WoW XX: It's Not A Recolor, It's An Original Thread

[sonofzeal]

In all seriousness, I'm not sure. Just out of curiosity, why? Just queue for it, the PUG train isn't that bad.

I'm mostly playing with my wife and nephew, all three of us sitting in the same room. My wife's a veteran but hates optimizing gear and skill orders, and my nephew is... young, and new, and I'd like to call him a newbie but he's really more of a noob, if that distinction still makes sense to anyone.

The nephew plays through the tv though, so I'm playing my own character and periodically calling out suggestions/instructions to him, and my wife and I spend an awful lot of time just bailing him out of whatever. It's going to be frustrating for any random stranger as he spends five minutes trying to climb a wall section that isn't intended to be climbed, or Leeroy Jenkins around, or whatever. And if the nephew dies too often and ragequits, that's bad too y'know?

[Psyren]

Yeah, it's personal loot only now. If you're teaming with your friends, however, I would let them know they're leaving behind free money by not looting stuff, and it all adds up. It's a pretty high tax to pay for not bothering to manage your bags. That said, yeah, you're gonna have people who can't be arsed to loot stuff, which makes skinning a screaming pain.

...What? Ugh.

At least the mob scaling means you won't be grinding grey mobs for scraps.

[Kish]

Three people should not have the slightest trouble with the joke dungeons in the modern game. Even if one of them is more burden than group member.

[Psyren]

Three people should not have the slightest trouble with the joke dungeons in the modern game. Even if one of them is more burden than group member.

Before the scaling I'd have agreed with you (at least up until SFK), but I haven't tried them since then myself.

[Spore]

Before the scaling I'd have agreed with you (at least up until SFK), but I haven't tried them since then myself.

You can still only wipe if you actively try to ruin the others experience or go afk.

[Resileaf]

As long as a healer is present, I think even someone who has no idea what they're doing can easily survive.

[Sian]

Specially if that someone is a DPS and his 'handlers' are the healer and the tank

[The_Jackal]

I'm mostly playing with my wife and nephew, all three of us sitting in the same room. My wife's a veteran but hates optimizing gear and skill orders, and my nephew is... young, and new, and I'd like to call him a newbie but he's really more of a noob, if that distinction still makes sense to anyone.

The nephew plays through the tv though, so I'm playing my own character and periodically calling out suggestions/instructions to him, and my wife and I spend an awful lot of time just bailing him out of whatever. It's going to be frustrating for any random stranger as he spends five minutes trying to climb a wall section that isn't intended to be climbed, or Leeroy Jenkins around, or whatever. And if the nephew dies too often and ragequits, that's bad too y'know?

Understood. In light of that, yeah, I'd avoid the PUG queue. I'd also likely avoid any instanced content, unless they're really excited to knock it out. That said, playing some classes is going to help a lot if you're looking to carry your team. One of the more self-sustaining tanks, like Blood DK or Vengeance Demon Hunter will help bailing your less 'l337' family members out from certain trubs. Also, I'd consider seeing if you can find a family-friendly casual guild to team up with, so if your buddies know they're going in with little kids, there's a well of patience from which to draw. I've done raiding with a group of mixed vets and scrubs, and it's fun, as long as you limit your expectations and keep it light.

...What? Ugh.

At least the mob scaling means you won't be grinding grey mobs for scraps.

Yeah, I'm not a fan either, but I think it's a small price to pay to get level scaling into the game. Also, they've really skewed the cash economy toward doing world quests, as far as I can tell, so losing the odd leather due to inattentive teammates isn't quite the bank breaker it once was.

Three people should not have the slightest trouble with the joke dungeons in the modern game. Even if one of them is more burden than group member.

You're using that word again. That said, yes, if you're a decently geared tank of the classes I mentioned before, carrying is not impossible.

You can still only wipe if you actively try to ruin the others experience or go afk.

This, above all, is my big beef with modern WoW. The talent changes, the compromises to verisimilitude and detail, I can live with all that, but the notion that there's no real consequence for playing badly seems, to me, to be a major design flaw in the game. I realize that not everyone is going to have the same level of investment and competence, but I do think there's a problem with making the general experience of the game so utterly unthreatening that you barely need to pay attention. It also runs contrary to their own claims about how they want the player to be engaged with the world, ie: removing flying. What difference does it really make to force me to ride around the map on the ground if nothing is capable of being a threat to me in the event I'm dismounted? How can you claim that it's anything but a pointless, drudgerous timesink?

In a related point, I've unlocked flying, and it's night and day how much more enjoyable the game becomes when you don't have to spend 80% of your time commuting back and forth to world quests. Mind you, this is on my Mage, so I actually have the best travel options in the entire game. Now to crank out my Argussian Reach and Army of Light reps for Allied races.

[Spore]

This, above all, is my big beef with modern WoW. The talent changes, the compromises to verisimilitude and detail, I can live with all that, but the notion that there's no real consequence for playing badly seems, to me, to be a major design flaw in the game. I realize that not everyone is going to have the same level of investment and competence, but I do think there's a problem with making the general experience of the game so utterly unthreatening that you barely need to pay attention. It also runs contrary to their own claims about how they want the player to be engaged with the world, ie: removing flying. What difference does it really make to force me to ride around the map on the ground if nothing is capable of being a threat to me in the event I'm dismounted? How can you claim that it's anything but a pointless, drudgerous timesink?

In a related point, I've unlocked flying, and it's night and day how much more enjoyable the game becomes when you don't have to spend 80% of your time commuting back and forth to world quests. Mind you, this is on my Mage, so I actually have the best travel options in the entire game. Now to crank out my Argussian Reach and Army of Light reps for Allied races.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree. But keep in mind WoW has a very 'needy' customer base and a wide array of class difficulty and variation. Content for a Havoc Demon Hunter or BM Hunter is of course easier than for a similarly geared Rogue or Ret Paladin. Not to mention differences in player skill. WoW is as successful because it doesn't penalize clueless players (or at least doesn't feel that way).

I have had people stop playing Dark Souls 10 minutes in because they got frustrated with the tutorial. Heck, I played it beyond the tutorial area 2 years after I have purchased it. In that way, WoW is like a bread crumb/candy trail. That makes it so addicting and rewarding. Honestly, the whole structure is - as Yahtzee would put it - entirely evil. Not for a lack of morality but because it heavily manipulates us.

I feel the game is broken beyond repair. But as long as it is still churning out cash

[Psyren]

This, above all, is my big beef with modern WoW. The talent changes, the compromises to verisimilitude and detail, I can live with all that, but the notion that there's no real consequence for playing badly seems, to me, to be a major design flaw in the game. I realize that not everyone is going to have the same level of investment and competence, but I do think there's a problem with making the general experience of the game so utterly unthreatening that you barely need to pay attention.

I think it's less that there's no consequences and more that the consequences are delayed; walled off from the leveling experience. Current "dungeon difficulty" imo should be Easy, while Heroics are Normal and Mythic is hard. That's what I would like to see myself. Then Heroic difficulty could be available while leveling for the Heirloom crowd, with increased rewards.

Yeah, I'm not a fan either, but I think it's a small price to pay to get level scaling into the game. Also, they've really skewed the cash economy toward doing world quests, as far as I can tell, so losing the odd leather due to inattentive teammates isn't quite the bank breaker it once was.

