I apologize for the vast delay on...well, anything happening here. RL has been busy, WoW has been busy, other games have kept me busy. A few things of note:
1,
my guild got 13/13H week one of Hellfire Citadel on two nights a week which was technically US 30th (despite killing Archimonde on Monday night at about 11 PM CST). Very happy about that. We prepared a lot (no PTR testing, didn't work for our schedule -- Sun/Mon is fun) and it paid off.
2,
I was interviewed on the Twisted Nether blogcast. So if you want to hear me ramble on for two hours feel free to check it out.
3, I'm still running weekly Openraid runs, switched to normal Hellfire Citadel with the release of 6.2. May possibly switch to heroic a few months down the line, but we stick with normal until we're full clearing it consistently and people don't need much gear from it. If you're new there's no guarantee you'll have a spot (some weeks we have like 20ish, some weeks we're at the max of 30) but if you're interested then
feel free to sign up. The run is meant for anyone -- have a mix of casual members in guild, alts in guild, bored mains in guild, and friends both on and off server. That said, like the description says, it IS normal and thus you need to be willing to, well, actually try. We don't expect perfection or even anything remotely close to it but if you show up completely unenchanted with empty sockets and try to AFK fights, well...
I'm working on another post at the moment but I got distracted by what wound up being a very a long comment on another blog so I decided to post said comment here as well. In general, I've been enjoying WoD and particularly the raids. I hardly think the expansion is perfect (both the garrison and shipyard have many issues, for example) but I admit it annoys me when I see people try to pick on WoD unjustifiably (stick to the justifiable stuff, please).
So I saw
this post and left the following comment...
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I don't think this is exactly fair:
"WoD will clearly be marked as the expansion with the least amount of content since launch. 2.5 raid tiers, 8 dungeons, no races, no classes, Garrisons, which killed cities, Ashran which put the final nail in open world PvP, a near-complete destruction of crafting. But we got selfies."
1, WoD launched with Shadowmoon Valley/Frostfire Ridge (I'll combine them as they're mostly faction specific even though they each took an entire's zone of work), Gorgrond, Talador, Spires of Arak, and Nagrand. So that's five "main" zones for leveling and I'd also point out that many of those are larger than past leveling zones.
BC launched with seven, best case -- Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar, Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Netherstorm, Shadowmoon. Terokkar/Blade's Edge were both smaller zones and Netherstorm/Shadowmoon were mostly intended for max level (while in WoD specific segments of those five zones were set aside for max level to continue previous storylines). So even if you argue that BC had more in that regard, it's not substantially more.
In theory, WotLK had eight...except two are basically mutually exclusive (similar to Shadowmoon/Frostfire in that regard), Grizzly/Zul'drak were smaller, and Icecrown/Storm Peaks had mostly max level content.
Cataclysm hit us with Vashj'ir/Hyjal (same mutually exclusive thing), Deepholm, Uldum, and Twilight Highlands. So that's five absolute best case, more like four if we compare to WoD (though, in all fairness, they did need to revamp all the earlier leveling zones in Azeroth).
MoP had six best case with Valley/Krasarang really "one" zone rolled into two names, size/story wise.
Put that all together and WoD equaled or exceeded MoP for sure, definitely exceeded Cataclysm (though leveling revamp), was about equal (maybe slightly smaller) than WotLK, and about the same as BC.
2, the raid tiers have 30 bosses between them (also note that Blizzard has explicitly said they want to get closer to a year between expansions, which means you can only realistically HAVE two raid tiers if they have like 12+ bosses per tier (about six months for each) so expecting more than that means you also have to take issue with Blizzard's expansion goal) -- and we'll lay aside quality for the moment (since it take massively more amounts of work to not only design modern bosses compared to something like BC but also to balance them for multiple difficulties -- LFR doesn't take careful tuning but Normal/Heroic do and Mythic is very tight tuning).
