Naxxramas

[Kevin]

There are two distinct groups of people complaining about 1.10.  For one I agree with you, for the other I don't.

The first group is the people that want easy loot.  For them, 1.10 is bad because it is too hard.  Granted, it is not helping that most of the people that say it is possible say "I did it with 4 other epic-geared raiding guild players and we used vent, but it should be possible for people in greens and blues".  They're misrepresenting the group that this content was designed for, and personally, I don't think content should be designed with voice chat in mind unless the voice chat is integrated.

The second group is the group that wants NEW 5-man content.  I am part of this group.  Adding in epics for the casual player was one thing, but all they did was send us all back into the same instances everyone has been running since the game came out.  It's a band-aid at best.  People have been sick of the instances themselves.  We need something new.

Right now the problem stems from a lack of foresight on Blizzard's part.  They stupidly put 3 raid instances into the pipeline without thinking "Maybe the other groups need content", then they rushed something out when they realized that 90% of the content in a year's patches was raid focused.

It also doesn't help that the "solo and small group friendly" content in Silithus got ninja-changed into small raid quest mobs at some random point. :angry:
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Good coverage of the issues.

I don't care about the people that want easy loot they will always complain. Screw them.

I'm part of two very different guilds. Alliance side I'm in a group that has just killed Nefarion and Skeram in AQ40. I can get in 20 mans if I have the time to kill everything in ZG, everything in AQ20, everything in MC, everything in BWL.

Horde side we have a guild alliance that can rarely get 20 people together. We were wanting to hit ZG before 1.10 came out, we were mostly tired of scholo and strat and most people had finished all the 5 man quests in there. We would 10 man UBRS because we couldn't get 15 without grabbing pugs though when we started the alliance we could get 15. But when we saw the 1.10 changes (announced shortly after the alliance was formed) we started really trying to complet the T0 sets because we knew the upgrades would be good and cool and hoped for some fun challenges. We have people that just love the 45 minute Baron run challenge. It takes time to learn everything and get it down, one mistake and you fail, but it's kinda like the 40 man raids but on a much smaller scale. You have to learn the group and tactics and execute the script. It's great. We are pretty happy and we are in the gear designed for the people the content is aimed at. We haven't suceeded yet but we will soon. Even if a 5 man can push 700 DPS on a single target (and that is pretty high DPS for a blue/green group) it takes 10 seconds to kill that 7000 HP elite mob. Many of the pulls in there have 2 to 3 elites so you are looking at 20-30 seconds a pull at least. It's a challenge you do have to skip some stuff you do have to keep moving, but it is by no means impossible.

ZG is also doable as long as you have a core of about 10-15 you can PuG the rest and still be successful. So it does fit the smaller guilds, that are willing to bring in PuGs pretty well. We are considering doing this with our horde guild. Sponsoring runs that we fill in warm bodies from the PuG classes, we have killed a few bosses in there with just 15-18 people as is. Generally on a boss fight even a bad PuG player won't be able to hurt you more than they can help you. So ZG is more casual friendly than MC. It's much easier in a place like MC or BWL for one persons mistake to kill the whole raid. In ZG a mistake by one person will generally only kill that person and maybe a few others. Even an MT not putting an exploding bat in a good spot shouldn't kill the raid as the rest of the raid can move themselves easily out of harms way if they have any skill. So I think it fit in right where it should fit as well, though you do have to make sacrifices for it. Guilds that were just shy of critical mass for MC and BWL should have loved ZG and AQ20 as they could have full guild run the places right away, no PuGs needed.

I've been happy with the solo stuff I've done so far for the upgrade quests (I haven't actually collected any ectoplasms yet because I didn't have the bracers on my horde character that really wanted the upgrades and on my alliance characters I haven't really bothered yet because while for some the uprades would be a sidegrade or minor boost for some gear sets with mostly epics on 2 of the 3 of my capped alliance 60's there isn't a lot of motivation to do other than doing it and I'm saving it for the horde toon that will get the most benefit as that will maximize my initial enjoyment of the quest more).

So yeah, Blizzard made a step in the right direction. I would like to see more solo and 5 man content though.

The problem is though that you can't push content fast enough to constantly have fresh stuff out there. 5 mans got stale faster than raid locked dungeons for a couple of reasons. They are shorter, when you could raid them they were complete jokes so the content gets old faster. For players new to the game the changes to make them only be 5 man just stretched the life of those instances out because they won't get stale as fast. They will remain challenging for a longer time. My rule of thumb is that you need to kill a boss mob about 20 times before you will get the loot you want from it assuming that the loot isn't contested. For everyone one else that wants the same loot from that boss as you do, add about 10 more kills. So if you have 11 people in your guild say 2 warriors, 2 hunters, a warlock, 2 shaman, a mage, a rogue, a druid, and a priest. You can expect to run scholo, strat and UBRS 30-40 times before everyone has gotten their T0 sets, even though if you get really lucky you could be done with UBRS in as few as 11 runs. The problems happen when in a group like that say the priest gets his loot from UBRS on the first run but the hunter doesn't get the loot till the 35th run. The priest is going to be tired of the place. The hunter is going to want to keep going back. Guilds that work are ones where the priest realizes that the hunter has been going to scholo for weeks on end even though he has nothing to get from there and the hunter realizes the priest in only going to UBRS because the hunter still needs stuff. For me the burnout happens a lot less quickly when I keep this in mind. I also cheat a little and take the 60 that has the most to gain as long as it doesn't endanger the run winning (though with a feral druid who can tank Drakk or solo UBRS all the way up to the beast or keep up with the rogues on DPS, a paladin that has solo healed it all the way to the beast and MT'd it all the way through Rend, and a warrior who has MT'd or provided solid DPS many times I generally can take whoever I want and still contribute something that is needed). It's just a tip for burn out. Try to keep loot in perspective of the group not the individual and it can help with the whole "why the hell do I want to kill yet another big lizard?" oh so that this team that I work with can be even better geared. It makes it feel more like you aren't wasting your time either. Yep play that seems selfless is often quite selfish too. :)