Whose stupid fucking decision was it at blizzard to keep DS as 1 entire raid for normal and heroic.

You had the perfect bloody design with the LFR and having 2 instances.  That should have been continued with DS Normal Heroic.  All I have to say is get your shit together for MoP, it is your last chance, hell it may be too late already.  I missed that point because given how you did T11 with BWD, Tot4W and BT then you were returning to that design with T13.

This was a stupid god damn design for your middle of the road guilds given the shared normal/heroic/10/25 man lockouts.  I can not believe how stupid your design has been with the entirety of Cataclysm End Game.  additionally you screw over guild progression because your bloody data reporting on the guild api does not actually give real boss statics on kills with your inability to identify between a 10 and 25 man guild group.  You make wow progress and all of your support community that actually make your game as big of a success as it is have to jump through convoluted hoops due to your lack of foresight.

I blame myself for being so completely pissed about this, I thought with the 4.3 dungeon design the developers had finally got their heads out of their asses.  I guess you need to loose another 1 – 2 million subscribers due to boredom  or hitting their head against the wall because there is no where to progress due to all the fucking restrictions you have placed on raiding.

I am so glad that Star Wars has a good single play story-line as it actually gives me something to do, that is not running boring dailies over and over for months.

And a clip to further express my feelings on this.

Fast Tube by Casper

Essentially all 6 of us agreed to role need on everything we could and let the rolls sort it out.  This is what I call live by the roll die by the roll.  Now if we did win something that was not ideal or was labeled dps and was caster and a melee got it pass the item to a caster in our group.  This then would be bettering our group and while somewhat adversarial to the other 19 it is collaborative and cooperative within our group.

While I am torn on whether this type of collaboration should be allowed, it now is and given the shitty loot system in WoW it is really the only way to play, other than getting really lucky, which is bullshit.

For the LFR players are bitching up a storm on how the loot system needs to be fairer or more intelligent.  While that would be nice there are always going to be winners and losers and people bitching about something.  The answer is actually very simple and straightforward, which means that if it is ever implemented it will be 2-3 expansions from now or in a different game.

The Answer is Blizzard DKP, with a change to the loot tables for LFR.

All Boss Loot tables will only consist of Tier Tokens.
Each Boss will drop 2 Token and no other loot in LFR.
Each Boss will award 1 Blizz-DKP Point/Token.
In each LFR Instance and Capitol there will be a Blizz-DKP Vendor.
Each Vendor will have all the other gear that would normally drop in the LFR level of the instance to purchase.
At the end of each Tier all DKP is converted to JP like VP is now, (May need to raise the cap on JP).
Blizz-DKP is earned each boss kill regardless of whether the player qualifies for loot or not. 

Given a normal full clear of Dragon Soul on 25 man we would see 8 * 4 = 32 pieces of loot.  Given a 25 man raid that is  1.28 pieces of loot per player per week.  So if we halve the # of loot drops because we will still have the tier tokens drop randomly from the bosses, that works out to an average of .64 pieces of loot per person per raid tier per week.

So what should items cost then.

Most pieces of gear should be worth 12 Blizz-DKP, 2 handed weapons 24 Blizz-DKP.  Now given rarity and stat point cost each actual piece would be acceptable to be worth 10-15 or even 18 for 1 handed weapons of a higher item level and 30 for 2-handers that are of a half tier higher.

The most important part of this whole system transformation is the last requirement that I bolded above.  This is important because we want to reward players willing to help kill bosses that they no longer qualify for loot from, i.e. reward their effort.

I have long hated the random loot system, actually for the entirety of my time playing wow.  It is not a major break as most of the other systems seem way to grind-y and I have come to accept that we need at least a little of the “Slot Machine Loot System” to keep the monkeys addicted to the chance of loot.

Yes I do realize that there will be some that will completely whore this out and run enough LFR to purchase LFR items in every slot the first week.  My opinion on that is, who cares.  If they are having fun and they help others complete the instances at the same time then so be it.  If you have the time and patience to do that more power to you.

I think this hybrid loot system which is very similar to the JP/VP system with the exception that it is for gear in the middle of the 2 which makes it different.  At the end of every tier of content the left over DKP should be converted to JP just as VP is to reset each tier.