I don't see why level scaling meant we had to lose group loot options though. If I'm questing with friends (literally the only people I'd group with out in the world anyway, minus a particularly tough elite area), then I don't care which one of us hoovers up the contents of a corpse; if one of us finds something cool he'll just let the others know anyway. And if you were grouping with randoms you could simply choose not to do FFA loot. But generally we're fine letting the guy who needs to kneel over every corpse anyway be the one to grab their contents.

As for the economy, I think it's less that they intended quests to be the moneymaker and more that their quality of life changes made gathering mats less lucrative. For example, you don't need X amount of leather spread across W, Y, and Z different grades in order to advance leatherworking anymore, you can just focus on getting to cap and then start leveling it right there in the end zones.

[The_Jackal]

I completely and wholeheartedly agree. But keep in mind WoW has a very 'needy' customer base and a wide array of class difficulty and variation. Content for a Havoc Demon Hunter or BM Hunter is of course easier than for a similarly geared Rogue or Ret Paladin. Not to mention differences in player skill. WoW is as successful because it doesn't penalize clueless players (or at least doesn't feel that way).

s/needy/entitled/, and I agree. But this is why I'd just assume they put in a difficulty slider. The game should be as challenging as you want to make it, and to be honest, earning anything in this game is largely a function of repetition. Sure, if you've got muscular dystrophy or something, you're probably not going to ever succeed at Mythic, but barring that, it's fair to assert that time + effort = success.

I have no interest in penalizing anyone, rather, I think the player ought to be given control over the challenge knob, instead of dropping in a bunch of material incentives to stuff queues for players who sleepwalk through everything, because there's no real reason to challenge yourself. Fun isn't something you should have to work your way up to.

I have had people stop playing Dark Souls 10 minutes in because they got frustrated with the tutorial. Heck, I played it beyond the tutorial area 2 years after I have purchased it.

I gave up on Dark Souls 3 before I started the game. Can't remap controls, your game is dumb and bad, and you should feel bad. I'm not advocating for Dark Souls, I think that would be the opposite of good for the game. For one thing, Dark Souls doesn't have to get you to pay a subscription fee for bouncing on bosses with insanely BS mechanics. For another thing, Dark Souls is a single-player game. If WoW was designed so that one player mis-timing a dodge resulted in a wipe, the game would have been depopulated before the end of 2007.

In that way, WoW is like a bread crumb/candy trail. That makes it so addicting and rewarding. Honestly, the whole structure is - as Yahtzee would put it - entirely evil. Not for a lack of morality but because it heavily manipulates us.

I find Yahtzee amusing, but he's a terrible judge of games, in my opinion. He's way too far down the 'dialogue tree storywank' spectrum of gaming. A classic example of his elitist attitude is expressed in this video:



I swear, every time I hear/read some reviewer talking about 'Games as an art form', it only makes me want to track them down, kill them, and teabag their corpse in real life. Look, if you like a style of game, that's great. I'm happy for you. But I have NO patience for the kind of rank snobbery of a critic who freely insults the audience of a popular game just because it doesn't meet their own criteria of 'quality'.

But leaving aside ad-hominem attacks, every game uses operant conditioning to design reward systems and make their games fun. Really, it's an issue of labels more than anything. When people talk about an activity releasing dopamine (by reading facebook, watching movies, playing games, eating cheese, or shooting heroin, for example), all you're really describing is the neurotransmitter by which your body experiences pleasure. I know a game has been devised which doesn't lead to any release of dopamine, it's called 'No Man's Sky'. But only a complete idiot would equate eating cheese to chasing the dragon.

I feel the game is broken beyond repair. But as long as it is still churning out cash

Well, I wouldn't put it that way, rather, I'd say that with a game of WoW's, shall we say... vintage, you're not really making the most of your software development investment.

I think it's less that there's no consequences and more that the consequences are delayed; walled off from the leveling experience. Current "dungeon difficulty" imo should be Easy, while Heroics are Normal and Mythic is hard. That's what I would like to see myself. Then Heroic difficulty could be available while leveling for the Heirloom crowd, with increased rewards.

I don't see the merit of forcing players to slog through a bunch of tedium before they get to the fun parts. Again, difficulty slider. You can still have 'elite-tier' locked content if you want to where the difficulty is fixed, if you must. But the idea of dumbing down the entire experience for the entire player base, just for the expressed purpose of accommodating the tail end of the bell curve, is a rotten, pernicious idea. World Quests don't have a difficulty slider. The daily stipend of gold, wakening essence, curious coins, and other resources is all gated, for everyone, on dumb, spud-tier quests whose biggest challenge is traversing the map to the enemy.

I don't see why level scaling meant we had to lose group loot options though. If I'm questing with friends (literally the only people I'd group with out in the world anyway, minus a particularly tough elite area), then I don't care which one of us hoovers up the contents of a corpse; if one of us finds something cool he'll just let the others know anyway. And if you were grouping with randoms you could simply choose not to do FFA loot. But generally we're fine letting the guy who needs to kneel over every corpse anyway be the one to grab their contents.

We didn't have to, I'm sure. I'm just saying that FFA loot is a feature I'm not that broken up about losing. Yes, it is, without question, a dumb removal of a useful feature. Who knows why they changed it? Optimizing GM tickets on loot arguments? Bollixing corner-case farming strats?

As for the economy, I think it's less that they intended quests to be the moneymaker and more that their quality of life changes made gathering mats less lucrative. For example, you don't need X amount of leather spread across W, Y, and Z different grades in order to advance leatherworking anymore, you can just focus on getting to cap and then start leveling it right there in the end zones.

Actually, my angle is much more Orwellian than that: By putting most of the money into world quests, they limit the amount of progress you can make on any particular axis in the game. They'd rather get you sucked into maintaining a giant stable of alts than let you power through on one character, and complete all the content the game has to offer. It winds up being another time-gate. Personally, I would much rather have a paradigm where I can choose what I spend time grinding toward, even if the rate of progress is as slow, or even slower, than just queuing up for a fat wad of gold and other loot from a daily giveaway.

[sonofzeal]

Ragefire Chasm Report

Me: lvl 18 Tauren Resto Shaman
Wife: lvl 18 Panda Arms Warrior
Nephew: lvl 18 Tauren BM Hunter

My wife and I are both old players who've gotten up to about lvl 80 the hard way, but only I spent any time at all in instances, mostly just soloing them when I had doubled the recommended level. My nephew's brand spanking new and doesn't have the best impulse control, so we knew not to expect a flawless victory. I let them know the general lay of the land, and basic strategy IRL, then we all met up in Orgrimmar and I led them through the Cleft of Shadows and through the Ragefire portal the old fashioned way.


Initial Impressions

Things actually seemed hopeful when we got inside. The initial Flame Hounds went down without too much trouble, but we had our first death against the 2x Mature / 1x Houndmaster formation a bit beyond the lava flow. Both of the Hounds aggroed on me, and despite calls for help and healing myself as fast as I could, I went down just as Wife and Nephew took down the Houndmaster. This was followed closely by our first wipe, as Wife and Nephew discovered that taking on two Mature Flame Hounds without a healer wasn't as productive as they might have hoped.

A sign of things to come, I'm sure.


The Midgame

From there... there was a lot of dying, but consistent forward progress. Adarogg proved not so dangerous, although at one point Nephew revived his pet in (apparently) and un-pathable spot, causing Adarogg to reset to full health every ten seconds or so? I figured out what was going on, and frantic shouts for him to dismiss and re-summon his pet resolved the issue.

