World of “Casualcraft”?
In the wake of a world-first powerhouse like <Risen> (Alleria US) dissolving, I think it’s pertinent to shelve my first discussion about druid tanking and reevaluate the point of raiding, period. The sentiments expressed on <Risen>’s front page very similarly mimic my own, and yet I’m still slogging through farm content, methodically revising my rotations and fervently hoping I’ll finally get the gear I want to drop.
Last August, when Runyarusco was still on Baelgun, <Awen> wasn’t the only guild that disbanded. Two of the other top tier guilds exploded, for many of the same reasons we did, and Glen’s statement about <Ordo Dog Genius>’s demise sums it up pretty accurately (I hesitate to link to the actual source since their website is absolutely NSFW):
“Let it be known that nothing killed this guild but the raiding game that is TBC. This expansion is a fucking virus that has slowly infected and consumed every middle of the road raiding guild this game has to offer. If you aren’t a guild of casual players or a guild of bleeding edge psychopaths, I pray for the well being of your guild, because if it isn’t dead yet, it probably will be very soon.”
True enough. Guilds who used to do moderately awesome pre BC have faltered tremendously since the unveiling of the expansion. Unwilling to invest the time and effort into re-gearing and re-training a group of brand-spanking-new raiders when they couldn’t skim experienced players off other guilds, there wasn’t much else to do but dissolve and hope for the best. But what’s changed?
- Old-school players, dismayed by the marginalization of their Azeroth raid achievements, dropped out of the game.
- Pools of players built around 40 man raid content had to be squeezed into haphazardly stacked groups for 10 manning Karazhan or 25 manning the rest of the Outland content. As a matter of consequence, players who were previously “carried” through 40 man content fell under considerable scrutiny in competitive guilds.
- Previously difficult PvP achievements have been watered down to the point of ridiculosity, making epics easily attainable by doing nothing but standing around waving a stick in a battleground.
- Players have dropped large guilds of unfamiliars in favor of close friends for the sole purpose of arena PvP.
- “Badges” have been made available in heroic instances and Karazhan (and in the upcoming patch, will also drop from 25 man raid bosses), allowing access to T5 quality loot. Soon, T6 quality loot will be available as well, in addition to non soul-bound Nether Vortexes and epic quality gems.
According to WowJutsu, there are over 131129 guilds registered in the world currently, and of the 39892 ranked guilds, only 4.36% of those guilds have downed Illidan Stormrage (as compared to the approximate 99% of those guilds who have killed a boss in Karazhan). While I don’t consider any of the dungeon content particularly difficult save, perhaps, Kael’thas pre-nerf, very few people have had the desire and the appropriate group of like-minded retards to consistently raid day in and day out to get to Illybeans and his Council of Special Friends.
There are plenty of “retards” out there, but what about desire? I’m not referencing the warm feeling when you check out that fine bear ass standing next to you in Shattrath; I’m referencing the will and drive to spend a fair amount of free time (you know, the time normally reserved for eating, makeouts, sleeping and going to work) exploring and conquering dungeon content with the vague promise of a reward afterward. Here, I’ll use <Singularity> as an example of “relaxed” end game raiding. Sing raids five days a week, from 10 PM EST to 1:30 AM EST–that’s my time; our server is MST. During those particular raid times, each guild raider is expected to be on their main, rocking and ready to go, repaired, and fully consumable buffed. We generally start with Mount Hyjal, blow through that content and then try for 2+ bosses down in Black Temple. The next day we finish up Black Temple, play the DST lottery with Mr. Gruul, and spend the rest of the week farming trinkets and offset gear in SSC and TK. Gruul is a perfect example of time spent > reward attained. To this day–and I’ve been farming Gruul since February/March 2007–I have never seen a Dragonspine Trophy drop and it’s still one of the best melee DPS trinkets in the game. We farm that bitch endlessly and still have melee (including me) crying.
Why spend countless hours farming dungeons, learning new encounters, and beating your head against the desk when the only promise is spending a large amount of gold (which also needs to be farmed) and facing continual disappointment and stress? I have no fucking clue. All right, I’m lying; part of the enjoyment is working together with others to reach a common goal, especially when you’re striving to be one of the first groups to destroy an encounter. I had a metaphorical boner goosebumps when we first laid the Council to rest and charged up the stairs to face Illidan. I wait in giddy anticipation for Bloodboil to one day drop his Priest-on-a-stick. But with the impending patch notes threatening more “welfare” epics that can be got with badges, the looming cloud of class balancing for PvP (the trees have dodged a bullet) and the recent removal of realm co-op to open the Sunwell, it gets harder and harder to justify spending 16 or so hours a week striving to be the best.
