Yea, yea, you think BFD is easy and you cleared it blindfolded with one hand. We get it. Not the point.
Here are the unintended consequences of making raids harder.
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Gatekeeping and class/spec exclusion becomes more necessary/easier to justify.
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Encourages GDKPs, which encourages real money transactions.
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Forces tanks to be better tanks. In-turn making it harder to solo level or participate in pvp (unless you have broken tanks in pvp which is a worse disaster.
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Forces healers to be better healers. So much so that healing in retail pvp needs to be stealth nerfed.
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Focuses design on end game content, making leveling feel more like a barrier to the game rather than the game. Makes players want to have level boosts purchasable.
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Makes players want to have duel-specing more.
Maybe there’s more. If you guy’s can think of any I’d like to hear um. If you think I got some wrong let me know. Or if you think making raids harder is worth it then I’m curious to hear that too.
To me I would rather raids be easy, but difficult to access.
8 Likes
I personally think BFD is more set up to be an introduction of future Raids, it’s more a glimpse of what they plan to do.
But if they intend to make Raids harder in future (naturally I assume they will with classes getting more power through Talents), more difficult mechanics, more dps checks and healing checks they most definitely need to start cracking down on class balancing.
Already certain specs are being dismissed from groups due to bad dps or hps, it feels bad, I guess it is the true classic experience in a sense but hopefully SoD can turn out differently.
Edit: I also forgot to mention Runes, if your a class that hits the jackpot with great Runes it’s smooth sailing, but if your a spec with Runes that aren’t so beneficial it feels worse. I feel this is gonna be the same each phase when more Runes are given. Great Spec and Runes everything is fine, bad spec with bad Runes be prepared to be sidelined in content.
Raids should be challenging to a degree, but all specs should have close to equal footing to complete it. I think that’s the biggest issue Blizzard is going to struggle on moving forward.
3 Likes
This isn’t a negative
Or the classes could be balanced
Dual Spec solves this problem
I Concede this point
You can make leveling content more difficult too, Cata hard notoriously hard dungeons. But I do agree the general player base doesn’t want to be sweating in their SM/RFD Runs while leveling
What does that mean?
As for my own thoughts, The best things about BFD is that it’s a 10 man. I Can run it with my friends who’s real name I all know and we don’t need to scrape the server for 25 other players that are neither too casual or too un-casual for the zone of functioning semi try hard we exit in (we’re not parse lords but have been farming 7/7 in like 3 alt raids)
1 Like
Yeah they should have released a Heroic/Mythic version of BFD for the elite players
Alright as someone thats raided in progressive raids quite a bit let me lay out a few things
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Its not gatekeeping, its making unique content. Not all content should be for all players. Just because its hard doesnt mean its designed to keep people out. Its designed for people that want a challenge to get together and properly attack a problem and enjoy the fruits of their labor
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GDKP is encouraged more by the introduction of buying gold, lack of rules regulating this and social norms. First, WoW tokens allow people to practically buy gold with their RL money and then turn around and use it to buy gear. Second, Blizzard needs to actually step in and say things like this isnt allowed as it completely messes up the dynamics but they wont because “lol gib moni plis”. Third, the entire community is allowing this. If we, the community would say “No” and shun them properly this wouldnt fly but people let it go on. Make people realize its looked at with disgust. Make it hostile.
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Nothing is wrong by making people better tanks. By forcing people to learn more about how to properly play a class means that people are more invested thus causes a more enjoyable experience. It does not make things harder to solo level as thats a completely different thing. Not a negative.
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see 3.
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The design on the world and end game raids are generally done by separate teams. No need to really worry. If anything thats just people being lazy. Blame the people in charge of the development for world building as they just let it go. Level boosts should be removed i will say that.
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People want duel specs because going to a trainer every single time to respec is god awful. Its not from difficulty, its quality of life. “Oh hey, our healer cant make it so we are down one for a raid” “Oh I can switch to healer and we can pull a bench dps off and get him geared up. No worries!”. That saves a LOT of time, frustration and effort. Quality of Life. Its not a negative in that either.
Raids need to be more difficult yes, but also more engaging. You cant just load up higher values and expect it to be better gameplay. “Oh it has more health and does more damage” is trash. Have fun mechanics, make people deviate from the norm ect. Thats why Gruuls and Kara were memorable. Mage and Warlock Tanks made things unique. SoD is making things unique like that. More “Outside the box” type mechanics go a long way.
3 Likes
There is no such thing as gatekeeping, you pay a sub and have access to everything everyone else does.
This phrase is used as copium for the lesser skilled players.
Yea good players are hiring security teams to make sure your raids aren’t allowed to zone into the raid.
8 Likes
Are you gatekeeping the replies? Shame.
1 Like
I hired a team to block all replies on this forum.
I’m gatekeeping.
With 3 and 4 I meant that the spec needs to get better, not the players. To be able to tank stronger bosses tanks are genna need gear and abilities/teir set bonuses to do it. Same with healers, their going to need the tools and the numbers to make it past the finish line.
This also goes to address your six point. But I in vanilla the differences between specs is pretty minimal. An Ele shaman or Balance druid, any class with int gear could off heal. Any class with a shield and a taunt could tank.