I don't think we had any deaths against Adarogg at all, but we learned not to underestimate the Acolytes. There were a couple times Nephew jumped the gun and the results were pretty dire, but we quickly became old-hat at running back to pick up where we left off, a little more careful the next time.


End Result

All told, we cleared the first two (of four) bosses, and rescued 4/5 of the Peons before calling game on account of Nephew's bedtime. I think we might have been able to win, given time, but it was pretty slow going and I think we were right to stop when we did. I got a Dark Ritual Cape out of it, and we all got some nice gold. Nephew and Wife had fun, and it's certainly something we might try again some day.


Afterthoughts

...good lord, healing is stressful. One wipe against Koranthal was completely my fault, because I failed to switch targets from Nephew to Wife in time, healed him instead of her, and couldn't recover before she died. There's a lot of juggling back and forth, aggravated by a desire to keep up my DOTs on him, stay off his Shadow Storm, etc. I can see why so few people want to play it, and also why it's the job that takes the most heat. It's definitely not always the healer's fault, but if there's not an obvious reason why everything went pear-shaped, a healer misclick is as likely a culprit as anything.

I do have to wonder how accurate the auto-scaling is, though. As we get new abilities and new items, shouldn't it get proportionately easier even if basic damage/health ratios stay the same? If we try again in a few levels, would we have an easier time of things?

I've applied to a couple guilds. I'm hoping to find a guildmate or two willing to help us through without zerging the whole thing down like PUGers seem to. Otherwise though, we may just stick to standard questing and save Instances for special occasions when we have a lot of time to kill and a willingness to die over... and over... and over...

[sonofzeal]

My Wife wishes me to clarify that she did try to rescue me from those Flame Hounds in that first wipe.

She also thinks it's important to note that, during one wipe against the Acolytes when both my Wife and I had gone down and he was on a sliver of health, he decided the best tactic was to jump off the bridge and into the river of lava. Which, at that point... well, fair. No heroic outplay was going to save his life there, so going out in style was a reasonable call IMO.

Y'know, I'm probably not the first person this has occured to, but... if the healer dies, it's probably the tank's fault. If the tank dies, it's probably the healer's fault. If the DPS dies, it's probably their own dang fault.

[Spore]

I think the player ought to be given control over the challenge knob, instead of dropping in a bunch of material incentives to stuff queues for players who sleepwalk through everything, because there's no real reason to challenge yourself.

I disagree slightly here. If you want capable players that behave in group content reliably, you have to adjust its difficulty slowly upwards. If you do not want to partake in group content, more power to you. And story driven questing and the occasional difficulty spike should keep that interesting. Because you know what's not cool?

Basically bashing your head onto the keyboard and winning for 100 levels and then running face first into a brick wall once you hit recent content that you cannot overgear and actually have to pay attention to.

For another thing, Dark Souls is a single-player game. If WoW was designed so that one player mis-timing a dodge resulted in a wipe, the game would have been depopulated before the end of 2007.

See? That is what I was afraid of. I took Dark Souls as an example for a game that is difficult. Not because it is comparable in any other metric. Now you just compare the differences with each other and call me out on that. I never said that.

Also there were and are many raid bosses that call for a wipe when (single!) people don't react to a mechanic. I distinctly remember wiping for three weeks at Garalon with my scrub guild because our hunter could not kite adds and everyone else lost so much damage that we further fell under the DPS requirement.

Can't remap controls, your game is dumb and bad, and you should feel bad.

You even started with objective criticism and then derailed yourself.

Can't remap controls, your game is dumb and bad, and you should feel bad. [...] But I have NO patience for the kind of rank snobbery of a critic who freely insults the audience of a popular game just because it doesn't meet their own criteria of 'quality'.

You do realize he is just playing up the snarky brit thing for internet points (and views and cash)? Funnily enough if you learn to look deeper into his review style and what he is and isn't okay with, you can more easily judge if the game is for you.

Well, I wouldn't put it that way, rather, I'd say that with a game of WoW's, shall we say... vintage, you're not really making the most of your software development investment.

It's more directed at the fan base and its expectations and certain staples that hold designing the game back. Demon Hunters are a great class, both from the game design and the possible builds. Lorewise, they're 105% edge, but I feel WoW doesn't care anymore because Void Elf Rogues casting "Shuriken Storm" and other weeb and dark stuff exist.

Older classes...tend to be paralyzed by old talents and skills. Fire Mages must do a fire based dot, else it doesn't feel like a fire mage. They have Rune of Power since Pandaria despite many players saying they hate the spell. They're bound to having Mirror Image because it's a D&D spell and was in vanilla and thus HAS TO BE in the game somewhere.

They turned some specs around by 180° (see Survival hunter) that aggravated people perfectly happy with the old ranged dot spec (see for example...me). WoW today is like an, uhm...you are familiar with WoW's abomination that is sewn together from a huge amount of corpses? Yea, some are fresh and nice to be around, some are old and rancid, and some got a make over so that you don't notice the old smell as badly.

Why yes, I am the king of metaphors!

All told, we cleared the first two (of four) bosses, and rescued 4/5 of the Peons before calling game on account of Nephew's bedtime. I think we might have been able to win, given time, but it was pretty slow going and I think we were right to stop when we did.

So....you wiped in an instance that is supposed to take up 15 minutes of time? You wiped several times? Did you go with 5 players as recommended?

..good lord, healing is stressful. One wipe against Koranthal was completely my fault, because I failed to switch targets from Nephew to Wife in time, healed him instead of her, and couldn't recover before she died.

Haha, yup. Two problems with the standard ui pop up with healing. First the health bars are at the side. Second you have to click to change targets.

As we get new abilities and new items, shouldn't it get proportionately easier even if basic damage/health ratios stay the same? If we try again in a few levels, would we have an easier time of things?

Heavily depends on the class but yes, definitely.

Nephew and Wife had fun, and it's certainly something we might try again some day.

Are you on the US side of things? If you are EU, I might have a tank in your range lying around so I can both look at what you are doing and give some tips.

Let me just say common courtesy, not knowing how old your nephew is and board rules are holding me back on unleashing my full snark. Wiping can def. happen in earlier instances. But you are doing something EXTREMELY WRONG for it to become a wipe fest.

[The_Jackal]

Ragefire Chasm Report

Have your Wife swap to protection for running instances, her ability to hold threat and absorb punishment for your team will be like night and day.

I disagree slightly here. If you want capable players that behave in group content reliably, you have to adjust its difficulty slowly upwards. If you do not want to partake in group content, more power to you. And story driven questing and the occasional difficulty spike should keep that interesting. Because you know what's not cool?

Basically bashing your head onto the keyboard and winning for 100 levels and then running face first into a brick wall once you hit recent content that you cannot overgear and actually have to pay attention to.

Yes, I think the default difficulty should be higher, and yes, the general play should more readily mirror the experience of regular endgame content. But I think putting in a slider you can mess after a wipe would do a better job of accommodating less astute players than the current status quo, where the default state of play is idiot-proof.

See? That is what I was afraid of. I took Dark Souls as an example for a game that is difficult. Not because it is comparable in any other metric. Now you just compare the differences with each other and call me out on that. I never said that.

Also there were and are many raid bosses that call for a wipe when (single!) people don't react to a mechanic. I distinctly remember wiping for three weeks at Garalon with my scrub guild because our hunter could not kite adds and everyone else lost so much damage that we further fell under the DPS requirement.

