official World of Warcraft

[firey]

Bleh, lack of heals/tanks make it hard to play as dps. I have had a disc priest main since BC [before that I was a mage], so I have done heals for years now, and heals are fun but I wanted to have little to no thought required to play so I made a Shammy. I made it all the way to 82 before I had to heal. In the past 3 dungeons I have done I've been the healer, it's nice and all but makes playing what you really want to, difficult.

It's no fun waiting 20+ mins for a dungeon as DPS, with heals I am in in under 5. Thing is though, if I wanted to heal I could play my priest. Just funny how you pretty much HAVE to roll a pure dps toon to avoid healing or tanking.

[the evn show]

Leck, the shaman who's playing is a main-switching for this tier. We've given up trying to recruit a competent shaman, they just don't exist. His music is a deliberate troll so just mute it. If you've done the fight ~2 weeks ago or more it's worth going back to have another peek because it's been buffed significantly since October.

Overall I think Dragonsoul is too damn easy. Blizzard tuned the difficulty of normal mode below T11 (pre-4.2). I'm hoping for fairly significant across-the-board buffs (roughly +20% HP/damage to everything in the zone) before this stuff hits live. Unfortunately with the build flagged as "release" and only 1 or 2 more raid lock outs, I'm not sure we're going to get that.

The fights are interesting, fun, and have enjoyable mechanics but they're too forgiving to be challenging. My complaints (so far) apply to the 10/25m normal modes and to the few heroic 10m fights I've seen. I'm hoping to get a couple of 25m heroics this week but I'm not counting on it. I don't care if looking-for-raid is trivial, but I really think normal mode is too easy for any competent non-heroic guild to enjoy for the next ~4-6 months.

The notable exception (heroic deathwing) reminds me too much of ragnaros: 10 minutes of punishment phase for a wipe at 20%. That stuff is soul crushing, nobody likes it. I wish they'd take a page from Sinestra's book for the last boss.

[Noveed]

Overall I think Dragonsoul is too damn easy. Blizzard tuned the difficulty of normal mode below T11 (pre-4.2). I'm hoping for fairly significant across-the-board buffs (roughly +20% HP/damage to everything in the zone) before this stuff hits live. Unfortunately with the build flagged as "release" and only 1 or 2 more raid lock outs, I'm not sure we're going to get that.

My thoughts exactly! I have been trying to get guldies on the PTR but since we are extremely casual they will not bother but then at the same time they get stressed about progression ...

LFR is a joke you do not get punished for standing in bad stuff like fire or goo or whatever and even with rubbish DPS with fail rotations you can still make it comfortably within the enrage timer.

Normal feels a bit easy to or maybe just right for your average Joe of a player. I have not tested any HCs but I can see the guild doing better in DS than FL pre-nerf.

[Bryan R.]

Had a good hour and a half on Heroic Ragnaros just for fun last night. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would have been. I guess we were just expecting the worst. Too bad we were so behind in starting Firelands. Would have been nice to have a while to work on him before gear nerfs the fight.

[the evn show]

The thing with heroic rag wasn't that his mechanics were particularly hard, nor that the DPS requirements were "obscene" (certainly not once you had ilevel 385 and/or there was a 15% HP nerf). The big issue was that phase 1-3 took 10+ minutes. Failure in phase 4 (which has a significant RNG component) means you have to go through punishment phase all over. Even a guild that's been farming him for months can still die in P4, when you're trying to learn the encounter you'll certainly wipe dozens of times while you figure out how to handle traps under boss, or crappy dreadflames, or frost doubled-up when meteor is due or...

Every failure is a ~15m time-sink just to get back to where you were.

Related: Dragonsoul went live, it was trivial. Took 2.25 hours to clear.

[S00N3R FR3AK]

2.25 hours for a guild that spends a lot of time in heroics. I don't see my guild clearing in the first week.

[the evn show]

2.25 hours for a guild that spends a lot of time in heroics. I don't see my guild clearing in the first week.

For comparison, we spent '6 real hours' to clear Firelands - that's a pretty big difference in relative difficulty IMO.

