Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Ambiturner_sl said:

Smaller raids means less people to screw up and cause a wipe. Given the same mechanics and proper scaling, the larger the raid is the more difficult it will be

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I disagree. 10 mans have less people to screw up, but also less room for error when someone does screw up. In a 40 man raid you can lose half a dozen people and still pull off a win. While losing even 1 person early in a 10 man encounter can mean a wipe. I still believe that smaller raids offer the biggest challenge for the individual. Larger raids are harder on the people who have to organize and lead, but for the average player being part of a 40 man raid is pretty easy. Your role is pretty watered down.

Edit: Speaking from a DPS perspective mainly though. I know that the raid scene is very different from the perspective of a healer/tank.

weird. double.

Rift had one of the best launches of all time. Constant patch updates. Good marketing.

That it is still sub based which should tell you alot about it.
Especially as a new Ip.



Rifts failures were. New IP.
Wrong time and place. There is so much competition now. People play mmos because other people are playing MMO's. Its exponential. A strong IP can go a long way here.
and with so many other games on the horizon, it had a fight.

A bit too much WoW still. Raids, pvp, crafting probably could have/should have had more innovation. World pvp and world layout for sure. More time should have been spent on making the worlds more memorable.
Giant invisible wall between level 1 faction zone is unforgivable. gw2 makes the same mistake, in that the world PvE is just way too smallscale. they needed to think grander. crafting being a cut/paste of wow was disappointing.

considering its still pay to play. I think any mmo would be just fine following in Rifts footsteps.

Although, I wonder if Rift would really take off if they went ftp? That patching process. I hear they've make alot of good changes to the game.

Ambiturner_sl said:

Smaller raids means less people to screw up and cause a wipe. Given the same mechanics and proper scaling, the larger the raid is the more difficult it will be

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Jesus Christ, it's like you people have never actually played an MMO, let alone WoW. The less people you have in the raid, the bigger the impact when somebody "screws up".

shabushabu_sl said:

Explain what you mean by challenging before I give you evidence to the contrary. We may be speaking around different definitions here.

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I'm referring to APM and things going on in a raid environment that you have to react to while still maintaining things like a DPS rotation, heals, etc. Heroic modes in WoW really have no equal when it comes to this. If you think otherwise, you haven't played on the bleeding edge of Heroics in WoW. There's a reason it takes the best guilds in the world days or weeks to beat some of them.

Kirun_sl said:

Jesus Christ, it's like you people have never actually played an MMO, let alone WoW. The less people you have in the raid, the bigger the impact when somebody "screws up".


I'm referring to APM and things going on in a raid environment that you have to react to. Heroic modes in WoW really have no equal when it comes to this. If you think otherwise, you haven't played on the bleeding edge of Heroics in WoW. There's a reason it takes the best guilds in the world days or weeks to beat some of them.

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I don't know, i raided in wow when there were no heroic modes and wow didn't get harder from vanilla until now. But saying WoW has the hardest raiding historically is inaccurate... in current 07+ MMO history i would agree however and that was the point of my post, there is a history we have forgotten.

When WoW released it was thought of as easy mode in MANY ways including raiding ( yes i am that old school )...

WoW raiding was never easy mode. Never. Some of the greatest raiders to come out of EQ fled back to EQ because they couldn't handle WoW raiding. I have seen multiple Fires of Heaven and Afterlife members mention that. Have other games had encounters that can compare? Absolutely. I raided in EQ2 pretty heavily as well and it had some very challenging content.

The easy mode comments though have always been bullshit about WoW. They come from people who cherry pick examples to try and make a point, or people who never actually did it.

shabushabu_sl said:

I don't know, i raided in wow when there were no heroic modes and wow didn't get harder from vanilla until now. But saying WoW has the hardest raiding historically is inaccurate... in current 07+ MMO history i would agree however and that was the point of my post, there is a history we have forgotten.

When WoW released it was thought of as easy mode in MANY ways including raiding ( yes i am that old school )...

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So, you raided in WoW when heroic modes didn't exist, yet you're saying heroic modes haven't made the game more difficult, and you haven't tested this theory yourself? No point discussing anything further with you then.

By the way, even before heroic modes existed, WoW was still the most difficult raiding experience to-date. Heroic modes have only made the gap wider.

I like smaller raids. I think its just an issue of raid size being handicapped by other mechanics.

Lockout timers.
Big raid, you have 1 lockout timer for the entire guild.
Small raids. ffs. trying to manage who can do what is horseshit.

Less people to make mistakes.
yeah, well. less people to ease over mistakes as well. Trinity is partly to blame for this of course.
10 man raid. 2 tanks, 4 healers, 4 dps? or is it 3 tanks, 3 healers, 4 dps? WoW with its pinpoint balancing for exact dps amounts and hard enrages are again, partly to blame.

Smaller raids have even less flexibility in who gets to come. Which sucks.

Fixings things.
Raid size should be dynamic. 10, 13, 21, 36, 40 man. This is a GW2-like concept. you should never have to tell someone no, you can't come. That shit is just anti-mmo. Fixed raid size is horseshit.
And obviously, if you dont have fixed raid sizes, you cant tune bosses to a pinpoint hard enrage if you don't meet x requirement dps. so that entire issue should vanish.


Lockouts and fixed raid sizes have handicapped the genre for years now.

I like how wildstar has separate raids for 40 mans and 20 mans. No more different difficulties and raid sizes of the same map. Each raid is different no matter the size, and they are all challenging. Once you started creating alternative versions you started to wear down the accomplishments, in my opinion. Wildstar spoke to this in several interviews.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

WoW raiding was never easy mode. Never. Some of the greatest raiders to come out of EQ fled back to EQ because they couldn't handle WoW raiding. I have seen multiple Fires of Heaven and Afterlife members mention that. Have other games had encounters that can compare? Absolutely. I raided in EQ2 pretty heavily as well and it had some very challenging content.