Sure, but 'failure to kite' isn't missing a single keystroke, it's a pretty high level of inteptitude. Dark Souls will ruthlessly send you to the loading screen for missing a single dodge. Look, I'm sure in practice we're both on the side of, "The game needs to improve its median level of challenge". How we describe that may differ, but that's

You even started with objective criticism and then derailed yourself.

Whatever. I refuse to play a game that doesn't let me customize my control scheme. I have limited free, and I want to play a game, not fight the user-interface. I do that kind of work for a living, and my consulting rate is over $100/hour.

You do realize he is just playing up the snarky brit thing for internet points (and views and cash)? Funnily enough if you learn to look deeper into his review style and what he is and isn't okay with, you can more easily judge if the game is for you.

Yes, I do realize his hyperbolic sarcastic persona is affected, but he's pretty clearly not a fan of FPS games, or MMORPGs, so I tend to discount his views on what constitutes a good game.

It's more directed at the fan base and its expectations and certain staples that hold designing the game back. Demon Hunters are a great class, both from the game design and the possible builds. Lorewise, they're 105% edge, but I feel WoW doesn't care anymore because Void Elf Rogues casting "Shuriken Storm" and other weeb and dark stuff exist.

Older classes...tend to be paralyzed by old talents and skills. Fire Mages must do a fire based dot, else it doesn't feel like a fire mage. They have Rune of Power since Pandaria despite many players saying they hate the spell. They're bound to having Mirror Image because it's a D&D spell and was in vanilla and thus HAS TO BE in the game somewhere.

What's wrong with my class keeping the style of my class? What, exactly, would you prefer that fire mages do, in lieu of setting people on fire? The problem I have with WoW is their tendency to discard class features that are popular or interesting for reasons that appear to be no better than design ideology, like the aforementioned gutting of the Survival Hunter for (just what we needed) yet another melee class.

They turned some specs around by 180° (see Survival hunter) that aggravated people perfectly happy with the old ranged dot spec (see for example...me). WoW today is like an, uhm...you are familiar with WoW's abomination that is sewn together from a huge amount of corpses? Yea, some are fresh and nice to be around, some are old and rancid, and some got a make over so that you don't notice the old smell as badly.

Why yes, I am the king of metaphors!

Yeah, this. Ultimately, what's driving the class iteration is 12+ years of feature creep. The code base has gotten too large and filled with bloaty irrelevant BS that some segment of their market still professes to like, like (shudder) pet battles. I've been playing my mage, hunter, and warrior since Vanilla, and of all the complaints I have about them, I do *not* mind that they still play mostly as they did back in the day. Rather, it's the relentless erosion and streamlining of my favorite characters, to the point where they're barely recognizable. I would happily remove Colossus Smash from Arms, I would happily bring back Impale and Weapon Specialization. I would happily bring back melee weapons for Hunters, and ranged slot items for everyone else. I would welcome the ability to make a hybrid spec, like combining frost and fire talents on my mage. I really liked being able to freeze an enemy with frost nova, wind up a frostbolt, and and line up a shatter with fire blast. No, Ice Lance is not the same.

Ultimately, I think what's wrong with WoW is that the people who had the passion and vision to make the original what it was have largely pushed off, and the people they brought in have also pushed off, and now the game is in the hands of a crew that don't seem to have a cohesive vision of what kind of game they're making, and for whom. I'm not left with the overriding impression that they're actually playing the game they're making, and considering the workload that maintaining that behemoth codebase is, and how much mindless timesink and 'click and wait' they've put into the game, I can't say I blame them. Well, I don't blame them for not playing. I do blame them for making a game they themselves don't want to play.

I also think that's an implicit argument against the 'forever game' model. It's not remotely reasonable to expect the people making the game to stay invested in the same project for 12 years. Oh well.

[sonofzeal]

So....you wiped in an instance that is supposed to take up 15 minutes of time? You wiped several times? Did you go with 5 players as recommended?

Nope. As I said before, my wife and I decided that, under the circumstances, it was better to keep communication just in our living room. We'd rather struggle than have PUGers get frustrated with Nephew's antics, or just mindlessly zerg it down as most seem inclined to.

Heavily depends on the class but yes, definitely.

That's good news then. The three of us had precisely one "blue" item between us, so retrying with less-awful gear should help.

Have your Wife swap to protection for running instances, her ability to hold threat and absorb punishment for your team will be like night and day.

That should help too, yeah. I didn't even think to ask her that.


In hindsight, I.... think we "only" wiped three times? I know we never wiped at the same spot twice, which was at least a little encouraging. And our ability to coordinate aggro definitely improved throughout the process. We'd probably have better luck doing it again, even without Wife swapping to Protection. A mini-wipefest isn't the worst thing ever if it's also a learning experience.

[Spore]

Dark Souls will ruthlessly send you to the loading screen for missing a single dodge.

No it won't. Maybe if you are playing at Level 1 while naked. Some bosses and large enemies have a grab attack that is easy to avoid and particularly cheap when you don't know they can do that. But the powerful attacks are telegraphed and slow. Similar to WoW's raid bosses it is just learning a pattern and adapting. I feel for Dark Souls I the boss you can only beat when you understood the boss mechanics is Smough and Ornstein. That's 20-25h in for a determined newcomer. Yes, it is a learning curve. But it's not as steep as you make it out to be.

Whatever. I refuse to play a game that doesn't let me customize my control scheme. I have limited free, and I want to play a game, not fight the user-interface. I do that kind of work for a living, and my consulting rate is over $100/hour.

I have stopped many games because the control scheme was crap. Latest one was Witcher 1. Also there is no need to add your salary per hour. Actually I should not give a damn but I feel you belittle me here.

What's wrong with my class keeping the style of my class? What, exactly, would you prefer that fire mages do, in lieu of setting people on fire? The problem I have with WoW is their tendency to discard class features that are popular or interesting for reasons that appear to be no better than design ideology, like the aforementioned gutting of the Survival Hunter for (just what we needed) yet another melee class.

I said Rune of Power. I really mean it. Also if you haven't paid attention, late WoD, Combustion was the main source of damage for a Fire Mage. Makes sense that "burning" a long time is worse than those fireballs flying your way. But somehow the dot could become so huge with all cooldowns that it did a major chunk of DPS. As a result, fire mages suffered the same fate that Shadow Priests did. In order to reel their overall DPS in, their damage outside cooldowns was gutted.

Incoming salt of a former priest player: I loved my priest. I was never a shadow as a main but I never wanted to level as Disc. But now that Voidform is so powerful, Dots outside are just weird. and just recently the Shadow Priest found to its fluff. Before it was some weird disease/negative energy damage/ anti-mage mana management class. Now it is firmly a class connected to the Old Ones and the Void so Void Form is here to stay (as much as I want Devouring Plague back). Improved fluff, but worse crunch.

I also think that's an implicit argument against the 'forever game' model. It's not remotely reasonable to expect the people making the game to stay invested in the same project for 12 years. Oh well.

A tad cheesy and philosophical but nothing lasts forever. Especially not online games. It makes good money for Blizzard (very good actually) so it is in their best to keep the game as healthy as ever. Even further it is - along with the bnet launcher - a way where they can advertise their other games without marketing costs.

