Hard raids will kill SoD slowly

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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You might not like it but Blizzard got a lot of very low skill / low performance players to enjoy raiding due to how pushover it was in phase 1 and 2. So what we have now for casual guilds is a large step up in difficulty AND coordinating 20 players. That might be fine for people who are really good at organizing raids and play the game like a second job but there is a lot of guilds that believed Blizzard when they said it would be a casual friendly experience and don’t want to suddenly be checking logs on their members and minmaxing / teaching convoluted mechanics. That is if those guilds even knew how to approach optimizing in the way that would be required to clear.

My guild still has hope but if the difficulty continues the casual guilds which provide a welcoming community for all types of players and aren’t full of weird macho hyper-competitive types will be gone. Then your game can be nothing but the best players who can pat themselves on the back that they were better than the people who just wanted to have some fun social game time in a nostalgic setting.

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Yep difficulty kills games that’s why checks notes one of the most popular games makers, From Soft, adds easy modes to their games. Wait…

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What point are you trying to make here, there are different games for different people. Blizzard just straight up mislead people about what kind of game this would be.

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They did? I don’t recall them EVER claiming that this would be easy raiding. Do you have some quotes to back up this line of thinking?

And for the record my point is that difficult games do not fail. Badly designed ones do. Some people like a challenge, and based on the feedback of Gnomer, more people like harder raiding than easier raiding.

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You don’t need to play the game like a second job to clear sunken temple. If you have players who admit to personal failure, learn and improve mechanics each attempt, you’ll clear the whole raid on 1-3 lockouts at worst on a typical 3 hour raid night.

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They complained in P1 and P2 about the difficulty and they got nerfed… while the 1 mechanic content was already incredibly easy. It’s the community’s inability to grow as players that’s holding them back. This isn’t OG vanilla where everything is essentially a patchwork fight, mechanics should be added and if people can’t keep up, that is on them… practice and get better at the fights, everyone can do it.

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I think to what FranklyDear is referring is the whole “soda and pretzels feel” and other such quotes that have come out of Aggrend’s Twitter feed.

That said, while making things have a devilishly high barrier to entry I think will push people away, as would long attunement chains (I’m not being suckered into Gnomer “epic” crafting ever again) I wholeheartedly disagree that hard content pushes away players. On the contrary, to Amideus’s point, harder content gets people into more stable guild structures, even if that’s a casual guild. And with regular weekly lockouts you’re going to have an option to take a couple of nights to take a crack at bosses, and, I haven’t been inside Sunken Temple to tell how hard it is or isn’t, but it felt far more “authentic” for my group pre-COVID with lives and jobs and deciding what kinda guild we wanted to be to take a month to clear MC. We were done in time to have it on farm and tweak strats for BWL, but hot take: there’s no shame in having life and content kick your butt so you can’t complete it in a week. Progging is good for you.

I felt far more alienated by people checking my logs for content that I had completed several times on several different characters, although I understand the rationale for it. And going into raid with a bunch of loot reserves with the same number of buffs and consumes as everyone else just made things feel gross, and largely unsurprising when someone ragequit. Lockouts are important, and where and with whom one chooses to spend theirs is an investment. And larger raid sizes doesn’t just allow us a greater diversity of buffs, it allows us to have a greater differential in player power.

When I think back to my best moments in personal WoW history, it is the hard-fought wins I cherish the most. My first Chromaggus kill - bronze/black too. Rags. The first time I popped Recklessness as Onyxia landed, shield slam crit, and I kept her. Tanking Sartharion 3-drake as a prot warrior, and having it take an unholy amount of time. But those were preceded by some pretty humbling failures, like not being able to deal with Magmadar, Obsidian Sanctum runs that just bled out over hours, and learning to use Warcraftlogs not just as a way to assess my personal performance, but to “debug” a raid. I loved it so much I signed on with a second 40-man squad to do it again.

Franklydear, you are entitled to your opinion, and I get why you’re saying what you are. Your concern for the health of the game is A Good Thing and im glad you spoke up. This is a seasonal game, we don’t have a ton of time for all of this and suddenly having to change tacks for others is hard - and in the long run, it’s worth it. I’m hoping harder content gives us a little more consistency patch to patch, phase to phase, and the friends and allies we make a bit of the continuity of validation that the game’s volatility can cost us. I go out of my way to look for Amideus’s posts for example - I don’t always agree, but I know there’s thought and heart behind ‘em.

(Shoutout to Bloodsail Buccs - <Cleave’s Homeless Shelter>, love to each and every one of ya.)

-Horse

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They also have already adjusted the difficulty down quite fast, and have more nerfs planned. So it’s a little weird to make a claim they are going to push people away when they are actively making it easier right now.

