Dec 30 2008
World of Warcraft Raiding: It Still Sucks
That headline is a grabber, isn’t it? I did not purchase Wrath of the Lich King so I have no practical knowledge regarding the current state of WoW raiding. I suspect it is not significantly different and still has the same problems that always annoyed me. I created this topic so those of you playing WotLK can educate me. I will start the discussion off by recapping a few things I hate(d) about WoW raiding, and the readers can tell me if WotLK is more of the same, or a major improvement.
A Few Reasons I Hated World of Warcraft Raiding
1) Bind on Pickup loot: I highly doubt this is changed, and it is still one of the big things I hate about WoW loot and WoW raiding in general. BoP loot is economic kryptonite, as it takes so many useful and desired items totally off the market. BoP has its place, but it should be extremely rare and reserved for long epic quest type items that are tied to your character because of how much you personally worked towards obtaining or forging it.
2) Strict number requirements. If a raid calls for 25 people, you need to bring 25. If you have 27 friends online, 3 of them are hosed. If you have only 19 friends online, all 20 of you are hosed, because lacking 3 people you just have no hope. Success being so tied to brute force and exact numbers means you cannot overcome a few missing people through skill. Skill just isn’t enough.
3) Strict class requirements. You can’t take 5 healers on a 10 man raid. You can’t even take 3 healers (realistically) on most 5 man dungeons. Heck, even 2 healers is sometimes too much as it means you don’t have enough DPS for the DPS speed bosses. Strict class requirements reduce options and again eliminate skill and variety from the equation.
4) Cheap Tricks from Bosses: I used to get so sick of the first fight against a boss being a battle of “Which 9 out of 10 abilities won’t work, and which one of my important abilities will shock me by actually working.” Taunt, Disarm, etc. were all key abilities for my tank that rarely worked on a boss.
5) If someone makes a mistake, everyone wipes. WoW Raiding (and perhaps modern raiding in general) loves this concept. If one person in your group makes a mistake, you all wipe. I hate this. I hate the fact that the heroic comeback or rescue is so incredibly rare.
6) Unrecoverable fights. This is related to #5. There were so many boss battles where about 20% of the way into the fight, you knew right then if you were going to win or lose. If you were “behind” at that point, you might as well suicide and start over. Bosses that enrage after X minutes are a great example of this. If you have 10 minutes, you basically know after 2 minutes if you should just start over. That’s lame. No real ability to make a last minute comeback sucks.
Is World of Warcraft Raiding Any Different Now?
Here is where you come in. Are things still the same? Or have some of the above issues been significantly modified?
In general, Wotlk has the most beautiful area in terms of landscape, quest design and features, also due to the new “phasing” idea of creating some kind of seamlessly integrated personal instances in the world. Despite all the improvements, it still managed to bore me quickly… more of the same, but SOME well meant changes to raids and dungeons were a downer to me:
1.) They added more BoE items, every heroic boss now has a BoE so that people have something to fill in the AH, which quickly turns in a raw materials and trade goods exchange. On Frostwolf, despite super high populatuin, you can hardly buy quality items, as quest rewards are usually better and there were not really worthwhile items for sale. Despite the idea to add more BoE items to raids and dungeons, this did not change.
Surprisingly, Guild Wars players often ask(ed) for Bind on Pickup mechanisms: As a proof of strength, you were there, you did not buy it for farmed or ebayed gold, something like that.
2.) Some achievements require you to do certain 25 man encounters with less than 20 players, and I think it is even more discriminating as the raid leader start minmaxing players to a degree Blizzard wanted to avoid. Ghostcrawler explained a change in philosophy: Bring the player, not the class. They tried to make classes more equal in terms of buffs, damage and abilities. So you do no longer need exactly 3 shamans, 1 mage for CC, 1 rogue for stun, 1 Warlock for demons and so on. They also made raiding easier: Naxxramas is piss easy. You cannot fail. There are now 10 man and 25 man versions of the dungeons, the loot of the 10 man is only slightly worse than that of the 25 man version. Funnily, it is a bit harder than the 25 man Naxx, if you do not take in account that getting 25 people together is more complicated per se.