Most of the encounters aren't too complex: the first 5 are extremely forgiving, gunship is kinda tricky. Spine takes a little 'coordination' but it isn't too tricky. Madness takes a little experimentation to figure out whether you want to handle it with tank/healers carrying or with raw DPS but the basic mechanics are easy to understand and the DPS requirements are pretty relaxed given the ease of obtaining 391 for the last 3 months.

I'd bet any guild capable of 7/7 normal mode will go 6/8 tonight. they'll probably want to wait for somebody to work out the "best" strategy for the deathwing fights. It's not so much that they need a big explanation but normal mode guilds might not be up to the experimentation it takes to figure it out what will work best.

[S00N3R FR3AK]

wow new heroics are a joke. Lost out to a second alt for a freaking great trinket I needed and was not happy. I am the only person in my guild who would pass on gear while on a alt to a main raider. Some of my guildies do nothing but raid on 4-5 alts. But this alt I lost too isn't even raiding.

[Shaun N.]

wow new heroics are a joke. Lost out to a second alt for a freaking great trinket I needed and was not happy. I am the only person in my guild who would pass on gear while on a alt to a main raider. Some of my guildies do nothing but raid on 4-5 alts. But this alt I lost too isn't even raiding.

Complain to your guild.

[LaP]

2.25 hours for a guild that spends a lot of time in heroics. I don't see my guild clearing in the first week.

We took around 2 hours yesterday to kill the first 4 bosses. We did not really know the strat as nobody in the raid tried it on the ptr and we did not check any video of the fight. We only knew the strats from the raid thing explaining strat added in cata and by reading some blog.

We are a semi hardcore semi casual group. We are 6/7 heroic in fireland and completed the glory achievement. But we did it after the nerf.

It was relatively easy. Specially the 4th boss which is a joke. I can see average groups having some difficulties with the ooze boss since some combination of oozes make it slightly harder than other bosses. We would have downed the 5th boss but we did not know the strat and it took us 5 tries to figure out what to do. Some people in the group did not see the special action button because of special UI and had to make a macro so it did not help either. But we will down him easily tonight no doubt about that.

Overall it's a really easy raid. But we are around 385-388 ilevel (i'm 388) so of course it's supposed to be easy.

I don't get the mentality of people who think only 1% of the players should be able to complete the normal mode of a raid. And only .0000000001% the heroic mode.

I mean people should wake up. There's now 2 raids. Normal mode and heroic mode. Normal mode should be hard only for extremely casual people wearing 378 ilevel gear. semi hardcore group with almost full heroic fireland gear and who did 6/7 heroic in fireland should not have any trouble doing the normal mode or else old people and young kids playing the game would need to cancel their account.

Before jugding the difficulty of this raid i'll wait to to try heroic content.

But what i find sad is the rehash of old contents. Cata can be summed in one word. REHASH. Even Nintendo is not guilty of so much rehash. Cata is definately the last xpac i'm playing Activision/Blizzard lost me as a customer anyway for this game.

[the evn show]

In my opinion the issue with difficulty is that right now we get this:

And I think we'd be better served by something like:

EDIT: I thought Firelands normal mode was too easy too (and heroics to for that matter) and I think that probably would have played out as true even if Blizzard hadn't completely squashed the difficulty.

With respect to DS: I've got about 3 hours of hard mode experience scattered between all 8 bosses -- most of that time spent with people disconnected or fighting interface issues. Hard mode was only available for ~1.5 hours per boss during PTR, usually at times we couldn't put together a proper raid to even attempt them. Next week will be "real progression", if it doesn't take until February to go 6/8 I'm going to be very disappointed. I'll be even more annoyed if they nerf the crap out of deathwing when we finally start getting consistent 20-10% wipes.

[Slane]

Agree with evn, 100%.

[S00N3R FR3AK]

Well my guild did 4/8. I'm done raiding with them for now as I enjoyed the LFR enough to do that so I no longer have to set my schedule around raiding. Gear has never mattered to me beyond staying competitive in my guild so just seeing the content is what I care about.

