Holy crap, you really have no self awareness whatsoever, do you? This really does get funnier every day.

 

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I found the whole thing to be condescending towards their players (specifically the ones that don't appreciate their change of vision for the game.) Don't like the changes? Tough!

I've decided to pass on dungeons until they rethink their stance on healing. If that makes me a "bad" or a face-roller, I don't care. I'm not going to participate in something that's not fun. Leveling alts for now and if that gets old I'll move on to something else.

A sane approach I can only approve. And no, it doesn't make you bad.

 

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I am doing the same thing that I did in WotLK. I played until the content took more time than I was willing to invest and then I took a break. I either stopped playing or I goofed around on alts until the next content patch at which time the original content difficulty usually was eased to the point where I could do it in the time I was willing to invest.

 

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I seriously doubt Ghostcrawler even knows what is going on in his own office. He must be spending way to much time reading the forums.


I'll explain:

Vanilla - My guild didn't ever once set up 'raid times' to run instances to get gear for people to raid. Instances took 2 hours to complete, not because of the difficulty but because of the size of the instance. Took me almost 2 months to gear up for raids; not because of the difficulty of the instances but because of the drop rates of the gear I needed to get into raids.


Burning Crusades - Still didn't set up 'raid times' to complete normal or heroic instances in my guild. Took me 2 weeks of grinding out rep for keys for 2 or 3 heriocs in which I used to get into raids 2 weeks later after getting my keys. Took me 6 months to completely fill out my rep set for my key ring into heroics. Was still raiding the entire time. Heroics took anywhere from 45 minutes - an hour gearing up and went down to about 30 minutes on farm mode after getting out geared (which didn't happen in vanilla).


Wrath of the Lich King - Still didn't set up 'raid times' to complete normal or heroic instances in my guild. Took me about 2 weeks of grinding heroics 4 hours a day (I had cut back my gearing time due to having 4 max level alts at this time and I'm just going to talk about only one of these toons.) Was possible to enter heroics in quested green gear. Time to complete heroics was around 30 minutes to 45 minutes dependent on pug or psuedo pug "/g need peeps for heorics" Was in Naxxramas 10 within a week of release and in Naxx 25 within 3 weeks of release. Adding in the Queue tool for LFD decreased the time it took to get into raids even entry level raids with alt groups in my guild.


Cataclysm - Took me about 15 hours of gameplay to level up to 85 on my first toon. Took me about 2 weeks to get the 329 Ilevel to be able to queue for heroics took me another 2 weeks to get the Ilevel 336 to be able to be viable in heroics ( I tend to only play healers at the start of xpacs and tend to be a healer in raid groups as 'mains'. Even with the rep grind / grinding 3 normals for 333 gear then the rep for purples. Never once steped into a raid.


To sum up:

Gearing in vanilla wasn't difficulty of the raid or instance, it was drop rate of purple in a raid, and length of the instance to gear up for raids.

Gearing in BC was a grind fest for rep, then a grind fest for much better drop rates in heroics.

Gearing in WotLK wasn't a grind fest at all and the content kept the same level of play throughout the entire xpac.

Gearing in Cataclysm is near impossible because you have to 'raid' heroics which defeats the LFD tool, and is near impossible to complete unless your in raid gear as a pug.


The game has never been difficult until now. Solo-ability to reach max level is only one reason WoW has been popular. Ease of getting into raid content is the other reason. They removed that ability and are losing subs because of it. I know this because of the number of posts to address the content to ease the minds of people that might be thinking of leaving like I did.


GL if your still in WoW playing and Like it. I didn't and I left. I'll keep an eye out and see if they fix it. They won't though so I'll bid you addue.

I have 3 85's at this time, and i have several others waiting for their turn to be leveled. This is including 3 more 80's, 2 76's, a 74, and then a bunch under 70 on down the totem pole to my uncreated worgen and goblin (read: created but sitting at level 1.) Based on how easy it is to level 80-85, I expect that my alts will all be max level pretty quickly, just need to get past the lump that is 1-80.

With all that in mind, my main has an ilvl of i think 328. I haven't completed a single heroic, yet, though I've tried. Stonecore is a 20 minute run on normal, and after two hours, I had to go to bed because I was working a 12 hour shift the next day. Gearing her isn't easy, and I'll admit, I myself am disheartened. I'm supposed to be recruiting raiders for my guild, but the problem I'm encountering is I don't even want to raid right now. I don't want to do the heroics because they take too long.

