Tigole moves on

[aurik]

You still misunderstand everything I've said. As I said, even in single player games, I enjoyed games with multiple difficulties, and I think most people do. I don't want hard content to feel superior to others, I want content that is challenging and gives me a personal sense of accomplishment when I am done with it.

I will do you a huge favor here then and tell you to play single player games if you're looking for a challenge that is tuned to you. With 11 million subscribers, of which we both agree 99.9% are far less dedicated to the game than you, there is absolutely no way you should expect or demand that Blizzard's design should cater to your skill level.

I agree that entry level content should be easier. There is still such a thing as too easy, however. The damage Sapphiron does to a tank is well tuned for entry-level content. The enrage timer on Patchwerk is not. I have never once heard of someone hitting the enrage timer on Patchwerk at 80, even in a pug.

Making the enrage timer 5ish minutes wouldn't be unreasonable at all. It may mean you need hunters that do more than auto shot with their pet at their side rather than attacking Patchwerk, but literally in pugs I see 5+ people not breaking 2k DPS, and still not coming close to Patchwerk's enrage.

I've seen enraged patchwerk in both a pug 10 and a pug 25. In the pugs I've attended which have even downed patchwerk, I'm usually seeing the fight last in the 5-6 minute range. (The real pug dps check is Thaddius anyway, especially since you can count on 1-2 morans to get themselves electrocuted)

Patch-10 is about a 12kdps requirement for a 6 minute fight. In a pug, you're running 3 healers, and 2 tanks which probably combine to do the damage of 1 dpser, so 2k per dpser average.

Patch-25 is about a 36kdps requirement for a 6 minute fight. In a pug, you're running 6 healers, and 3 tanks which probably combine to do the damage of 1.5 dpser, so 2050 per dpser average.

Basically, the statement that Bliz has made is that entry into the construct quarter is a 2k/dps average target. From my experience with pugs--and I probably have a lot more experience with pugs than you do--this is a decent target for someone who has done most of the heroics once or twice and has a decent grasp on how to play his class.

And let's face it, most people don't run more than a few heroics a week. Not everyone is hardcore enough to hit 80 in 8 days and have accumulated 100 heroic badges by December 1. A lot of the more casual players probably only hit 80 over the Christmas holiday, and having spent a month tooling around want to try out the raid content, and Blizzard's mission statement this expansion is to welcome them with open arms.

This is a significant departure from TBC, where the design at 70 was to grind dungeon reputation in normal just to have access to heroic dungeons. The message is loud and clear to me: Naxx is for everyone, and heroic is the difficulty that instances are meant to be played at.

I could go on and point out other things that are similar to this. I'm not saying Naxx should be some hardcore/etc instance. I'm saying it should be harder than 5man heroics, and it should be at least equal to what Kara was.

I can tell you right now that naxx10 is harder than 5mans--I'm primarily a healing druid, and recently I've been taking mostly pickup dps to heroics the last few nights in order to purptrain a friend who just hit 80 paladin. Most aren't even close to 2k dps in heroics. Yadda yadda missing raid buffs, etc. These people are doing like 1.5k dps tops, and regularly stand in the poop. And we're still clearing the instances fine, hell my tank still has max 20k hp and we're still not wiping. There's no way in hell we could take this into naxx and expect to kill anything, except maybe Noth.

Give shield walls back to the horsemen

I'll give you that they probably did not anticipate heroism/bloodlust burning down the front 2 horsemen, and that fight is a lot more fun without a shaman. I'll give you that this fight seems a bit mistuned. Should have given the front horses more hp and compensated by nerfing the meteor a bit.

make a Heigan splash do more than ~30% of a random DPSers max HP.

According to wowhead, the splash does more damage if you're actually in the middle of the poop instead of on the edge. I wouldn't know, I've never missed the target that badly. But I understand the mindset behind the tuning here, because it's really easy to catch the edge of a splash just from latency. They want to punish you for being in the wrong place, not for having a bad connection.

