Warlords PvP Gearing Blog, Patch 5.4.7 Hotfixes for April 28, Raid Philosophy Part 2 - Wowhead News
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on T12:55:38-05:00
I think that even with the &experience raid content on your own schedule& argument, Raid Finder got also severely weakened by addons like oqueue.With oqueue, it can be actually faster to find a Flex raiding segment than to queue for Raid Finder.In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard promised us an integrated tool similar to oqueue (minus the bugs and constant upgrades required), and I think Normal Raiding (the equivalent of today's Flex difficulty) is going to become the norm, with Raid Finder a very marginal tool used only to gear up for Heroic Dungeons.All in all, great changes and I can't wait for WoD's raiding content.
on T13:32:23-05:00
While I started raiding in Wrath with one of the &Raiding Guild& segments, and ran LFR as much as I could stomach through Cata, I now consider myself part of the &Friends/Family& grouping, and I still find myself left out of a majority of the content. Currently, I only play with small group. All of the friends/guildies/etc. that we have played with over the either out of game, to other games, or to more dedicated raiding teams. Our little group of Four to six friends and family is all we have. We only play a few hours a week, and have wildly varying skill levels. One girl is in a rural area with very slow internet, and large raids are out-of-the-question-laggy. Another is a true duffer and really only enjoys the battle pets, because every time she's run a dungeon the people are awful to her. We have tried other guilds, only to run into &family& guilds that are abusive and wannabe &hardcore&; &hardcore& disguised as &friendly&, which they aren't; or social guilds that run no content whatsoever and only exist as a sort of loose collective who are only in it for the guild perks. We are sort of left out. There is no way for us to experience current content that does not involve exposing ourselves to the deplorable cesspool of nasty that is LFR/LFD. People call LFR &tourist mode& because it is too easy. I say take the Flex one step further. I would pay double my current sub to have a real &tourist mode&. Allow the Flex to scale down to four. Let me see the content - the stories, the events, the action- with the people I like playing with, without forcing me to play with horrible people with whom I have no desire to interact. I don't even care about the loot. Make the loot equivalent to quest greens and blues. I don't care. Why do I need Epic loot when I am not raiding heroic content? I am not doing anything epic to earn it, I don't deserve epic gear.It doesn't effect anyone else. People can still have their epic and heroic achievements and gear that t I just want to play a video game on my off time with my family and friends. I think the rest of us would like to have a vehicle to see the content for which we pay the exact same fees as everybody else./whineTL;DR - QQ why don't they design the game just for my friends and family :P
on T14:05:57-05:00
LFR provided an incentive for me to raid. To get better gear than heroic dungeons, I tried it and loved it. It became my endgame. I would prefer the gear levels would stay similar to keep my interest, but it doesn't look like that is the case. Hopefully the beta will provide me the opportunity to see what other ways will be created that will fill that space.
on T16:15:33-05:00
Elder Lin and Elder Liao now have significantly more health. Elder Lin and Elder Liao will now respawn much more quickly.Lol I wonder if some people have been having some PvP fun.
on T16:56:14-05:00
(And for those who are wondering, “Then why not allow cross-faction raiding? Why not let me raid with my Alliance friends even if I play Undead?” Fundamentally, Alliance vs. Horde, Orcs vs. Humans, is the heart and soul of the Warcraft universe—we have to draw the line somewhere, and we draw it there.)awwww D=So much for that hope.
on T19:31:50-05:00
Well sadly it makes sense, as much as I want to raid with a bunch of Alliance buddies.On another note I wish they'd do more about decreasing or outright axing the prices of realm and faction changes.