BC had three bosses in t4, 10 bosses in t5, and 14 bosses in t6. That gives us 27 total (not counting Sunwell since that was planned for WotLK and only introduced to avoid too long of a wait -- hence something like that could technically happen for WoD still). That doesn't include the 13 bosses in Karazhan (if we count every Opera boss individually) or 6 in Zul'Aman but the raids were also designed for only one size (and difficulty, but we said we'd leave difficulties/tuning/quality out of it for now). Overall, though, absolute best case we have 52 bosses for 22 months of BC (counting Sunwell) compared to (theoretically) 30 bosses for maybe 13-14 months (hopefully) of WoD. Ratio of 2.36 for BC and 2.14-2.31 for WoD which isn't far off.
WotLK technically had 15 bosses in Naxx (though given that they literally just adjusted some numbers and the tuning was laughable I'm not sure how much that counts), 1 in Malygos, 14 in Ulduar, 5 in Trial of the Crusader, and 12 in Icecrown Citadel (ignoring Ruby Sanctum since it was added as filler and literally was only 1 boss anyway, wouldn't even make a significant difference). So best case (even WITH Ruby Sanctum) we're looking at 48 bosses for 25 months which is a ratio of 1.92...which is worse than both BC and WoD, especially given the lack of effort needed for Naxx.
Cataclysm had 28 bosses TOTAL counting Sinestra. That's just flat out less than WoD.
Mists of Pandaria had 42 bosses for 25 months, or 1.68 ratio...not exactly a "good" ratio there compared WoD.
The funny thing is that people didn't complain about the lack of overall raid content in WotLK/Cata/MoP despite the fact the ratio was "lower" than BC -- they really only complained about super long final patches. And that "ratio" can't even afford to get too high -- guilds can only go through raid bosses so fast. Even if Blizzard could drop a 10 boss raid zone on us every month it wouldn't make any sense to do so, we can't consume the content at that pace.
So really, the only reason you could complain about the "lack" of raid content in WoD is if you want the time between expansions to be longer than Blizzard's stated goal...which I guess you'd do because you're concerned about the one-time expansion purchase fee or something?
3, no races/classes. This is completely a matter of personal taste -- I don't *want* new classes and I don't care about new races either. Remember that a new race also means every piece of gear needs to work for that new race too and a new class can cause major issues (balancing 11 classes is already a major problem -- and I don't mean Blizzard is incompetent, I mean that it's really hard to do). I admit it kind of feels like the people usually wanting new races/classes are the people NOT doing high end PvE/PvP. I'm not saying you're "inferior" or something if you don't engage in either of those, just keep in mind that our perspectives are vastly different about some things.
4, Garrisons. I honestly don't know what "killed cities" means in this context. I didn't pay attention to other players in cities before and I can still meet people in many locations (including garrisons AND cities) if I want. The only times I really recall cities "mattering" are...
Vanilla: people tried to show off gear on Ironforge bridge and people spammed trade for groups.
BC: people spammed trade for groups.
WotLK: people spammed trade for groups.
Beyond that?... I mean, I guess people sometimes people spammed trade for actual trade...but that still happens today too.
I interact with people in guild chat, group finder (as in pre-made raid group tool), OpenRaid, and blogs mainly. Cities never really played a role.
5, Ashran. I'll admit I don't really follow/participate in PvP much these days so I'll just skip this point. Maybe you're right, we can try to discuss it if you want, but I'm not sure it's really important in the grand scheme of things (aka, even if you're 100% right on that I don't think it would matter if you weren't right on everything else).