At that point, I was and still am to a lesser extent bitter and disappointed in Cataclysm.  The release of MoP information at Blizzcon got me interested in WoW again for a few days, and then after returning from the event, I actually ran a heroic or 2.  I was then immediately burnt out again as the heroics/Zulroics were too long, took too much effort for way to little reward.  The thought of attempting to queue up for one of these was enough to cause me to log off and go play an Xbox game, EVE Online, Civ5, anything other than WoW.  Fortunately enough for me I was able to get into the D3 Beta so that distracted me for several weeks.  However after the 3rd character data wipe, it induced the same inertia into logging into it that the Zulroics did.

I already ranted a bit over the raid design and the stay the course attitude that was expressed at Blizzcon.

Now that 4.3 has been out a few weeks, I have to say that with a few minor tweaks if the stay the course plan in MoP is like 4.3 I can accept that.  I would still prefer and Ulduar model with LFR auto-locking to the easiest setting but like I said minor tweaks.

IMO 4.3 is one of the most successful patches to an expansion that has come out for WoW.  The other contenders would be Ulduar and the original ZA patches.

What metric am I using to decide this.  Well since 4.3 hit the live servers I have most likely run more heroics than I did the entirety of Cataclym up until 4.3.  I VP capped on at least 6 characters for the past 2 weeks.  On average that amounted to about 7 heroics per character which puts the estimate at around 35 heroics a week for 2 weeks, and some LFR on top of that.  There were large stretches of patch 4.2 where I did not run 1 heroic a week.  I just did not care, the normal heroics while quick and a ROFLStomp, which I find entertaining did not really get me anything and the Zulroics were a major Pain In The ASS, so I did not run anything, see earlier description of playing other games and reading several book series, including The Game of Thrones.

The only really major Negative I have for this patch is the complete lack of consistency in the handling of Professions and the AH.  But given Blizzards track record with crafting professions in the game I should not be surprised but it is still a major annoyance because, the crafting systems are a subsystem in the game that I actually enjoy pissing with in games.  The fact that tailoring Dream Cloth is still Bo(FUCKING)P when Chaos orbs are now BoE is pathetic.  Please for the love of whatever demon of the lower planes in hell you worship Blizzard hire some more designers to deal with your crafting professions and only your crafting professions.  Additionally hire some people to actually model your AH a bit so that it is not the major cesspool that it is in the current state.    Your rarity dynamics on component materials that should be rare versus common are all FUBARed at the moment.

Anyway all in all I am pretty happy with the patch and hope to see some rapid iteration on the LFR.  I honestly believe that LFR by the time MoP is finished will be to Normal/Heroic Raids as Random Heroics are to Normal Heroics.  There needs to be greater rewards to the investment of time to run Random Raids multiple times in a week.  Be it major Gold or Major JP incentive.

I will most likely make another post about this Dev Watercooler but I wanted to comment on this separately and not as a large tangent in a more serious post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw

I have stopped raiding for this expansion.  I may attempt to raid again in 4.3 but as it stands now unless 4.3 is a redesign of their raiding standards for this expansion I am mostly Waiting on D3, Old Republic and or GW2.  I hate how every raid encounter other than TB:BH, is a GD gimmick fight.  Additionally almost every encounter in T11 was like this as well.  So why do I hate gimmick fights so much?  The answer is simple because it can not be brute forced or soloed by average and less than average players after it becomes useless.  Prime example that I was introduced to this problem was BWL.  I dual boxing and another guild member went to farm BWL, given our gear we should be able to face roll the instance.  If it was just a simple numbers game then yes we would have.  But no the first encounter was a cock block because of the MC mechanic and the constant stream of adds.  Especially when you can’t even damage the Eggs unless it is from the MCed NPC.

I will tell you that unlike, NAXX, Ulduar, ICC, BT, SSC, Kara, TK, Hyjal you will not see people run T11/T12 when the next expansion comes out because they will still be a pain in the ass due to the gimmick encounters that we have to deal with at the moment.

