Correct, but that was a function of his difficulty.
You can read Ions response here:
Yes, Oondasta’s maximum health has been reduced by 50%. The design intent behind this boss was for the primary audience to be guilds rather than pickup groups. That is why we placed Oondasta on a relatively remote island, surrounded by powerful elite dinosaurs that make solo travel in the area a dicey proposition. It’s why he has mechanics that will outright kill you without the coordinated use of cooldowns, and careful positioning. It’s a very different philosophy than our approach to designing bosses like Sha of Anger or Nalak. Of course, things didn’t exactly play out as we envisioned – as we all know, it was possible to overwhelm Oondasta with sheer numbers. While not intended, that was not entirely negative. There have been some pretty epic experiences on the Isle of Giants in the last couple of weeks. There’s something to be said for the sight of a hundred spells and missiles flying through the air at a huge dinosaur.
We could have made a number of changes that would have made this approach entirely impossible: Consider a version of Oondasta with a Spiritfire Beam that could hop to 99 targets instead of 20, and a Doomwalker-style debuff that prevented players who had died during the encounter from re-engaging. Definitely not zergable. But that doesn’t mean that people would stop trying, and the result would likely be a boss that no one could kill, and a frustrating experience for most participants. So we didn’t do that.
Ultimately, while our server hardware is much, much more powerful than what we had in place during the days of events like the Opening of Ahn’Qiraj years ago, it still has limits. And what we have increasingly been observing was players massing around Oondasta in such great numbers that it brought servers to their knees. As word spreads that Oondasta has spawned, more and more people flock to the Isle of Giants for a piece of the action. Many people have been in Oondasta fights where spells took multiple seconds to cast, and the dinosaur perhaps stopped using its abilities entirely. Players with anything but the very best computers saw nothing but a slideshow. And in extreme cases, the entire continent of Pandaria crashed. That simply isn’t an acceptable experience for our players, and so we reduced Oondasta’s health, so that smaller groups are more likely to be successful, and he’ll likely die before so many players arrive that it degrades the experience for everyone present. If server capacity were limitless, we wouldn’t have made any of these changes, but alas that is not the case.
Oondasta clearly did not deliver on our original expectations. We’ll apply the lessons learned from this experience to any future world bosses we add.
So we’re comparing the idea of mythic raiding for cosmetics only to a solo challenge for cosmetics, and a mythic raid that from how you phrase it, people went back in for the cosmetics after they added a skip, thusly reducing the time commitment? What is wrong with people wanting their ilevel to go up for doing challenging content? Sure it’s by a small margin compared to heroic and you can get similar ilevel from mythics, but I don’t think that should mean removing the actual gear from the raid on the highest difficulty. If you can kill Mythic Fyrakk you should have a chance at that 496 Augury. I’m sure people who enjoy both mythic raiding and key pushing would rather have actual gear than simply cosmetics.
It was a moderately challenging boss by world boss standards and this was “overcome” in some capacity by absolutely obliterating the servers by tossing literal thousands of players at the boss.
Oondasta is the reason why hard world bosses will literally never exist again.
This wasn’t limited to mythic raiding, and some of the most popular content ever made in this game has been cosmetic only.
If we just look at the numbers it tells us that a chance of a minor ilvl increase isn’t rewarding enough for players to spend the hundreds of hours every raid tier running a mythic guild.
I actually disagree. The people doing keys higher than +20 are not doing them for gear. I would also argue that the majority of CE guilds are not raiding for gear either. An example of this is how many groups choose to extend their lockouts for the last few bosses. They see getting CE is more important than re-clearing for more gear.
Cool cosmetics last forever, gear is only good for the season you are playing in.
My question still stands, what’s wrong with people wanting their ilevel to go up for doing challenging content? I don’t mythic raid, I heroic raid, and I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy M+ but I still do it because it gives gear. If content that has always provided players with gear suddenly stops giving them gear, I would be quite mad, doesn’t matter if I actually do that content or not. It’s the idea that you can be doing what you enjoy in the game and then Blizzard coming in and saying, “hey, so I see you’re having fun, gearing your character in and what not, to continue doing the thing you enjoy and even perform better while doing that. Well… now you’re gonna have to do stuff you don’t find fun as your only means of gearing for the stuff you do enjoy.” If mythic raiding was purely cosmetic to start then that’s one thing, but suddenly removing part of the reward for what reason? Yeah, no, that would be incredibly asinine.