I'd never have sunk 600+ Euro into Hearthstone if not for WoW. I never would have played Heroes of the Storm without its predecessor Warcraft 3.

[Spore]

Nope. As I said before, my wife and I decided that, under the circumstances, it was better to keep communication just in our living room. We'd rather struggle than have PUGers get frustrated with Nephew's antics, or just mindlessly zerg it down as most seem inclined to.

I feel that "learning curve" is actually a bit pointless. You get knowledge you cannot really apply in the end content. And for how many miserable people I have annoyed with my hunter antics and my brainless tanking, as much if not more life have I made better by basically performing heroic raid worthy healing in LFR (yes, I loved sniping heals as Disc back in Pandaria).

[Kish]

Mirror Image was introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, just incidentally.

[The_Jackal]

I have stopped many games because the control scheme was crap. Latest one was Witcher 1. Also there is no need to add your salary per hour. Actually I should not give a damn but I feel you belittle me here.

Fair enough, but I'm not. The point I'm trying to make is that time has value. It's the most valuable thing we have, because all the other things we get in life, we trade time to get. Frankly, I don't care if you don't quite earn minimum wage, there's no reason for a game to make you fight the user-interface.

I said Rune of Power. I really mean it. Also if you haven't paid attention, late WoD, Combustion was the main source of damage for a Fire Mage. Makes sense that "burning" a long time is worse than those fireballs flying your way. But somehow the dot could become so huge with all cooldowns that it did a major chunk of DPS. As a result, fire mages suffered the same fate that Shadow Priests did. In order to reel their overall DPS in, their damage outside cooldowns was gutted.

Yes, well, that is something we agree on, completely. The same thing has happened to virtually every class. Frost Mages get most of their damage from ice lance procs, the base spells are barely noticeable. Arms Warrior is completely dependent on Colossus Smash, or soon, Overpower. Sustained, consistent, predictable damage output is, for some reason, the enemy of the designers. Look, I don't want a return to single-button rotations, but the pendulum has swung far too wide of proc-triggered burst.

Incoming salt of a former priest player: I loved my priest. I was never a shadow as a main but I never wanted to level as Disc. But now that Voidform is so powerful, Dots outside are just weird. and just recently the Shadow Priest found to its fluff. Before it was some weird disease/negative energy damage/ anti-mage mana management class. Now it is firmly a class connected to the Old Ones and the Void so Void Form is here to stay (as much as I want Devouring Plague back). Improved fluff, but worse crunch.

Yes, I never played much priest, but I feel your pain. The notion of taking a DoT-focused class and putting MORE of its damage potential behind a ramp-phase is absurd. It shows just how much the game design is catered toward big raid encounters at the expense of everything else.

A tad cheesy and philosophical but nothing lasts forever. Especially not online games. It makes good money for Blizzard (very good actually) so it is in their best to keep the game as healthy as ever. Even further it is - along with the bnet launcher - a way where they can advertise their other games without marketing costs.

I'd never have sunk 600+ Euro into Hearthstone if not for WoW. I never would have played Heroes of the Storm without its predecessor Warcraft 3.

No, it's not cheesy, it's true. In fact, I think we're sort of living that fact. The designers don't appear to have any passion for the game, they certainly aren't interested in making the regular parts of play engaging, the sandbox parts of the game are really just filler for the raid encounters. That's where their effort goes, because that's where their pareto principle pays off.

[sonofzeal]

I feel that "learning curve" is actually a bit pointless. You get knowledge you cannot really apply in the end content. And for how many miserable people I have annoyed with my hunter antics and my brainless tanking, as much if not more life have I made better by basically performing heroic raid worthy healing in LFR (yes, I loved sniping heals as Disc back in Pandaria).

We're not looking at end-game raiding though. The ideal goal would be to just do what we did here, but with more success - tackling low-to-mid level instances as a group of three (or four if we can rope in a friend). It's that or overworld questing. You can only go through Barrens so many times, or have so many iterations of "collect 20 body parts of such-and-such" or "find 12 boxes of whatever".

Nephew had a blast, Wife seemed to really enjoy it too, and it involved all three of us working together rather than competing for quest goals or me not being able to skin anything because he's off mining and she's collecting battle pets. Compared to that, wiping a few times in the easiest of instances isn't all that terrible as long as we could recoup and try again.

[The_Jackal]

We're not looking at end-game raiding though. The ideal goal would be to just do what we did here, but with more success - tackling low-to-mid level instances as a group of three (or four if we can rope in a friend). It's that or overworld questing. You can only go through Barrens so many times, or have so many iterations of "collect 20 body parts of such-and-such" or "find 12 boxes of whatever".

If you're persistent, and use a tank/healer, there's no reason you can't do most instances with just the 3 of you. You can also go back and do classic raids, places like Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Naxxramas all don't have really complicated raid mechanics. People solo those places all the time.

Nephew had a blast, Wife seemed to really enjoy it too, and it involved all three of us working together rather than competing for quest goals or me not being able to skin anything because he's off mining and she's collecting battle pets. Compared to that, wiping a few times in the easiest of instances isn't all that terrible as long as we could recoup and try again.

There's battle pets dropped by instance and raid bosses your wife might want to acquire. Some of them are really, really good.

[Psyren]

I don't see the merit of forcing players to slog through a bunch of tedium before they get to the fun parts. Again, difficulty slider. You can still have 'elite-tier' locked content if you want to where the difficulty is fixed, if you must. But the idea of dumbing down the entire experience for the entire player base, just for the expressed purpose of accommodating the tail end of the bell curve, is a rotten, pernicious idea. World Quests don't have a difficulty slider. The daily stipend of gold, wakening essence, curious coins, and other resources is all gated, for everyone, on dumb, spud-tier quests whose biggest challenge is traversing the map to the enemy.

We actually agree here, I'm fine with earlier dungeons having difficulty settings too. It's one reason I find Timewalking to be so much fun. Not a "slider" necessarily (you don't want to get too granular outside of the endgame - see Diablo for an example done poorly) but having multiple categories like Regular, Heroic and Mythic, absolutely.

We didn't have to, I'm sure. I'm just saying that FFA loot is a feature I'm not that broken up about losing. Yes, it is, without question, a dumb removal of a useful feature. Who knows why they changed it? Optimizing GM tickets on loot arguments? Bollixing corner-case farming strats?

No clue and it is indeed dumb. No, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me either (again, you can level skinning on your own time just fine) but I can still gripe about it.

Actually, my angle is much more Orwellian than that: By putting most of the money into world quests, they limit the amount of progress you can make on any particular axis in the game. They'd rather get you sucked into maintaining a giant stable of alts than let you power through on one character, and complete all the content the game has to offer. It winds up being another time-gate. Personally, I would much rather have a paradigm where I can choose what I spend time grinding toward, even if the rate of progress is as slow, or even slower, than just queuing up for a fat wad of gold and other loot from a daily giveaway.

Making quests be the primary way to make money might very well have been intentional. As for me, I see it as an inevitable consequence of the QoL changes they made elsewhere, and those changes were necessary to the continuing health of the game anyway. Changes like letting you level skinning and mining from zero in the max level areas so all those folks who used a level boost don't immediately get bored having to run around Azuremyst looking for copper nodes etc.

[sonofzeal]

Ragefire Chasm v2.0

After Wife respecced her Warrior into Protection, and after I levelled up my Enchanting skill for some better effects, we tried again - still just the three of us at lvl 18.