[iKenndac]

Derailing the thread slightly:

Yesterday, I downed Murozond in End Time. This is incredibly exciting for me, since it's the first time I've ever downed fresh, current content - I was late to the party with Wrath, then took a break from Cata after hitting 85 and by the time the troll heroics came round it took me a while to catch up with gear.

I'm a fairly causal player and the Raid Finder will mean I finally have a chance to experience endgame content while it's still fairly fresh. I can't wait! :D

[DrunkenBeard]

I haven't experienced the raids yet but I did a run through the 3 new dungeons. I must say I enjoyed it a lot. Even though it was quite easy compared to the Zandalari HCs or the original Cataclysm HCs, the mechanics were interesting and some bosses were challenging at my level of gear. More than the mechanics, I absolutely loved the setting. I refrained from playing the PTR and I'm glad I did as everything seemed fresh and new to me. I sincerely don't think I'll ever get burnt out from running Well of Eternity ! I literraly shivered when we were fighting Mannoroth !

I will take my time now and go slowly through the raids, starting with normal modes with the guild and doing LFR runs. The fact that normal modes seem to be easier that Firelands is a good thing for small casual guilds. I can't even remember how many times we wiped on Beth'tilac, it's fun the first 2 weeks but after that it becomes just frustrating and people start losing hope. For someone like me who is a lot more interested by the lore than by difficulty, an easy-ish fight with interesting mechanics is more enjoyable than a fight that requires perfect coordination, perfect individual execution and some RNG to top it off.

All in all, I like this patch a lot more than the last one :)

[Noveed]

Raid finder is full of win for casual and terrible players. Is it possible to wipe?

We killed the first wing in LFR the guild queued together with 11 people and we were the only 11 alive for all of the fights bar the first one. Was hilarious and we still killed them all. The bosses do not seem to enrage or the enrage timers are really long dare I say you LFR difficulty is so low its possible to kill it with even less than 11?

Starting Normals tonight I hope to god the guild actually checked the tactics and watched the videos instead of being baby sat for 3-4 hours through the fights.

[the evn show]

Here's madness of deathwing from Tuesday. I might start uploading 25m videos from our alt run though they'll probably only be normal mode kills until after Christmas.

On Monday night my server had 23 6/7 heroic guilds. We're ~48 hours after the patch hit and we have 10 guilds that are working on Deathwing or have killed him - i figure we'll probably have around 15 guilds trying heroic mode next week. That's a pretty huge step up from the number that killed rag week 1. Doing a bit of math, even normal mode seems tuned for "I've been 85 for about 8 hours and I want to raid" characters. Consider normal mode 25m chogall had 101m HP. Morchok 25m normal mode has 102m HP.

We went back to farm mounts from heroic rag (for people who main-switched this patch). If you weren't somewhat good at the encounter beforehand you'll still probably have some difficulty but if you could make phase 4 he's basically free loot now even if you have 2 meteors. It's amazing what a difference being able to completely ignore positioning requirements is. I also think dreadflame spawns way slower than before: we only had it spawn twice during the entire kill which was quickly extinguished so there was never any on the platform.

[LaP]

I don't know how you were able to kill Spine of Deathwing easily. This fight is so bugged right now.

One of our healer crash every time the fight start. And he has 2 addons only. xperl and dbm (both updated). 2 addons also used by other people in the group without any problem. Then people keep crashing every time we wipe. And then they can't log back until their toon is dced from the server so we need to wait like 20 minutes almost every wipe.

We almost killed the 3rd tendon but constant crashes prevented us from doing enough try to kill it since we did not try it on ptr or watched any video before hand. Nice fight though and a fun one.

I still don't see the problem with normal content being easy though. To me it's a case of elitist mentality. I'm good and i do not accept people i consider bad to see the content.

Easy mode of fps has never been a problem for people as long as the hard mode was actually hard. I've never seen anybody complain about badies being able to complete Halo on easy mode while legendary was hard enough for good players.

To me as long as the heroic mode is challenging enough there's no problem with the normal content being easy.

