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

I'm sorry Zoltar, but I agree 100% with Ion (and with what lore said in the video, though that's not really what we're talking about here).

If LFR people want their "okay everyone can do this on their own time without a scheduled raid" mode, and then the next echelon of people want the "okay we want to do the content in an organized fashion that still requires some effort but not a lot" group (aka normal modes), then hardcore raiders should be able to get their unnerfed hardmodes that they get to do at their own pace without nerfs.

It's a complete double standard to say "LFR (and even normal) is fine, but so is nerfing hardmoes so everyone can see them"

AND IT'S NOT OPTIONAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT IS A NON-CHOICE. It is the illusion of choice.

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You are assuming that all "hardcore raiders" do not want hard modes nerfed in a reasonable manner. I don't think that's the case, unless you are defining hardcore as people that don't want the nerfs. In that case, I would say you can't always get what you want. There are people that do heroics that don't want to be stuck on the same boss for months and do want appropriate nerfs. You can scream that it's not optional all you want, but it is optional. That's a fact.

Also, in Dragon Soul the nerfs aren't about letting everyone see the bosses. It's about not wanting players to get stuck. Without the nerfs, it's inevitable that many guilds will hit a wall at some point. Now you can say "just get better" but in reality that is not a reasonable answer for most guilds. A large portion of the player base is not going to be willing to wipe on the same boss for weeks and weeks. Someone will give up and quit, and then that is a huge setback for the rest of the players that don't want to quit.