With all we complain about, Blizzard has created a game environment that hasn’t been equaled in playstyle to date. When I mangle someone or accidentally auto-attack with my staff, it feels as though I’m really beating the pants off a mob. My toon looks reasonably cool. I don’t get that whole person-in-front-of-a-blue screen effect that Age of Conan (disappointingly) seems to project or the stupidly disproportionate characters that Vanguard would have you nance around with. Blizzard created a PvE game that originally shuffled PvP into a corner, the veritable mini-game of a much bigger environment, and now, as they try to reverse that, they’re turning their backs on the original patrons of their games: the raiders and the role players. Raiders might be elitist jerks, but the massive influx of immature noobs running around in PvP epics reminds me of Counterstrike on the LAN at college.
And so it comes to heroics and PvP. I can run those all day with a relatively marginal repair cost and minimal consumable farming, but I’m generally ambivalent. Sure, I can gear up my menagerie of alts without coercing guildmates to attune me to BT or Hyjal, or round out my multitude of armor sets with random badge pieces. But I admittedly miss the Old World villains and hope Blizzard will at least create a rich and interesting cornucopia of foes in Sunwell and beyond. Kalecgos has piqued my curiosity, but unless each encounter proves to be different or dynamic, more and more of the “hardcore” raiders will die of boredom or drop off the map entirely.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure Blizzard cares. With raiders occupying an increasingly small minority, Blizz stands more to lose monetarily by making them happy; a loss of the aforementioned 4.36% of players, nevermind the folks still in SSC and TK, would hardly dent their bank.
If you’re a raider effected by the Blizzard PvP Steamroller, mount up, unite, remind Blizzard where it came from, and start clamoring for change.
Thanks for this. It’s an eloquent and cohesive explanation of the current frustrations of endgame players. I am sympathetic toward those who opt to pursue into this form of content since so much of the joy derived from it seems to come from the feeling of uniqueness. That being said, it’s pretty clear to me the difference between a Druid in S3 vs. a Druid in T6 (though unfortunately both sets are sort of silly looking).
That being said, I think that if only 4.36% of players have killed Illybeans and 99% have killed someone in Karazhan (an indication that these players at least somewhat enjoy getting together with groups of 10 or more players) there’s a real problem in terms of content availability and difficulty. If none of this content is truly “hard”, it’s important to look at other barriers of entry that would prevent more players from enjoying it: time investment, consumable costs, repair costs. The costs from potions and blacksmiths can easily be “covered” by farming the items that drop from these bosses if you consider what the closest equivalents would be purchased for on the AH. Time is less and less of an issue with Blizzard developing content designed to be completed in pieces.
As much as it will likely chafe hardcore raiders in BT and beyond, Blizzard will likely continue this model of “free” epics via badges (and for some classes/specs, Arenas) since overgearing is one way that they can “allow” players in less progression-oriented guilds to experience the content they’ve already spent money developing. Removal of attunements and time-acquired T5- and T6-equivalent gear does not mean that any of these players are going to walk into BT and kill Illidan, though. If gear were the ONLY issue, they would have defeated earlier content by now to acquire it themselves (er … ourselves … we’re in SSC).
I can only guess that Blizzard saw a large number of “casual” players (and in that group I include most players whose guilds have not yet progressed to 25-man content and those players who don’t Arena competitively; your definition will likely be more broad) leaving the game because they felt as though they could no longer progress their characters (Arena epics are not the answer if you don’t enjoy PvP). They had to decide between pissing off the 4% who have killed Illidan and the 96% who haven’t. It’s not difficult to understand why they made the decision they have.
