World Of Warcraft Discussion Thread

[aohige]

Originally Posted by GDB

On that same token, I feel you're out of touch with the casual player. If you don't get into one of these special/high end guilds like you did, there's not much to do. You have LFD/LFR, and... that's about it. Maybe you get lucky and get into a real normal or hard raid, but that's few and far between. And once they've loot pinata'd those... there's nothing left but alts. And that gets old fast.

No, I am not. I AM casual, just a casual raider. I only go as far as heroic raid progression.
I do agree with you that casual players need more content, but there has been plenty of casual content added over the years. It's just never enough, and that's definitely a valid concern.

That's the thing though. It USED to be fine. Sure, you might not be able to do the big raids, but you could still do a challenging dungeon in an hour or two and be done for the night. Now dungeons are about 10-15 minutes and the only challenge is people being intentionally stupid. Kind of goes back to the community thing, but making all but the last few levels of leveling facerolls encouraged people to act like this, and they think that's how it will always be.

See, there it is. I knew it. See, you don't do a mythic+ in 10-15min.
The average required run time for a mythic+ is over 30 minutes, and that's just trying to make the timer.
Our +9 run with 1 chest for Temple of Sethralis was 34:52. Our two-chest +7 Freehold run was 27:52 min.

Mythic+ is SCALING dungeons, and you can do them as low as +2. Which is not any more difficult than what Heroic dungeon was in The Burning Crusade. Or even Cataclysm heroic dungeons.
If you're not good enough to run a specific key in time, and just want loot and not a keystone upgrade, you can spend an hour or two doing the mythic+ run. Our first attempt at +9 Temple when we just weren't good enough took 3 grueling hours.
Any casual player in their 340s from quests who can run a heroic in 10-15 min can do a +2 key in one hour or so. You may not make the timer, but you will still get loot and the weekly cache reward. And another +2 key. It will provide you with sufficient challenge which is precisely what you are asking for above, and one day you might be good enough to push the key to +3 (finish the dungeon in 30min). Then maybe +4. And on, and on, and voila, you're a pretty decent player now!

The fact that you don't know this is an indication that you don't know how endgame content works.
It's been like this for over TWO years bro.

[Keila]

Spoiler for hide wall of text:

Originally Posted by aohige

Again, how is that anyway relevant? That's like saying "I have the potential to play in the NBA if I got off my ass and practice basketball."
Eh, sure man, what does that even prove? The issue is, those players did NOT put in effort, time, commitment and practice. The fact that in alternate reality they could, means absolutely nothing.

Moreover, Vanilla or Live isn't gonna change that situation.
In fact, there were even less activities for casual players in the early days, unlike Legion and on having content tiers designed for everyone.



Eh

How long have you been gone from the game?
You do realize with the vastly different mechanic of dungeon affixes that randomize every week, the combination literally changes how you do the dungeons every week. They are incredibly punishing, and synergize with each other. It's not a "follow the script and do exactly this to beat this dungeon". You have to suffer through multiple instances of the dungeon with the suffixes, and plan out how you're going to beat that specific instance in time. (this week for example, we got four varying different keys for the Temple of Sethralis, from +7 to +10. Because we were lucky to do them four times, our strategy for this week on this specific dungeon got better and better. Temple may be easier or harder next week, and will require different strategy)

You make it sound like we're mindless drones without agency. Do you have ANY experiences in high keys?? At Mythic +10 you get FOUR of these affixes.
One week your affixes might be "gain increasing dots while under 90% health, must be topped off every second, and there are also stacking dots on the tank with every autoattack of the mobs". Next week it may be a combination of "double the mobs, double the HP. You must pick and choose your fight or you will run out of time". Etc, etc. Some combinations of affixes can be absolutely lethal, while others managable.

It's not a "do this exact thing to beat this dungeon lol". I mean, what you're claiming is essentially no different than those guys who talk mighty in the General Forums saying "lol you're just good at doing the same shit over and over. I could totally do it if I try. Totally." without anything to show for.