And..... wow. Yeah, much better. Part of that was the upgrade, but a much larger part was the improved coordination. Tank-and-spank was in full effect, and the results were much more consistent. Instead of wiping three times by the second boss, we made it through to the last boss - and got him down to 5-10% health - before wiping.

The big lesson learned there was mana management. I OOMed about two thirds of the way through the fight and was able to limp out enough heals to keep us going for a ways, but that very directly lead to our eventual deaths. Fortunately, we could regroup, trudge back over, and take him on again with me minding my mana efficiency much more. And hey presto, we beat him!

Nephew still has a nasty tendency to pull mobs without telling us, and I have to pack mana pots I guess, but the experience was encouraging. If one of us goes down the group's going to wipe, but that's not going to happen unless one of us messes up. I think we'll be able to add 3-man Instance-running as a regular part of our WoW experience.

Is there anything we should know before going into any of the other low-level raids? Any tricks to the boss fights beyond "proactively heal the person whose name gets broadcast" and "don't stand in fire"? Anything that'll make our experience easier besides recruiting a fourth?

[The_Jackal]

We actually agree here, I'm fine with earlier dungeons having difficulty settings too. It's one reason I find Timewalking to be so much fun. Not a "slider" necessarily (you don't want to get too granular outside of the endgame - see Diablo for an example done poorly) but having multiple categories like Regular, Heroic and Mythic, absolutely.

Well, my problem with the current paradigm of raid tiers is how it bifurcates the player pool, which has three negative consequences. The first is carrying. If you have one mythic geared raider who's willing to stoop to visit normal plebs for a lockout, that one player can trivialize the raid for 24 other players. This can really make raiding feel unrewarding if you're trying to experience the progression legitimately, and is very hard to argue against when you're in a guild where what most players care about is 'the lewts'. The second, arguably more pernicious, is what I call the roller-coaster effect, "You must be this tall to ride this ride", where you get group leaders insisting on itemization levels in excess of the rewards of the content they want to run. Typically this happens when some player wants, usually for itemization reasons (looking for BiS gear, in lieu of ilvl) some rare drop out of raid content they'd normally progressed past. Finally, the third is just plain old math bloat, where you've got to have stat squishes after every other expansion, because in order to offer meaningful rewards between four different raid tiers (and now Mythic+), you've got to slather on the bonuses extra thick.

What you wind up with is the worst of both worlds. The good players have no incentive to help carry the bad ones, and the bad ones have no incentive to improve when they can leech off the accomplishments of the good ones, and everyone has game math so wildly inflated that damage meters may as well use scientific notation.

That said, I am glad we're fundamentally in agreement, if for no other reason than its rarity makes it special. :P

No clue and it is indeed dumb. No, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me either (again, you can level skinning on your own time just fine) but I can still gripe about it.

And you may consider me griping right alongside you. Another agreement! Where's Allen Funt?

Making quests be the primary way to make money might very well have been intentional. As for me, I see it as an inevitable consequence of the QoL changes they made elsewhere, and those changes were necessary to the continuing health of the game anyway. Changes like letting you level skinning and mining from zero in the max level areas so all those folks who used a level boost don't immediately get bored having to run around Azuremyst looking for copper nodes etc.

While I'm mostly in favor of those kinds of changes, I do think there's a downside to taking the 'daily stipend' system of bonuses too far. The effect is to create an economy where, after you've done all your 'one-a-day' bonuses, further engagement with the game is far less profitable, and subtly discouraged. I would not be saddened to see them limit these kinds of 'remember to log in' bonuses to present incentives for multi-player content. That's one thing that Diablo III has on WoW, they don't seem to need a bribe to get people to engage with the game regularly (well, maybe Seasons kind of count). But I guess I can understand their incentive, since nothing can kill a MMO like deserted zones.

Ragefire Chasm v2.0And..... wow. Yeah, much better. Part of that was the upgrade, but a much larger part was the improved coordination. Tank-and-spank was in full effect, and the results were much more consistent. Instead of wiping three times by the second boss, we made it through to the last boss - and got him down to 5-10% health - before wiping.

Outstanding, I'm glad our advice was helpful, and you can welcome your wife to joining the ranks of the most glorious class & spec of the game.

The big lesson learned there was mana management. I OOMed about two thirds of the way through the fight and was able to limp out enough heals to keep us going for a ways, but that very directly lead to our eventual deaths. Fortunately, we could regroup, trudge back over, and take him on again with me minding my mana efficiency much more. And hey presto, we beat him!

Congratulations!

I have to pack mana pots I guess

LOL, I usually answer these posts one paragraph at a time, and I had to go back to remove "Was your mana potion on cooldown when you wiped?", before I read the implicit answer here. Yes. Potions are cheaper than repair bills. Of course, sometimes you wind up buying both.

Is there anything we should know before going into any of the other low-level raids? Any tricks to the boss fights beyond "proactively heal the person whose name gets broadcast" and "don't stand in fire"? Anything that'll make our experience easier besides recruiting a fourth?

Yeah, that's kind of a loaded question. My honest advice would recommend reading the 10th Anniversary guide to Molten Core, here. Raid mechanics tend to get a lot more complex and less intuitive than dungeons, and while you can ignore many of them if you overgear them sufficiently, if you're going to make things interesting, you'll want to hit them when they're still somewhat challenging. The trend of raid mechanics is only going to crank up from there.

[Resileaf]

A little more than 50 days left to get all the challenge appearances... Feeling the pressure mounting. Hopefully druid appearances won't be too much of a pain to acquire. Ugh, wish I had the tank legendary to cheese the boss. I hate it so much.

[Psyren]

That said, I am glad we're fundamentally in agreement, if for no other reason than its rarity makes it special. :P

Yeah, about that...

Well, my problem with the current paradigm of raid tiers is how it bifurcates the player pool, which has three negative consequences. The first is carrying. If you have one mythic geared raider who's willing to stoop to visit normal plebs for a lockout, that one player can trivialize the raid for 24 other players. This can really make raiding feel unrewarding if you're trying to experience the progression legitimately, and is very hard to argue against when you're in a guild where what most players care about is 'the lewts'.

I disagree - look, you can't please everyone and it's foolish to try. Quite frankly, I think the positive benefits of overgeared players being ABLE to carry, far outweigh those few who lack the backbone/assertiveness to say "I'd rather experience the content at progression difficulty even if that means wiping all night" and back out. Since you can't please both, I'm going with the former. Hell, for many guilds (particularly those with a younger, lower-income/higher-progressed base) carrying is a pretty regular revenue stream and another strong source of engagement with the game.

It's also not a binary between legitimate players and lazy people. Maybe on your main you do experience the content the "right way" (insofar as you are the arbiter of the "right" way to experience content someone else is paying for - just saying,) i.e. steadily progressing from your quest greens to your dungeon blues to Heroics to Mythics and slowly saving up for whatever AH purples you can get your hands on while you watch strats on Youtube. But on your alt(s), rather than slog through all that mess a second (or third or fourth) time, you just use your main to get some gold and have your alt pay for a carry to skip the line. Or you trade a carry on your main for a carry for your alt. Or it even happens in reverse - your main gets the initial carry, and having learned the "boss dance" firsthand, now you know how to apply it to another character leveling the "traditional" way. Again, the benefits of it existing far and away beat the downsides.