Also keep in mind this encounter is probably the first real stressful full-raid-movement fight that most players will see, if they start at WotLK. For someone who has gone through Kara and done Shade of Aran, yes, this is going to be a joke. But that's because you have already learned the necessary skills. For someone who levels straight 1-80, and hasn't yet learned how to perform their job and move constantly at the same time, it's going to take some learning, and this is the (first) idiot check that will force them to.

Trying to get someone to work at Blizzard and come post here would be going out of my way, and quite pointless, I hope you can agree with and appreciate that.

I agree with it being pointless, because even if they did show up and say that, I would STILL disagree with them, blue name or not, that Naxx as an entry level raiding instance is too easy.

I think the big problem is that people remember Naxx being a tier 3 raiding instance, not a tier 1 raid. They remember it being the thing that they did after taking down the emperors and C'thun. They don't understand that Naxx has essentially been retcon'd into the slot that UBRS/Stratholme used to occupy, not molten core.

Me: "People at Blizzard in the development department actually agree with me that Naxx was too easy, they didn't tune it properly."
You: "Haven't heard them say Naxx was "too easy", I've heard them say plenty of times that is was "easy, just as designed"."
Me: "I know someone who works at Blizzard, and they were unhappy with it (no point arguing this further, take my word for it or don't)"

Still haven't heard GC or whoever is in charge say it was too easy, just some inside source that you have feels that way. He also probably FC's Guitar Hero songs on expert and eats raw metal for lunch.

As a design for an entry level raid, I say the difficulty of Naxx is really well placed, which means I'm not surprised in the least that the hardcore players are anxiously twiddling their thumbs. After all, it's been 7 months since the last time raiding has been meaningful for them. That doesn't make it bad design.

[FailureMidgard]

Single player game was merely to point out that people don't want a challenge due to epeen bragging only. Also, most those games have what, 3 difficulty levels (I haven't actually played one in a while)? It isn't catered to "everyone". I want them to have content catered to casuals/etc, without a doubt. I think Ulduar with the difficulty option is a good step for them. I don't think we are really in disagreement here.

As for PuGs, I dunno, I did 1 25man weekly up until 2 weeks ago when I decided I was bored of it. Patchwerk kill times averaged 4.5-5.5minutes. I guess I'll take your word for it that you've seen him enrage, I'm actually shocked you have.

Regardless of that though, I disagree with what 2k DPS means. I think that someone in full blues that is decent at their class should be pulling at least 2500. And that ramps up fast if they move past "decent" or past "full blues (I literally mean not a single epic...the heroic badge trinket alone is ~150 DPS increase).

And again, I agree Naxx should be entry level and for everyone. That being said, I think requiring ~2500 dps per DPSer is a completely reasonable requirement for an entry level raid. Go to a pug, look at people's gear...it's one thing to have blues, and be smart with them, but pugs I go to have warlocks that choose an mp5+click dmg trinket from a quest that has a different reward as crit+click dmg. Literally, the 2 trinkets are identical, and the lock was wearing the mp5 one. It has people with empty gem slots...hunters with stamina gems in their slots. These aren't "decent players that have a basic understanding of their class". These are truly clueless gimps (Post ele patch, in 1 raid with 2 eles, I decided to use a Magma totem instead of Wrath, it outdmged some people in the raid).

As for Heigan splashes, if you care, there's overlapping "zones" inside each of the 4 quadrants, each zone explodes simultaneously, so if you are in a 3-overlap area, you take 3. The sides of each zone generally have no overlap. There are also spots dead in the middle that have 0 overlap (and the famous safe spots have been spots that are perfectly between 2 zones).

I don't think my expectations are that unreasonable - I think a few fights (Thaddius, Sapph, KT) are ok in their current difficulty. 4 horsemen, however, should not be the easiest and least coordination required fight in Naxx. I'd even be fine leaving Patchwerk as he is if they upped the difficulty a little of some later bosses (first boss in a wing should be easier than later ones).

