Some Drop in WoW Subs

[Kzach]

This is because people don't remember things.

I remember. I remember logging on in the first hour of Wrath and breezing through the quests without anyone's assistance and getting to 80th and then breezing through dungeons with no CC (and no prior knowledge of the dungeons). I then remember breezing through the heroic versions and then breezing through the raids. And I remember PUG'ing it all because I was in-between guilds after my friend's guild broke up (they went to a PVP server and I loathe PVP servers).

I remember logging on in the first hour of TBC and going, "Holy goddamn, that thing hit like a truck!" But my awesomely geared rouge persevered and hacked his way through content with the aid of friends and compatriots in arms. It wasn't easy. It wasn't pretty. But it got done. And then dungeons. ACK! Wipe after wipe after wipe. But finally I was geared enough to latch on to the upper echelons of heroic dungeons! Annnnnnd wipefest repeat. I just had to hint at the letters "SH" to cause fear and dread in my guildies and anyone in earshot. And then we finally got raid ready and took on Karazhan, still one of THE most fun raids in the game. But even after Magtheridon, Mechanar dailies were still a headache without the right group. I remember it being par for the course to skip the fire bitch, whether in a PUG or guild group. And those golem sentinel thingies that I had to interrupt or they'd almost one-shot the tank... as trash!

Should we go back to vanilla and raiding Scholomance? Yes, I said RAIDING Scholo.

Cataclysm came along and finally I had thought the promises of requiring CC were real. They weren't. Before I had even gotten to 333il I was in PUG's that were aoespamming their way through without a glitch. Only the bosses presented any difficulty and nine times out of ten it was simply a matter of low-dps. And this despite having the crappiest tanks in WoW's existence, which is really par for the course these days, given that they are, far and away, the most powerful class.

 

[Celtavian]

Nothing will ever be as fun for me as the first Everquest was.

I played WoW for years. It was fun for quite a while. The raiding always gets tedious. I only really need to beat a raid instance once and I feel like I'm done. Going back again and again makes me feel like I accomplishing nothing.

Hopefully someone can figure out a way to make MMORPGs interesting again. I tried RIFT, but it was lacking. It was more of the same as in WoW with a different look.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I remember.

Good for you. Most people don't. Memories tend to be very, very short.

I just had to hint at the letters "SH" to cause fear and dread in my guildies and anyone in earshot. And then we finally got raid ready and took on Karazhan, still one of THE most fun raids in the game.

Oh, I skipped most of the heroics. Between the BOE purples I picked up, and regular dungeons, I was able to Sinister Strike my way through Karazhan repeatedly. Which, once you had any gear at all, was actually easier than most TBC heroics, and certainly a much more efficient means of getting badges; 22 badges in about 2.5-3 hours was a pretty good return. We also arena-farmed, which is where my Blinkstrike finally got replaced with a season 2 PVP sword.

Ironically, the only TBC heroic I did on the rogue repeatedly was Magister's Terrace, because it actually had gear for me.

They weren't. Before I had even gotten to 333il I was in PUG's that were aoespamming their way through without a glitch.

When? The first couple of weeks were absolutely brutal. You must've gotten into some damn good pugs. After some gearing up, they got vastly easier, but most people still use some CC, and I haven't seen anything AOE-fested even at 350s il. Hell, I sap things that I think need sapping, whether or not the tank thinks they need it. The real reason for CC is not to directly keep the tank alive, it's to keep the healer from going OOM trying to keep the tank and group alive.

Brad

 

[Kzach]

Oh, I skipped most of the heroics. Between the BOE purples I picked up, and regular dungeons, I was able to Sinister Strike my way through Karazhan repeatedly. Which, once you had any gear at all, was actually easier than most TBC heroics, and certainly a much more efficient means of getting badges; 22 badges in about 2.5-3 hours was a pretty good return. We also arena-farmed, which is where my Blinkstrike finally got replaced with a season 2 PVP sword.

You had BoE purples in TBC. This explains why you considered Cataclysm hard in the first few weeks. I'm guessing you placed a great deal of importance on GS.

My guildies and I were face-rolling Cataclysm heroics within the first month. Then again, we were the type of players who out-healed and out-dpsed and out-tanked players in twice the gear we had. WoW isn't what I'd call a difficult game to master, so I don't really feel like this is bragging.