Through both of these posts, I have a feeling you're unfamiliar with the end game systems.

There is nothing different between a mythic capable raider and a random person who will potentially fails during 'looking for raid' under the assumptions that

+ 1. All participants are 'able bodied' (or otherwise not afflicted by a disability)
+ 2. Have knowledge/understand of what can happen and how they should react to it.

You tried to make an argument that you could do Mythic+ in ilevel 'x' gear and that someone else would be incapable of doing whilst ignoring the difference in time/effort to learn something.

+ WoW has never been hard
+ Retail WoW is no harder than Vanilla WoW (and by extension, is not more challenging, or requiring a different level of skill).

A person might only be able to 'commit' 30 minutes per week to the game and that (for obvious reasons) will limit them from a 'gear' perspective, but in no way reflects their technical capabilities or ability to handle game mechanics. The whole point of 'training/standadisation' in a real-world environment is to ensure that in the worst case a person is capable of performing xyz task. The retail game (even in Mythic) is not that complicated that if you actually bother to explain the mechanics, or just show someone how they need to play to beat the raid boss that they'd fail to do so. The entire point of PvP templates (for stat scaling, when they were implemented) was to make 'gear' more or less irrelevant. It was to stop massive disparities in gear, such as a freshly dinged 60 competing against a fully decked out t3 player. If 'stat templates' existed for PvE (instead of people having to spend countless hours with an exponential RNG system) significantly more players would be attempting and suceeding at mythic content. The limiting factor (for the most part) is the time avaiability to even have the gear to do the content.

Having more time available doesn't make you a better player. It just affords you the luxuary of having more time. You wouldn't call a 1st grader an idiot compared to university graduate simply because the university graduate has had more time to learn things.

Vanilla had attunements, but they didn't artifically gate you from the content because you didn't have the time to play. You could get an AQ40/Nax capable character from a freshly dinged 60 within a weekly lockout (if you were lucky enough with drops from bosses obviously). Things like T0.5 (aka dungeon 2) were things you could do incrementally over months and they'd still give you a clear reward for your time in addition to potentially being best in slot (see fury warriors).



There's nothing fundamentally different with Mythic dungeons to how they handled the various modifies and scaling in Diablo 3. It is literally understanding how the various modifiers work and prepare accordingly. The fact that you can figure out what the modifiers are at all instead of being randomly 'sniped' mid-dungeon pull by a previously unannounced ability means the randomization is pointless.

If Mythic+ kept the same 'terrain/environment (i.e. the dungeon map)' but randomly spawned any possible combination of instance NPCs in addition to giving them all random stats/abilities (so skins and skills were all random) in addition to the modifiers then you could make the argument that it was somewhat hard. It would literally be a new dungeon every single time with a trial-by-fire (people encountering a dungeon for the first time, people discovering bosses for the first time and actually having to devise boss strategies on the fly with zero preparation until they failed). Think 'Log Horizon', or 'SAO', no guides or 'prior knowledge', with assumptions potentially being more harmful than helpful.


Mythic+ (even with scaling and random modifiers) is not something that other games haven't done before and conceptually is not something that is unique to WoW. Hell, Fornite has multiple modifiers that function in the same way and it is one of the key decision making variables as to how you will 'play out' a mission. You can have games where the minute differences between individuals makes a world of difference in their performance/potential. WoW is not one of those games (nor is it ever likely to be).


This main (collective) discussion topic stemmed from whether Vanilla content is/is not more challenging than live content. Objectively, the challenge is and always has been the same (willing to put in the time and effort). Understanding what you need to do (not just knowing, actually understanding) and then being able to execute (regardless of how trivial or complex) is where the challenge lies. That's why you can get bosses on 'farm status' and not just as a result of power creep, or why class stacking, or even specific talent/trait/usage-of-ability choices will make a world of difference.

[aohige]

^Holy shit that is not even remotely the problem.

Yes, I said someone can't do it. Doesn't mean that person cannot learn.