I really think you disagree with me less than you think you do, I'm just bad at getting across exactly what I mean, or you're misunderstanding. I truly do believe Naxx is easier than Kara was, and Kara difficulty is what I think Naxx should have been.
Though we do clearly disagree on what a decent player at his class should be hitting, DPS wise. Maybe if I get bored later, I'll do some math for you to prove this, I think if you look at the #s, however, you will be very surprised.

[aurik]

I have no doubt that Naxx is easier than Kara was, but that's because Kara was tuned to be "that thing you did after you did a bunch of heroics", where TBC heroics themselves required a bunch of grinding to unlock.

Naxx is still tuned as "the thing you did after you did a bunch of heroics", just that heroics are now what you do basically the moment you turn 80 instead of 2-3 weeks after. We're missing a tier of content, compared to TBC, and the impact is that the first raid instance you run into isn't going to be nearly as hard on the gear checks.

One thing I do wish they had done is ramped the difficulty for the 25-man compared to the 10. From the napkin-math analysis of patchwerk above, it's apparent that they have about the same dps targets in both 25 and 10. But, in 25 man you get a more complete raid buff set...AND the items are ilvl 213/226...AND you have a lot more margin of error.

It seems to me only 2 fights are harder on 25 than 10: thaddius, because of the tight enrage, and KT because of the MCs. Most are actually easier due to having more manpower--sapphiron, grobbulus, and Sarth+adds particularly.

I think that's their biggest problem with Naxx tuning. 25 man should be harder and more rewarding, or easier and less rewarding, not the same and better rewards (nor easier and better rewards).

[FailureMidgard]

Some reallllly fast/rough math:

Lightning Bolt = .714 coefficient base, .814 coefficient after talents
715-815 damage, base
+20% chance to do a 50% bolt (+10% average damage).
+5% base damage.
+10% base damage for 2 spells after a crit (Ele is at ~30% crit raid buffed with 0 gear on at all)..Estimate at

5% average...that's pretty low, even for 0 gear (not even blues).


So every 2 seconds, you cast a Lightning Bolt. With 0 gear on, you have 274+280=554 spellpower.

[765 + .814(554)]*1.1*1.13*1.05*1.05*1.04*1.3~=2253 average. That's over 1100 DPS, casting no Lava Bursts, and wearing no gear except a grey weapon with Flametongue on it.

Every 1 SP you add will add .75 DPS. So, if you have base 1k spellpower (and still 0 crit on gear..I think thats low for blues), you're adding another 750 DPS, putting you dangerously close to the 2k mark. And this is playing the class terribly (Spamming only lightning bolt). The only thing I assumed here is capped hit (which is easy to get with blues, if you are smart) and raid buffs.

If you want to get actual gear #s, count in haste (8% from raid buffs alone), you can hit 2500 playing like an idiot with full/mostly full blues.

A good player, in full blues, will break 3k (this doesn't necess apply to all classes...rogues need a fix/help)

[aurik]

There's a whole bunch of assumptions in your analysis. One of the big ones is that people have chosen raid-oriented gear. For example, I would say that most casual players are NOT hit capped for raids. Hell, the first pug naxx10 I tried, the tank wasn't even crit capped.

No caster dps is going to pine after mark of the war prisoner for heroics, despite it being a very nice trinket for entry-level raiding. Nor the Water Drenched Robe. For casual players, these pieces of gear probably look terrible; they haven't yet trained their sense of item value. That warlock maybe grabbed the mp5 click trinket instead of the crit click trinket because he's not aware that crit actually helps him.

Entering naxx and having moderate success but not topping the meters, and not being able to down sapph/kt should help these players learn--not by slamming their heads with a brick wall like broodlord or skeram, but rather by those players investigating for themselves "why are other people beating me on the meters?".