 

[Impeesa]

That's funny stuff considering how it seems like they lowered the game's difficulty settings with each patch. For instance, I remember how difficult the plague lands instances were in beta about at the end of the first year of the game being live they got significantly easier (and from what I read they are even easier today).

So yeah, when you dumb down a game and allow players to play easy medium hard or EXTREME! versions of each level they will finish the game a lot faster then they would when the game was defaulted to hard.

I think your second paragraph sort of negates your first. It's probably more correct to say the challenge spectrum has widened rather than moved down. Yeah, the leveling experience is dead easy now. And it's great, I've had a few people start playing just recently who like it now and probably would have been put off by the WoW of six years ago.

On the other hand, I've earned my Light of Dawn and Blackwing's Bane titles the hard way, and along with the rest of the raid content it's been a pretty challenging experience. Guilds better than mine have described the current raid content as the most relentless challenge yet. But it has no artificial pacing mechanics, like 10-minute corpse runs, bosses that despawn after an hour, or take 15 minutes to respawn after a wipe. Tools exist to analyze every point of damage dealt and taken immediately following each attempt. The challenge is higher, but you can put effort into it much, much more efficiently now than ever before. Between that and the option of a much easier experience for those who desire it, we get the effect quoted in the article: people go through the content available to their skill and time limits faster than ever, and so the natural rise and fall of subs between content waves grows sharper.

Oh, I skipped most of the heroics. Between the BOE purples I picked up, and regular dungeons, I was able to Sinister Strike my way through Karazhan repeatedly. Which, once you had any gear at all, was actually easier than most TBC heroics, and certainly a much more efficient means of getting badges; 22 badges in about 2.5-3 hours was a pretty good return. We also arena-farmed, which is where my Blinkstrike finally got replaced with a season 2 PVP sword.

By the time Kara dropped badges (2.3), yeah, it had been nerfed many times. When it was current content, it was definitely no joke. It's true that many heroics were harder, but only because many BC heroics were absolutely brutal at release.

 

[Celtavian]

re

That's a good way to put it. The challenges are more varied now. You have everything from vanilla raid instances to super hard mode. Some of those hard modes are really difficult. Some are still pretty easy for experienced players. But I know a few of those hard modes made you want to punch a game developer.

Hard mode Yog-shoggoth. That was ridiculous.

It tooks us a bit to do hard mode on the engineer guy with the three parts in Ulduar too. I left after that. Didn't do much once the Citadel of the Lich King came out. I'm sure the hard modes in there were not easy.

 

[Kzach]

It tooks us a bit to do hard mode on the engineer guy with the three parts in Ulduar too. I left after that. Didn't do much once the Citadel of the Lich King came out. I'm sure the hard modes in there were not easy.

Having been in a variety of guilds from casual to hardcore, I think I can state with some level of authority that the game is never difficult. It's actually very basic. The difficulty comes from getting 10/20/25/40 people together who are all on the same page at the same time and of the same persistence level.

I say persistence because I maintain that (PVE) WoW is not a game that requires a great deal of skill. It just requires practice. Once I 'get' an encounter, whether it be with a heroic dungeon mob or a heroic raid boss, I rarely screw it up after that because it really just requires that you do X at Y time. There's very little adaption or pressure required once you know what to do to avoid the danger and maintain your role.

The disparity between a group who know their class, role, and the encounters and can perform in these tasks to the expectations of the dungeon, and a group who fails at one or all of these aspects, is quite large. You might've experienced the same after defeating a particular boss. Ten wipes ago he was hard, but after finally downing him, suddenly he becomes easy and your group cake-walks through him all the time.

Now, if the game had some level of pressure to adapt to varying situations in the heat of the moment, like a remotely sophisticated AI for mobs that made them use intelligent tactics, THEN it would be a game of skill. This is why I maintain that PVP is far harder to master than PVE, and even then, only when gear is even.

 

[Impeesa]

Now, if the game had some level of pressure to adapt to varying situations in the heat of the moment, like a remotely sophisticated AI for mobs that made them use intelligent tactics, THEN it would be a game of skill. This is why I maintain that PVP is far harder to master than PVE, and even then, only when gear is even.