The second, arguably more pernicious, is what I call the roller-coaster effect, "You must be this tall to ride this ride", where you get group leaders insisting on itemization levels in excess of the rewards of the content they want to run. Typically this happens when some player wants, usually for itemization reasons (looking for BiS gear, in lieu of ilvl) some rare drop out of raid content they'd normally progressed past.

This kind of toxicity is going to exist whether there are raid tiers or not. The simple fact is that insisting on an item level that exceeds the rewards for the raid itself is ludicrous, and even if chat is full of fools doing it, you can and will find a guild with the sense not to. It's certainly a nice-to-have, particularly on your tank(s), but clearly not everyone is requiring it or nobody would've been able to run the content in the first place.

Finally, the third is just plain old math bloat, where you've got to have stat squishes after every other expansion, because in order to offer meaningful rewards between four different raid tiers (and now Mythic+), you've got to slather on the bonuses extra thick.

Putting aside that math bloat is easily fixed even if it did become a problem, you're forgetting the positive benefits of big stat jumps - namely, the folks able to go back and solo older content (e.g. dungeons and raids) looking for transmog gear. And big numbers are just cool. Nobody wants to come back to the game for a new expansion and find themselves light-years behind the folks who spent the last several months raiding; all that's going to do is make them deactivate for good this time. Hence the quest gear in the new area being on par with at least the heroic gear of the previous one. A recalibration of the numbers every now and again is a small price to pay for that.

What you wind up with is the worst of both worlds. The good players have no incentive to help carry the bad ones, and the bad ones have no incentive to improve when they can leech off the accomplishments of the good ones, and everyone has game math so wildly inflated that damage meters may as well use scientific notation.

You probably didn't intend it this way but this does smack of elitism to me. Gear is not equivalent to skill. If anything, it correlates most strongly with time investment. If you play long enough you'll get decked out in purples, it's just a matter of learning the bosses' dance moves and putting in the time needed to upgrade pieces of your gear via alternate means (e.g. rare mats, lots of gold, and crafting.)

Expecting the players without that time to invest to continue subsidizing the experience of those who do with no recourse is a losing proposition for the game as a whole. Blizzard rightly realized that, which is why raid carrying exists. Perhaps Mythic Carry shouldn't be, however expensive, but I'd say they brought that on themselves by making some content (e.g. entire bosses) be Mythic-only and thus forcing folks to go through Mythic in order to see it. If Mythic was purely a difficulty rather than a gate for some of the lore itself, I think it would be less in demand than it is and they'd be justified in tuning it to make it impossible to carry (if they can even do that in the first place.)

[Spore]

The big lesson learned there was mana management. I OOMed about two thirds of the way through the fight and was able to limp out enough heals to keep us going for a ways, but that very directly lead to our eventual deaths. Fortunately, we could regroup, trudge back over, and take him on again with me minding my mana efficiency much more. And hey presto, we beat him!

Congrats. The bosses are meant for three DPS that don't really know what they're doing - yet. If you beat them with a single DPS your nephew did his job well. Hunters are not the most complicated class but still. =)

Basic but forgotten things for all three specs:
1) Tanks: Check your healer's mana. Let them drink if they are not topped off (70% mana is no cause to stop, 30% mana is). Pull responsibly and try to stop spellcasts (you get Pummel at 24), try to use your damage mitigation often but especially at the start of pulls and during high damage.

2) Healers: Check your mana, and if you are infight. If not, try to sit down to drink. Even if you just get 3-4 ticks of mana in, you are faring better than without drinks. Either buy enough or become friends with a mage. Don't panic with damage spikes. Dungeon mechanics are rarely made so two high damage effects overlap killing your wards. But if your tank goes below 30%, you can use the quick expensive heals. Try to always stay casting (even if it is the odd damage spell when you don't have to heal for a bit).

3) DPS: Try to position outside of damage effects. Maximize your DPS and learn your class. For pet classes, turn of the pet taunt. Get to know aggro ranges. Feign Death comes online at 28. Use it!

[The_Jackal]

I disagree - look, you can't please everyone and it's foolish to try. Quite frankly, I think the positive benefits of overgeared players being ABLE to carry, far outweigh those few who lack the backbone/assertiveness to say "I'd rather experience the content at progression difficulty even if that means wiping all night" and back out. Since you can't please both, I'm going with the former. Hell, for many guilds (particularly those with a younger, lower-income/higher-progressed base) carrying is a pretty regular revenue stream and another strong source of engagement with the game.

If you just implement one itemization path for everyone, and mediate player skill/challenge appetite with a difficulty slider, then the whole concept of carrying becomes moot. And frankly, the notion of top-tier guilds selling their time to earn in-game gold from less astute players to let them unlock top-tier rewards is also cutting across the whole value premise of making the game challenging in the first place. If you can get your AotC rewards just by buying a couple of WoW tokens, then what, really, is the point of having the exclusive reward in the first place? Both systems feature scrubs trying to end-run their own challenge and fun, only mine does it with a lot fewer negative side effects to the rest of the player pool.

It's also not a binary between legitimate players and lazy people. Maybe on your main you do experience the content the "right way" (insofar as you are the arbiter of the "right" way to experience content someone else is paying for - just saying,) i.e. steadily progressing from your quest greens to your dungeon blues to Heroics to Mythics and slowly saving up for whatever AH purples you can get your hands on while you watch strats on Youtube. But on your alt(s), rather than slog through all that mess a second (or third or fourth) time, you just use your main to get some gold and have your alt pay for a carry to skip the line. Or you trade a carry on your main for a carry for your alt. Or it even happens in reverse - your main gets the initial carry, and having learned the "boss dance" firsthand, now you know how to apply it to another character leveling the "traditional" way. Again, the benefits of it existing far and away beat the downsides.

No, it's not a binary arrangement, which is why I want a difficulty slider. You can still have the very hardest content which requires locking the slider at the maximum difficulty, and which will require only the most skillful, coordinated, and well-equipped teams to defeat. You lose nothing, except for an extra 50-100 levels of ilvl bloat.

As for 'the right way', I think you're mis-interpreting my position. I don't wish to *be* carried, that's my primary objection. I don't want my experience to hinge on whether the ringers from mythic decide to show up on raid night. What I would like is a mechanism whereby I can tailor the difficulty of the evening's content to the capabilities of the group I have to hand, an any particular evening.

This kind of toxicity is going to exist whether there are raid tiers or not. The simple fact is that insisting on an item level that exceeds the rewards for the raid itself is ludicrous, and even if chat is full of fools doing it, you can and will find a guild with the sense not to. It's certainly a nice-to-have, particularly on your tank(s), but clearly not everyone is requiring it or nobody would've been able to run the content in the first place.

No, that's simply not so. The reason the item limit shows up in pre-mades is that's the only way you can ascertain whether you've got sufficient firepower to defeat the scenario. Your payoff is contingent on downing the bosses. Well, when you can just dial in the difficulty to the capability of your team, you're far better off staffing up and getting to work than giving yourself piles sitting around in Orgrimmar.

Putting aside that math bloat is easily fixed even if it did become a problem, you're forgetting the positive benefits of big stat jumps - namely, the folks able to go back and solo older content (e.g. dungeons and raids) looking for transmog gear. And big numbers are just cool. Nobody wants to come back to the game for a new expansion and find themselves light-years behind the folks who spent the last several months raiding; all that's going to do is make them deactivate for good this time. Hence the quest gear in the new area being on par with at least the heroic gear of the previous one. A recalibration of the numbers every now and again is a small price to pay for that.