[S00N3R FR3AK]

O joy logged on to find myself gkicked for no apparent reason. If I can't get this straightened out tomorrow will be a 377 12/12(pre-nerf) 7/7(4/7 pre-nerf) 4/8(LFR) hunter looking for a new guild. This guy knows the GMs of all the major guilds on my server and he can be a dick if he wants to so I might have to xfer off to raid. I know I said i was done with raiding but that's because he had too many dps and I didn't feel like rotating.

My hunter

Hell I might just level what you need. Also have a 85 pally but he isn't really geared. Screw the annual pass.

[S00N3R FR3AK]

Well turns out the GL was a in a dick mood as I talked to all the regulars and that's what they think. Off to a RP-PvP server on horde, $55 is worth going to play with some friends. Though I'm iffy about the whole RP-PvP thing lol.

[the evn show]

I don't know how you were able to kill Spine of Deathwing easily. This fight is so bugged right now.

If people are disconnecting there's a good chance they're just falling off the side of the dragon: that causes disconnects. Crashing when you load in (I think) is caused by not having the little movies ready to go. I'm not really sure what to say except to try running the repair tool.

I still don't see the problem with normal content being easy though. To me it's a case of elitist mentality. I'm good and i do not accept people i consider bad to see the content.

Every level of difficulty has players that are excellent and players that are bad. 2/7 is bad and 7/7. The problem happens when you have players that are 7/7 normal (good) so they try heroic mode but lack the skill to do better than 2/7 heroic (bad). They end up in a wierd middle ground:

• Normal mode is too easy so they get no sense of progression and feel obligated to do hard mode
  
• They're not good enough to clear hard mode so they end up with grinding, frustration, and burn-out
  

Eventually Blizzard has to respond to that: they can either make normal mode harder so that more players don't feel obligated to kill the same boss twice, and they don't have to try and be good enough for content that's challenging for Paragon/Method/Vodka/etc. Or they can make Hard mode easier - which would make it positively trivial for any "good" guild. When they try to ramp up difficulty in hard modes you end up with "staircase progression", 20,000 6/7 heroic guilds and 1500 killing rag while the other 18,000 either give up or spend months wiping on content they'll never kill. T11 had a pretty good spread up to 8/13 then it got a bit stair casey as people ran into the really hard content for their tier but I don't think it's a problem to have 1000 guilds getting sinestra and 300 getting council -- 30% completion is much better than 1%.

If it's about "see the content" then they've got easy mode LFR. I think hard mode should be optional content for the top 5% and tuned to be appropriately difficult for that crowd. It has nothing to do with keeping the bads out of normal mode - if anything it's about keeping the bads out of hard mode. I think the average player is better than the skill level normal mode is tuned for and blizzard is forcing too many people into hard mode by making normal not challenging enough.

Easy mode of fps has never been a problem for people as long as the hard mode was actually hard. I've never seen anybody complain about badies being able to complete Halo on easy mode while legendary was hard enough for good players.

This is the problem we have now - hard mode isn't hard in T12. If you were looking to do the hardest 3 encounters in the game right now I'd argue they're 25m Heroic Al'akir, 10m Sinestra, and Twilight Council heroic - even now in full 391/397 gear those fights are more challenging than anything in Firelands. Ragnaros would be fourth now that Phase 4 is nerfed, nothing in normal mode Dragon Soul comes close.

When the hardest content in the game was 2 tiers old you know the difficulty is out of whack.

[Shaun N.]

Anyone think I bully the Shaman in this video :D

[patseguin Global Moderator]

WoW has been dead to me for some time now. Ever since Cataclysm came out the game changed dramatically for me. People became really elitist and mean. Running the heroics with guildies I'd get yelled at for dying, etc. and then eventually got cut from the guild. Who needs that kind of stress in a game. Having a great time in Rift. People are grown up and nice for the most part and the soul tree system make the game fun and exciting.

