The Weekly Marmot - The Problem with Hard Modes

[Kazeyonoma]

I'd venture to say, a large portion of current day "raiders" who progress along with each tier, if we reverted to the difficulty and attunement system of karazhan, would never leave tier 4.

The game was just difficult then and you had to be good. There's just... i dunno so much "missing" from the difficulty of the game now it FEELS like.

[Bovinity]

This is where I am going to use your argument and say "functionally" it is dead. People are still running it, I still did kara and 5 man heroics on my druid in full sunwell gear, but that was just for fun. Not relevant =/= dead, only "functionally" dead.

Yes, you were someone in Sunwell gear. For someone NOT in that position, Karazhan was actually still a VERY nice place to go for gear and badges even well into T6. Maybe for YOU it was functionally dead but I assure you that on my server Karazhan groups run by everyone from fresh 70 pugs to casual raiding guilds looking for more badges/particular slots were VERY common all the way up to the last month of TBC.

Oh yeah, and we made do without hardmodes to make the content last a long time too.

Yeah, like I said before, instead of hardmodes you had huge cockblocks in the form of attunements, raid stacking, extreme consumable farming, resist gear farming, etc etc. How anyone can think that was a BETTER system is confusing to me.

[Leucifer]

That is how we cleared 11/12 between the 22nd december and the 7th january. In 333/346 gear. And it wasn't hard. I have the combatlogs on my harddisk to prove it. How do you think everybody did the raids? they didn't farm 3/5 T11, all the valor point items and BiS 346.

See this..... I like. I LIKE seeing this sort of thing.

I have a damn hard time convincing the people in my guild that it CAN be done.... that, like Naxx... Cata content was built with the idea that, if you run heroics, you CAN clear raid content with the gear from it.

Hat's off to you. Cause there are a LOT who are convinced it CAN'T be done without all that stuff. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that unless you have that stuff, you have no purpose in running with their raid group.

P.S. - You gave me something to really think about with your post. I'll take that as a challenge to step up my game and improve myself. Thank you. ~ Mike

[Bovinity]

See this..... I like. I LIKE seeing this sort of thing.

I have a damn hard time convincing the people in my guild that it CAN be done.... that, like Naxx... Cata content was built with the idea that, if you run heroics, you CAN clear raid content with the gear from it.

Hat's off to you. Cause there are a LOT who are convinced it CAN'T be done without all that stuff. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that unless you have that stuff, you have no purpose in running with their raid group.

How do you think people cleared the content early on? =P

[Kazeyonoma]

See this..... I like. I LIKE seeing this sort of thing.

I have a damn hard time convincing the people in my guild that it CAN be done.... that, like Naxx... Cata content was built with the idea that, if you run heroics, you CAN clear raid content with the gear from it.

Hat's off to you. Cause there are a LOT who are convinced it CAN'T be done without all that stuff. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that unless you have that stuff, you have no purpose in running with their raid group.

This is nothing new. raw ability and good raid composition and synergy has always allowed raiders to get past "gear". Gear just helps make up any slack that players themselves innately have. You honestly think the top 100 world guilds just "farm gear" faster than the other less successful guilds?

Guilds that can't, make excuses about gear, and sometimes after enough gear they make it, but more often than not, all the gear in the world at that content level, won't allow these guilds to kill a boss they haven't been able to in the past.

346 gear vs 359 gear doesn't stop people from standing in fire.

[Fetzie]

See this..... I like. I LIKE seeing this sort of thing.

I have a damn hard time convincing the people in my guild that it CAN be done.... that, like Naxx... Cata content was built with the idea that, if you run heroics, you CAN clear raid content with the gear from it.

Hat's off to you. Cause there are a LOT who are convinced it CAN'T be done without all that stuff. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that unless you have that stuff, you have no purpose in running with their raid group.

P.S. - You gave me something to really think about with your post. I'll take that as a challenge to step up my game and improve myself. Thank you. ~ Mike

But...isn't this how raids work? You outplay the encounter so you don't need to outgear it. This is nothing special.

[Ion]

See this..... I like. I LIKE seeing this sort of thing.

I have a damn hard time convincing the people in my guild that it CAN be done.... that, like Naxx... Cata content was built with the idea that, if you run heroics, you CAN clear raid content with the gear from it.

Hat's off to you. Cause there are a LOT who are convinced it CAN'T be done without all that stuff. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that unless you have that stuff, you have no purpose in running with their raid group.

P.S. - You gave me something to really think about with your post. I'll take that as a challenge to step up my game and improve myself. Thank you. ~ Mike

Er...what? This is like...the most confusing statement I've seen in a while. There are seriously "a LOT" of people who think you need all the gear FROM a tier to kill the bosses you get that gear FROM?

How could that ever make any sense? It's not like those of us who cleared normal modes in december/january had full 359/372s on...we wore blues, sometimes even greens (wands, in particular, were extremely difficult to come by).

As to SSC/TK falling to "naxx during icc" levels when sunwell came out...it did. Nobody did SSC/TK...you could just go do Hyjal/BT instead...or if you were into farming badges, Karazhan was the best badges/time, even better than places like SPens and Mech.

[Outbackjack]

You're agreeing with Leucifer, but I don't think you realize it. Skill>gear as the old adage goes. Many folks will sit in their raid after 10 wipes and say "well, we just don't have the gear to do this" well before they will admit "well, we just don't have the skill to complete this."