on T20:20:07-05:00
I think that even with the &experience raid content on your own schedule& argument, Raid Finder got also severely weakened by addons like oqueue.With oqueue, it can be actually faster to find a Flex raiding segment than to queue for Raid Finder.In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard promised us an integrated tool similar to oqueue (minus the bugs and constant upgrades required), and I think Normal Raiding (the equivalent of today's Flex difficulty) is going to become the norm, with Raid Finder a very marginal tool used only to gear up for Heroic Dungeons.All in all, great changes and I can't wait for WoD's raiding content.The problem with Oqueque and with the new tool from Blizzard is that they still require a leader, and that leader is free to set any requirements they want and to be a total ass. Two things are going to continue to happen that will keep LFR relevant for a lot of players. The first is that people will, and always have, set crazy ilvl requirements for PUGs. I tanked Flex the first week it was available at ilvl 502 and we cleared 4 bosses in an hour with no wipes. Look at Flex1 gear requirements in Oqueue right now.. my guess is you won?t find any under 525ish and probably would have to wait to find one under 535.Then there are just idiot leaders. I had one a few months ago ( again, oqueue). here is what he thought was funny. the lowest dps got kicked after each boss without him saying a word. It took 3 bosses until people figured it out. None of the dps were really low, and we were downing bosses easily.then you are going to have the added problem in WoD where the first level of flex ( normal I guess we call it now) is going to default to need/greed or master looter or whatever. The person who sets up the group can determine, and I am guessing not a lot of them are going to pick personal loot. Which means now you have to worry about rolling against the raid leader or his guildmates. Again, this type of drama is one of the good things about LFR.But you will say ?then just set up your own group?.. and that is fine. I already run Openraid groups all the time. But the average LFR user is not going to want to get into all that and deal with leadership issues, again, that is one of the draws of LFR.. you can just be a cog in the machine.
on T23:41:51-05:00
Gear scaling for PVE and PVP gear looks like a great idea. I hope it is as good as it looks in the notes. Also getting personal rewards for doing well in battlegrounds is a great idea. There are times when the other faction gets off to a quick start and people bail. Then those who stay quit. Giving people incentive to rally and keep trying could result in some epic come backs. I like these changes and I am excited to see them live.
on T05:21:06-05:00
I'd rather have the LFR / Flex lootsystem with a small change.. make the items tradeable, there are many items I get and don't need and vice versa. If you could just trade the items you get within the group I believe all would be happy :)
on T06:49:23-05:00
While I started raiding in Wrath with one of the &Raiding Guild& segments, and ran LFR as much as I could stomach through Cata, I now consider myself part of the &Friends/Family& grouping, and I still find myself left out of a majority of the content. Currently, I only play with small group. All of the friends/guildies/etc. that we have played with over the either out of game, to other games, or to more dedicated raiding teams. Our little group of Four to six friends and family is all we have. We only play a few hours a week, and have wildly varying skill levels. One girl is in a rural area with very slow internet, and large raids are out-of-the-question-laggy. Another is a true duffer and really only enjoys the battle pets, because every time she's run a dungeon the people are awful to her. We have tried other guilds, only to run into &family& guilds that are abusive and wannabe &hardcore&; &hardcore& disguised as &friendly&, which they aren't; or social guilds that run no content whatsoever and only exist as a sort of loose collective who are only in it for the guild perks. We are sort of left out. There is no way for us to experience current content that does not involve exposing ourselves to the deplorable cesspool of nasty that is LFR/LFD. People call LFR &tourist mode& because it is too easy. I say take the Flex one step further. I would pay double my current sub to have a real &tourist mode&. Allow the Flex to scale down to four. Let me see the content - the stories, the events, the action- with the people I like playing with, without forcing me to play with horrible people with whom I have no desire to interact. I don't even care about the loot. Make the loot equivalent to quest greens and blues. I don't care. Why do I need Epic loot when I am not raiding heroic content? I am not doing anything epic to earn it, I don't deserve epic gear.It doesn't effect anyone else. People can still have their epic and heroic achievements and gear that t I just want to play a video game on my off time with my family and friends. I think the rest of us would like to have a vehicle to see the content for which we pay the exact same fees as everybody else./whineTL;DR - QQ why don't they design the game just for my friends and family :PI'd go one step further and say they should let the content scale to anywhere from one to forty players. If someone wants to breeze through a watered-down version of SoO on their own that's fine by me, just like it doesn't bother me if someone wants to do a super-hardcore version of it. I like LFR and flex/normal because I play WoW for fun, not for a challenge, but I don't see why everyone should have to play the same way I do.