I can’t speak for any mythic raider, but if people only do it for gear, do it because they enjoy the challenge, or both, what does it matter? I think people doing harder content than me should have better gear than me.
Challenge modes
Mage Tower
Legion Class Mount Quests
Green Fire Questline for Warlocks
Hivemind, Lucid Nightmare, and other secret questlines
I would even throw the SL Beta version of Torghast which was WAY more fun before they added a player power element to it on release.
Mage Tower also had fomo for it’s cosmetics, you had an end date to get them, that means people knew they couldn’t put it off until next expac. This account didn’t exist until the end of SL season 4, I have the mythic leather set from Nathria. What’s the point of only cosmetic rewards if I can wait for the next expansion to get them? I suppose you could make another alternate coloration of the tier for getting CE like there is with the elite set in PvP. But there’s a lot of people who don’t want more fomo. Also, how many of these cosmetic only rewards required a group of 20 or so people and hours upon hours of playing at high a level? I don’t mind farming mythic keystone only drops for the cosmetics, but that’s because I only need 4 other people and since I only want the cosmetic, can do keys that I overgear by a large margin. I can easily do that. I can’t easily go get that mythic Fyrakk exclusive bird mount easily right now.
And that’s their decision. If they just want to get CE and be done with it, there’s nothing wrong with that. If they can’t get CE and are tired of trying and want to move on to something different, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some guilds have participation drop offs after getting AotC, does that mean the gear from Heroic isn’t rewarding enough for them to keep raiding?
No, they’re not, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, when you’re doing infinitely scaling content, especially if you’re trying to be in the top whatever percent for that exclusive title, why would you not want to have the best possible ilevel for your BiS? If you know you can kill mythic Fyrakk and Augury is a BiS trinket for you, why would you not want to try to get it to push your group pushing keys a little further to compete with the other groups doing the same?
Yes, and in season we can get both at the same time.
I hate fomo, but also the cosmetics should still feel rewarding to get. FF14 does this extremely well with their ultimate raids. WoW should figure out a way to do something similar with their scaling tech.
Yes, that’s exactly what that means.
Because for a lot of people, 200-300 hours of raiding over the course of a raid tier isn’t worth the 2-4% dps increase.
So, should we make heroic rewards cosmetic only and cap the gear at normal?
And? It’s worth it for some people, why does gear most players aren’t going to have need to be eliminated when the people who get the gear are doing the content that Blizzard decided should drop those pieces at those ilevels?
The game doesn’t end at Mythic Fyrakk for everyone. It might for you, but you’re not everyone.
Nothing wrong with having both types of content. In fact, we should have both.
WoW wouldn’t last long because the content outside of raiding and M+ is either bad or non-existent outside of a few outliers. This is the scary thing because the participation of both is in a steady decline, which is why OP made this thread in the first place.
They are basically already cosmetic outside of trinkets and early tier sets. It’s way easier to get better gear doing M+.
What I’m getting from this is that you (and others evidently) are starting to sour on the concept of gear (and gear progression) being a reward. Not having an item simply means you aren’t done gearing yet. I get that missing specific items can feel frustrating when gearing is as fast as it currently is (those are basically the only upgrades left after the 1st month), but I think that’s more related to M+/upgrade system making gearing unhealthily fast. ICC came out in mid October, and my S3 retail main is closer to being fully done gearing than my classic warlock.
If the people who wanted to refuse to learn would stick to solo content, and not demand that the entire reward structure of the game be re-designed and re-tuned to cater specifically to them, this wouldn’t be an issue. But they keep finding themselves in group content, expecting a free carry from players like me, and then arguing that the rewards from trivial content should be buffed up the wahzoo to the point where everyone is forced to participate in content that is so trivially easy it’s boring and unfun.
I was exaggerating a little bit, but 1 or 2 people is rarely the reason a CE guild would be wiping all night, like the guy I was quoting was suggesting. We only have good players, if someone is making the same mistake over and over they should probably take a break for the night, because they are distracted for some reason and they are not playing at their best.