6, Crafting. I honestly don't know what you want. Vanilla/BC crafting was terrible -- complete RNG for rare open world drops for the most part, some raid drops I think? I got a rare tailoring belt pattern in BC and had a monopoly on it for a while since only I could provide the primals. Made me a lot of money but I don't think it was a good system. Saying that everyone can slowly work towards items with daily cooldowns seems to generally have been the best system yet. Yes, it does mean that there was little people could do outside of the daily cooldowns. I'm not saying it's perfect, but what crafting system in WoW was better? Remember, you said it was a "near-complete destruction of crafting" :P
7, selfies. I'm pretty sure a Blue posted that the vast majority of the "feature" was done by one employee over a weekend or three. If I'm wrong I will gladly retract this statement but I seem to recall that. And as a programmer myself I can assure you that adding the "selfie" feature would not have been a major ordeal. We didn't lose a raid tier because of selfies. The music jukebox honestly probably took more work but you don't see people complaining about that.
I've been leaving said essays on two blogs lately:
1, The Grumpy Elf has a post about a player unexpectedly ignoring mechanics in normal raids and the potential decline of raiding skill due to age/time away from WoW/etc. There's sort of two "conversations" I have going on with Grumpy at the same time in the comments with the first being here and the second being here.
2. Azuriel has a post questioning the amount of content in WoD. The comment chain I've been involved in starts here and it is quite long. So long, in fact, that since Azuriel seems to have lost interest in the subject and it's a royal pain to reply that I'm "restarting" the chain here in an effort to bring the vertical scroll down to a more manageable length. The last several replies have been to a MattH and that's who I am quoting in this post in response.
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(Note: the following quote originated from Grumpy's post (which is why I noticed said post), though if you've read some of that already you might guess that I disagreed with that player being a good example of normal being overtuned -- rather, it was a player just completely ignoring mechanics)
First of all, let's be clear about something -- most people's memories of Flex SoO are from when they overgeared the place and were facerolling it. That whole year of farming with having an item level significantly above what the raid dropped (plus the direct item level upgrades and legendary cloak). You also had a lot more mains raiding Normal/Heroic going to Flex or even going on just their alts out of sheer boredom. Which meant a lot of the later raids in particular significantly outskilled and/or outgeared the content which is NOT happening now in Hellfire Citadel (or earlier in Highmaul/BRF).
Why is this important? Well, your mention of Sha, for example, because I'm not even sure what you're referring to in the fight. Breaking people out of prisons? Avoiding getting Pride (because if you got a lot of Pride you could nuke the raid through one of several abilities based on Swelling Pride)? The tanks taunt swapping to avoid getting Pride (and thus MCed)? Or are we excluding tanks from these mechanics?
And then we bring in that skill/gear factor I mention above -- I actually remember being able to one-tank Sha of Pride due to having some very geared players (as in a large chunk of the raid being Heroic geared players doing Flex for fun with friends). How did we deal with the lack of a tank swap? We pushed him to 30% before the tank hit 100% pride so it then got reset (lusted on pull). But that was not how Flex originally was in your average Flex group.
The point I'm making is that if you look at some of the following examples and think "Well, it didn't hit THAT hard" then you were doing the content with an overgeared or overskilled group. Because I saw PUG groups struggle with some of stuff I'm about to mention.
1, Galakras required two people to be able to fire the cannon correctly at the same time and at the right time (didn't want to do it mid add-wave, for example). Usually when discussing this topic people are referring to randomly targeted mechanics rather than assigned mechanics but you *did* mention Flamethrowers on Brackenspore. In the final phase you needed to have people bring the fireball through the raid -- and I saw several cases where a person got targeted and got OUT of the raid since that's usually what those mechanics do. Queue raid wipe.
2, Iron Juggernaut had the tank debuff, of course, and in the second phase a person kiting the laser over the tar while the pulse was going off could wipe the raid.
3, Dark Shamans had several more examples where one bad tank could screw over the raid -- taunt swap, slime placement, Ashan Wall placement, etc. Individual raid members could run Foul Stream over a large chunk of the raid -- and if people were at lower health due to the Falling Ash landing <25% it could easily kill quite a few people and lead to a wipe.
4. Nazgrim had another tank swap and if a person or two decided to stand in Aftershocks and DPS the boss during Defensive Stance you could easily get some Ravagers flying...which that person or two would then stand in and you get more Ravagers and oh god the axes.
