Thread: Blizzard Conducted A WoW Former Player Study. Here Are the Questions Asked

We need more death touches, void zones, server disconnects and perfect immortal run achievements. Because all of that is not only awesome but super awesome when combined together.

I'm posting the neg I got for a post I made in this thread, because I had to share the lulz. You can't make this shit up.

glad you're happy with what is in the market. blizzard is looking for feedback for a reason. unlike other success stories in the genre they want their sophomore game to be something other than a copy of what is our there

Tenks_sl said:

The bar is raised and raid content needs to rival what Naxx gave us in Vanilla. People wouldn't be happy if MC/BWL/AQ were released these days because even though some bosses had interesting little quirks not all were very interesting fights.

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I played so much WoW it aches to admit it and I have my idea: the answer to this is not simple, first it's a game design decision (issue?) from the ground up: to play EQ, very simple, you played with a handful of hotkeys and a chat box.
Now every WoW-clone and of course the original, makes you keybind something between 30 and 40 hotkeys (post culling). They are not all high priority buttons, thankfully or you'd have EQ2, but they are still there.
On top of this, they strayed away from "rotations" and used priority lists, so your list of things to do has a more varied pattern.

Then you have to look at their latest encounter design and the 4 different levels of difficulty to see how fucked up raid encounters are these days: just count the warnings from GTFO or DBM.
I thought that raids were cool because they felt epic (as an EQ noob being vaporized by lady Vox), then I appreciated a few gimmicks thrown in to keep people paying attention instead of watching TV (Molten Core), from there on it went (imo) downhill from a certain point of view: you no longer could afford dead weights in a raid, you needed very good healers working endlessly around stopcasting or the 5s rule, because you needed a fuckton more dps to pass some checks (Vael) or a coordinated group with able kiters (Razorgore). Up to and including LK, all fights required little more than positional awareness and it was good, because you could afford to fuckup and still recover (healers could make up for a lot of small mistakes and some big ones).

Nowadays if you do a fight like Emperor Mar'gok, you understand how crazy can a fight can become and of course the only way to have below average players doing it, is if every mistake they make is ignorable (LFR). In BRF there are already a couple bosses were the raid wipes in LFR difficulty and I suspect they could nerf it down even more.

Personally I'm done with WoD, got two months of fun and one of not so much fun. I don't like modern raiding, for me LK had the correct balance of good and bad and allowed people like me to play with less performing players without getting frustrated and advancing at a decent rate. We completed all normal mode raid tiers in LK with a super casual guild of 10 raiders, 2 or 3 of them being *quite* below average, playing one night per week, but we had fun and shit died relatively quickly.

In WoD I joined a similar guild (1/week) and in normal mode we couldn't kill shit because of underperformers.
Highmaul: Ko'ragh died twice, probably by mistake (or boredom). Mar'gok never died, not even once, I don't think we ever reached the last phase with orbs.
BRF: we hit hard enrage 3 times on Beastlord (I was as a brewmaster 2nd on the parse), before killing him one week later, we were 3/10 (Gruul, Darmak, Hans Franz) and couldn't kill Oregorger for both dps and mechanics. So yeah, some players were not good enough.
I could scout for a different place, but the guys are nice and I didn't want to leave them screwed, so once a window of opportunity opened (alliance with another guild that covered my tank slot) I decided to quit, because I had little to no fun. I prefer easy raids and carrying friends to dance dance revolution competitions and wipefests.

I'd say to Blizzard: first no enrage timers in normal mode, second, pick a random encounter mechanic and remove it and third... make that shit 1-groupable. Some people just don't like to raid. Leave heroic for real raiders and mythic for crazies.

6.1 was a fucking joke: let's consider BRF part of the patch, so raiders were happy. Everyone else got... a selfie camera and twitter implementation. What the fuck? Unless you consider playing facebook games in your garrison part of an MMO. As Mr Creed said: they are just pissing money away because they can.

So if I understand this correctly you're complaining that Normal is too hard, but LFR is too easy?

Do you want them to make LFR difficulty available to guild groups with a flex system of group numbers?

I never found normal very difficult. The problem is there are so many people out there who are very, very bad at even simple video games. With flexible raiding sizes now if you aren't pulling your weight you are now negatively impacting the raid in a very real way. With static sizes even if someone sucked it was still better than that player not being there at all (sans some mechanics where if you dropped them it would be a net gain.) Now with flexible sizes the reality is removing that player is a huge net gain. But walking that social line is somewhat awkward.