I agree that GC's post was a TLR L2P. However, I know how to play, and I got very good at playing my priest. I do move out of the dust cloud, I do move out of the ground effects that hurt/kill you. I don't stand in front of dragons or right behind them. However, 2+ hours for a heroic is something I just don't have time to do. I work a full time job, often in the form of 12 hour shifts. I don't want to come home after working for 12 hours and sit for the only 2-2.5 hours I have before I need to go to bed in order to do it all again the next day just to do one heroic. I'd rather use that 2-2.5 hours for RP (yeah I'm on an RP server. Flame me all you want.) or level an alt. Heck, I'd even rather watch youtube some nights or watch a movie with my husband.

I don't mind that they're difficult, I don't mind that they're meant to be time consuming, just that their philosophy of being available to a wide variety of players is defeated if they're also wanting you to be able to devote a full day to two or three instance runs. Not all of us can/will do that. But yeah, I'll keep playing. I enjoy the game and I like the expac so far for the content that's here. My husband is already bored with it. He's the type who, once he's done it he doesn't want to do it again. He doesn't want to wipe for hours in a heroic, either.

So yeah, GC and the devs do have it wrong. We don't want the multi-hour raid time wipefests just to gear up for the multi-hour raid time wipefests as we defeat the raid content.

 

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I still stand by my ealier conclution that the dungeons have not been made challenging, they have been made tedious.


Ghostcrawler himself admits that players are not having fun. There is a such thing as something that can be challenging with out being tedious.


Challenge and tedium are not one in the same.


That being said I won't bag on them too much because it seems like Blizzard has not created a middle ground between zerg fest dungeons as they call them, and this new tedious content.


I don't know the answer myself here. With the current tools implace I can't suggest ways to create challenge with out making the content tedious. Sure I could dream up new and creative tools and mechanics that could be used as I am sure any of us could. Problem there is I am not a developer so I don't know the guidlines to work with in as far as a certain mechanic being viable from a programming perspective, especially in concidering it working with the existing content.


For now this is Blizzards version of a challenge. This is their vision.


Even though Ghostcrawler doesn't come out and say it, it is plain to me that it is either this way, or go back to how it was in Wrath. At least for now.


Which would you choose?

 

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Right now, the lesser of the 2 evils is the way it was in Wrath. Yes the heroics were too easy and got boring rather quickly with the lol faceroll, but at least the majority of players were running them instead of running away from them.

but that was the point of the 2 evils. LOLFACEROLL instances made it where more then 5% of the population got to see raid content. Even high end raid content. Adding in queue's for heroics allowed for even more casuals to enter raid content.


LOLUGOTFACEROLLED heroics is a step into the wrong direction. Look at the # of guilds in high end raid content currently. What is the population % even looking at raid content currently?


I would rather get the majority of players into highend raid content, then to go back to the less then 1% of the people in the entire wow community that I had to down kiljaeden with before WotLK release.


If you know anyone in full highend raid gear atm talk with them for a lil bit about gear. If you don't feel like your completely worthless in less then 5 minutes because of the Epeen waving, you will within a few more minutes.


I learned my lesson with BC about not shakin my Epeen. So what if I was server first to down Illidian. So what if my guild had been raiding since vanilla and was server first C'thun defeat. Didn't make a bit of difference really. We just seen content that others never would until they could just about solo it.


I as a hardcore raider prefer having pugged raid content. If I can step into trade chat and see that people are doing raid content that i'm on. it's better for the community at large. I can talk about encounters and people know what I mean by it.


Twins in AQ40 - do you know what you had to do with 40 60's to beat that encounter?


Twins in ToC - do you know what to do to beat that encounter on 10 or 25 man?


case in point. I want WotLK back for that sole reason.

Meh, I don't buy the fact that only a very very small percentage of players ever see the higher end content anymore. Yes that was a valid argument in Vanilla when you needed a 40 man group to go into MC and BWL. In order to accomplish that back then you had to havea very organized fairly hard core raiding guild to see that content.


To me that isn't a valid argument anymore. If you really want to see that content you need to make an effort to get yourself into a guild and accomplish that. There are raiding guilds starting up all over the place, look into trade chat for 5 minutes and you'll have the opportunity to join 5 guilds.


Now you only need 10 or 25 people to see this content. If you can't get yourself into this content, it is your own fault plain and simple, I'm not being elitist here, if you want to expirience end game you are going to have to do a little bit more then dancing on the mail box to do it.


I do agree that the heroic content is tedious right now, and because of that less fun. It is still not at the point of being impossible. I've spend a lot of time arguing against the heroic content here, but I would never say its impossible and I would certainly never say only 5% of the player base can access it.

 

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