Again, let me repeat this.

"The issue is, those players did NOT put in effort, time, commitment and practice. The fact that in alternate reality they could, means absolutely nothing."

Your argument that "well if they DID practice and get better they'd be just as good!" is irrelevant until it's a reality. Quite frankly it's a impossibly dumb hill you chose to die on. I'm not doubting the POTENTIAL of someone, just their current skillset. IF and BUTS are by nature, exactly that, theoretical.

Again, let me REPEAT myself.

"I have the potential to play in the NBA if I got off my ass and practice basketball."
This is a dumb as all hell logic, it does by no means make me equal to an NBA player.

This isn't shitting on people with low skills, it's simply stating the fact. They may have higher priorities and cannot bother to learn how to play better. That's perfectly fine. It doesn't make them WORSE a person, just worse a performer in that particular game.
And they are still deserving of content for their difficulty, which Blizzard agrees. Thus going back to my point that there are more tiers and diversity for every player now than ever. That's the road they chose, and it was inevitable.

Having more time available doesn't make you a better player.

I do not. The playtime of most of these players quite often exceed mine.
Later during Legion I only logged on three days a week, of those two of them were just the raid nights. 2 and half hour each. The other was a mythic+ night, if I didn't have one scheduled before or after raid.
The TIME you spend is not the issue, what you do with it is.

It's one those classic "lol raiders have no life" talk that have no basis in facts.
Outside of mythic raiding, casual raiding (normal, heroic) is only about TIMING, not total time available.
Quite frankly, the biggest contributing factor to this is finding guilds and community to play with.

Hate to say this but I'm gonna ignore your replies now, the lack of logic is giving me physical pain.

[Ithekro]

It gets slipping in there and mostly ignored, but it seems like the idea is that PVP is superior content because its random due to players.

I don't know honestly since I've played on a PVE server since I started playing, and only dabbled in PVP on rare occasions (TBC still has the Southshore vs Tarren Mill battles that flared up from time to time), and either achievement hunts or quest requirements to do battlegrounds.

But with the new War Mode, World PVP is different and is potentially dynamic, if Blizzard goes for it. Arathi Highlands can be a hot spot along with Darkshore and the two new continents at present. I zoned into Arathi as Horde just to do the introduction to the area questline and got ganked by two Alliance players at the spawn point because it was under Alliance control (and I didn't notice because I hadn't bothered to check before I accepted the quest, thinking I was only suppose to get the quest if the Horde owned the zone, like I had when I did them on my Alliance character weeks earlier when the Warfronts started). Got killed a few times, than just watched them for about five minutes until I could rez and ride out of there....and one of them followed me across half the zone in the air until I decided to start doing aerobatics over one of the circles.

[Jaden]

While I wouldn't say WoW was ever a hard game, I do see considerable gaps in individual "skill".

I'm also in a guild that raids twice a week on Heroic difficulty, and we are being consistently pushed to our limits, even though everyone is a veteran player and the average ilvl of the raid is ~360.

We killed Zul last night after some time wiping on it (also in the previous raid). We used the most popular strategy of nuking Zul early and going to the second phase before the second set of Hexxers spawn.

As a restoration shaman, I was really busy in the initial phase of the fight. During Bloodlust, healers had to contribute some DPS to make sure we get him down quickly enough. Then there's spot healing, tank healing, raid healing, coordination of CDs with other healers, purging the minions, soaking the pools, and even crowd controlling a mob...all within a couple of minutes.

I don't think I'm bad at playing the character, but let's just say that if I was a better player, many wipes would have been avoided.

[Keila]

Strictly speaking, PvP isn't superior to PvE as far as content is concerned, but a PvP scenario is significantly more likely to highlight differences in the level of understanding of game mechanics (and subsequently how players react in a dynamic environment).

The 'Ring of Law, T0.5 upgrade fight' (Vanilla) and the 'Faction Champions' fight (WoTLK) are great examples of a pseudo PvP dynamic fight (can't spank and tank, taunting doesn't work) that many people struggle with initially but ultimately are able to overcome if they understand that (more or less) they may be targeted at any time and need to move.

