The Weekly Marmot - The Casualization of Hardcore Raiding

[Lore]

[Trahvolta]

Amen Lore. But unfortunately the vocal (minority) community has such a blind passive/aggressive hatred for anyone in hardcore guilds, and any talk of hardcore guilds, that they will literally quit, and encourage others to quit to drop numbers to influence the change they want. And in turn that takes a stab at the type of players that they hate. And that brings them joy. And that's what all of this has become. A fight for Blizzard's ear. Most of the difficulty arguments in the game have very little to do with the actual content. As many of the players demanding an easier game don't even set foot into raids. They just want to give a middle finger to they kinds of players that they somehow in their mind have built up to be bullies.

[ChairmanHez]

My first post here....

I agree with most of what you have here, Lore. Although I'm not willing to forgive them as much on the "hatchet-style" of raid nerfing as I think you are. What Blizzard has been doing reeks of laziness in my opinion. But I concur that it feels like Blizzard is holding our hands now on raiding, afraid to let anyone fail for too long.

I am a 10-man raider. I did not have the time when I started playing WoW back in classic to commit to raiding; my first raid was Karazhan. Since then I have stuck mostly to 10-mans in all the expansions, with the exception of ICC in Wrath when I was part of a 3 guild consortium that consistently fielded a 25-man raid. Blizzard making raids less time consuming was a good thing IMO. It allowed people who weren't able to commit tons of time yet still wanted to have a challenge experience raid content.

However, they've taken this to the extreme. They've made raiding the end-all/be-all of PvE endgame content. It is now accepted by most of the WoW community that if you want a PvE challenge, it's raiding or bust (arguably heroic raiding or bust), and I think that's a bad thing. Because when you shoehorn players of all abilities into one place, you're going to have problems, and that's exactly what has happened. Since there is no other acceptable place for people to go to progress their characters in PvE anymore (challenging heroics, crafting, general world exploration are now dead), the expectation is now firmly in place that everyone is "entitled" to not only see, but beat endgame content. I don't know why they felt the need to go in this direction, design-wise. I never saw MC, BWL, AQ20, AQ40, ZG (v1.0), Naxx (v1.0), SSC, TK, or BT when it was current content. I never felt angry, bored, or raged at Blizz for "zomg I can't see content." There were plenty of other things to do in WoW that I enjoyed and that gave me a challenge. And seeing others succeed at raiding gave players like myself and my guildies something to shoot for. But we always wanted to bring ourselves up to the bar needed to raid successfully, not have the bar lowered down to our level.

My guild raids 2 days a week. That's all we can manage with our RL schedules (most of us are 25-40 years old and have jobs and families). We are currently 6/8 heroic DS, which given that we get maybe 5-6 total hours of raiding a week, I think is pretty good (especially since we lost a month in January when 40% of our raid left, and other random weeks when people couldn't make it). But we can't naturally progress through the content. I always thought that the way raiding worked was that if you can't get a raid-boss down, you continue to gear up and that natural progression would carry you over the top. But all of that is being short-circuited now, and its extremely frustrating (and like you, Lore, I don't think that "turning off the debuff" is a valid option; Blizzard stressing that every time they push a nerf feels kind of insulting).

It's gotten to a point where our raid has decided that we're going to sit on the sidelines next expansion; many of us won't even be buying MoP (at least at the beginning). That's a sad state of affairs IMO.

[Mashone]

My thoughts on this are simple, it's all about taking care of your customer base and sense the more casual players outnumber the hard core players 100 to 1 they are going to think about the money first. That is a sad state for a developer to be in but bills must be paid, sadly. As far as " sledge hammer" nerfs go I always thought a system should be in place where the raiders had to ask a NPC or something for help and with every increase you would have to ask said NPC for more help, simply because no one is gonna turn off automatic nerfs. As far as Heroics I think they need to make fight difficulty scale like it was in Uld having extra mini bosses to kill off or what not to make the big encounter more challenging, then they could scale it till in was damn near impossible.

