This is getting a little annoying not having enough people to do the raids we want but I guess with about 2 weeks left before Cata I can understand why people don't want to come for H LK and beat their head against the wall. And you know what? Im fine with that. What i really find annoying is the people who just dont show up and dont tell anyone. If you dont want to come because you are soaking your feet in the bathtub, im fine with that, just tell somebody. I know, I know, its just a game, and i would agree if you said that; however, if you join a raid group those people are expecting you to show up. I dont care why you dont want to show up, as long as you tell someone. I may make some jokes about you if you are whipped or playing cricket with your mother, but I wont care all that much.
I just think that if you were on a sports team, you wouldn't stay on the team very long if simply just decided to not go to some games without letting anyone know. It is not exactly the same situation as raiding but really, how hard is it to get a hold of someone and say that you wont be able to make it. Most guilds have a forum you can post on, my guild leader has his cellphone number available to people, and it is really easy to send an in-game mail.
You may feel otherwise but i think that just because you dont have to personally man up to the situation, doesnt mean that you should do something that would be really frowned upon in real life. I think a lot of this problem stems from how easy WotLK is. Wrath has enabled people who probably need to do more challenging heroics, to simply blow through them and get relatively good gear. The learning curve is not steep enough for new players at the moment. I am not trying to be elitist and say, "casuals shouldnt be able to raid," but i think that raising the barrier to entry would do a lot of good for the general state of raiding. This is why i am optimistic that the new stance on heroics will be good.
Having the ability to be able to raid by putting in less effort is a good thing. During Vanilla and BC, I think they lost a lot of good potential raiders because you had to do so much front end work before you could get into raids. I never got into raiding before WotLK because I just didnt have the time to get all that gear, gems, and enchants.
That was quite the tangent to what i wanted to talk about. Anyways, so we didnt raid ICC on Wednesday because we didnt have the people for it, so we decided to do 10 man ToGC and get the mount that drops when you have 50 attempts left. That was actually a lot of fun. Our gear trivialized a lot of it and it was pretty easy, but it was a lot of fun.
Our raid leader still insisted upon marking the faction champs and explaining the fights in detail, even though during the first fight we only got 4 stacks of the bleed, the worms only burrowed once and Icehowl only charged once. Me and our rogue had a lot of fun listening to "You Face Jaraxxus" to get us in the mood for some ToGC action. When we actually faced Jaraxxus we got one portal and one volcano and blew him apart but i couldnt get that song out of my head. Faction champs is a joke now with our increased health and damage. Valks was originally a really cool idea but it was never really that hard on 10 man in my opinion. anub'arak was pretty easy until P3 when he almost killed me because he was melee'ing me at the same time his aura was ticking for about 10k a second.
Overall it was pretty fun. Good light hearted time. There werent really an big challenges despite our GM saying that "Icehowl still hits hard guys" and then having him hot me for penuts. While i wish we had done our ICC i had a good time and i would do it again.
And if you are wondering about the mount, i had the highest roll with 91...until the pug rolled 100 :(
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Vanilla, BC and WotLK each had it's own little "problem" with casual players. In vanilla, it was hard to get the gear to enter some raids. In BC, if you weren't in a raiding guild, you could forget about everything past Gruul.
ReplyDeleteI can't talk a lot about WotLK since I did not had the chance to enter any raid except Naxx and the first 2 bosses of Ulduar. But from what I heard, WotLK sounds almost too easy... You don't have to be very skilled to be successful in a raid group. All you need is a good gearscore and some boss kills in your stats. In heroics, it's a huge AOE fest and if you can't keep up, you're /votekick from the group even if it's your very first time in said heroic.
I hope Cata will be somewhere between BC and WotLK. A place where good players, even if they haven't the highest gearscore available in-game, will be preferred to brainless gear-a-olics.
I think that after vanilla they really wanted more people to see the content and so they loosened up on some of the gearing requirements, but didnt go far enough with it. Then wrath came and they had another shot at it but this time they overdid it.
ReplyDeleteThat is typically how i see blizzard works i think. They do a little change to see the impact, then they overshoot the mark and then they rein it back.
so far it looks like cata will strike a pretty good spot. They seem to be making raiding more open to people (by not forcing you into a 25 man to do the hardest content) while at the same making things a little bit more difficult in raids and before raids.
I am sure that at some point gear will end up trivializing heroics but i hope that you still need to CC well into, at least, the second tier of raiding in order to be successful at all. If they could make it so that you always needed to be careful in heroics that would be great but i think it would repuire them to be overtuned at 85 for beginners.
I wouldnt say that you dont have to be skilled to be successful in the raids, but for some of wrath raiding, yes, you could do it with unskilled players. this also depends on your def. of successful too. I want to push some content and so i do feel that you need skilled players with you, but for a pug that wants to go 8/12 on regular, that is not really as important.
And on heroics in wrath, yeah they suck. I dont tank them anymore unless a guildy asks me to because they are so boring. I dont care what my group comp is anymore because in most cases if i go in with a guildy me and them could probably clear the instance by ourselves given enough time. Wrath heroics sucks now, which is a shame because i remember regular ingvar giving us a fair amount of trouble when it was new and nobody knew how to do it.
If you want a flushed out thing of my thoughts i did a post on raiding in wrath in october that you could go look at.