3.) I already partly answered in 2., and Blizzard / Ghostcrawler really try to make raids more casual friendly. They plan another feature, the “Dual spec” feature. You can basically switch out of fight between 2 saved stats and interface templates. This means, a priest can now change from holy to shadow for dps. And they do very good dps by now. Despite the change to unify healing spell power and damage spell power in the new stat “spell power”, meaning you can basically dps in your healing gear, you will still want some extra dps items to become a viable DD. Note that this feature is not implemented yet, and I must say as a Warlock I hate it. Because classes that can be DPS/TANK/HEALER can now switch as needed almost on the fly. The rules or if there are time restrictions or other requirements to switch spec, e.g. only in raid dungeons, are not set in stone yet. My Warlock is DPS/DPS/DPS in 3 flavors and I fear this will make pure dps classes the least desirable, while buffing hybrid classes even more. WoW was once a hybrid unfriendly game, now they rule.
I fear Ghostcrawler had a good idea by saying that designing content for 0.2% of the players is a waste (meaning Naxx highend content before TBC). So he made raids more accessible: 10 man and 25 man version for every raid.
The downside: All encounters are so extremely easy that every combo of classes and every idiot can do it. Really, the better guilds cleared Naxx on day 1-2 after getting 80. While…
4.) … the boss fights still have the same abilities and tactics. They added some really cool new ideas, like fighting your own party in Ahn’Kahet, every player in his own phase. To return to the fight against the boss you need to kill your whole party, and then you are back together in the “boss phase”. I must say I think it is okay that we cannot stun bosses with hammer of justice or disarm them. This would make some fights too easy. I do not have much problems with that, but I would agree in one point: A boss fight in WoW is basically a 10-25 man dance choreography. You can train and learn it once per week. The new Naxx design emphasizes this notion: There are no longer many trash mobs between bosses, there is boss after boss - because bosses are the interesting parts of the fights, according to the players. Newbs design MMORPGs, said Bartle… I guess he is right…^^
Because I doubt that raiding is really the best idea for endgame content. Bosses became a dance choreography, reward always +1 achievement, +1 more if you do it in a certain retarded way mentioned in the special achievements section, and +2-3 items for 2-3 guys in the raid. Guild Wars added treasure chests, everyone who participated in a boss battle in the Deep or Urgoz Warrens or elsewhere was awarded a fixed good (like a diamond or obsidian shard) plus one rare or green drop. Some got lucky and got the supposedly most valuable and fancy item, but everyone was eligible. No need for DKP or other systems.
Ghostcrawler was already working on making raids more accessible for Joe Average. Maybe Tigole, Kalgan, Pardo and other former EverQuest-Raid-Superstars ™ get the idea that raiding is not what defines a living and breathing MMO. Raiding is a design failure, it is for sure nice, but it should not be the one and only and most important kind of the dreaded “endgame content” philosophy.
Imagine this: “Hey guys, we have a cool new idea, and it is not some kind of raid or pvp!” -> this is what MMOs nowadays are all about, we need something else. Raiding is a dead end … IMO, of course.
5+6.) YES! This is not only WoW’s problem. Many games work like this: It is not that you must be good or do something right, you must make sure to make NO mistake. I hope for a game where doing something good is more important than not making a mistake.
Besides that, dungeons and raids are now dumbed down for the sake of accessibility. Basically, there is no challenge involved anymore at all. Elitist hardcore raiders are bored to hell (haha!), but even I as a hardcore gamer that still never enjoyed constant raiding schedules feel bored.
Tanks can EASILY aoe aggro and never lose aggro. Fact! OK, the fucking game to watch the threat meter was really artificial and odd, but now all you do is: Rain of Fire, AoE spell everything around the tank. You can do EVERY heroic instance in WOTLK in green level 80 gear this way. No kidding. I was playing with 3 friends and a random, my warlock, my friends mage, paladin tank and shadow priest plus a healer from their guild. Trash mobs in Naxx are also group pull, AoE nuke them down.
This is a pity as they made several boss fights more interesting and gave mobs rather funny special abilities. The case is still lost, as all them any nice ideas are not really doing anything, if we are just able to overpower them with aoe pull, aoe nuke all the time!!!