[ChairmanHez]

I think you have it mostly right, Mashone, but I don't think Blizzard is having issues paying its bills. Call it a hunch. :P

As a business, Blizzard saw a growing demographic of player that doesn't like challenging video games. They have made a conscious business choice to make WoW appeal to that type of player. I will never badmouth someone or a business for trying to make money, they can be as greedy as they want, IMO. However, I also agree that its a sad state to be in as a game developer, designing games for the lowest common denominator.

I'm about ready to "vote with my feet" myself. At the risk of derailing this thread, I'll simply add that I played the GW2 beta this past weekend and had a blast, beta-bugs and all. The difficulty I had out in the open world was fun! It wasn't uber hard, but you definitely got penalized for tunnel-visioning and not executing, which is the way I want my games to be. There is no raiding to speak of, but I can live with that.

[Valaras]

Good episode, really interesting topic and one of the most enjoyable marmots I have watched.

You make many valid points, but I have a couple of objections. You said that they are limited in their encounter design, because some mechanics might be impossible to balance on 10-man without making it super easy on 25. Don't you think that it can go the other way around too? Meaning, perhaps there is a great mechanic that would be amazingly innovative on 10-man, but impossible to implement to 25? Both types of raiding are perhaps hindering each other in this regard, but I think that having those 2 options for raiding is a good thing for the game and does not really affect hardcore raiding.

Also, I'm surprized you would say classic and TBC had the hardest bosses, since yourself you said that a lot of it was 'fake' difficulty. Examples: Super tight group compositions or tediously long trash clears after each wipe (C'thun comes to mind). Not to mention tedious farming for resistance gear and all that good stuff. We had really difficult end bosses in Cataclysm and Wrath as well. Yes, Firelands and DS got cleared a bit too fast, but don't forget that they had small amounts of bosses. Tier 11 was the hardest first tier any expansion has ever seen, simply judging by the amount of time it took the best guilds to clear it all.

I wouldn't even agree 100% with your arguments against LFR. Yes, I think that the boss design was indeed affected by LFR. But here are 2 things to keep in mind. First, LFR was intended to be part of MoP release and they sort of just squeezed it in there for T13. This MIGHT mean that they just had too much stuff to do, and simply decided to simplify some tactics instead. Second, we do have a couple of fights that are pretty complicated (Hagara and Warmaster) and still could be viable in LFR. I wouldn't worry about it unless the whole T14 is single-phase boss fights.

My last objection would be how normal modes "train" you for heroic content. No, just no. We crushed all normal modes without PTR training in one evening and had 5 wipes in total, 1 in Ultraxion, 1 on Warmaster and 3 on Madness. When we started pulling heroics on the week after, it was basically new content.

What I full-heartedly agree with, is your argument regarding the nerfs. As a top 100 EU guild, I personally am not affected by them. However, the nerfing system they started to implement played a huge roll in wanting to swift the playstyle of my guild to more hardcore. See, during Firelands, where I started building this guild together with my best mate, we basically managed to get a raiding team together on the week the nerfs hit. And that just CRIPPLED our enthusiasm. Sure, we kept on going and eventually killed Rag before 4.3, but it really felt like the bosses were killed for us (well, apart from the Rag kill, that was cool). After that, it was either "Let's go really hardcore" or "let's just be frustrated and hate ourselves when we kill bosses post-nerf". At that point, yes, the nerfs also served like motivation to become better and simply not be affected by them, but at the moment, I feel there is no choice if you want to see and kill all the bosses pre-nerf. Yes, one could argue that if you are really fucking good, you can still raid 3-4 days per week and clear everything pre-nerf. But let's face it, very few guilds exists who do that, because if you are so good, chances are you have a lot of time to dedicate to the game as well.

