Hardcore guild finishes wrath of the lich king, bitches

[zabuni]

A combination of two of the top raiding guilds, Nihilium and SK Gaming, have just finished going through every Wrath raid instance:

http://www.twentyfifthnovember.com/

We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?

I see one of raid bosses dropped a rather large entitlement complex as loot. And yes, Blizzard is folding under the weight of a large player base. Even with the recent nerfs, only a small percentage of the playerbase ever experienced the high end raid content. Why should your ability to feel special rest upon everyone else's ability to experience the rest of the content?

Eh, QQ more. I've never really bought the argument that elite raid guilds serve as aspirational role models for the rest of the playerbase. I over 25% of the playerbase knows who they are.

[Zylon]

Originally Posted by zabuni

Eh, QQ more.

Why should they quit questing?

[mystery]

Originally Posted by zabuni

I see one of raid bosses dropped a rather large entitlement complex as loot.

I have a little bit of a man-crush on you now, Zabs.

[Athryn]

Considering they cleared it all during the beta before, I don't know why they're surprised that they cleared it so quickly now. They did all the learning during beta.

[MarinusWA]

Originally Posted by zabuni

I see one of raid bosses dropped a rather large entitlement complex as loot.

Nothing new there. It's sad and laughable at the same time.

[jellyfish]

Power gamers and speed run experts can do this sort of thing in any game. I don't see how it is of concern to the vast majority of players. And they are the audience the developers care about, I mean make all their money from.

[Zylon]

Dethklok knows how to deal with fans like this.

[RobotPants]

I'm so concerned!

[AaronSofaer]

Originally Posted by Athryn

Considering they cleared it all during the beta before, I don't know why they're surprised that they cleared it so quickly now. They did all the learning during beta.

Many guilds that downed Sunwell bosses during the testing phase found themselves unable to do it on Live, due to balance tweaks, bug fixes, or de-nerfs.

And then of course there're M'uru and KJ, which weren't really downed during Beta... I don't even know if anyone got KJ to Phase 3 on the PTR.


And y'know, you guys might think it's laughable, and call it an entitlement complex or what have you, but content that's trivially easy isn't content that's fun for long. There's a difference between pre-nerf Kael and post-3.0 Kara, if you know what I mean... one of them was to hard, and the other is a 2-hour clear in blues.

It's kind of like people who only ever do BGs complaining bitterly about high-end arena balance. Yes, there needs to be high-end BG balance; no, you won't ever be ranked above 2k. That doesn't mean people who play at 2k+ ratings shouldn't be concerned if the balance is off.


Meh, I probably shouldn't bother. I'm sure most of you who are more than happy to bitch about "entitlement complexes" are the same ones who will bitch that Naxx is so very hard because you can't clear it while semi-AFK mashing one button and standing in fire. :) And then bitch about how hard it is.

[RobotPants]

Yeah, but the people laughing are likely the ones who would never see the content otherwise. Despite what you may think, raiders aren't the only people playing the game and those complaining that they're unable to see shitloads of content due to the inablility to join a raiding guild have just as much right to do so as these hardcore guilds have a right to whine about going through stuff too easily. So who's more "right" in it all? It's good you're including such broad, sweeping generalizations about the people "bitching" here, though.

[Kareem]

I'm not sure the argument is about content being too easy or too hard. Personally, I find it funny that power gamers are complaining that there isn't enough content, since that's easily solvable - i.e. don't powerlevel your toon in shifts and then complain that you got to the endgame too fast.

Also, it doesn't even matter that some of the content might be a bit too easy. So they already learned all the fights in the beta, which most of the WoW population didn't have access to, and then after beating it following all that practice, they complain that it's too easy? It didn't strike them as imbalanced (or possibly imbalanced if they didn't do it on the beta server with the 3.0 changes) prior to powerleveling to 80 in 2 days and clearing it again?

Cry me a river.

[Horrible Oscar]

Having been in Sunwell, I think this is wonderful news. SWP was fun in that it was incredibly challenging, but it was also painful in that it was an epic bumfuck. Sure, 10% of my time in there was enjoying the teamwork and high requirements and the incredible head rush after downing a server first, but 90% was worrying about logistics and having to yell at my guildmates because they only brought four out of the five requisite consumables for Brutallus.

