I make it a regular habit to pause the vid at the very end just to see what random snipits or jokes can be found, and I nealry laughed myself right out of my chair with this one... Shadowmourne with Haste/mp 5 and black magic huh?? LOL... Where do you come up with this stuff?
This late in WOTLK even Lore still call emblems for badges. Stop this madness please! :P
But a nice recap of the raiding things Blizzard has tried out in WOTLK, good marmot as usual.
"We have two ears and one mouth for a reason." - Buddhist belief.
I think you could add achievements to what they learned in t7 and t8, specifically the 'no death' achievements. Those are just too RNG and they cause too much stress to be much fun. The 'no wipes' achievements (skill, mad skill, etc) in hardmode TOC were more successful in my opinion: they were still a challenge, but they didn't punish you excessively (beyond the actual encounter mechanics) for bad RNG or the poor choices of one player.
I think something that is being swept under the rug when discussing the new 10/25 split in Cataclysm is that we won't have to farm badges as much. Sharing the lockout means that Blizzard no longer has to make emblem gear as expensive as it was in ICC, because they can assume you're only running one or the other instance, not both. The Frost Emblem costs assume you are clearing both 10 and 25, which was certainly not always the case, especially while the gates were still up. Hopefully, we'll see more reasonable emblem (Valor Points or whatever) costs in Cataclysm. Heroic modes from day 1 should be just fine. Perhaps it will even keep hard core raiders from completely rushing to the gate on the 2nd day of raiding in a week of new content.
They learned limited attempts are bad. The goal there I think was to "save us from ourselves" as GC has mentioned. They don't want to make the game an annoying grind, and they don't want to be stuck in a place where hard core raiders are done with the instance while everyone else is barely halfway done. Limited attempts are just like 'no death' achievements though: they punish you for RNG or just plain bad luck with disconnects and whatnot. They make players do strange stuff, like progression alt runs, which don't really serve their goal of making progression less grindy. It makes it even less casual friendly (not everyone has a fully raid geared alt you know).
I think the ICC buff is working out well, although I don't think there are enough (read:any) benefits for turning it off. There needs to be an achievement, or better loot, or something for choosing to turn off the buff, otherwise it shouldn't even be able to be shut off.
I'd like to see shorter instances, similar to TK and SSC, in Cataclysm raiding. The one-shot bosses (like Ony and Maly) aren't all that interesting to me. It takes longer to set up the group and get to the instance than it does to kill the boss! Long instances like ICC and Ulduar though can become pretty grindy and stressful in the middle of progression, and they can be tough to get full clears on if you are going on alts or with pugs. Having two smaller instances in a tier can help spread out the load and get to your progression boss a bit quicker, allowing more attempts on progression and less grindy farming.
I think I saw a Gnome DK having it gemmed with 3 Dazzling Deep Peridot's (3int/2mp5) last week. I'm glad that the boost of 9 int eventually made him realize 3x 34str would be betterOriginally Posted by Brigandy
This is one of the things they discussed, I believe at Blizzcon last year, that there were going to do. When Cata is launched, it will have a few raid dungeons with fewer bosses (5-6).
Last edited by Timecks; 05-07-2010 at 08:31 AM.
I think a point you didn't mention Lore, which i found to be a very important one in WotLK was VoA. The scaling bosses were a pivotal point which many people latched on to, and seriously made the game expand, my POV being you could easily pug voa25 man which contained the better loot or casually run the 10man if you had nothing else to do which empowered the smaller or more casual guilds players with better gear, with the flipside being you had to actually control VOA. This pushed a lot of players into wanting PVP action simply for the chance at better loot for raiding (playing pvp for raiding?!?!!). With every positive there's a negative and the biggest negative by far inherent with this was realm balance, because WG was the only "single server" BG left many servers factions struggled to control VOA, leaving one side frustrated and less geared, while the other was stronger. Also picking up on Knighterrant81's point it was a short instance that could be done between coming home from work/school and having dinner(or whatever example you choose to use).
I think a better way for unlocking heroic modes for bosses would be to unlock it a wing at a time, as opposed to the entire instance or a boss at a time, like I saw a blue post suggest. For example, once you've downed Marrowgar, Lady DW, the Gunship, and Saurfang on normal, you can try any (or all) of them on heroic mode.