Now they said that the 4.3 raid will be like Ulduar, this is either very promising or going to be an utter horror of an instance.  If they mean 12 bosses/encounters in 1 instance on 1 raid ID that will suck but is bearable.  If it means the preceding and also has the current binary encounter difficulty setting for Normal/Heroic then it is be a nightmare.  If it is the 12 bosses on 1 ID and they boss encounters have multiple levels of difficulty like FL, Freiya, Yogg then it will be a bit better than the Firelands.

What would be best would be a multiple dungeon Raid Tier of 3-5 bosses per ID per Week and have multiple levels of difficulty per encounter then that would be the best of both worlds.  I will not hold my breath on this one.

There was so much potential for a really great game with the promise of Cataclysm and the revamp of the Old World and Talent Trees.   It unfortunately it was squandered and burned to hell with the encounter and mechanical difficulties introduced with the Dungeon/Heroic and First Tier of Raiding was current.  Instead of learning from the numbers and making Firelands more open and welcoming to all types of players they doubled down on the difficulty for the pretty snowflake encounter design and it is a failure.

It think there are things that could be done to redeem Firelands a little bit but 2 months in it is a little too late for it.

Before I get into Tanking and Threat, let me bring up one change I found out about last night that had me swearing a bit in a random I was running.  There are very few things that I find “fun” in the game at the moment.  I find many thing entertaining and can hold my attention but most I would not consider just fun.  One of the really pure fun in a devious sort of way was a trick I learned in The Vortex Pinnacle.  You see these really annoying mobs called Minister’s of Air that can knock you back and over the edge depending upon placement and then will stand there and spam lightning bolts every about .5 seconds for what seems 10 seconds, they are a real annoying pain in the ass.  Well when I was leveling and gearing my Priest, I would have laughing fits when I would Mind Control them and run them over the side of the walkways, thus killing them and getting rid of them.  This no longer works, they now re-spawn with full health.  Now I do not see what is so game breaking with actually using your class abilities to defeat an encounter.  I have long said that if you want use to play the game a certain way Blizzard to tell us the strategy we should use.  If you just nerf this type of play and make our abilities worthless then why are they still in the fucking game.

So since you refuse to let us use Mind Control effectively then just remove it.  The alternative would be to make it like fear/enslave demon so that the priest has a pet to use for a short time.  But as a channeled CC it is bullshit.

Ok back to the tanking.

Ya tanking is not fun in Cataclysm due to the threat problems and it is even worse when you have a new fresh tank and are grouped up with a bunch of characters in T11/12 gear, when the tank has an average iLvl of 330.  But then this was a foreseeable issue because as you say it is just a numbers issue.  Many of us would like to see an expansion where the game does not have to be redesigned every content patch, at least for the issues that are just numbers.  Honestly I would rather see threat stay the same and have boss mechanics simplified but your elite and very vocal minority in the game will bitch and moan too much.

Well this is turning into a post of tangents.

On to the topics of Warrior and Druid Tanking and Active Defensive abilities.

If the tanking classes are going to get a bit of an overhaul and new abilities are going to be added or existing modified, mayhap we should also look at removing some.  I have always considered some classes, Druid, Rogue, DK as having too many abilities, and I really started to think about it more seriously after the post on WoWInsider about the 5×2 initiative, http://wow.joystiq.com/tag/5×2/.  I really think this is something all classes could use a working over on in the next expansion.  Essentially review abilities and make it such that they would fit this model.  I will say this much if you want to use your full range of abilities as a druid, priest, DK, warrior, rogue it is not really possible unless you do some extensive game modding and/or macros.

Anyway the changes that GC mentions in the Dev Water Cooler blog post for Warrior and Druid worry me.  The active mechanics for DK work for 1 reason they are a 2 resource tank.  Paladins are a 1.5 at the moment because they really only have 1 reliable way to stack holy points.  For it to really work for the rage based classes as rage being something to be managed, there needs to be a way to reliably generate rage.  This is achievable if you divide all the Warrior/Feral abilities into 2 or 3 categories.  The simpler Rage Negative/Rage Positive breakdown or the slightly more expanded Rage Negative/Rage Positive/Rage Neutral abilities.  Rage Neutral just means that the abilities use rage to activate and in general generate the same amount of rage that they consume, crits could affect this depending upon design.  This is important because the most frustrating thing with my Warrior and Feral Druid is the beginning of the fight being rage starved and then having to work the entire fight to attempt to keep threat because I can not generate it enough when not being hit and or dodging or parrying.