+ These are PvE 'scripted' fights (in that the number of abilities and actions that will be taken are known ahead of time)
+ These are PvP 'dynamic' fights in the sense that you can't just assign a tank to hold aggro and feel protected. You're always at risk of being targeted/engaged (just like in actual PvP) and you may need to 'bait' the NPC's after you (and tank them) no matter what your class.

For many people familiar with PvP (or just, kiting in general, such as if they played things like a Hunter, or a Frost mage) these sort of fights were trivially easy but for the more PvE-Only oriented folks these were hellish boss fights until they got used to paying attention to where the NPC's were and possibly running away instead of just cycling through their normal rotations.


Ultimately, even PvE-Only oriented players succeeded at these boss fights (and got them on farm status) because once they understood the various rules and potential outcomes they could react accordingly and this is (fundamentally) how every PvE boss fight works out. The 'Heigan Dance' (for melee) in Nax is insanely simple, but until a player has understood the sequence of 'safe-zones' (where the safe zones are and the timing) they're going to die horribly over and over.


The thing about raids (or pretty much anything that isn't solo content) is that a 'wipe' may not necessarily be your fault. You (individually) could be executing perfectly to the plan, per your instructions but if someone else isn't quite there you're going to wipe. It's not until all party members execute to an acceptable level that you'll actually be successful (and on fights with enrage timers/'built-in-checks for performance' you may not be successful simply because you do not have the performance output required to be successful so it is mathematically impossible).


People learn things differently, but the difference in something in a game like WoW is something not extreme. People 'know' not to stand in fire, but they may not necessarily 'understand' what fire looks like (I'm aware this is a massive generalisation).

For simplicity

+ 5 man instance
+ 1 tank, 3 dps, 1 healer (conventional party)
+ You're the healer and you successfully complete the instance.

Can anyone honestly say that (assuming no prior tanking experience) that after watching the tank do their thing that if they were given the exact same character to control (i.e. piloting the tank) and an explanation of how to tank and the mechanics they had to deal with that they would be unable to do so? I'm not saying 100% perfect replica with zero failures, I'm just asking whether (given the opportunity) you think you could 'learn' and do the same job.

The absolute extreme end of this chain of thought is essentially could you succeed in a Mythic fight (having never attempted mythic content before) if you were handed the character and all the gear (of a character that was successful) and someone taught you everything you needed to know about the fight, but you just had to execute (and this concept was applied to all raid members).

Given a fair opportunity, you would only ever have 'edge cases' being unsuccessful. The problem with WoW (being an RPG and subject to the realities of time) most people don't get the opportunity, even if they would otherwise be fully capable (and in the retail game with things like raider.io and gear-score these opportunities become even less and less).

Being a 'veteran' (in the sense that you've been playing for a long time) has no real meaning when you're in a new scenario learning new things. Some prior experience may be able to shorten your over-all learning time but if they completely altered the rules of the game (green circles are bad, red circles are good) that veterancy would probably come back to bite you. Hell, if someone just switched your hot and cold water taps (hooked them up in the opposite configuration) you'd probably still end up scorching yourself a few times even if they were labeled accordingly.




I have no idea why "aohige" is seemingly taking things so personally, or what irrational leaps in logic they've had to make to come to the conclusions they have (such as the false equivalency they're trying to make re: NBA) but for someone who tried to argue for objectivity and logic they've somehow become the only person to ignore it all completely.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by aohige

See, there it is. I knew it. See, you don't do a mythic+ in 10-15min.

I mean, I said I last played in Draenor, so... duh?

The fact that you don't know this is an indication that you don't know how endgame content works.
It's been like this for over TWO years bro.

Thanks for being condescending, considering I said I hadn't played since Draenor. Which, if you happened to check, was more than two years ago.

Originally Posted by aohige

Quite frankly, the biggest contributing factor to this is finding guilds and community to play with.