I can totally sympathise with the guilds who are stuck in this middle ground and who, to be fucking honest, present the crushing majority of the people who are actually interested in challenging content. I really wish Blizzard would turn things around, make normals challenging enough for the casual population and heroics challenging without nerfing them too rapidly, but I'm afraid we are not going back there. What can I say, try to look at the bright side. See it as an incentive to become better as a guild. And when you don't feel like the game is targeted at you anymore, simply quit.

[Trahvolta]

My thoughts on this are simple, it's all about taking care of your customer base and sense the more casual players outnumber the hard core players 100 to 1 they are going to think about the money first. That is a sad state for a developer to be in but bills must be paid, sadly. As far as " sledge hammer" nerfs go I always thought a system should be in place where the raiders had to ask a NPC or something for help and with every increase you would have to ask said NPC for more help, simply because no one is gonna turn off automatic nerfs. As far as Heroics I think they need to make fight difficulty scale like it was in Uld having extra mini bosses to kill off or what not to make the big encounter more challenging, then they could scale it till in was damn near impossible.

There aren't just 2 types of players in this game. Hardcore, and Casual. There is a vast playerbase between those two. There are people that don't touch raids or pvp that play all day everyday. There are players that only play on raid nights that are 8/8 hm that are not hardcore. Blizz needs to stop looking at the game like "It's only like .05% of the playerbase that likes challenging content.". Because that's false. They need to start looking at the different types of players they have, and stop trying to create content based off of what people say. Because show me 10 people that say "I have a life, and only play a couple hours a week", and I'll show you 8 of them that are not being truthful.

But Blizzard are going to shoot themselves in the foot eventually with this stuff. Players are going to start consuming content so fast, that Blizzard is either going to be pressured into pushing out content faster, and having the quality suffer, or not push it out fast enough, and have players getting bored and leaving. Moderation is key for Blizz going into MoP. Not trying to reinvent the game.

[Nagassh]

I can completely emphasise with your position, being middle-ground hardcore raiders (or whatever you want to call it) and feeling the hurt from the nerfs.

I can't see a reason for the nerfs to touch heroics, I really can't. They have LFR and Normal mode - surely two difficulties are enough for people to "experience the content".

[ChairmanHez]

But Blizzard are going to shoot themselves in the foot eventually with this stuff. Players are going to start consuming content so fast, that Blizzard is either going to be pressured into pushing out content faster, and having the quality suffer, or not push it out fast enough, and have players getting bored and leaving. Moderation is key for Blizz going into MoP. Not trying to reinvent the game.

I think that's exactly right. And not only will the raiding suffer, but the rest of the game as well. Granted, I don't think they'll ever get to a point where all their developers are doing is working on raid content, but in my opinion many aspects of the game have suffered over the last couple years; my guess is that some aspects of the game were thrown in the backseat to keep the raid engine churning.

Getting back on topic: The title of this week's topic is "The Casualization of Hardcore Raiding" but that assumes a one-dimensional spectrum of players (with "hardcore" on one side and "casual" on the other). I would argue (with many others) that hardcore vs. casual should be used to describe how much time players spend in game per week, and how vigorously they pursue certain facets of the game, such as raiding. A second dimension involves skill and expectation of challenge, another way that WoW players differ.

Blizzard has definitely made many decisions that tune the game away from hardcores and toward casuals (as I have used the two terms). The average successful raid spends far less time raiding now than they did back in classic and TBC. Stripping attunements and lessening the amount of trash within raids are two examples. I would argue that these changes are good changes (yes I'm biased, these changes have let me raid more).

However, Blizzard has made many design decisions that have tuned the game decidedly away from those that enjoy a good challenge and expect to have to "up their game" to succeed and toward those that just want to mash buttons, see bosses die, and collect loot. Examples include the abundant "sledgehammer" nerfs over the last few raid tiers. These are the design decisions that are controversial.

From where I sit, I just wish that they'd leave normals and heroics alone, especially while the content is still current (with LFR being the "see the content" difficulty level). Targetted nerfs can be appropriate if they're done to specific skills on specific bosses.