on T22:53:19-05:00
PvP:I don't PvP but when I do, I feel I don't have the freedom to do it on just any of my characters. If I spread it out, I'll never amass enough Honor, etc needed to buy better pvp gear. I have to pick one character for pvp, to concentrate my points in one place.I hope that the new systems help to loosen this restriction.
on T11:22:41-05:00
I don't know how many people there are like me, but I have never been part of raiding (and I've even played since classic). It attracts the most loathsome part of the community and every time I've attempted it, I've been thrust out by unruly and vile pick up groups or otherwise. I understand some groups get to enjoy it and do well at it, and that's fine for them, but to me raiding really seems like something only a minority can truly experience.Does anyone else share the belief that WoW should integrate the gear treadmill into something other than raiding? Why is raiding so important? Sure, it's a big game with lots of people - but that doesn't necessarily mean the raid format is the way to go. I'm sure Blizzard could create something far more entertaining and accessible by the majority of players. The encounters in raids are thoroughly entertaining, the players we're forced to accompany to engage in said encounters however are not. I ask: who has nine friends to run about with? Nine close, genuine friends at least. I do outside of the game, sure, but I don't in game, and even if I did I'd have to organise a date and time and they'd actually all have to be there. Raiding simply isn't possible without outsiders and unfortunately it serves more as a gateway to meeting the most foul and contemptible people playing the game rather than WoW's exciting endgame.Edit: Alternatively, they could just edit the current raid structure to be for any number of people. Difficult, sure, but far more accessible and thereby enjoyable for most players, surely.
on T17:30:32-05:00
Does anyone else share the belief that WoW should integrate the gear treadmill into something other than raiding?I've thought that they should implement a universal &not raiding& currency for buying out-of-date ilvls of gear.Like pet battling? You get 2 coins for every evenly-matched battle (i.e., you have a team of three pets of the right level range for a zone) that you win.Like grinding rep? You get 1% of rep gains (pre-bonuses) as coins.That sort of thing.Then spend the coins to buy gear that's a couple of tiers behind current raid gear (but without the tier bonuses, and what the heck, have it be green font instead of purple). Raiders keep their special toys and their &elite&/exclusive gear look, but non-raiders and other casuals get some gear progression.Edit: Alternatively, they could just edit the current raid structure to be for any number of people. Difficult, sure, but far more accessible and thereby enjoyable for most players, surely.The new &Looking for Group& tool that's coming out should help. You can get a few friends, act as raid leader, get some others to join up, and if the strangers turn out to be jerks, you can kick them to the curb. You can (I think I've read?) even set the loot to, for instance, personal loot (so everyone rolls on their own loot table--so no drama over who gets what). Those who work out, get put on your friend list, to be invited to the next raid.
on T21:52:15-05:00
This is what I gather from reading the thread:LFR/LFD is full of horrible people. Well, duh. LFR contains players who don't play well with others, or they'd be in some kind of guild. There's a guild on every server for every playstyle. If you don't want to get into a pug full of people who are learning their role in a raid setting and are in the process of learning the fights, or whose personalities are so intolerable that they can't find friends to play with, don't use LFR.This &new& flex system is just a partial return to early 1.0, when any instance could be entered by any number of people. However, you can't ask the devs to figure out a tuning scale that accomodates group sizes from solo to 40. You would eliminate mechanics that differentiate raids from dungeons because certain encounter effects (like main tank debuffs or MC) would make successful completion next to impossible for small groups or solo (like Kael'thas in TK), and the removal of these kinds of mechanics will make fights incredibly boring for large groups who just tank and spank a boss for 6 minutes that simply has more health because there are more people in the room. The answer to this problem is 5-man content, a tier of content that seems to be completely forgotten about by the player base. It used to was that if you couldn't get 10 people together on a regular basis or you didn't want to spam trade to fill the holes in your roster, you took 4 of your peeps and DID HEROIC DUNGEONS. If a 6th guy was online, you rotated him in. BC was definitely the heyday of heroic dungeons. They were fun, unique, well-tuned, and granted access to rewards that felt appropriately powered for their position in content progression. I