Yes, which is actually quite difficult depending on your server, class, spec, and availability.

Originally Posted by Keila

Strictly speaking, PvP isn't superior to PvE as far as content is concerned, but a PvP scenario is significantly more likely to highlight differences in the level of understanding of game mechanics (and subsequently how players react in a dynamic environment).

It's also more likely to highlight the differences in class viability for PvP.

[Last Sinner]

373 without Uldir. And I am not going to bother with Uldir and probably not any other raid. M+ is enough.

[Keila]

Has the 'guild name' character cap always been 24 characters? I just tried (on live/retail) to make a guild and couldn't because the name was too long.

<Is it Wrong to Try to PUG in a Dungeon>: Too many characters (38)

[Last Sinner]

Or it could be denying it because the answer is obvious.

Bloody Raider.Io scores....I swear so many got their numbers inflated from a one-off carry and generally suck.

[Keila]

Originally Posted by Last Sinner

Or it could be denying it because the answer is obvious.

Bloody Raider.Io scores....I sweat so many got their numbers inflated from a one-off carry and generally suck.

I wanted to make a leveling/dungeon/'drop-in/drop-out' type guild if 'classic' ends up not having a recurring sub cost (both factions) and a name that would stick out for people in the 'know' but still otherwise make sense contextually to everyone else. Being limited to 24 characters though makes it insanely hard <that and how nicely the acronym worked>.


People could always 'not' rely on things like Raider.IO, but that would mean actually investing into relationships/building a deeper community rather than relying on an arbitrary number (which is the same problem with item level and other similar mechanisms).

Classic will fail if stuff like that (Raider.IO, Item Level, other meaningless measuring sticks) take root. Meaningful social circles/communities (beyond individual guilds) needs to be there.

[Ithekro]

<PUGitALL>

[Keila]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

<PUGitALL>

Doesn't quite stand out like the danmachi equivilent

[MeoTwister5]

So I decided to give BFA a shot. My understanding is to finish up your regular story regions (KT since I'm alliance) before doing War Campaign?

[Tokkan]

Originally Posted by MeoTwister5

So I decided to give BFA a shot. My understanding is to finish up your regular story regions (KT since I'm alliance) before doing War Campaign?

Maybe?

The "establishing footholds" phase of the War Campaign is designed so that you do them parallel with your leveling.

[Ithekro]

Do that least two of the introduction "foothold" quests while leveling and the third at 119 or just after hitting 120, as doing the last part will unlock both the rest of the War Campaign and if you have the required rep with the local factions, World Quests at 120.

[Last Sinner]

They are finally putting Azerite items of decent ilvls onto vendors in 8.1. About time. Doesn't quite fix the inherent problems with Azerite stuff but at least it's going to be more accessible to non mythic raiders.

Darkshore Warfront looks more refined than Arathi was. Invasion windows are back.

I just hope they do balance classes in M+ though....When Blood DKs are so blatantly the must have at high end keys or healing options get limited, it's not good. Even those who will be competing at the next MDI are voicing their concerns about the skewed state of classes and the bugs in certain instances. (Calling it now that unless balances come in before MDI, the standard lineup will be Blood DK/Mist Monk/Aff Lock/Rogue/BM Hunter)

[Keila]

WoW Classic demo info released

+ Westfall/Barrens
+ Start @ 15
+ Level Cap @ 19
+ Widescreen monitor support!


Hopefully Blizzcon will actually get into details about the 'price of entry'

[Ithekro]

Four levels doesn't seem like a lot, but back then, with the type of quests, and mobs (Westfall), and distances (the Barrens), that could takes a while.

Plus, unless you've been playing on a private server....no one has played this way since Cataclysm pre-patch came out eight years ago, and changed it all, and even more so after MoP and WoD changed how levels and talent trees work.

[MeoTwister5]

I guess those two areas are expected since those are the first major regions outside Orgrimmar and Stormwind. It's not Vanilla without Barrens chat. I almost miss it.

Almost.