[Suicideking666]

If they wanted to do something like C'Thun and make it viable for both 10 and 25 all they'd have to do is make the abilities range scale with raid size, it would have a shorted range on 25 then on 10. So that positioning would still be the main way to avoid the mechanic without it being really easy or hard on either raid size.

[Lore]

I believe it is completely possible to satisfy the casual playerbase without sacrificing the hardcore.

[Ion]

My last objection would be how normal modes "train" you for heroic content. No, just no. We crushed all normal modes without PTR training in one evening and had 5 wipes in total, 1 in Ultraxion, 1 on Warmaster and 3 on Madness. When we started pulling heroics on the week after, it was basically new content.

All other things aside, this was the thing that struck me the most (well...this and the potential for this being a very stroke-inducing thread for Krenian).

We rolled through week 1 normal modes without even paying attention to mechanics. When we started doing hardmodes and actually noticed what things were doing ("Is that new on heroic? No? Heh."). For us, doing normal modes was a complete waste of time...we completely outgeared them, they were no challenge and they offered basically no gear for us either (403 gear was adequate, at least)...it was simply not content designed for our raid. Hardmodes were. Now, Dragon Soul hardmodes weren't particularly interesting (not interesting, not not challenging) either...but at least we noticed when something happened.

I would note that some problems are easily solved by, for example, making things chain from further away in 10 mans (like...if it was 5 yards in 40 man it could be 8 yards in 25 man and 20 yards in 10 man) to effectively "shrink" the room without actually changing its size.

I believe it is completely possible to satisfy the casual playerbase without sacrificing the hardcore.

I'd suggest that this is the ENTIRE POINT of having 3 different difficulties...

[Leucifer]

I'm just going to make a quick reply, as I really don't care to get too engaged in this discussion, given the potential radioactive nature of the topic.

However, they've taken this to the extreme. They've made raiding the end-all/be-all of PvE endgame content. It is now accepted by most of the WoW community that if you want a PvE challenge, it's raiding or bust (arguably heroic raiding or bust), and I think that's a bad thing. Because when you shoehorn players of all abilities into one place, you're going to have problems, and that's exactly what has happened. Since there is no other acceptable place for people to go to progress their characters in PvE anymore (challenging heroics, crafting, general world exploration are now dead), the expectation is now firmly in place that everyone is "entitled" to not only see, but beat endgame content. I don't know why they felt the need to go in this direction, design-wise. I never saw MC, BWL, AQ20, AQ40, ZG (v1.0), Naxx (v1.0), SSC, TK, or BT when it was current content. I never felt angry, bored, or raged at Blizz for "zomg I can't see content." There were plenty of other things to do in WoW that I enjoyed and that gave me a challenge. And seeing others succeed at raiding gave players like myself and my guildies something to shoot for. But we always wanted to bring ourselves up to the bar needed to raid successfully, not have the bar lowered down to our level.

THIS...... especially the highlighted portion. End-game became raiding ..... or nothing else. There is pretty much jack-all nothing else to do that is even remotely interesting. You might say PvP..... but PvP is such a mess. I'm going to take the easy way out and say "BALANCE ISSUES" all around. The heart of that issue, imo, is in stat inflation and PvE/PvP balance.

I'd suggest that this is the ENTIRE POINT of having 3 different difficulties...

Yep!!!! That's what you'd like to think. Sadly.... I offer to you exhibit A .... Dragonsoul.

[JongyFong]

Great episode.

[ChairmanHez]

I believe it is completely possible to satisfy the casual playerbase without sacrificing the hardcore.

I agree with you. The question is: will they? And given what has happened over the last expansion and a half, that question is not easily answered in the affirmative.