The easy mode comments though have always been bullshit about WoW. They come from people who cherry pick examples to try and make a point, or people who never actually did it.

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My feeling was that 40 mans required less focus than 24 and that there was much less preparation required to raid in WoW than eq2. I know early on there was emphasis ( MC ) on resists and things, but today I have no idea.. I raided again in WOTLK and i don't recall any preparation issues other than show up and watch a video. One of the "difficult" parts of eq2 raiding was not only the mobs were nasty gear checks but also that you had to understand which mobs were slash resistant, pierce resistant etc... these concepts never existed in WoW to my knowledge.. Also, we did this without Voice comms and complete lack of guides that make raiding easy today... it was a different time and hard to compare i suppose.

Maybe my experience is tainted because of the change in tech around things.. eq2 we never had mods to tell us what to do, we never had voice comms, we never had guides or walkthroughs we figured stuff out ourselves...

I wonder if you guys or the top guilds in raids raid without DPS meters, aggro meters and such... that stuff kind of trivializes things doesn't it ? I guess from my POV it would be cool to see some of these concepts come back including contested raid mobs... which are amazing fun on PVP servers... bring that back and man i am back in raiding full time.

Caliane_sl said:

Fixings things.
Raid size should be dynamic. 10, 13, 21, 36, 40 man. This is a GW2-like concept. you should never have to tell someone no, you can't come. That shit is just anti-mmo. Fixed raid size is horseshit.
And obviously, if you dont have fixed raid sizes, you cant tune bosses to a pinpoint hard enrage if you don't meet x requirement dps. so that entire issue should vanish.


Lockouts and fixed raid sizes have handicapped the genre for years now.

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Fixed raid size is here to stay. This genre is too big to just do away with that now. While I agree that telling friends they can't come is some horseshit that is also a problem on the players end, not the games. If you are a 20 man raiding guild with 80 guild members then your leadership is retarded. Players should build their social circle around the games mechanics. Not the other way around. Just letting people bring who ever they want to doesn't fix anything. It just makes a whole new list of problems. That is assuming you can find many people who even agree with you that it needs fixing. People want challenge, and bringing 300 people to kill a dragon is the exact opposite of that.

Now lockout timers are a different matter altogether. I'm not a fan of lockouts either, but at the same time just letting people run large scale group content at will only consumes content faster then it already gets consumed. You would have people in full raid gear in 1-2 days if lock outs didn't exist anymore. I'd love to hear alternatives, but I don't think there is a simple fix. Not one that would be received well by the masses anyway.

Draegan_sl said:

I like how wildstar has separate raids for 40 mans and 20 mans. No more different difficulties and raid sizes of the same map. Each raid is different no matter the size, and they are all challenging. Once you started creating alternative versions you started to wear down the accomplishments, in my opinion. Wildstar spoke to this in several interviews.

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/agree

shabushabu_sl said:

I wonder if you guys or the top guilds in raids raid without DPS meters, aggro meters and such... that stuff kind of trivializes things doesn't it ?

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No. DPS meters are mostly a personal ego thing. You use them to better yourself. Choosing to be ignorant of your performance I guess is a personal choice, but I have never heard a good reason for not having them. Also, EQ2 had DPS meters from the very beginning. It didn't have a cute little UI interface but we were running parser programs in place of that. Your guild might of not had anyone broadcasting the information, but I'll bet dollars to donuts at least some people were interested enough if their performance to have something running.

Aggro meters are the same. Again I guess you can just opt for ignorance on exactly how threat works if you find that more enjoyable.

Thing to keep in mind is that all of this stuff is taken into account when encounters are made. They make content knowing that people can see their threat, and can practice to get good DPS. It is one of the biggest reasons they have been able to make such challenging content. People are no longer just auto attacking shit standing in a corner anymore.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

No. DPS meters are mostly a personal ego thing. You use them to better yourself. Choosing to be ignorant of your performance I guess is a personal choice, but I have never heard a good reason for not having them. Also, EQ2 had DPS meters from the very beginning. It didn't have a cute little UI interface but we were running parser programs in place of that. Your guild might of not had anyone broadcasting the information, but I'll bet dollars to donuts at least some people were interested enough if their performance to have something running.

Aggro meters are the same. Again I guess you can just opt for ignorance on exactly how threat works if you find that more enjoyable.

Thing to keep in mind is that all of this stuff is taken into account when encounters are made. They make content knowing that people can see their threat, and can practice to get good DPS. It is one of the biggest reasons they have been able to make such challenging content. People are no longer just auto attacking shit standing in a corner anymore.

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I shall agree to disagree with you sir. Good Points however ! net-net -> I hope you are right ( raiding is not trivial these days ) and I hope Wildstar offers challenging content other than 40 ppl is harder than 20. I hope there is meat to their claims... if so we are all happy ppls !

We should tailor our social circles around a computer game? That is just stupid. If I have 80 friends in my guild why the hell should that matter? I understand how instanced encounters will only allow X number of people in a fight, but I remember the same handful of people helping out our entire guild get keys on multiple occasions. I just wish that lockout timers did not screw over a guild's ability to include all its members. There needs to be a compromise between no drop items and the ability to include those who were not able to go on a raid. I am not saying I know the perfect solution to that, but the statement to tailor our social circles to a game is kinda silly.

Didn't EQ2 have that dps meter program that was really amazing? I forget what it is off the top of my head.

Draegan_sl said:

Didn't EQ2 have that dps meter program that was really amazing? I forget what it is off the top of my head.

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ACT. It actually supports multiple games via its plugin engine.