Edit: Looking at my guild's recent raid stats (I don't raid with em because I can't make the raid times) I see a hunter that is fresh 80 and done about a week's worth of heroics. He was a big raider back in t6 content, but been afk a while, so he's not an idiot, just late to the party. And with 25man w/ full raid-buffs his patch dps was 2.5k

[FailureMidgard]

There's a whole bunch of assumptions in your analysis. One of the big ones is that people have chosen raid-oriented gear. For example, I would say that most casual players are NOT hit capped for raids. Hell, the first pug naxx10 I tried, the tank wasn't even crit capped.

No caster dps is going to pine after mark of the war prisoner for heroics, despite it being a very nice trinket for entry-level raiding. Nor the Water Drenched Robe. For casual players, these pieces of gear probably look terrible; they haven't yet trained their sense of item value. That warlock maybe grabbed the mp5 click trinket instead of the crit click trinket because he's not aware that crit actually helps him.

Entering naxx and having moderate success but not topping the meters, and not being able to down sapph/kt should help these players learn--not by slamming their heads with a brick wall like broodlord or skeram, but rather by those players investigating for themselves "why are other people beating me on the meters?".

263 hit rating is not hard to get, and requires very little heroic running. Just green quality hit gems (and perhaps spending your first badges on the cloth belt). Yes, it does require a basic knowledge that hit is a good stat. And again, I underestimated crit, and spellpower (which will make up for lack of hit). I also assumed a solid pve spec. I also assumed lightning bolt spam on an ele shaman (which is -terrible-).

Anyway, there's blue quest rewards that don't require an instance that give decent hit items..trinket from Wyrmrest, neck from a group quest in Icecrown come to mind quickly. My shaman was hit capped ~2hrs after hitting 80, when I went to my first 10man on her. That was with 0 heroics. Yea, I knew how to use wowhead, and what quests/items to go for, but I think that should be a staple of a "decent player".

I also assume that DPS dont socket stam or other useless stats.

I think these are reasonable things to expect and tune an encounter for. Like I said, a 2500 dps requirement per person is what I think it should be. And I think with full blues I could do 3k easily (I also think expecting people to have a -couple- epics or heroic drops isn't that unrealistic.)

Reply to your edit: there's the 2500 I'm saying in full blues, and I bet if he went and read EJ/etc, he has room to improve and could push 3k with his current gear.

[aurik]

It's a little different to say a shaman spamming lightning bolt should exceed 2.5kdps with blues w/ no raid buffs and seeing an actual, raid-buffed hunter putting out that 2.5k dps. I'm guessing he's one of the non-idiot raiders from my guild's t6 days (they were mid-Sunwell) because they're purp-training him pretty hard now that he's back.

Considering the quality of pugs, I honestly think 2500 is way too high of a bar, without requiring them more than a month of running heroics in preparation.

[FailureMidgard]

It's a little different to say a shaman spamming lightning bolt should exceed 2.5kdps with blues w/ no raid buffs and seeing an actual, raid-buffed hunter putting out that 2.5k dps. I'm guessing he's one of the non-idiot raiders from my guild's t6 days (they were mid-Sunwell) because they're purp-training him pretty hard now that he's back.

Considering the quality of pugs, I honestly think 2500 is way too high of a bar, without requiring them more than a month of running heroics in preparation.

Err, I assumed full raid buffs on said shaman...

[Correction]

A PUG with every raid buff slot filled is kinda...special.

[FailureMidgard]

A PUG with every raid buff slot filled is kinda...special.

When you are an ele Shaman, and cover 4 of your own buffs (3% crit debuff, spellpower, 5% crit buff, 5% spellhaste), it's a lot less difficult.

All you need is 1 ret or boomkin for haste (which wasn't even factored in my calculations), 1 mage for crit debuff, and 1 spriest or boomkin for spellhit.

Edit: and again I lowballed stats by some huge margin and didn't even use a DPS rotation...just spamming 1 ability. Lava Burst adds 5-7k dmg per 10 sec (or 500+ dps), Flame Shock adds another couple hundred if you keep it up, and we won't even get into chain lightning cause they are nerfing that anyway!