feel this tier of play was completely missing from MoP and should come back. The new structure would go something much like this: hit level cap, normal dungeons&LFR&flex&=heroic dungeons&normal raid&heroic raid. The people who want/use LFR and flex don't care about having the biggest numbers, they just want to play the game. Give them a detuned version of the raid. Some people, one of whom is me, want to do something that feels challenging and epic but don't have time to raid aggressively or seriously (anymore). Give us really hard 5 man content. Some people hate dungeons and just want to raid. Make flex and heroic dungeons separate but equal entry points to normal raids. Option A: Gear currency (honor, justice, conquest, valor) is all screwed up right now. dungeon-&heroic dungeon and LFR-&flex content need to be on parallel tracks that lead up to raiding. In my model, normal dungeons get you the blues to start heroics or flex. LFR gives you slightly higher powered blues to start heroics or flex. Both of these reward justice to buy gear to fill in the gaps left by stubborn drops. Flex gives you epics to start raiding with and valor to fill in the gaps. Heroics give you less powerful epics than flex to make doing heroics easier, and heroics reward valor to buy the EXACT same pre-raid gear you get from flex. This puts everyone who wants to go past toddler-tuned raids and hardcore 5 mans at the same starting power. You just have a choice in how you get there. Leave normal raids challenging and heroic raids incredibly challenging for the people the content is intended for. Option B: make everything flex. Allow all content to be done by a group of 3 to 40. The more people in the group, the more abilities and mechanics are activated. Reward gear at item levels that increase proportionately to encounter difficulty. Allow the difficulty level to scale in real time: 3-6 players, dungeon difficulty. 7-12 players, lfr difficulty. 13-21, heroic dungeon difficulty. 22-30 players, normal raid difficulty. 31+, heroic raid difficulty. And for the fun of it, exactly 40, nightmare mode. This way, everyone gets to see everything.My last point is about loot. People don't want to get stuck with stuff they don't want, and they don't want to have to roll against teammates (or LFR dbags) to win drops. Everybody wants to hand off items they don't need to other people in their raid ID, so let them. The ability to extend such a kindness would go incredibly far to countering the overwhelming prevalence of bad feels in LFR/D. To be completely fair, we have to make a concession and use the current need/greed roll system to recycle the loot. Give players a 2 min window to put unwanted personal loot into a pool for people in the same raid of the appropriate armor type and spec, and let them roll on it. That way, the player giving the loot back to the raid is not burdened with choosing who gets it. It becomes available to everyone who can use it. The 2 min window prevents people from having to stand around next to a boss corpse for 20 mins waiting to see if any loot will be recycled. Give players some form of low-impact reward for recycling loot, like a bit of valor or gold, or even a personal loot reroll token. You may spend this token to roll again for loot in Siege of Crossroads. &Good trade.& - TontoThoughts?
on T16:43:44-05:00
Not really digging the PvP gear scaling stuff because on a fundamental level the act of scaling devalues gear. If I get an iLvL 600 piece it should be just that - no more and no less. Gear variety would have been a better use of dev resources, which means you can let players do pvp-related quest lines to obtain specific items that enable unique enhancements or abilities. An example would be a weapon that buffs your main damage/defense ability by giving it an improvement that is particularly useful in pvp. They could have the same types of quests for people who prefer pve gear.For raids, instead of &tuning& them for a mob of players, why not tune them for multiple groups of 5 players? That way you could have raids that require small groups to split up and complete objectives simultaneously and independently before regrouping for a final showdown, and instead of one &right way& to complete the raid, there could be several possible solutions each with their own set of pros/cons. The variations in solving raid challenges would not only make it more fun to do the same raid multiple times, but it could also become an objective for a quest line as mentioned in the first paragraph.Raid bosses could move away from being a single NPC to something more dynamic, like a group of enemy NPCs with more sophisticated AI that attempt to hinder your progress thru the raid (unpredictably to the players, and based on what the players are doing) as you play it rather than simply being the last stop before the station. The improved AI could have the enemies finding your group's weak point and attempting to exploit it rather than predictably focusing on the tank.
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