Noodlemod_sl said:

So if I understand this correctly you're complaining that Normal is too hard, but LFR is too easy?

Do you want them to make LFR difficulty available to guild groups with a flex system of group numbers?

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I played a 661 brewmaster, on Beastlord I parsed 26k dps over the whole fight (hard enrage wipe, boss had 1,5m left or thereabout), above me 1 ret paladin at 28k, below there were dps at 22k, 20k and so on down to 17k. Being a 10 men, raid dps check wasn't met.
In LK, I remember ICC, but it was the same in Ulduar, I had a warrior and a warlock that were severely limited in dps capacity, yet we never had an issue progressing for 2 main reasons: enrage timers were a lot less tight and 1 or 2 deaths didn't mean a wipe was occuring so regularly.
From a certain point of view, enrage timers are just stupid: if a guild wants to bring two tanks, 2 dps and 6 healers, why forbid them? Who the fuck really cares?

So yeah, for several guilds, normal is already too tough, because of the 20% or 30% of the raid that isn't up to par. LFR is a joke, because you can ignore almost all mechanics (almost). Maybe 1 step back (MoP LFR tuning) with a flexible raid size would be good for certain guilds. Most good guilds would skip normal and go to heroic for a challenge and better gear.

LFR fixed at 30 with random people is for guildless people or those that just can't commit to any kind of schedule, not even once a week. It's okay that it exists, but as I said, I would tune it a bit more like in MoP - SoO (aka, can't fully ignore mechanics, but it's still fairly easy).

Flexible adds HP to a boss for each member, so some people are actually best left at home (enrage timers), this is totally wrong from a social perspective, at least at the lowest difficulty levels. That's all I'm saying.

TL,DR: Make me carry my friends to victory, who gives a fuck but us in the end? Transitioning to heroic is not a requirement.

EDIT: also every old school player has memories of the hero of the day that saved the raid by doing something cool, such as kiting the boss while others ressed the raid (Everquest), why isn't possible anymore to do such feats? Aren't these games made so that we feel like heroes from time to time? What they (Blizzard) made over ten years is changing this genre and making it more like a lobby game: aside from the concurrent amount of users on a fight (and the existance of an underutilized open world), there is little difference between wow and diablo nowadays. Wow is technically awesome, but it lost its soul over the years.

Catering to the lowest common denominator has been the method WoW has used to sacrifice quality for quantity. LFR is no exception.

As far as having that "raid hero" feel, to my more recent memory FFXIV Turns 1 through 4 were saveable by one person (I personally saved turn 2 multiple times).

Vitality_sl said:

Catering to the lowest common denominator has been the method WoW has used to sacrifice quality for quantity. LFR is no exception.

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That's an odd sentiment considering they were adding Raid bosses at a faster clip before the tool was introduced.

Miele_sl said:

I played a 661 brewmaster, on Beastlord I parsed 26k dps over the whole fight (hard enrage wipe, boss had 1,5m left or thereabout), above me 1 ret paladin at 28k, below there were dps at 22k, 20k and so on down to 17k. Being a 10 men, raid dps check wasn't met.
In LK, I remember ICC, but it was the same in Ulduar, I had a warrior and a warlock that were severely limited in dps capacity, yet we never had an issue progressing for 2 main reasons: enrage timers were a lot less tight and 1 or 2 deaths didn't mean a wipe was occuring so regularly.
From a certain point of view, enrage timers are just stupid: if a guild wants to bring two tanks, 2 dps and 6 healers, why forbid them? Who the fuck really cares?

So yeah, for several guilds, normal is already too tough, because of the 20% or 30% of the raid that isn't up to par. LFR is a joke, because you can ignore almost all mechanics (almost). Maybe 1 step back (MoP LFR tuning) with a flexible raid size would be good for certain guilds. Most good guilds would skip normal and go to heroic for a challenge and better gear.

LFR fixed at 30 with random people is for guildless people or those that just can't commit to any kind of schedule, not even once a week. It's okay that it exists, but as I said, I would tune it a bit more like in MoP - SoO (aka, can't fully ignore mechanics, but it's still fairly easy).

Flexible adds HP to a boss for each member, so some people are actually best left at home (enrage timers), this is totally wrong from a social perspective, at least at the lowest difficulty levels. That's all I'm saying.

TL,DR: Make me carry my friends to victory, who gives a fuck but us in the end? Transitioning to heroic is not a requirement.