@Phaelia
Thanks for the well-thought out response to a veritable wall of rambling text. I think I mentioned that much of the prohibitive cost of high end raiding lies within the amount of gold invested; it is, at times, daunting. The amount of gold dropped from bosses in BT and Hyjal never quite covers the costs of repairs and consumables unless you’ve made it through every encounter without getting nuked, and, generally speaking, the patterns and gems gleaned off of trash mobs and bosses (nevermind the ongoing Hearts of Darkness issue) are put to use solely for the guild bank. I’m sure each guild functions differently, but we have a few items/mats/gems made available to us from the guild bank, and the rest of my potions (and everyone else’s) have to be bought or farmed. As someone who plays as a tree, a bear, and a cat, sometimes all in the same evening, it means having three different sets of raid consumables ready–and I’m sure I’m not alone on that.
I also agree that the “time” quotient of raiding is less and less a problem these days; players are more than content to spend their days or nights farming heroics, battlegrounds, or arenas, and the fact remains if everyone shows up ready and attentive, serious content progression can happen in three hours or less. Where I see the issue being problematic is when the amount of time spent learning and farming raid content (let’s say for gear) tremendously outweighs the amount of time one has to PvP to earn comparable gear. I’m constantly boggled that the Gladiators on Doomhammer spend one or two nights badgering their ratings and zoom around in full Vengeful when I, on the other hand, have been raiding Black Temple and Mt. Hyjal since November and am wearing one piece of tier gear. Maybe I’m looking for some sort of balancing, here.
Pre-BC, PvP was intensely difficult to excel at–or rather, intensely difficult to earn gear or titles from. The initial PvP changes were welcome ones (as I think many people spent an unhealthy amount of time grinding to Grand Marshal or High Warlord), but it seems to be taking over what I always considered a well put together PvE game. I enjoy that I can PvP in my off time (as there ISN’T any good way to progress your character at 70 beyond gear or getting exalted with everyone and their mom), but I miss the days when the achievements of both raiding and PvP were similarly difficult.
Games are meant to be challenging, but more and more often it seems as though people (casual, hardcore, whoever) just want things handed to them. I am far less cranky about the attunement removals (especially since I still think that most people are stuck on Kael and Vashj); you’re very correct in that it’ll still take a forward moving raid composition to take down the harder bosses in BT and Hyjal–gear can only take you so far. In my mind it’s always been the “how many not so awesome players are bogging us down” part of the equation.
It’s an interesting reversal. I’m not sure if code will work in here or not, but Mmm, irony that particular post references the days when C’thun was considered unkillable, and a small group of elite raiders threatening to leave if content wasn’t fixed actually got attention. Blizzard wouldn’t care at all now, and I don’t know if I blame them. But what I’d still like to see is challenging content with some sort of incentive that makes ALL players, of every skill/gear level, want to get involved. People have to want to earn it, and I really do believe that everyone will get there if they want it hard enough–even if it means transferring realms, etc. That’s actually why I was so excited about the prospect of the entire realm collaborating on opening the Sunwell–FINALLY! Something we can all do, together!
Good job, Blizz. It seems like we’re finding the need to come full circle once more.
But seriously, good luck in SSC.
Nice to see you’re finally posting. You weren’t joking when you said you have a backlog of articles that just haven’t been posted.
I’m in a ‘casual raiding’ guild that hasn’t even started raiding yet. How much raid-time would you say a starting guild should aim for? I’m one of the officers, so getting the opinion of an established raider would be nice on this one (can’t rely on the GL for /all/ of our raiding info, afterall).
@Mynd
Thanks for reading!
I really can’t make that sort of decision for you guys, but the things you can definitely take into account are as follows:
How many groups are you looking to run through Kara?
How many people are seriously looking to get into Kara?
What days/times are people available?
If everyone’s on the same wavelength, everyone has dungeon/heroic gear, and everyone’s willing to put in the time and effort, I’d aim for about three hours a night, and maybe only raid two or so nights a week. If the reception for that scheduling goes well and you actually have folks showing up, then build around that. The reason I say three hours is because trash generally resets in two, and that gives you another chance for attempts if you feel like reclearing trash (abysmally depressing, but often necessary). Additionally, once you’ve got everyone geared, up to speed, and moving steadily through content, three hours (or less) will be all it takes you to clear the instance.
I’m of the mindset that Karazhan is actually one of the smoothest running raid zones that Blizzard’s created, and it’s fun while simultaneously having a sinister edge (in addition to a few lore driven quests that have you interact with Medivh, etc.).
Good luck :).
Thank you muchly. We’ll certainly need it, since we’re short on healers. Hopefully we’ll get more in the next couple of months.
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