I'm also excited about the lockout change. I really really enjoy raiding, but spending 18 hours a week raiding (3 hours/day, 3 days/week, 2 raid lockouts) is a little much for one toon. Maybe I'll actually have time to PvP or do non-raid achievements in Cata...
I still liked the ulduar way that hardmodes were executed, and activated. A lot more interesting than the general +30% Health/Damage and making things you should avoid already, even more dangerous.
This is more or less going to be applied in Cataclysm. With raids having around as many bosses as you find in a wing today. Multiple raids will come out in a tier to compensate.
I personally dont find it enough to do. I was close to quitting during the joke known as 3.2 due to lack of content. Eventually I started doing Arena which rekindled my flame, that along with gearing up an alt.
I'm not saying there needs to be more to raiding, but just more to do in general. Due to Burning Crusades more time/reward system, getting things accomplished took longer, thus you had way more to do. If I wasn't raiding 3-4 nights a week I would be
- farming gold (WoTLK its nearly handed to you sitting in Org/IF all day)
- farming rep
- maxxing my profession (was actually hard back then)
- farming my epic flyer (making 5k is a joke now)
- farming my resistance set
- farming ore
- farming a craftable piece (could take some time)
- helping a guildy in a Heroic 5 man since they were actually entertaining back then and not face roll
- badge grinding
- doing dailies which could then lead up to other activites, such as World PvP skirimishes. (but again dailies are no longer a main source of income like back then and most of it is made sitting in a city.
- messing around in BGs.....honestly though I didn't have much time to PvP because PvE content was enough to keep me tied down and satisfied.
In WoTLK you could either get all the above done quickly or not even have to worry about it since its practically handed to you. Having an alt now is almost mandatory if your non-casual, to keep yourself anywhere near that busy. Now naturally many people dont have that kind of time, so I understand why much of it was cut out, but in the end one of the things that makes most RPGs amazing is the amount of options you have to do.
And in regards to the listed I posted I think its just such a shame that Northrend is so beautiful, but its practically almost barren. I have no serious memories in Northrend outside of instances.
Last edited by Kahmal; 05-09-2010 at 11:11 PM.
A thing that could be pretty interesting to see in cata is dynamic difficulty in heroic 5 mans. That is, the server probes the average gear level of the group and tune the health and damage of of the mobs accordingly (and perhaps even ups the loot as well). Possibly a weighted average, such that the gear level of the tank and healer is more important in determining the damage of the mobs and the gear level of the dps is more important in determining the health of the mobs. Think how the mobs in Diablo 2 got stronger or weaker depending on how many people had joined the current game session.
That way 5 man heroics could maintain a degree of challenge (and reward) and not be prone to this ridiculous steamrolling we've seen in the higher tiers of Wrath.
Last edited by Ajire; 05-10-2010 at 02:45 AM.
"You pull it, you tank it" -Ajire
Armory: Ajire@Scarshield Legion.EU
I'm going to agree with everything you just said.
I loved actually having to farm for my stuff, but now in WotLK I get everything practically handed to me.
Having to actually fly around Outland to do dailies/farm/ Get TO dungeons not just magically *poof* there.
Heroics were actually slightly a challenge, and you needed to farm rep to do them!
Now... We level to 80, get everything to exalted just by doing random dungeons. Get a bunch of badges while doing that, and instantly get up to the current tier level gear. BORING.
maybe you should listen a bit more carefully to what is said about Blizzard making WoW not ONLY for the hardcore gamers in the "biannual weekly marmot". Most people don't have 8+ hours a day, everyday to sit and play wow. just doing dailies can take hours before even getting to raiding.
I have a handful of ICC 80's, but i still like the fact i can choose to play for an hour at a time, and not have to dedicate 6 hours of grinding for everything.
I was merely stating that the fact the game seems to revolve around how many alts you have these days is just kind of dull. What has always made most RPGs as amazing as they are is how much you have to do before playing the game all over again. (making an alt)
I didn't spend 8 hours a day crafting my Breastplate of Kings or maxxing out my Blacksmithing, hell that took me almost a year to get down, they were just projects I'd work on slowly when there wasn't anything else to do. Now n days if I log on when its not a raid night, I just run a few circles around Orgrimmar hoping my Arena Partners log on then log off.
And I think it would be great in Cata if they just gave us a damn reason to actually leave the capitial cities and actually enjoy the world that they built, much like Vanilla and TBC.
I forgot to add in working on your offspec set, getting a decent one together and then gemming/enchanting it took sometime.
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