May News/Discussions

[Mirajj]

May 31 News
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Here's a nice article that sums up the final leg of all three gathering professions. It's a nice base, and has some good suggestions in it.

[Swiss Mercenary]

On the other hand, in difficult 5-10 man groups, you dont have the room to bring any dead weight. If one of your DPS'ers is outputting 50% of your other two, you are running at 75-80% of your groups potential DPS.

And what are you going to do about it?

Replace him?

It must be nice to have a full 10 people who can make every raid night, with all of them being good players.

I know I'd love nothing more then to see my guild come to raid with a full 25 people, who can make every fight.

The reality of it is, those 10 people are probably in a 30, 40, or 60 man guild. They pooled together their top talent, to build a good 10-man group.

To keep scaling fair, if a 25-man raiding guild had 75, 100, or 150 members to draw from(And not just /random invites, either), then you wouldn't see them carry four people to Illadin.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that would leave the other 50/75/125 of them pretty unhappy.

[lfd]

If you look at tBC at launch, the only raid instance that required no attunements was Gruul's lair.

And Magtheridon. Of course, he was also grossly overtuned.

[Bolty]

IMO, the best solution for Blizzard would be to set normal and heroic levels to the instances. Make it so those people that want a truly hardcore experience can do the heroic level at either 10 man or 25 and get one level of loot higher than what normal would be. You then give the hardcore people the same amount of opportunity at which ever level they prefer while still leaving things open for the less skilled and more casual players to run either at 10 man or 25 man.

Ultimately it comes down to this:

When you first run The Burning Crusade, you watch a video. In this video, a half-demon, half-Night Elf named Illidan tells you about how he was imprisoned for 10,000 years, banished from his homeworld, and now you're daring to enter his turf. You are not prepared.

Now, for the vast majority of players, they will never get to fight him. Ever. Either they are:
1) Not skilled enough
2) Don't have the excessive amounts of time required to play in a successful 25-man guild
3) Don't have the social connections
4) Have other social obligations to people who fall in categories 1-3

Yet, Illidan is the "goal" of TBC. He's in the intro movie. From the very first quest you undertake, you start hearing about Illidan and how he must be stopped. An excessive amount of lore in the expansion points you to the Black Temple. He's big. He's bad. All of this buildup is what makes getting to him so freaking incredible. And most players will never see him.

Utilizing a 10-player version of Arthas, with scaled-down difficulty, allows players of all types to at least have a dream of having a shot at him. He's at least an attainable goal now, something that's not so far out of reach that he's considered not worth trying for. I'm sure he's going to be really really hard. I would imagine that he'd be on the order of difficulty of a Zul'Aman bear run in Karazhan-level gear. But it's still *possible* and gives players something to shoot for.

The only danger of this is if Blizzard scales him to be *too* easy. Quite a few players may take the attitude of "okay, I win WoW, see you next expansion." Nothing wrong with that, but Blizzard's bottom line might not like it. So I expect the difficulty will be pretty up there. This is why the non-heroic version of Arthas cannot exist - killing him still has to mean something. You just don't need to find 24 other players who don't drive you crazy to do it.

-Bolty

[oldmandennis]

So are the heroic 5 mans, but do you remember what the heroics were like prior to 2.1 (especially Shattered Halls and Arcatraz)?

Actually this perfectly demonstrates my point. Not only were heroic Arc and SH not as difficult as the final boss of a game (like Arthas) should be, but even at that level of difficulty it was radically easier or harder depending on your class/spec. The major reason those places were nerfed was that a bear/mage/mage/lock/holy priest could snooze their way through the 45 min timer, but prot warrior/arms warrior/cat druid/hunter/tree was pretty much boned.

If you look at tBC at launch, the only raid instance that required no attunements was Gruul's lair. If you also look at the way Blizzard lays out difficulty based on the tokens, Gruul's lair *should* have been easier than Karazhan. Difficulty for Blizzard has been shoulders -> gloves -> pants -> hat -> robe with shoulders and gloves sometimes being interchangeable.)

I wouldn't call that a rule. T4 is all screwey because of the 10/25 devide, and personally we found Leo more difficult then FLK, and it's arguable which direction makes more sense in that section of the instance. We also found council harder then Archi, though Archi is more random and difficult to farm. Goin back before TBC, T1 the pants and hat drop before the shoulders, T2 the pants and hat drop a whole dungeon before the shoulders, 2.5 the hat drops before the pants.

Do you remember just what was required for Curator in the early days? People were going into that fight with every buff imaginable to have a chance against him.

What? I remember it being exciting, but we didn't flask or anything.

They could do that same by tuning the encounters for 10 man and then scale hit points and maybe damage done by mobs/bosses for 25 man, but they would be able to leave some slack.

A 10 man that was tuned to be barely beatable by a stacked group will be impossible with a balanced one. This tuning cannot exist, therefore your upscaled 25 man cannot exist. Also, 25 mans based on 10 mans would be relatively boring.

I challenge you to scale the Illadin encounter down to 10 while still keeping all the essential challenges of the full version. It has to be completable by any reasonably balanced group of 10 at the appropriate gear level. It has to be completable with 1-2 of the less favored specs like Ret or Moonkin. It can't require any one class. Min-Maxing your raid composition can't make it trivial.