Log reviews are silly in 99% of situations. Most people can’t properly read or analyze the information and treat it as more of an overview of someone for quick and easy ways to classify them. That is after all this age’s key goal. “I don’t want to have to learn or experience with you, I just want you to be a set piece in my experience and make assessments of you before knowing you.”

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I don´t think the difficulty can “kill” a raid.

But the players can, if they gatekeep everyone who is not in BIS.

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Wouldn’t inviting bad players gatekeep your raid success?

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Yeah we are up to shade and not having a good time.

Even the trash makes this too time consuming for me to keep playing forever.

If I can’t so the raid in 2-3 hours max one night a week I’m out. I’m too old for this shiz

I doubt this was intentional though. I bet it’ll be changed when the Devs get back.

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Of course it’s possible, but then again the expectation of the playerbase is if you’re progressing for very long you’re failing and people start leaving for greener pastures. Maybe some of these people will find they love prog raiding but honestly not even the high skill players like that that’s why they minmax to avoid it.

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Amen. Only a small percentage of people like taking a long time to figure stuff out and wiping along the way. UBRS is fun and its easy. The difficulty in raids should be about making sure not to pull to much, watch out for pats, make sure to be geared enough to down the bosses. Mechanics are fine, but not the dance or die type, and not the one mistake and it wipes the raid type.

ST has already been nerfed. Why? They overdid the health of mobs. Whats next to be nerfed?

Its never too easy, ever notice that? Always gets nerfed. The designers of the raids get carried away.
People want to do their rotations and get lucky on a roll for loot.

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One thing I want to say in response to this: The phases so far have been incredibly short and high difficulty requires much longer phases. There were already people saying they just were getting their first gnomer clears in, I think if anyone sticks around for this they won’t be allowed breathing room to prog even if that was their intention. I do think prog-raiding is dead on arrival for SoD though, half of the players will just quit if their guild falls apart under the pressure.

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So what do you prefer? Shorter phases with players min-maxing things more frequently or longer phases where there’s less of that and more experimentation?

And a bunch more where they were still catching up on loot because of the revolving door of pug rosters.

So are those the only two choices we have?

There’s no reason there can’t be content of variable difficulty, optional bosses, or phases that take as long as they need to.

Some of the feedback that seems to have gotten to the developers (breaking classes without patch notes sucks, it’s hard to have hard content without a weekly schedule, 10-man raiding forces meta-adherence) and is preventing reiteration of things that are unpleasant. Other bits of feedback (feeling pressured/rushed, bugs and untested balance issues cause problems, delaying lockouts at the beginning of the phase takes some pressure off) have been acknowledged but don’t seem to be really making much of an improvement. And some of that we signed up for.

So I don’t know entirely how to respond to this.

Despite all my frustrations, I’m still here. And I’m seeing more honest and positive posts on the forums about the game.

If you were in charge of the game, what would you want to see? What kind of player base would you want? How hard would things be? Would there be a heads up before content dropped? Would there be a delay between the start of the phase and when raid opened?

-Horse

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I don’t think I can answer big questions. I’ll just say I am about to quit if my guild falls apart on this content ( I said there was hope for us which is to be determined how we fair in this high difficulty). From my I admit limited perspective difficulty has only negatives and will (likely) destroy my social network in the game.

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Fun things are supposed to be fun for everyone.

Seasonal content is supposed to be fun.

Hard things are only fun to select people.

Seasonal content is supposed to be for everyone, not for select people.

Seasonal content should not be a hard thing to participate in.

Hope this simple flow chart helps anyone confused about the problem.

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Better post than mine, wish you made the thread xD.

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Not true. Blatantly false. People call your raid failing when there is no learning or progression. Nobody called you a “failure” if your guild didn’t have muru down week 2, people left for greener pastures when your raid when doing the exact same avoidable mistake multitudes of times over consistently and stuck at the same HP% with no progress towards a kill. It took my guild in TBC 100 wipes to kill muru and we had to deal with 3-5 pugs every week due to the roster boss but we did it, and there was tons of similar guilds out there who weren’t top 1% that eventually did it and it felt great when you finally did.

ST isn’t even close to sun well, people who put the bare minimum effort and learn from their mistakes will be 8/8 in week 3 at worst. This isn’t that hard, it’s just high on individual responsibility and requires people to do the god damn mechanics.

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Gatekeeping was never about “bad players”, people did ask for full T5 back in TBC at Kara, that dropped pieces of T4, which we cleared in blue gear before the nerfs. :joy:

Those that restrict who can join the group by ilvls or some virtual score, often do it because they want to ignore mechanics and not put any effort into the raid. Some may also do it to just be a brat…