Also, what do you mean by "casual" and "hardcore?" You've said yourself that the terms are mushy in their meaning. For example I would consider myself fairly casual, since I don't find myself logging in to play very often outside of raids and occasional PvP with some guildies. Yet I am more than capable of holding my own in heroic raids. I do my homework on gemming, reforging, etc. and keep up to date via fansites such as this one. And yet, I am feeling pushed away by the current state of the game.

[Trahvolta]

I agree with you. The question is: will they? And given what has happened over the last expansion and a half, that question is not easily answered in the affirmative.

Also, what do you mean by "casual" and "hardcore?" You've said yourself that the terms are mushy in their meaning. For example I would consider myself fairly casual, since I don't find myself logging in to play very often outside of raids and occasional PvP with some guildies. Yet I am more than capable of holding my own in heroic raids. I do my homework on gemming, reforging, etc. and keep up to date via fansites such as this one. And yet, I am feeling pushed away by the current state of the game.

This is exactly what Blizzard needs to understand. Casual and Hardcore are pretty useless titles. There are mages gemming for expertise that play 24/7, and hard mode raiders that play 5 hours a week.

I think it's going to have to get alot worse in order for Blizz to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that challenge is good in a game. And not only for a month. And not only for "challenge modes" which their trying to just slide off on the hardcores as saying "Look, we gave you guys something.". They don't even have the balls to give you enhanced gear from it. Because they know that the hardcore bashers will cry. I think it's going to have to get to a point where the game is a complete joke for them to go back to sticking with having and keeping challenging content in the game.

They seem to think that they're going to get waves of new players by being "new player friendly", but they won't. Most people that want to play this game play it. It's big enough to where most people know what it is, and being incredibly easy isn't going to get some kid who wants to buy the game to buy it. People that flock to this game and stick with it are fans of the genre. And that's who they need to listen to.

I also think they need to restrict forum posting. Small issues look massive because you have the same people posting 100 times per thread, and creating duplicate, triplicate threads on the same thing. Make it so you can only post twice per thread, and you can only create a few threads weekly. Wow is turning into a forum game. And it's fucking everything up.

[Maven]

Three comments:
1) 10 and 25 cannot both be the same difficulty the way blizzard designs encounters. In 25 compared to 10, the number of healers basically doubles, the number of dps basically triples and the number of tanks basically stays the same. Blizzard adjusts the numbers to try and make up for this, and it allows them to be somewhat similar encounters. In 25 man healing, you can (and should) mostly assign roles. People who have the strongest/most efficient tank heals should tank heal, people with the strongest/most efficient raid heals should raid heal. This doesn't scale down to 10man. In 10 man instead of having (hypothetically) 3 raid healers and 1 healer on each tank, you have 2 healers that (depending on mechanics) probably both have to cover a tank and part of the raid. These require different tools. Likewise with the DPS numbers. A great example is ragnaros. On 10m, Our shadow priest has accidently had all his cooldowns up and 1 shot his add then 2shot the healer's add. This can't happen on 25man (either there are 20 spawns and cleaves come into play, or there are 8 (or a similar number) and the individual responsibility greatly diminishes.

I could go on and on, but it is simply not possible to have encounters be the same. So blizzard should stop trying. They should start creating customized challenges to 10 and 25 man modes. The basic mechanics can stay the same (just like LFR), but then inside the normal and heroic, blizzard should feel free to have completely different mechanics that stress raiders in different ways. If they do it right, sometimes 10 will be harder on a fight and sometimes 25, but it will be designed that way rather than blizzard trying to make progression paths the same.

2) Blizzard has said several times that they want to increase their rate of content release. They said during the press event they were planning for about 3 tiers a year. At 4 months a tier, that means progression time is going to be MUCH more limited. Either there is going to be a lot more heavy nerfs, or a lot of uncleared content. Each way screws some aspect of the community.