That's also not a benefit. Trivializing earlier content releases is a *bad* thing. It would be far better for the game is every component would scale with your level. Are you honestly declaring your preference for people soloing the Firelands for easy cash and mounts than playing together, where the content is still challenging and fun? Transmog, pets, mounts, and other rewards feel far more rewarding when they're legitimately earned. My favorite mount to this day is the Red Proto-Drake, because it's one I earned honestly, getting all the achievements while they were still at-level. And I'd venture to suggest that you also feel more attached to rewards you go from doing content at-level, instead of going back and midget farming.

[QUOTE]You probably didn't intend it this way but this does smack of elitism to me. Gear is not equivalent to skill. If anything, it correlates most strongly with time investment. If you play long enough you'll get decked out in purples, it's just a matter of learning the bosses' dance moves and putting in the time needed to upgrade pieces of your gear via alternate means (e.g. rare mats, lots of gold, and crafting.)

Well, I am an elitist, but I'd hardly equate accomplishment in WoW to anything requiring superior phsyical or intellectual capabilities. The game engine simply does not permit it. I completely agree that accomplisment in WoW is a function of time, not talent or skill. And I'm fine with that. That's how a game should be.

Expecting the players without that time to invest to continue subsidizing the experience of those who do with no recourse is a losing proposition for the game as a whole. Blizzard rightly realized that, which is why raid carrying exists. Perhaps Mythic Carry shouldn't be, however expensive, but I'd say they brought that on themselves by making some content (e.g. entire bosses) be Mythic-only and thus forcing folks to go through Mythic in order to see it. If Mythic was purely a difficulty rather than a gate for some of the lore itself, I think it would be less in demand than it is and they'd be justified in tuning it to make it impossible to carry (if they can even do that in the first place.)

Oh, do let's not pretend that there's any reason Mythic carries are bought and sold, other than the AotC rewards. Otherwise, why would you dump $10 worth of gold you could use to offset your play time balance when you could just wait for the next expansion? Both methods are cheesing, one is far, far less expensive. Maybe for the few goblins who apparently enjoy running TSM more than showing up for raids, it's not a big deal, but for the average player, I doubt it.

[Psyren]

If you just implement one itemization path for everyone, and mediate player skill/challenge appetite with a difficulty slider, then the whole concept of carrying becomes moot. And frankly, the notion of top-tier guilds selling their time to earn in-game gold from less astute players to let them unlock top-tier rewards is also cutting across the whole value premise of making the game challenging in the first place. If you can get your AotC rewards just by buying a couple of WoW tokens, then what, really, is the point of having the exclusive reward in the first place? Both systems feature scrubs trying to end-run their own challenge and fun, only mine does it with a lot fewer negative side effects to the rest of the player pool.
...
No, it's not a binary arrangement, which is why I want a difficulty slider. You can still have the very hardest content which requires locking the slider at the maximum difficulty, and which will require only the most skillful, coordinated, and well-equipped teams to defeat. You lose nothing, except for an extra 50-100 levels of ilvl bloat.
...
Well, I am an elitist, but I'd hardly equate accomplishment in WoW to anything requiring superior phsyical or intellectual capabilities. The game engine simply does not permit it. I completely agree that accomplisment in WoW is a function of time, not talent or skill. And I'm fine with that. That's how a game should be.

First off, the constant digs about players who are "less astute" and "bad" are why I have trouble taking your PoV seriously. Especially after you yourself just admitted that accomplishment in WoW is a function of time investment, rather than intellect or skill. All you can truly conclude about a player with no purples+ is that they haven't been playing endgame long enough.

Secondly, even if they implemented a slider, what makes you think the maximum end of that slider would be any more difficult than Mythic Raiding now? Again, you're starting from a premise that has yet to be proven - that Blizzard is both willing and able to calibrate a difficulty so exacting that it's possible to succeed at (that being the point and all) but impossible to carry anyone through. This is especially true given that the whole point of running top-end difficulty would be for gear that would make top-end difficulty even easier (otherwise why do it?) and make such carries more feasible. Such calibration, on top of being a waste of their time, would just lead to an arms race - and with it, the very "math bloat" you were just opposed to.

As for 'the right way', I think you're mis-interpreting my position. I don't wish to *be* carried, that's my primary objection. I don't want my experience to hinge on whether the ringers from mythic decide to show up on raid night. What I would like is a mechanism whereby I can tailor the difficulty of the evening's content to the capabilities of the group I have to hand, an any particular evening.

If you don't want to be carried, then don't be. It seems pretty basic to me
Why should your preferences dictate the play experience for everyone else?

No, that's simply not so. The reason the item limit shows up in pre-mades is that's the only way you can ascertain whether you've got sufficient firepower to defeat the scenario. Your payoff is contingent on downing the bosses. Well, when you can just dial in the difficulty to the capability of your team, you're far better off staffing up and getting to work than giving yourself piles sitting around in Orgrimmar.

Let me first reiterate that I support difficulty settings for all instanced content. But proposing them as a remedy for this specific behavior is ludicrous. If you give the folks you talk about (the ones with "piles") a difficulty slider, they're just going to crank it all the way up and go right back to spamming trade for recruits with higher ilvls than the instance like they are now. Designing around those folks is pointless. Instead, just ignore them; eventually they'll either get a bored elite to sign up, or they'll relent and run the content with folks looking to gear up like they themselves often are. Either way, no additional design needed.

That's also not a benefit. Trivializing earlier content releases is a *bad* thing. It would be far better for the game is every component would scale with your level. Are you honestly declaring your preference for people soloing the Firelands for easy cash and mounts than playing together, where the content is still challenging and fun?

They already have scaling for old content, it's called Timewalking. If you really want old content to be challenging and need proper groups and tactics to pull off, that's your answer. But if all I want from an old instance is a transmog or mount, I shouldn't need to gather up 24 other people every single time because there was no way around the content scaling.

Challenge is fun in an RPG, I agree - but so is a power fantasy. Being able to go back to a dungeon that your group struggled with years ago and curbstomp it with a much smaller group (or solo!) is cathartic. And WoW has done the right thing by letting both be options.

Honestly, the only major issue I have with the game in its current form is the core engine, almost every other decision they've made (well, except garrisons, eff garrisons) I've been on board with. It's a big issue sure, but if and when we finally get to a new engine, I have a feeling all the other design lessons they've learned over the years won't just be jettisoned.

Oh, do let's not pretend that there's any reason Mythic carries are bought and sold, other than the AotC rewards. Otherwise, why would you dump $10 worth of gold you could use to offset your play time balance when you could just wait for the next expansion? Both methods are cheesing, one is far, far less expensive. Maybe for the few goblins who apparently enjoy running TSM more than showing up for raids, it's not a big deal, but for the average player, I doubt it.

Given your own supposed wages disclosed above, I'm confused how you could consider $10 to be some titanic expenditure. Especially compared to waiting, when that time is much more valuable. Yeah you can just wait until the content isn't new anymore to see the cutscenes and obtain the drops in-game, but I'm hoping you see the value proposition to not doing so from both the player's side, the guild's side, and Blizzard's as a whole. Simply put, it keeps people engaged with the game who would otherwise run out of things they're interested in doing (at all strata) and gives them time to design additional content for everyone to enjoy. It's win-win-win.