There was a boss fight that used some tricks to simulate intelligent tactics rather than the usual scripted behaviour, the faction champions in ToC. IMO, it never felt any more like a legitimate challenge than any other fight, just tedious when it went well and annoyingly random when it didn't. As far as PVP goes, all the serious PVPers I've ever spoken to have agreed that once you get good at it, you know the set of abilities each class has, and find them as predictable as any boss. The only difference is there's only been one new class to learn in the last 6 years.

There is some truth to your initial statement, though. I'm only half joking when I say that the hardest encounter ever would be one that requires all 25 people to spell their own name correctly at the same time.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

You had BoE purples in TBC. This explains why you considered Cataclysm hard in the first few weeks. I'm guessing you placed a great deal of importance on GS.

Heh. You'd guess wrong. I haven't had GS in ages. I do have to say that, when I did, I enjoyed reviewing the DPS/GS ratios on Recount and seeing how bad some of the high-GS people could be.

But given that gear has a demonstrably correlative effect on throughput*, as stats have direct effects on damage, healing, and mitigation, and this was on my alt, *and* I had money to burn, it only made sense to get a couple of useful pieces once I found out we were doing Karazhan at a guild LAN party, so I could actually pull my weight and not feel like I was being carried by my friends.

* - This is, of course, not to say that skill and knowledge don't. All things being equal, though, a toon in all greens with the same spec, knowledge, and ability will be outperformed by the same toon in blues, who will in turn be outperformed by the same toon in purples, simply because they have more stats. But the good player in greens will quite possibly do better than the poor player in blues or purples.

My guildies and I were face-rolling Cataclysm heroics within the first month. Then again, we were the type of players who out-healed and out-dpsed and out-tanked players in twice the gear we had. WoW isn't what I'd call a difficult game to master, so I don't really feel like this is bragging.

See the italicized part. There is a world of difference between a guild run, where you can coordinate easily and know everyone's capabilities, and a pug, where it's the luck of the draw. You might get competent people, and you might get people who are used to AOEing everything and /ragequit on the first mistake, be it their own or someone else's.

With a guild run and Vent? They weren't bad. In a pug where at best you might get hurriedly-typed instructions (which I tended to wind up having to do) and people who assume you're capable of reading their minds? Hope everybody knows what to do!

I suspect I wound up doing a LOT more runs in pugs than you did, since not all of my friends and guildies were on when I wanted to do a dungeon. This was even more fun when people had to discover the entrance to get the dungeon in the dungeon finder. I got REALLY tired of doing Heroic Deadmines and SFK.

Lumping these two quotes together for a response:

On the other hand, I've earned my Light of Dawn and Blackwing's Bane titles the hard way, and along with the rest of the raid content it's been a pretty challenging experience. Guilds better than mine have described the current raid content as the most relentless challenge yet. But it has no artificial pacing mechanics, like 10-minute corpse runs, bosses that despawn after an hour, or take 15 minutes to respawn after a wipe.

and

I say persistence because I maintain that (PVE) WoW is not a game that requires a great deal of skill. It just requires practice. Once I 'get' an encounter, whether it be with a heroic dungeon mob or a heroic raid boss, I rarely screw it up after that because it really just requires that you do X at Y time. There's very little adaption or pressure required once you know what to do to avoid the danger and maintain your role.

Yup to both. As long as the group doesn't make too many little mistakes, or doesn't make a big one, they're okay. It does seem that the threshold for fatal mistakes is lower now than it was back in Wrath, but I can't say that for sure.

Once everybody knows what they're doing on the encounter, and is unlikely to make unforced errors, you shouldn't have an issue. Of course, different people learn at different rates, and you can't completely eliminate the possibility of brain farts or forced errors (like connection issues, kid/pet puking, etc).

By the time Kara dropped badges (2.3)

You know, I could've sworn I had badge gear by the time ZA dropped, but apparently not (my rogue has exactly one heroic TBC dungeon achievement). Took a while to dig up the reference on Wowpedia.

Apparently, I farmed the hell out of Kara post-2.3, though.

Brad

 

[Kzach]

Apparently, I farmed the hell out of Kara post-2.3, though.

IIRC the badges allowed my enchanter rogue to buy a pally relic thingy (or whatever they were called back then) that was only a few badges in comparison to everything else... and then DE it into an abyss (was it abyss? so long ago...). I seem to recall making a lot of money off that scam

Then again, I also made a ton of money farming Mana Tombs chests. I rage-quit the game when they took that away from me