With apologies for the delay in replying: I play mainly on the EU Aszune PVE server, fighting for the Alliance.
Kael wrote:
In essence what you are saying is to find the challenge in WoW raiding one must be prepared to slough through months of dross with some good bits thrown in to get to the good stuff. I no longer have the time, nor should it be necessary to have the inlcination, a genre that has been going for 13'ish years now should have this problem ironed out. Perhaps new players to the genre or those who are structuring and working out the lines of communications with in a guild need these steps, but can we just drop the older heads in the deep end please?
I'm *coughs* in the forty-something gaming bracket, so you young'uns in your thirties should have plenty of energy and time!
I agree Blizz stuck some padding into the instances, but then it would be almost impossible to make each fight show progession in tactics - just try yourself to whiteboard 40 consecutive bosses with tactical progression. See the problem? Certain steps are evident, but when you try to fill the number of instances people wanted, well, you get the idea.
As for time, if you want to raid at the top end then yes it will involve an investment of time - but if it did not you would not be playing it - people want to see the top end instances because they are the peak of the teamwork side of the game. BRD was fun when I was L52 or so, but when I went back there with a L70 hunter alt of mine it was boring. I solo'd the content and left. Bored. But now able to smelt dark iron ore. Easy instances represent no challenge and give no thrill. You liked Hexxer in ZG because it required more control - it was a greater challenge - and not many guilds killed him regularly. TBC instances are the same - general progression towards top end fights and the tactical awareness has to evolve with the team.
If you have no time then even if you went into a top end instance you would still die. No, you do not need the loiwer instance gear, go play 10 Arena games per week and with a decent rating you can get Tier 5 equivalent epic gear. Now go to the Eye (Blizz removed all the attunement quest stuff people had to do, doh!). Straight after the last patch how many low end guilds charged into the Eye? Loads. They all wiped, horribly. On the trash. The one or two who even got to the boss wiped time and time again and made no progress. Why? Because the guild did not work as a team and did not have a developed tactical awareness. You only get that by putting in the time to develop it - it is a skill that you cannot buy from your class trainer! This may mean you might not get to raid where you want to, but then that's the game.
Q: How would you create progression from boss to boss without the type of system that currently exists?
I'm not arguing what we have is perfect (far from it), but I struggle to see a better idea that leaves a challenge in the game.
As for "months of dross" comment. By the time you have levelled to 70 did you really want to walz through every instance in a night? Sounds pretty boring to me.
My guild raids 4 nights per week, for 3-4 hours on each of those nights. We do ok and are towards the top end of server progression, but then we don't expect to be higher as we don't put more time in. I think that shows that for a limited investement of time you can gain access to top end instances: we're almost done in SSC and into the Eye. If it only required 2 hours per week to reach these places I'm not sure the subscriber numbers would be quite the same.
October 18th 2006!!!!! "first" my ass!
Yeah ok i get where ur coming from, Web Rage huh? interesting term not sure i like it lol if you get that angry then you probably got owned
I've spent far too much of my life playing it and have a few too many chars these days, main ones being a 70 Human Pali & the 70 mage (no Horde players at all though)