I can’t really say more on the subject until more details are released but I know they will make things work, I am just not certain it will be fun.

To give some background on my opinion of Cataclysm content, let me point to a few older posts.
Impressions of the Cataclysm (PVE) – Month 1
Guild Raiding Progression Ranking – Another Fail of Blizzard
Trash + Unreliable CC + Massive CC Requirements = Waste of Time. This is Good Content?
Something Good to Break the Negative – Leveling Content 80-85
Market Chaos: BoP + Poor Itemization = Market Hell
Tier 11 Raiding – Blizzards Failure on Achievements and Reporting
Blizzard Fails 25-Man Raiding… Again.

Some Previous Hopes for Cataclysm and Future Content
A guess at the Raid Between Firelands and Deathwing – More Trolls
The Vision of a new MMO Encounter Paradigm
Will we ever see scalable Raid Content again?
A Tale of 2 Hunters
Efficiency – Measurement and Balancing Issues
Additional UI Improvements I wish Blizzard would Tackle

I was never a raider in Vanilla, that is most likely a good thing.  Given how it was described I would have dropped the game and most likely would not have looked back.  I may have rejoined during Wrath but neither happened so can’t say for sure.

Now to start looking at the current raiding Data here is a table that is mostly up to date as of August 15 2011.

To make the numbers easier to understand here are a few charts based off the data.

Sections

• Purple – Start 10 Man
• Blue – End 10 Man
• Yellow – Start 25 Man
• Beige – End 25 Man

So what has this chart told us, that after the success of raiding that was WotLK, as far as getting player into raiding and completing content was completely and totally killed with the cataclysm.  The other interesting thing to see was that those 25 man guilds that survived about 2 in 3 stayed together between 4.0 and 4.2.

No admittedly the numbers are skewed when comparing previous tiers to the current tier as the current tier is not yet finished.  However if you look at the overall trends they show that for normal mode the general trend for completion is about the same.  The most disturbing numbers that should be taken from this, given that WoW started Raiding at 40 man and then went to 25 for the previous 2 expansions is now a 10 man raiding game for the most part.  9 out of 10 guilds that started Tier 10 – ICC did not even attempt the first tier in Cataclysm, Tier 11.

I don’t know what Blizzards goal for Cataclysm raiding was prior to the release. All I can say is that something went horribly, horribly wrong. My 2 cents on the subject which I have ranted about on this blog before, is that it was the first tuning of content on an ENTRY Tier or raiding for the new expansion killed guilds. Every expansion the content difficulty needs to have a reset. The first Tier or raiding will need to have content to introduce raiding concepts to the masses anew. This is good for both new and old players alike. The veteran players may bitch about how easy the content is but when you don’t have such a reset you will most likely see a drop off like we saw with Cataclysm. Honestly though with 90% of 25 man guilds disbanding or giving up on raiding, there very well may be no going back.

Lissanna, my wife, ya we got married last month, might hate this idea but it needs to be said. Given some of the comments and feed back that I saw from MMO-Champions blue tracker, in the next expansion 10 and 25 man raids should be done away with and just make it 15 man raiding.

The other option would be to actually put some constraints on the content design.

Not every boss has to be brand new and unique. Hell if you need to take mechanics from a couple of different bosses and make it a new combination of abilities that is good. Also every tier needs a few Patchwork / Tank & Spank bosses. Even if you have to pad them out. There needs to be more fights where you don’t have to be running at 100-110% every second or the raid wipes. That is what heroic modes are for. Also if bosses have more levels of difficulty than normal and stupid hard heroic mode then it will allow for a smoother more consistent flow of progressions.

When I started thinking about this post, I was planning to go all fire and brimstone on the content. However after the wedding and not raiding for several weeks, I have come to realize that I just don’t give a damn. I am done raiding until 4.3 or the next expansion. I just do not find the current raiding scene or really anything in the game enjoyable anymore, other than playing with alts when I feel like it and making Gold. But even then the limits on crafting materials are so stupid that the crafting profession scene is not even available. Oh and ZA and ZG can go straight to hell, of course when you run them for the 1000th time it feels like you are there. God Dammit Blizzard at least if you make a new tier of dungeons and make it so that it is the only thing you want to run to make it the optimal at least make them quick and make sure there are more than 2 dungeons. ToC5 was hell because it was the same thing over and over and over. The 3 with ICC were cool but HoR was a wHoRe unless you completely out geared it.