5. Malkorok had another tank swap and required people to soak the puddles -- in theory anyone can get in any puddle...but in practice everyone can't run across the entire room to get the puddle next to that oblivious mage. A person or two not soaking the puddles could lead to a wipe. Then we had the Displaced Energy debuff during Blood Rage -- I don't want to count the times I saw everyone with the debuff stay in the raid and then the raid just exploded.
6. Thok had a tank swap (technically could be solo tanked but made the fight much harder) and, of course, the Fixate in phase 2. Raise your hand if you saw someone get chased by Thok and they just led him through the entire raid. Yeah.
7. Paragons had the Kuchongs which people could either stand next to and get Mesmerized into or they could just flat out run into the Kuchongs. Either way you got the Mature Kuchongs which sucked to deal with and I saw them wipe some groups. Technically you could often handle them as long as you didn't get more than one or two but...still a major problem.
So yeah. SoO had a lot of mechanics that relied on individuals following them to not wipe the raid (or at least cause major problems which sometimes resulted in a wipe).
Regarding Brackenspore: I don't know what class you play(ed), but Flamethrowers technically should be a DPS increase if you do them correctly as a ranged DPS, at least. Might be a DPS loss for melee, don't remember at this point.
This next part is talking about ZA/ZG in Cataclysm -- previously I pointed out that while he said the gear was nowhere close to the raids that had come out, they were only 6 ilvls below the normal raid difficulty at the time the dungeons came out (during Blackwing Descent/Bastion of Twilight/Throne of the Four Winds).
I don't understand what you expected out of them. Valor gave gear equal to normal raids (current heroic difficulty) and had a weekly limit -- you could only get one item every week or two. Did you expect ZA/ZG to also give gear equal to normal raids despite being easier and on a daily lockout? You might be able to *eventually* fill most slots with Valor but that would take months to do (even one item per week on average would be 14+ weeks for a full Valor set -- that's 3.5 months of capping Valor every week).
Again, normal BD/BoT/TotFW (tier 11 -- which was the *current* content, you had nothing to catch up to at the time) was tuned around 346 blues. ZA/ZG gave 353 gear. It was amazing catch up content in that regard -- though whether they were too difficult is another story (meaning ZA/ZG were too difficult for their intended audience -- *I* loved them personally).
Then you mention 4.3 in a manner that makes me think you're trying to talk about ZG/ZA as catch-up content for both tier 11 AND Firelands. I don't see how that makes any sense given that ZG/ZA were released before Firelands was the current content.
So now if we're talking Firelands catch-up content, when Firelands came out there was a new selection of Valor gear while the old Valor gear became purchasable for Justice. Meaning you could get ton of 359 items from Justice, some 365 items from the Molten Front, and 378 items from Valor. Weapon-wise you could get a 365 weapon from Blacksmithing (BoE so could buy it on AH as I recall). If people spent an entire year with one weapon from ZA/ZG then they weren't raiding (otherwise they'd have a tier 11 or Firelands weapon) and didn't care enough to buy a crafted weapon.
So I'm really not sure what to say here. Cataclysm/ZA/ZG all certainly had some flaws but what you're talking about doesn't seem to have been a major issue...
Next up we have dungeon (either dropped or "Valor" type rewards) vs LFR gear! The previous question was "Dragon Soul LFR dropped 384 with tier/trinkets/etc. The dungeons with the same patch dropped 378. Are you claiming that no one was running those 378 dungeons for catch-up/alternate progression?"
A major thing you're missing here is the time investment. The vast majority of people who only run LFR/dungeons are not going to be doing all of the the dailies every single day. Even if you did do all the dailies every day and earned, say, 6667 crystals per day (I don't know how accurate that number is, I basically just tripled the "main" quest's rewards) it would still take a minimum of 45 days to get *just* the upgrade items themselves (well, technically 42 if you also do the Garrison Campaign for Tanaan since you get a free upgrade item). Then you also need another 5000 crystals per slot you didn't get a drop/reward of and 10000 for a weapon slot in particular. This is also assuming a 2H or ranged weapon -- add some more time in if you use two unique weapon slots.