[fantasticdan]

Naxx is still tuned as "the thing you did after you did a bunch of heroics", just that heroics are now what you do basically the moment you turn 80 instead of 2-3 weeks after. We're missing a tier of content, compared to TBC, and the impact is that the first raid instance you run into isn't going to be nearly as hard on the gear checks.

The only people that needed to do normal 70 instances in tbc were maybe tanks. Everyone else could and did jump into heroics (and often kara) right after hitting 70.

In wotlk I just jumped into raids after hitting 80 with nothing but the epic engineering gun/helm and blue LW bracers, and I was doing over 3k dps in 25man. I was beating out must geared hunters too, because apparently it's really hard to prioritize explosive shot.

[aurik]

The only people that needed to do normal 70 instances in tbc were maybe tanks. Everyone else could and did jump into heroics (and often kara) right after hitting 70.

You needed revered reputation in order to do heroics in old TBC. That required in virtually every hub a bunch of grinding normal dungeons.

[fantasticdan]

You needed revered reputation in order to do heroics in old TBC. That required in virtually every hub a bunch of grinding normal dungeons.

For coilfang and hellfire instances, it was pretty easy to be revered hitting 70, and some factions had turn-ins for rep. They eventually dropped the revered requirement to honored as well. And when they added it, heroic mgt had the best gear from heroics, and you only had to beat normal once to get keyed.

Only key I think I had to run normal instance at 70 for was the TK one I think.

[Plow]

I haven't finished most of the recent argument yet, but I'd just like to say that my connection is terrible, I can't get above 18-1900ish as a rogue in arena because of the raw quantity of "I kicked, it went off and used cooldown, I'm still sheeped," shit, and I could Heigan dance on high speed for hours even if it did 90% damage.


I see people take 3 hits from it, get a couple holy shocks and shields and shit, then get hit 3 more times from it before they finally die. That's really not how it should be lol. Although I guess it's better than the retard corner ;p



Edit after reading the rest--

2500 from a hunter on patch are you serious? I'm almost certain I can put on my block value set and beat that as a prot pally post-nerf, if I don't have to worry about mitigation. Pretty sure people I know could pull 2500 putting pet on boss engaging auto-attack and going AFK. Gear from the instance itself making the "gear-check" encounters auto-attackable is a bit much, no? lol...

You realize Sunwell gear is not exactly bad entry level raid gear right?

[Plow]

For coilfang and hellfire instances, it was pretty easy to be revered hitting 70, and some factions had turn-ins for rep. They eventually dropped the revered requirement to honored as well. And when they added it, heroic mgt had the best gear from heroics, and you only had to beat normal once to get keyed.

Only key I think I had to run normal instance at 70 for was the TK one I think.

Coilfang and Hellfire you could skip running SV/... can't even remember the 80 hellfire's name lol.... by running the low level instances a ton as you leveled.


Doesn't matter who you are, until they reduced the requirements it took an *immense* amount of grinding normal instances to get into heroics. I remember nights running Botanica then Mech then Botanica then Mech then Botanic etc etc, for hours on end, with people good enough that we'd test our limits (24 elites in Botanica when nobody had even heroic gear, let alone kara stuff) and after 6-8 hours in a night people might be halfway to Revered.


I was also kinda lol'ing about the whole heroic difficulty vs raid difficulty thing, I remember healing a full t4 warrior tank in BF and watching a Felguard time his cleave and other strike thingy perfectly around a melee hit and literally drop him from 100% - 0 instantly.

[Norellicus]

For coilfang and hellfire instances, it was pretty easy to be revered hitting 70, and some factions had turn-ins for rep. They eventually dropped the revered requirement to honored as well. And when they added it, heroic mgt had the best gear from heroics, and you only had to beat normal once to get keyed.

Only key I think I had to run normal instance at 70 for was the TK one I think.

While I'm the last one to complain about content being too easy or whatever, the change from Revered to Honored was one of the worst things to come out of BC because of how unforgiving the heroics were. You could get honored with every faction just by doing all the quests pretty much, so many people simply weren't geared enough to be an asset in the heroic scene straight out of the gate, whereas by the time you got enough rep to hit revered you were very likely in MOSTLY R110-115s, far more palatable for places that have a bad habit of insta-gibbing undergeared players.