The dungeons are easier, shorter in both length and time. Nothing wrong with that. I still miss some epic long dungeon runs, but the majority wants fast dungeons, fast rewards and so on. We still have the limitation of doing a heroic dungeon only once per day, and this part of the system is rotten, too.
I think the whole EverQuest idea behind WoW is the major limiter in the development of the game. It is based on a system of constant progression and addiction, limiting or preventing many new ideas and improvements. But the system is tried and true, and it works.
I can only hope for Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet uses and used Guild Wars 1 as testbed for some great ideas and bad implementation, IMO…^^
BTW: WoW did not add many new skins, so many armors and items look exactly identical. This put the wife of my friend really off! Add in the fact that EVERYONE now has the very same quest or badge reward, and you can get T7 gear parts for badges, too, and welcome to World of Clonecraft. Raiding has become almost guaranteed reward over time, depending on your status in the guild/dkp system you will get it sooner or later.
A couple things I would like to say in response Longasc. Many of the things he says are true, and many of the complaints I have heard as well.
I have a level 80 but I do not participate in end-game raiding, by choice. At least, not at this time.
Dungeons are easy-mode. Yes, they are. By design. Blizzard feels that the dungeons were too insanely hard and too many people were brick-walling in strange catch 22 situations (I need uber gear, so i gotta do entry-level raid kara to get it, but I need uber gear to do kara). They’ve made the entry-level raid dungeon (Naxx) easier. Yes, much. Much less trash than before, in all dungeons, as a matter of fact.
I disagree that any idiot can lolspam an ability in a group and get away with it. Unless you’re saying that idiots do better in heroics and raids than they do in standard non-80 5-mans. I’ve run with COUNTLESS idiots in PUGs in just the usual zone 5-mans and been wiped numerous times on TRASH. I’m in “quest greens/blues”, so are they. I make mistakes, sure, I’m not perfect and am still learning how to properly marry my abilities as everybody does. You still need to know what you’re doing or at least be able to rescue an incoming failure or be willing to learn the dungeon and the moves.
The thing is, they really buffed player spells and abilities and didn’t make the dungeons are hard as their TBC equivalents so we’re all just that much MORE powerful than before. So, yeah, AOEing is a valid strat now (as it usually is when you’re running less difficult content).
The release of WotLK was not the full of Wrath, much like TBC didn’t end with the box release. We still have more dungeons coming. In fact, we knew this in advance of WotLK, that everything Blizzard wanted to put in was not in the release.
As for the gear, this is a trivial complaint. Sure, it would be nice to have a bit more variety, but again, more content to come.
I think the biggest bonus for me is the fact that leatherworking gear is USEFUL. It’s not just “make a bunch of stuff and DE or vendor it”. Now I can make a rogue a full set of gear, or a hunter, or a druid right from the trainer. I can additionally buy patterns from a vendor to create hunter/rogue/druid gear with RESLIENCE (full set, again). I can make really awesome cloaks. I can make epic BOE gear from patterns I can buy from the same vendor.
This is awesome to me. I can AH stuff I make for gold because it’s no longer BoP.
I just kinda wish the flying carpets were BoE.
“Boos Loot/DKP stuff: This needs to go. The whole system should be everyone in the group gets a token of some kind from every boss (or multiple tokens from super hard bosses), and then you spend the tokens on gear. Then every single person benefits from every boss kill, rather than some people getting super lucky occasionally. The Badge of Justice system was like this, but this type of system should be for every raid dungeon - or perhaps all high end dungeons raid or non raid.”
This is how it is. Every boss >= Heroic will drop a badge or two for each member, along with a few pieces of loot.
Guild Wars introduced the boss loot chest: After the boss is dead, a big chest spawns. Everyone can open it once, and get some fixed rare material usually + 1 random rare item and + 1 random item. The chance to get a certain rare item would still be only x %, but it would not be influenced by DKP, if the raid leader is your friend or whatever.
But guess what would happen in WoW: people might be done raiding earlier in this system, less income for Blizz…^^
I quit warcraft because of the raiding. I got tired of wipe after wipe, no loot, and wasted hours with out no real direction from the leaders. I think the whole game is ridiculus and I played up to lvl 80. I also got tired of having to pimp for peeps just to complete quests. Thanks for the article, it made me feel validated.