Not exactly… that’s more blizzard eventually deciding that it should have 3-4 difficulty levels that each have a tier gap in ilvl and that each tier gap should be like a 13-30% power boost.
Then they do 3 to 4 raid tiers per expansion and it just gets silly pretty quick because it’s exponential growth.
At the end of the day, the 30% buff IS canon.
determination stacks…for those lacking determination.
In a way, we are both correct.
The intense power level increase already existed with only 2 difficulties, but as you say, it only grew bigger as more difficluty levels were introduced.
However, Blizzard actvely chooses to make the differences that big. It could be minimal upgrades, but they are usually huge. While we cannot be 100% sure why, it has to be either the carrot on the stick for power level feeling, or that the content should not become trivial too soon, as players are outgearing it even with the fromer raid tiers raid gear. Personally I think its some of both.
In the end, the design, that new endgame content is very hard, if not impossible, without gearing in the content first, is undeniable.
Blizz has commented on it in the past. It’s the first one. They want you to be able to notice the gear upgrades on your numbers so that you want to keep working toward them.
Exponential scaling just eventually becomes problematically large.
Im sure you are correct, but the outcome is the same. Players can only feel a power level difference, if something that was hard once gets easy with the new upgrades. Its connected significantly.
It definitely does. I tend to agree with the argument that base scaling of bosses shouldn’t really consider the gear that they drop to be the “nerf” for the content though, as you have to be able to kill them in the first place to even see that power spike.
The gear should largely be available before then if we want to consider out gearing them to be a reasonable way to make them more accessible to others.
Without that, the content kind of needs direct nerfs to expand access to the bosses (and the gear that would have made them easier if worse players could actually get it).
WoW is a bit odd in the gaming world in that it gives the best players the best gear. Most games handicap their players on hard mode, not reward them better.
I would argue that the content is usually, if not always, accessible in form of the non heroic/ 10man version. The heroic version is not designed to be cleared everyone, especially early in the game.
My interpretation for the 30% buff in ICC is that Blizzard tried to make every player, even the ones joining late, kill their most iconic boss, before the expansion ends. In a way, this concept to make all players kill the bosses at least once, was later continued in form of LFR.
Personally I think the buff will have the same effect again, so I do not see the necessity to nerf the content earily. Eventually everyone will kill the Lich King, as intended.
This assumes that all fights are equally difficult though and bosses on heroic are the only source of gear, which isn’t true
Even in the heroic raid alone there’s like 4 tiers of bosses that help you gear for the next
T1 = Gunship, rotface, valithria dreamwalker, marrowgar
T2 = Festergut, BQL, BPC, Saurfang
T3 = LDW, Putricide, Sindra
T20 = Lich King
You can get like 265+ ilevel without ever touching a heroic boss
You get 264s by doing normal modes and heroic dailies, the gearing is very kind compared to what you’d have now if you went to HLK, 251 and 265 is kinda different
Sometimes raids have a good gradient of hard mode fights that bridge the gap. If you are going to have hard mode dropping better gear, you kind of need that.
Others (like pre-nerf Ulduar) really didn’t (which was made far worse by the tiny quantity of hard mode loot it dropped).
The game, especially the classic series, has definitely been leaning more toward demanding the Ulduar style balancing, where most of the raid is fairly exclusively tuned to lock out lesser players from both the boss, and the gear that they need to actually get the kill.
I personally would have just given hard mode kills extra (not better) loot, or a currency that lets them target farm items that have high competition or they have been unlucky with.
It would have let less good players get the gear they need to “nerf” the bosses regardless of how they were originally tuned or what items are where, slowed down the power creep of the game, and helped to keep the hard modes from being trivialized for the best players by the gear that they themselves drop for those that want a more lasting challenge.
Ulduar absolutely did have that gradient + it had insane 10 man gear that was better than the 25 normal, sometimes by up to +13 ilevels
Thorim, Yogg 1 and FL are the base tier, freya, xt-002 and vezax are your next tier, hodir is kind of in a tier of his own where he is either exceptionally easy or exceptionally hard depending on your guild and then there’s the get lost tier which is basically mimiron/council/algalon
Gear nerfed the hell out of these fights
I would generally keep Freya in the Hodir tier, that fight is RNG hell.
Gear definitely did weaken the Ulduar fights, but they stayed beyond the ability a majority of players very deep into the phase.
The place was overtuned, the gear wasn’t enough to make the harder fights accessible to enough players, and even the following tier hast made the place PuG friendly.
I find that to be a very weird thing to say. Gear is the best, most organic way of nerfing content. Feeling like you are getting more powerful is kind of a major point of gearing in RPGs.
That’s why normal mode exists.
Freya RNG doesn’t even matter unless you’re trying to do some parse silliness. It’s not like getting the waves in a different order actually matters or will make you miss a tight enrage timer.
Yup, 10m was way easier and dropped bis items for everyone. And even normal Ulduar gear was a significant upgrade from P1 gear.
That is simply gear progression.
Calling it a nerf is disingenuous because it applies differently for everyone each week, when an actual nerf reduces the difficulty for everyone at the same time, even those who have not ran the stuff yet.
But at the end of the day the best gear that drops in ICC is the same as it was, and the 30% buff is authentic to the experience.
The people who need the gear to nerf the content can’t get the gear because the content is too hard for them. So the gear nerfs it is a pretty weak argument for getting more players engaged with the content.
Ulduar saw the biggest dip in players raiding in classic since launch percentage wise. We lost over half the raiders in classic over the lifespan of Ulduar before ToGC. If their goal is to run all the players off by keeping the content hard then they are succeeding.
If you want hard raids go play retail, the average classic player is not looking for hard raids. They can be challenging on release, but should see post nerf versions.
Yes normal mode exists, but people still struggle with those. Even now with all the trial gear Ulduar fights have low kill rates.
We are going to run into the same player burnout in ICC if they don’t add the buff at a decent time, both guilds I’m in are already panicking after seeing no one is killing the Lich King on Heroic (sub 5%). Even normal his kill rate is abysmal.
If you want this version of wow to survive you should be advocating for the average player instead of telling them git gud because at the end of the day, player count is what drives blizzard’s decisions on the future of this version of wow.
Exactly.
Look how well the ToGC numbers are holding up. It’s a tiny, five boss raid only being supplemented by Ulduar farm, and yet the numbers are significantly better than what we saw during Ulduar progression.
That’s because for every loud elite gamer who wants raids to be super hard, there’s multiple average gamers who just want their guilds they’ve been with since 2019 to stay intact without having to constantly recruit new players due to the progression churn.
Here’s what the WCL creator had to say about Molten Core, 3.5 years ago:
I agree with this but comparing retail and Classic raiding numbers is never really accurate as Retail has many more avenues of play. M+ is absolutely massive as an example.
But as far as just raiding, yes easier raids generally keep numbers better than super hard and overly complicated ones.
Then why have gear at all? Just make a singular difficulty and make it pass or fail and everyone has the same level of gear.
Then why have shoes at all? Just make a singular style of socks and make it clean or dirty and everyone has the same toe fungus.
What?
Again… what?
Are you just upset that I showed your suggestion to be bad? Lets take gear progression out of a game that is about gear progression, when you gain gear you feel no stronger than when you didnt get an upgrade! Thats called D4, go play it.