Hell by the sounds of it I am tired of playing the secret pre-pre-pre-alpha of Titan, the game called World of Warcraft.  I think I am now waiting on Diablo 3 and Titan.

Blizzard has already created the 2 mechanics to create the best raiding, which would surpass all of their earlier Tiers.  All they have to do is combine the multiple levels of difficulty found in the Ulduar Bosses and combine it with the 5% progressive buff that came out with ICC and capped out at 25% over 6 months (0,5,10,15,20,25)%, which means by the time the next tier of raiding comes out the previous tier has between a 15% and 25% overall buff.

Well this went off on a couple of different tangents but I really don’t have much more to say on the subject.  I will just have to wait until details about 4.3 starts to come out.

We do not need separate achievements, unless that is the only way Blizzard can track the information.  What we need is a Kill Board/List for each Guild under the Guild Information Section of the Website/JSON Interface, or what ever other method they wish to track this information.

It would need 1 Entry Per Boss, Per Raid Size, Per Difficulty.  I say entry because you could store all 4 Timestamps in 1 Row in a Database if need be.  It really depends upon how normalized you would make the data.

Well said this would be short and it is.  Any complaints and opinions I have for the Trash and Encounter complexity I will save for another post.

There are 2 ways to make Rated BGs more popular and get more teams of all play levels into queue.

1. Remove the need for a full team and allow people to queue, also let full raids queue for non-rated BGs to practice and still at least gain honor.  This will allow new teams to work out their issues on PUGs and other training rBG groups.  Additionally if people can queue up to fill out teams it will allow more dynamic gear acquisition.
2. The biggest change that I think is really all that is needed is at 3:1 ratio of conquest points.  3 going to the victors and 1 going to the defeated, this of course is just in share so most likely 150/50 or some other similar split.  Essentially you need to pay/reward the defeated for their time or soon they will not bother to queue, especially if it take more than 2-3 matches to decide ranking.

An alternative system would be to make the league system like Starcraft 2 uses and have 10 demo matches at the beginning of each season or for each team/player each season.  Maybe this is when during you reward the defeated but when they get out of the trial period of the season they no longer qualify for the Conquest points.  This would make the most sense on a per player basis now that I think about it more while writing.

The changes coming to Rated Battlegrounds in 4.2 seem to be a quick fix that in the end will not really work.  The flaws are at the fundamental way the system and rewards work.  One or both will need to change.  Also this really describes both Arenas and rBGs.  IMO both need to change before I would truly find them worth my time other than as a causal something to do when bored and even then the pain is just too great most of the time.

While I was questing and reading up on the lore associated with the revamped ZA/ZG it dawned on me that it was setting up the perfect foundation for another large outside zone and possibly internal dungeons and raids for another tier of content eventually.  Now over the years I have made comments to a similar effect about Gilneas.  That is now a zone in the game with a BG.  I could see this area introduced in a later patch to follow-up 4.1, some time after 4.2, possibly in the 5.x series but I hope sooner actually before Deathwing or if it is after it is the in between raid zone like the Sunwell that would introduce the following expansion.

Zandalar

The word links to the wowpedia entry with a small map, I think from the RPG book.  However looking at the small map and the description I could see a large outside world zone with at least 1 raid instance and several smaller dungeons including plenty of space for a progressive questing zone like Sunwell and what they are now doing with Firelands.

Depending upon what has corrupted some or all the Zandalar it could be used as a precursor to the next expansion or extra content leading to some other plot path that the player base on average has not even considered.  It would be the left turn that Ulduar took in the WotLK story arc, it really did not fit in very well.  Honestly it would have been a better instance to place after ICC leading into Cataclysm and Deathwing, given the Old God corruption angle.

Well I wanted to get this thought out there, hopefully someone else will pick up the thread and start a conversation in the community.