[LaP]

Every level of difficulty has players that are excellent and players that are bad. 2/7 is bad and 7/7. The problem happens when you have players that are 7/7 normal (good) so they try heroic mode but lack the skill to do better than 2/7 heroic (bad). They end up in a wierd middle ground:

• Normal mode is too easy so they get no sense of progression and feel obligated to do hard mode
  
• They're not good enough to clear hard mode so they end up with grinding, frustration, and burn-out
  

Eventually Blizzard has to respond to that: they can either make normal mode harder so that more players don't feel obligated to kill the same boss twice, and they don't have to try and be good enough for content that's challenging for Paragon/Method/Vodka/etc. Or they can make Hard mode easier - which would make it positively trivial for any "good" guild. When they try to ramp up difficulty in hard modes you end up with "staircase progression", 20,000 6/7 heroic guilds and 1500 killing rag while the other 18,000 either give up or spend months wiping on content they'll never kill. T11 had a pretty good spread up to 8/13 then it got a bit stair casey as people ran into the really hard content for their tier but I don't think it's a problem to have 1000 guilds getting sinestra and 300 getting council -- 30% completion is much better than 1%.

I totally agree with you and you make good points.

But i don't think the problem is with the difficulty. As a semi-hardcore player i don't have any problem with clearing 10/13, 11/13 or 12/3 only in heroic mode and eventually clear it and do the glory achivement when the next tier (and possible nerf) comes out. But clearing 2/7 or 3/7 is just not fun. The problem to me is more with the number of bosses. It's almost impossible to create a smoth progression with 7-8 bosses only.

The problem with Firelands heroic before the nerf was that for most semi-hardcore guilds like us only 4 bosses was doable with 378-380 ilevel. Shannox, Rhyolith, Major and Alys was doable with 378-380 ilevel. But of those only Shannox and Major was farmable with 378-380 ilevel. For group like us Beth and Baleroc (before the nerf) was impossible to kill without 384+ ilevel.

Gearing a group with 4 bosses only take LOT of time. It's a pain in the ass specially since Firelands had a lot of rng. Rhyolith was rather easy when the volcanoes was all spawning at the right place. But RNG could screw you on this fight before the nerf. Alys tornadoes was a pain in the ass for people with latency or bad computer (and not hardcore group almost always have one player like this).

Another problem arise with only 7 bosses. The loot table for each bosses is so big rng can screw you for months. It literally took us 23 kills of Rhyolth (normal + heroic) before the crossbow drop for the first time. 4 bosses doable. Only 2 maybe 3 farmable. Big loot table. Bad rng for loot (de heroic gear with 378 ilevel cause you don't have rogue and there's no one hand enchant for hunter anymore). This is where the real problem of Firelands was imo.

It's a lot easier to have a smoth progression with between 11 and 13 bosses. You can have 4 bosses easy and farmable by semi hardcore group. You can have 4 other bosses doable while not having a max ilevel but still enough hard for them to not be farmable before getting close to max ilevel. Then you can have beween 2 and 3 bosses hard enough to be a challenge for top guild and not be doable for semi hardcore guild like us which then aim for the glory achivement and getting to max ilevel gear.

I think Firelands was a nice raid. But the heroic progression was really bad before and after the nerf. And normal (before the nerf) was not challenging enough. I agree with you on that. But i think the problem had more to do with the low number of bosses and bad progression than difficulty.

If Blizzard start to make normal mode a lot hard for semi-hardcore group like us average players wont be able to down more than one boss if the raid has 7-8 bosses only or else the progression will be broken. I agree that with lfr this could be a viable option now. lfr for joe blow. Normal for semi-hardcore group and heroic for top guild. But n the end if there's 7-8 bosses only progression will still be broken imo. You will get from easy to in your face diffuculty again with only 2-3 bosses to gear the group and big loot table and bad rng screwing you for months.

[the evn show]

As a semi-hardcore player i don't have any problem with clearing 10/13, 11/13 or 12/3 only in heroic mode and eventually clear it and do the glory achivement when the next tier (and possible nerf) comes out.

You keep using this label but it has no meaning for me.

What exactly does "semi-hardcore" mean?