[Kahmal]

Yes, you were someone in Sunwell gear. For someone NOT in that position, Karazhan was actually still a VERY nice place to go for gear and badges even well into T6. Maybe for YOU it was functionally dead but I assure you that on my server Karazhan groups run by everyone from fresh 70 pugs to casual raiding guilds looking for more badges/particular slots were VERY common all the way up to the last month of TBC.



Yeah, like I said before, instead of hardmodes you had huge cockblocks in the form of attunements, raid stacking, extreme consumable farming, resist gear farming, etc etc. How anyone can think that was a BETTER system is confusing to me.

It was the way TBC was designed that made Tier 4 content still worth it well until the end of TBC. I dont see why casuals complained back then since there was a whole lot of things for them to do back then even if they weren't hardcore raiders.

Being a casual now makes me bored out of my mind since there is really nothing to do when your not pugging a raid (that isn't so easily puggable, but i still think 20% is an extreme nerf)
At least in TBC i could farm for my epic flying mount, grind reputation, grind craftable epics, work on my offset, I didn't even need to pvp to occupy myself back then. Now all of the above can be completed on one character in about 2 weeks or less...

[Bovinity]

At least in TBC i could farm for my epic flying mount, grind reputation, grind craftable epics, work on my offset, I didn't even need to pvp to occupy myself back then. Now all of the above can be completed on one character in about 2 weeks or less...

That's something I mentioned earlier and agree with, outside of raids it seems like there's not a whole lot to do sometimes. I'm either on my maxed out and nothing-left-to-do main or being bored and annoyed on one of my alts, praying I get lucky and some tank or healer in the guild wants to run ZA/ZG.

[Kahmal]

That's something I mentioned earlier and agree with, outside of raids it seems like there's not a whole lot to do sometimes. I'm either on my maxed out and nothing-left-to-do main or being bored and annoyed on one of my alts, praying I get lucky and some tank or healer in the guild wants to run ZA/ZG.

Yea gold just seems to fly into your pocket these days so there is no reason to leave Orgrimmar/Stormwind.

Also bear in mind that in my above statement the majority of players were in that Tier 4 level so its not like Tier 4 ever truely became outdated, that person that would show up to your Heroic in Tier 6 just so happened to be Superman.
Now I'm not saying there isn't a design flaw in only allowing so few to see the raiding content, but it did seem to work as long as the casuals had enough to keep themselves busy. I think Blizzard could have went about this in a better way.

[Ritzcracks]

Lore I think that what they could do is put Finkle Einhorn in the front of the instance since we technically saved him from Chimaeron and he could have some sort of gismo or gadget that nerfs the bosses by 30% or whatever the change is. I think that would still fit into lore since we already saved him about a million times and he's a gnome so gadgets are his "specialty". That's my perspective on the topic, they did it in Ulduar with Brann Bronzebeard so I think they could easily do it in BWD.

[Fetzie]

Brann didn't change any boss difficulty levels. You could start flame leviathan without having to kill the towers by talking to him and not the pantheon dude, but otherwise he had absolutely nothing to do with any of the fights in there.

[Iury]

I think that there is a difference between heroic modes and hard modes, I mean in Ulduar days you had an option of defeating the encounter in a harder way and you got an achievement for that. In tier 11 for instance, you still have a sort of harder way of defeating the boss and get an achievement for that and a heroic mode with, sometimes new mechanics, bigger numbers, improved loot and also an achievement. Obviously killing Magmaw without anyone in the raid getting hit by a parasite is as easy as killing him with a tank tanking the adds, but it's still a different way and sometimes challenging.

[Spiritus]

I think that there is a difference between heroic modes and hard modes, I mean in Ulduar days you had an option of defeating the encounter in a harder way and you got an achievement for that. In tier 11 for instance, you still have a sort of harder way of defeating the boss and get an achievement for that and a heroic mode with, sometimes new mechanics, bigger numbers, improved loot and also an achievement. Obviously killing Magmaw without anyone in the raid getting hit by a parasite is as easy as killing him with a tank tanking the adds, but it's still a different way and sometimes challenging.

While I agree that there is a completely different feel to the Ulduar Hardmode and the subsequent UI flipped "Heroic" modes, the differences aren't as drastic as you make it seem. Hardmodes in Ulduar did drop better loot (In fact, it was this "hardmode" loot system that was the greatest failing of Ulduar) and, with a few exceptions, they had new mechanics.

[Kahmal]

If that was Ulduar's greatest failing, thats what made it among the best raids to date, and as stated before, could have been easily fixed.

[Leucifer]

You're agreeing with Leucifer, but I don't think you realize it. Skill>gear as the old adage goes. Many folks will sit in their raid after 10 wipes and say "well, we just don't have the gear to do this" well before they will admit "well, we just don't have the skill to complete this."

I DO AGREE that Skill > Gear.....

But I think you're spot on with what you said last. It's easier for people to blame their "gear" than to say, "I'm not good enough."

Or as Kaz put.... "346 gear vs 359 gear doesn't stop people from standing in fire".

Sorry, just so damn used to seeing people whine about "not having good enough gear" or that someone "must have ilvl XXX in order to go", it's really maddening.