Making raids harder hurts this laid back culture.
If you’re not the best you’re last. Unfortunate side effect of trying to do the raid after people have geared and cleared it multiple resets
My hunter with 90 percentile logs and only missing 2 pieces of gear from the raid gets into groups almost instantly.
My warlock who has fairly decent boe gear and the epic boots can’t find a group because people stick their nose up at her despite me having the consumables and knowledge of all the fights multitudes of times over.
In their minds the warlock would just slow them down, and would roll on too many drops.
It’s a thing that happens in MMO’s. Greed and gatekeeping because people want the most gear/quickest clear since they have many geared players to chose from at this point in the phase.
I’m seeing more and more GDKP’s and reserving of the epic loot too.
4 Likes
Well the issue is more of a design then. 3 and 4 you want better players overall as generally values dont matter TOO much for tanking and healing when you can compensate for better usage of skills/timing. Rarely have I seen them buff due to underperformance. People have already found work arounds like paladins taking aggro for first few stacks of a debuff and then bubbling, or soul stoning ect. For the most part numbers are fine for this phase except for 1-2 classes. I dont see bear tanks like at all.
The specs are minimal right now but there are some things like Paladin consecration and a few others. Dual Specs may not seem like much NOW but next phase it will make a world of difference. So adding it in next phase is a huge quality of life. Also being able to level as dps and then heal/tank for dungeons is insanely helpful. It actually helps resolve a lack of healer/tank diversity we tend to see especially when playerbase numbers fall.
We need to hurt the laid back culture because it overall hurts. No one cares, no one wants to do a good job, everyone wants instant gratification. The reason why people are playing Classic is because it was made in a time that didnt have laid back culture. People had drive to make something amazing. Now we have too many sorry people making games that dont care.
Anyways thats my thoughts on the matter. In the end, it doesnt even matter. I try so hard and got so far. But in the end it doesnt even matter in todays age.
I like the raid difficulty of things like zg.
They aren’t hard but it does require a little bit of knowledge.
2 Likes
Most of that though, becomes a non issue if you find proper guilds. I waited a bit to raid as i was just leveling characters and my guild took me and im getting stuff, hell even my alt has gear. My guild is doing 10 groups. Its just not much of a factor. The only issue is if you are pugging. This becomes a complete non factor if you find a decent guild which isnt hard.
That can be true but I prefer not to raid on a schedule. You will get more consistent loot if you run with the same team every reset too.
Well then thats the pros and cons. It sucks but if you want to hang loose on the schedule and rely on pugs, you have to resolve yourself to their rules ect. Pugs have always been absolutely awful and its akin to buying something from a sidewalk vendor. It could be good, but chances are its going to end badly for you or not work out.
Less uniform, more nonsense. More uniform, less nonsense. I guess pick your battles the best you can in that regard.
making raids easier isnt fun.
it isnt interesting.
its adding loot pinatas to the game that people will still try to parse and zug through.
harder content doesnt promote class exclusion, a toxic run down community of people who value parses and speedruns over game enjoyment does.
Believe it or not people used to form guilds and plan raids with a list of people they considered their active roster. They used to have entire loot systems panned out to disperse loot and you saw the same people each week and conversed while progressing through content.
It’s an alien concept now, i know.
That way of playing only exists in the strict minority of the playerbase today.
Logging, Parsing and GDKPs have absolutely butchered this game.
People will do absolutely anything to save a bit of time even if its at the direct expense of themselves actually enjoying the game.
There are more guilds that pug every single raid than have an active roster.
That’s what you’re seeing.
So long as pugging is more common than an active raid roster you’ll see players be more excluding with class/spec and how they even approach the game.
1 Like
Thats exactly right. People misuse things like parsing/logging and thus we have all the issues that come from it. It honestly was just supposed to make you a better player. People use it as a way to judge.
I think those things only exist because of this weird way of playing the game that’s immigrating over classic. This mode of “get to max level, get BIS, and raidlog.”
It’s just how every other MMO besides vanilla WoW plays. And it’s garbage. It’s why MMOs are a dead genre.
1 Like
MMOs being a dying genre is a different discussion.
I think youre more so looking at a genre thats failed to adequately adhere to new players and bring them into the fold patch after patch really ensuring they have a good way to access and catch up on wtf is going on and how to do things.
That continued failure or just neglect has in-turn made it so you don’t have a steady flow of players so the game’s just aged with it’s playerbase that was hooked to it all those years ago.
Players aren’t kids anymore, they have jobs, families and a whole lot less free time but a whole lot more disposable income.
That has let this very Eastern concept of GDKPS and really race to the finish, efficiency over enjoyment mentality to thrive.
I sympathize with people not being able to approach the game in the same way as they could when they were younger but this failure to deal with RMT’ing has made a massive impact on the game and IMO is on the brink of ending it.
This version of the game should be a midway between Classic and Retail. I agree very much that instances should not be a pain in the but like Classic. So far I am having fun leveling but I just know I am going to get to the point that all these people will go all elitist soon and only take x class and not y because of one reason.