None of the instances for the rep were particularly hard, though some of them got to be a bit long-winded and annoying with trash pulls (ogod shattered halls), so it's kind of a silly thing to have done, but eh.

I understand the spirit of the change considering how many people were well established at Lv70 and simply wanted to be able to branch out and explore content on multiple classes without grinding themselves into oblivion, but it was still damaging to the effectiveness of the playerbase at the time.

[fantasticdan]

Coilfang and Hellfire you could skip running SV/... can't even remember the 80 hellfire's name lol.... by running the low level instances a ton as you leveled.


Doesn't matter who you are, until they reduced the requirements it took an *immense* amount of grinding normal instances to get into heroics. I remember nights running Botanica then Mech then Botanica then Mech then Botanic etc etc, for hours on end, with people good enough that we'd test our limits (24 elites in Botanica when nobody had even heroic gear, let alone kara stuff) and after 6-8 hours in a night people might be halfway to Revered.

For thrallmar, I ran the instances maybe a couple times each while leveling up, and did all or nearly all of the quests in hellfire (including the repeatable pvp one a few times), and I was revered before hitting 70. Coilfang is really easy if you do the turn-in quest a bunch before doing the rest of the CE quests, you could get to honored I beleive.

Tk wasn't that hard for the same reason, turn-ins for getting aldor/scryer rep to exalted would get you honored with sha'tr automatically. That would mean with the 3000 you get from doing the arc key questline, you should need to run 9-10 tk instances, which sucks, but it's not as bad as you're implying.

[Plow]

Shat was the "easiest," unless you planned it all out ahead and sat around waiting for instances to get to honored before doing certain shit and all that. Take that 9-10 runs, do it for 4 different places (won't count cot cuz... yeah that's like 2) and you're looking at 40 runs, clearing all the trash.

That's a long fucking time grinding normal mode instances that tended to be way longer than they had any business being.

If they'd all been mech, sure, but we didn't even have the reset an instance option yet and pretty much had to alternate instances to get them to reset worth a shit even just for TK.

[fantasticdan]

Oh I know the revered rep requirements were retarded, I was just saying you didn't need to do much grinding if you were smart with quests/turn-ins, and didn't care about getting keyed for everywhere. I mean as a dps/healer you didn't really need much gear to start kara, maybe some boe craftables, bop profession stuff, or pvp gear and you were fine.

[Plow]

Oh I know the revered rep requirements were retarded, I was just saying you didn't need to do much grinding if you were smart with quests/turn-ins, and didn't care about getting keyed for everywhere. I mean as a dps/healer you didn't really need much gear to start kara, maybe some boe craftables, bop profession stuff, or pvp gear and you were fine.

Uh... the pvp gear available when t4 content was tops was basically get blue stuff and epic off pieces that weren't as good as heroic blues. My rogue partner's Malchazeen was fucking amaaaaaazing back then, enough to run 30/0/31 very effectively.

The problem here is you're comparing Kara a year after release to Naxx at WotLK release. I was in there early on when Maiden was mathematically a difficult fight based on the available gear with just a couple melee, and I was in there when all of us pvpers could go in there with like 4 dps wars in pvp gear and take down curator in the first evocate. There was a pretty massive difference between those, and a long time in between that as well heh.


At this point in a couple of months, new 80's won't really even bother with heroics other than achievements, they'll just have a couple t8.5 people carry em through ez mode Naxx.


In even the tough heroics at 70, having people in shit gear (or just shit people) really killed runs, the bosses would get freaking hard by the time you down shit with a bunch of 600 dps trash, let alone Kara.

Was a whole different world, really. And, quite honestly, it sucked lol. Nobody wanted to do heroics or kara once they had their badges, and for good reason. It drove me nuts that the only way to get to participate in content that was "challenging," and not just a bitch, was to get 25 people and herd them through, once Kara got outgeared.