That is a massive amount of time invested right there whereas LFR takes significantly less time relative to the rewards given. That's the paradigm -- LFR will gear you far more quickly with less effort but the gear is random and a lot of it is worse than the Tanaan Empowered gear. Then you can fill any slots missing with Empowered gear and/or crafted gear if you want.
Also, LFR is not *supposed* to be extended out. Blizzard specifically wants people who only do LFR to get through it quickly and then unsubscribe if they so wish, not drag out a gear grind in it. They said they'd rather have a person generally enjoy their LFR (gearing) experience and be wanting to resubscribe for the next patch rather than have that person miserable and hating LFR and quitting WoW entirely.
Now we have a discussion of catching up in WoD and I pointed out that "If your goal is to raid, then in 6.0 and 6.1 catching up was never easier in the history of WoW. However, it did require doing LFR and normal and/or heroic of older raids (in addition to other things like crafting, apexis gear, and so on). And since HM/BRF was the current tier, there wasn’t really anything to catch-up TO if you weren’t raiding."
Where did I ever say "grind LFR to grind Normal to grind Heroic?" We were discussing someone trying to catch up as quickly as possible here to Normal/Heroic raiding. Between 630 dungeon blues, 640 Challenge Mode epics, up to three 670 crafted items, various 655+ BoEs, 640 LFR Highmaul items, and potentially even some Apexis gear you could *easily* be ready for Normal, hell, even Heroic Highmaul within a week of hitting 100. I trust you're not saying that potentially doing Highmaul LFR one time for an item or three due to being behind the curve is a grind? That's not even getting into the Conquest items either which were 660 I believe.
Have you considered using a site like OpenRaid rather than the Group Finder? You're a lot more likely to find quality groups there that lack the "mouthbreathers" you mention. I know you said you don't have a set schedule, but you don't have to go to the same run every week or something.
And I'm not sure why you're trying to get that across to me -- I've said multiple times through the comments I left that I agreed that if you tried to play WoD at max level "solo" and didn't want to do anything besides daily quests, normal/heroic dungeons, and LFR that there was very little to do.
Things like...
"If your goal is to do solo content, some five man normal/heroic dungeons, and then an occasional LFR…then yeah, WoD would suck for you. Very little max level solo content (mostly a weekly quest chain that took probably less than an hour per week), quickly obsoleted normal/heroic dungeons, and LFR intentionally watered down to pure tourist mode.
On the flip side, if you’re interested in Normal/Heroic/Mythic raiding then raiding has literally never been better or easier to get into, for example."
"Someone who mainly does dungeons/max level solo content would have loathed WoD (and for good reason from their perspective)."
"The problem was that if you take all of them together you wind up gutting the game for people who don’t want to engage in organized group content at ANY level of difficulty (PvP OR PvE) and their experience sucks. They basically just took away stuff from the “solo” player and added it to other sections of the game (raids are better than ever for many reasons) but didn’t replace the stuff for “solo” players with anything those players wanted."
"Where did I disagree? Pretty sure I’ve said multiple times that WoD massively lacked stuff the “solo” players were used to."
So...yeah.
That said, what *would* make you happy? Azuriel said he'd be happy with 2-3 new (harder) dungeons per raid with better rewards and all dungeons giving Valor -- basically the ICC patch but every patch. But presumably mostly doing the same dungeons over and over again (with a few new ones added into the pool each raid tier) for a renewing Valor gear grind would fall into the category of "rehashed, warmed over, tired" stuff for you (I personally can't imagine doing an entire expansion of that, for the record).
So his solution wouldn't satisfy you -- what do you think is a reasonable solution?