Blizzard will never, ever be able to deliver a satisfying experience to the likes of Nihilum or SK and cater to a measurable portion of their playerbase at the same time. Just because these guys breezed through it hardly means they were half AFK and /dancing in void zones. I feel a little sorry for them, but raid design has gotten too realistic for world firsts to mean anything now.

[Kareem]

Originally Posted by Horrible Oscar

Blizzard will never, ever be able to deliver a satisfying experience to the likes of Nihilum or SK and cater to a measurable portion of their playerbase at the same time.

And we know which portion of the playerbase is the overwhelming majority.

[Hanacker]

I thought the 25-mans were supposed to be really hard and the 10-mans were supposed to be for casuals who just wanted to see the content. If all the 25-mans are beatable within days of release, then something probably is wrong. When is the next round of raids supposed to be released? Maybe those will be harder.

[Dave Long]

I don't understand how it's even remotely a concern if they all knew what to do from the beta. It's like playing a game with a trainer or a Game Genie.

[Libra]

I figured Arthas would be the last encounter in the expansion? Unless it's going to be patched in later like they did with Black Temple.

[Hanacker]

According to Wowwiki, there's a whole bunch of raid content still to be patched in.

[Pogo]

So now Blizzard will release instances with ridiculously hard gear check encounters to compensate for the easier raid game that's currently in place, a la Sunwell Plateau (which most high end guilds didn't even clear before WotLK came out).

[AaronSofaer]

Originally Posted by Dave Long

I don't understand how it's even remotely a concern if they all knew what to do from the beta. It's like playing a game with a trainer or a Game Genie.

People knew what to do when M'uru was released, but that doesn't mean he got killed that night.

[Athryn]

Naxx has been in the game for like 2 years though, and they haven't really changed the fights at all.

[Spect]

Originally Posted by Dave Long

I don't understand how it's even remotely a concern if they all knew what to do from the beta. It's like playing a game with a trainer or a Game Genie.

Knowing the strats is certainly a benefit, but what's troubling to me is that there's no way they could have geared everyone for a 25 man raid. Sure they blew through all the 10 man content, but think about what it would take to gear everyone. There's no way they did this, so that means they went into 25 man content with whatever blues and greens dropped along the way and a couple of purples for the few people that got them. Then they beat the highest level bosses. That's disturbing to me.

[Johan A]

Well.. I have a 5/8 t6-geared protection paladin with all prot gear from BT. I look at maybe 4-5 upgrades that would make life easier when raiding Naxx, but I could pretty much craft a few BS blues to make up for the new defence requirements and be ready to go.

I'm not surprised at all, as there is no gear checks whatsoever in the first 3 raids, and the gear-reset for WOTLK was pretty much nada compared to the TBC one.

I think pretty much all guilds that had illidan dead before 3.0 will have Malygos dead within 2 weeks of getting 25mans to raid.

[Kareem]

Originally Posted by Spect

Knowing the strats is certainly a benefit, but what's troubling to me is that there's no way they could have geared everyone for a 25 man raid. Sure they blew through all the 10 man content, but think about what it would take to gear everyone. There's no way they did this, so that means they went into 25 man content with whatever blues and greens dropped along the way and a couple of purples for the few people that got them. Then they beat the highest level bosses. That's disturbing to me.

That's not a big deal this time around because it seems to me like the gear from the expansion so far isn't the huge leap that TBC gear was from vanilla WoW. I'm level 74 now, and I play with tier 6 geared friends, and we've blown through all the dungeon content that we've played through so far with zero problems, and this is including some dungeon content that's for level 76-78 and without much in the way of CC - we're 2 protection warriors, 1 fury warrior, a balance druid, and a holy paladin. And I think I've only replaced 2 tank items (both 5-man blues, a cape from Steamvault and shoulders from Sethekk), and 1 dps item.

[Mordrak]

Originally Posted by AaronSofaer

Meh, I probably shouldn't bother. I'm sure most of you who are more than happy to bitch about "entitlement complexes" are the same ones who will bitch that Naxx is so very hard because you can't clear it while semi-AFK mashing one button and standing in fire. :) And then bitch about how hard it is.