3) While it was frustrating for so many reasons, the fondest 7 weeks of my raiding experience were spent constantly wiping on Cho'gal. The last week before he got nerfed, we had 6 wipes at 2% or lower. We one shot him the next week, and never wiped again. There are similar moments from this tier - I felt like a BOSS for solo healing a side of morchock with neither armor nor haste buff (and no heart of aspects), and similarly the time we healed madness without fire resistance (pre buff). Comparing all of those to my experience facerolling DS tonight makes me a sad panda. None of those were deliberate challenges we faced, just quarks of composition, but it was awesome and fun. Nerfs make content no fun, no matter how they are done.

[Gregasaurous]

2) Blizzard has said several times that they want to increase their rate of content release. They said during the press event they were planning for about 3 tiers a year. At 4 months a tier, that means progression time is going to be MUCH more limited. Either there is going to be a lot more heavy nerfs, or a lot of uncleared content. Each way screws some aspect of the community.

I do believe Ghost Crawler said that this turned out far from how they had hoped (see T12-13). I can't remember though if he said they were going to try to improve on the method in the future or if they decided it was just a bad idea.

I however fully agree with your first point. It would be a lot more fun (i think) to have encounters better tailored to your raid size. Let's face it, some mechanics that might give a 10 man trouble can sometimes just be brushed aside by a 25 man. (FOR EXAMPLE; DON'T B!#CH AT ME) So, if they started changing fight mechanics a bit here and there so that they act completely differently on a different raid size, they could make it a suitable mechanic. As apposed to something that just doesn't take as much skill to deal with if you have less(or more) people in your raid group

As to nerfs: NOTHING beats the feeling of having a pre-nerf kill. That said, i still believe they are necessary Though i actually tend to agree with Lore on this one: targeted nerfs>across the board. Since i'm sure you've all heard the reasoning and arguments on this a few times, i'll leave it at that.

[Fetzie]

I would note that some problems are easily solved by, for example, making things chain from further away in 10 mans (like...if it was 5 yards in 40 man it could be 8 yards in 25 man and 20 yards in 10 man) to effectively "shrink" the room without actually changing its size.

Except that a lot of AoE heals are tuned for 8 yard spreading. A 25 man group can use AoE heals to hit 5 players, a 10 man group that has to be nearly 3 times as far apart would have to resort to single target healing, and making sure that everybody is within range to be healed would also be difficult. Imagine doing Yor'sahj with the raid scattered around the room being 20 yards apart while green is active, or having to run twice or three times as far away from the group with the debuff at Zon'ozz before being dispelled.

No, Blizzard needs to stop with their "build for 25 man and scale the numbers down" attitude to raid design. They need to design mechanics that are specific to 10 man size, and other mechanics that are specific to 25 man size. Let's take Ragnaros transition phases: He spawns 8 adds that need to be killed within 15-20 seconds. On 25 man you have 18 dps, so 2 dps per add and two sweepers helping out where it is needed. On ten man you have 6 dps (0.8 dps per add), so tanks and healers need to help out with stuns and add dps (and the tanks can't really help much in the T2 phase because they are busy stopping the large elementals from mushing the healers). Of course, they drastically reduced the health of the Sons for ten man, however it still requires more responsibility from each dps. So reduce the amount of adds to 3 and double their health. There, that transition is now "the same" for both settings.

[Krenian]

A lil thought process for everyone:

You think maybe with the addition of pet battles and other things that were placed in for MoP should be enough to actually cater to the casual base, they are actually planning on revving up the Raiding scene back to 'hardcore' status? You'll always have LFG but what if this is the start of what they want to bring back to the leveling scheme, but adding more things for the casual fanbase to do.

Think about it: New gear doing the 5 man challenge mode; gear that no other raid or instance will have. The pet battles, although vanity wise, has been covered by Legendary as having a lot of depth that is possible to come out of this.

A lot of people are missing out on this by looking at MoP and saying "Ugh, pandas and pokemon."

Just some food for thought.

(And yes, when I saw the title of this thread, I groaned out loud. As with every thread Lore tends to make that has controversy written all over, please be respectful of each other's raiding opinions. Thank you.)