EDIT: also every old school player has memories of the hero of the day that saved the raid by doing something cool, such as kiting the boss while others ressed the raid (Everquest), why isn't possible anymore to do such feats? Aren't these games made so that we feel like heroes from time to time? What they (Blizzard) made over ten years is changing this genre and making it more like a lobby game: aside from the concurrent amount of users on a fight (and the existance of an underutilized open world), there is little difference between wow and diablo nowadays. Wow is technically awesome, but it lost its soul over the years.

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What you're talking about though seems to me to be a group that is severely handicapped. Right now the Rerolled guild is only doing Normal BRF. We were normal/heroic Highmaul geared but Heroic BRF was too much. We've finally progressed to 8/10 normal but I don't think we've ever hit an enrage. In fact, I didn't even know that Beastlord had an enrage. From what I've gathered, the enrage timers in normal are extremely lax and you're only hitting them if the group is really, really bad. We aren't even good and we've never hit one.

I can understand your point in that if you want to play with a certain group, good or bad, you want to see all the content. But at the same time, there is a cutoff where you go "Well, these people are so bad that they can't kill one of the 3 intro bosses to a raid zone" and the content just isn't designed for them.

I think Ulduar and ICC were much different as there weren't quite as many mechanics as we're seeing now.

I honestly believe that LFR is designed for the people in your group you're referring to. They could flex it and introduce it to guilds, but I feel like the purpose would be defeated here.

As for heroes, I don't believe we should have a single person able to save the raid by doing some crazy mechanics. Maybe for a couple seconds or something, but not like previously in history.

I think the only Enrage I ever saw were Butcher and Twins. Butcher being obvious because it's quick enrage is the mechanic to make it a DPS check. The twins because you can heal their minimal damage pretty easily if you dance quakes. So you could basically fight them for hours as long as your healers and tanks don't take optional damage.

I think Tectus had an enrage, I didn't know the twins did.

10m enrage iirc. I hit it once in LFR. It was brutal.

Neranja_sl said:

This idea gets thrown around so much it's like a required bullet point for every new MMO. Maybe paraphrased like "a living, breathing world" or other euphemisms. It never works as the devs realize they don't have the time/ressources/skills to make that happen. .

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I think ED has delivered the best shot so far at dynamic worlds

Tenks_sl said:

Some DDR fights were fun. Heigan was an entertaining fight back in vanilla. But they pretty much had to tune that fight expecting about half your raid to die on the first dance routine.

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It wasn't that most people died during the dance after a few learning attempts, they all would die in the other room you'd have 3 random people at a time get teleported to and have to run/fight out of with those shitty eyestalks with the snare beams. Was easy as fuck for some classes, much harder for others. Also you'd have to wait at the door sometimes if the dance phase was going on and the "clear zone" wasn't where you needed it to be yet to run back into the main fight room.

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

I quit during Blackwing Lair simply because of the "Welp, one person died...wipe and reset guys!" bullshit.

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The fuck? I remember losing tons of the raid on pretty much all the fights in Blackwing Lair. We'd leave a paladin out of combat (when you could still do that) to rezz people. OOC rezzing made it easier for some healers/etc to just die and get rezzed to clear built up aggro on the 3 drakes when they were bugged and untauntable.

I still remember this one warrior Valory getting one shot by Broodlord's Mortal Strike EVERY single clear. It literally became a tradition. Always had to have the Valory sacrifice for it to be a good night...anytime it didn't happen we'd get shit loot.

I think the worst part about WoD is that when you clear Normal BRF, you don't get to go to progress to a new, more difficult raid, you get to do BRF again only harder. Instead of 4 different modes for the same raid, why not spend a little more money and release 3 cool tiered raids?

Release - 3 tiered raids, LFR only for tier 1
1st patch - 4th tier raid, LFR for tier 1/2
2nd patch - 5th tier raid, LFT for tier 1/2/3
3rd patch - 6th tier raid, LFR for all tiers
Rinse and repeat

Elsebet_sl said:

I think the worst part about WoD is that when you clear Normal BRF, you don't get to go to progress to a new, more difficult raid, you get to do BRF again only harder. Instead of 4 different modes for the same raid, why not spend a little more money and release 3 cool tiered raids?

Release - 3 tiered raids, LFR only for tier 1
1st patch - 4th tier raid, LFR for tier 1/2
2nd patch - 5th tier raid, LFT for tier 1/2/3
3rd patch - 6th tier raid, LFR for all tiers
Rinse and repeat

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Really makes you wonder where all the money is going doesn't it? Regurgitation is Blizzards main course.