Way to challenge those stereotypes!

[mouselock]

Originally Posted by RobotPants

Despite what you may think, raiders aren't the only people playing the game and those complaining that they're unable to see shitloads of content due to the inablility to join a raiding guild have just as much right to do so as these hardcore guilds have a right to whine about going through stuff too easily.

Seems like it could be argued that the vast majority of the non-raid game is more oriented toward the casual players though. Take it to the extreme: Should I be allowed to see all the 25-man content if I form a guild with folks who take the next year and a half simply to get to 80, and then at the very end have a few months to get through all the raids?

There's no way to make content that keeps the entire range of the player base happy. At one end there will always be folks for whom it's too much time investment/effort. At the other end there are folks who'll always want more challenge. The question is at the beginning of a brand new expansion how much expanse should there be between those folks. I'd argue there should be a pretty wide gulf, and that ongoing balancing/tweaking of the game should expand the casual power base faster than the power player content gets added, so that by the end of the cycle you have folks "finishing" content.

The uberguilds were hoping for some nice challenging surprises a la Sunwell and got nothing. Now they have to wait for Blizzard to add something new. Meanwhile the casuals who do indeed have every right to see all that stuff are level 71 and months away from even considering maybe possibly raiding. Plenty of time to tune that stuff down if need be, but essentially no way to tune it up for that portion of the audience.

[Mordrak]

Originally Posted by mouselock

There's no way to make content that keeps the entire range of the player base happy. At one end there will always be folks for whom it's too much time investment/effort. At the other end there are folks who'll always want more challenge. The question is at the beginning of a brand new expansion how much expanse should there be between those folks. I'd argue there should be a pretty wide gulf, and that ongoing balancing/tweaking of the game should expand the casual power base faster than the power player content gets added, so that by the end of the cycle you have folks "finishing" content.

But that doesn't really happen. Heck, what was their most played instance by the end of TBC... Kara. But that was because there was nothing else for those in-between... and everyone bitched about only being able to do Kara. Almost every major content patch brought in new content for raiders and casuals didn't get a new 5 man until the very last one. I'm not saying the way it is now is the best, but I really thought that gulf was going to be between the 10 man versions and the 25 man versions. That seemed like a decent compromise, but I guess they made them both easy. The old model left out the not quite high end player but those who were still leaps and bounds above casual players for whom it takes months to get to max level. It took me two weeks in TBC.

[Athryn]

Originally Posted by AaronSofaer

Meh, I probably shouldn't bother. I'm sure most of you who are more than happy to bitch about "entitlement complexes" are the same ones who will bitch that Naxx is so very hard because you can't clear it while semi-AFK mashing one button and standing in fire. :) And then bitch about how hard it is.

I'm pretty surprised and honestly kind of offended that you would take this attitude, Aaron. There are plenty of guilds that reside in the in between of the total extremes that you describe.

[mouselock]

Originally Posted by Mordrak

The old model left out the not quite high end player but those who were still leaps and bounds above casual players for whom it takes months to get to max level. It took me two weeks in TBC.

Draw me a definitive line for "High end enough they should be able to see all the content" and "Not high end enough to see all the content" please.

[Mordrak]

Originally Posted by mouselock

Draw me a definitive line for "High end enough they should be able to see all the content" and "Not high end enough to see all the content" please.

It might actual help if you read the post. I'm not saying that every player needs to see high end raid content, though I am happy that they attempted to create tiers for the same raid dungeon. What I am saying is that they should add content for that middle group at a rate similar (or at least in the same ball park) as they do for raiders. Just because someone isn't good enough to be a raider, doesn't mean that person goes through their skill level appropriate content at a snails pace.

The line between difficulty levels has seemed pretty clear in the past:

solo, small group world quests. -> 5-man dungeons -> 10 man raids -> 25 man raids.

Throwing in a single 5 man dungeon at the end of an expansion's life cycle is kind of pathetic, especially for a game with 10 million subscribers.

[Joe M.]

Originally Posted by Athryn

I'm pretty surprised and honestly kind of offended that you would take this attitude, Aaron. There are plenty of guilds that reside in the in between of the total extremes that you describe.

Plus, there's no freaking fire in Naxxramas. What a noob.