Hehehe, leveling pre-nerf artifacts was FUN as a healer! Broken pve-expansion. Which later turned out to be necessary for pvp, interestingly enough.Akaza wrote:(with free content) as opposed to the model used in Daoc (ToA anyone?)
The Risen Mandate
Anna Navarre: You're wearing sunglasses on a night operation?
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
Haha I remember that. Searching for special mobs, grinding like woah. It was easier as a mercenary than a bard, I can tell you thatJhorar wrote:Hehehe, leveling pre-nerf artifacts was FUN as a healer! Broken pve-expansion. Which later turned out to be necessary for pvp, interestingly enough.Akaza wrote:(with free content) as opposed to the model used in Daoc (ToA anyone?)
ToA was kind of ok... but NF was the biggest shit expansion ever. That made me quit the game atleast.
Krita säger:
Utan din penis i min röv känner jag mig halv
Utan din penis i min röv känner jag mig halv
Ran a 3-man gank squad when they introduced insane artifact xp in the frontiers, that was pure awesome. Skald + RM + Shaman = win. Speed 6 ftw.Skyly wrote:Haha I remember that. Searching for special mobs, grinding like woah. It was easier as a mercenary than a bard, I can tell you thatJhorar wrote:Hehehe, leveling pre-nerf artifacts was FUN as a healer! Broken pve-expansion. Which later turned out to be necessary for pvp, interestingly enough.Akaza wrote:(with free content) as opposed to the model used in Daoc (ToA anyone?)
ToA was kind of ok... but NF was the biggest shit expansion ever. That made me quit the game atleast.
Oh, and Hijack!
Anna Navarre: You're wearing sunglasses on a night operation?
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
Well they have potential with the Sunwell, since it isn't on the box art of Illidan saying you're not prepared.
So they can, and imo will, do everything - Kil'Jaeden wasn't promised to the typical off-the-shelf buyer of WoW; it's additional content.
Problem is balancing once again since the Warglaives that a lot of guilds are harping about is quite an issue already.
With a guild like Forté supposedly having 6+ completed sets of 'glaives already is able to create a bigger margin of error on something like Brutallus then a guild like Nihilum.
Kozu is the expert here though, since he has been on Risen's level - and in some ways still is at their level of thought.
Naxx had it's charm, because it was basically something that either required, as Fenz put it, an insane time requirement - or you'd have to take Naxx as a serious hobby, investing several hundreds of euros in order to see it all (consumables).
One of the more nastier things I've seen though is that quite a few high end guilds worked around this consumable requirement by insuring they'd drop the consumable heavy target without any issues at all - either by stacking soulstones in the raid, world buffing to the extreme and all that jazz.
What Blizzard basically did -and what some folks in for example former Unleash complained about- is remove the "serious hobby" part from the game.
It's like being a car enthusiast and not needing to tinker with your car yourself spending several hundreds of euros on upgrading parts of it, tweaking, tuning till you get it just the way you want it.
Instead the local garage'll do all that for you for a measly 25 bucks (and the requirement that you'll do maintenance there till your car's truly dead).
So now everyone has a turbo charged pimpmobile.
And the serious hobbyist is one of the common folk; a schmuck who does it all himself and gets nasty greasy hands by doing so.
I've taken another look at wowjutsu and there are 1752 guilds in the western hemisphere of the planet right now who've killed Illidan.
This is still chalked up as 4.4% by wowjutsu, but it can and should be normalized to more realistic numbers.
If you take a look at the worldwide percentages for Magtheridon kills and Hydross kills you'll see that Hydross kills are at 38% of all guilds. Magtheridon's a little bit higher.
I see Hydross (and possibly Magtheridon) as the baseline for any serious guild - since it requires very thorough understanding of threat mechanics, taunt immune mobs and the potential to fuck up the encounter by making such a single overnuking mistake.
It also has a pretty strict enrage limit for guilds that haven't had any previous raiding experience and it requires a considerable guild effort to get the gear on two reliable tanks.
And, up till 2.4, doing SSC is required to see MH/BT - and so it's required that every single person doing MH/BT has done Hydross or at the very bloody least Vashj and Kael.
Normalize Illidan kill percentage to Hydross and you'll see this percentage rise to 11.6% of all "serious" raiding guilds killing Illidan.
And this number'll only rise till WotLK hits.
Another interesting piece of drama in that EU thread is the following comment from an anonymous low level alt from Magtheridon:
"Id feel abit sorry if it wasn't for their guild master being a complete @%%!%%%#%@. "Sunwell is to easy" yet they wiped for two nights on Kalecgos after they had killed him once before, and couldn't even kill the pre-buff Brut and Felmyst? Yeah they sound great. Over-reactions ftw. One scrub US guild down, another has taken it's place already." -Sulli, Level 12 Rogue
I agree with Kozu though, figuring out how to make encounters work requires a lot of time and effort.
Though, in all fairness, I honestly think each top guild out there has at least one lua script monkey that's capable of making a DBM module for the timers and they sure as hell have people who go through combatlogs and recording to analyse what's going on in order to come to a certain timer cooldown.
Otherwise you wouldn't be at that top end.
Also, here's Neg (which I called a vinegar pisser in an earlier raid) talking about Nihilum's warglaives: 36 kills, 0 glaives.
Now let's add, what, 14 resets to that figure to account for all the instances they spawned while learning all the content up to Illidan and we'll see 50 kills, 0 glaives.
Wowhead's clocked only ~400 kills of Illidan, so that's not really a good statistical sampling, and they place droprate of main and off-hand at 6 and 3% respectively.
Nihilum should've received about two to three glaives, statistically speaking.
How do you tune content so that Nihilum doesn't run into a wall while not making it easy for Forté with their gazillion glaives?
And how about that quest reward from Kel'Thuzad which is probably better then any other out there for the Sunwell Plateau?
So they can, and imo will, do everything - Kil'Jaeden wasn't promised to the typical off-the-shelf buyer of WoW; it's additional content.
Problem is balancing once again since the Warglaives that a lot of guilds are harping about is quite an issue already.
With a guild like Forté supposedly having 6+ completed sets of 'glaives already is able to create a bigger margin of error on something like Brutallus then a guild like Nihilum.
Kozu is the expert here though, since he has been on Risen's level - and in some ways still is at their level of thought.
Naxx had it's charm, because it was basically something that either required, as Fenz put it, an insane time requirement - or you'd have to take Naxx as a serious hobby, investing several hundreds of euros in order to see it all (consumables).
One of the more nastier things I've seen though is that quite a few high end guilds worked around this consumable requirement by insuring they'd drop the consumable heavy target without any issues at all - either by stacking soulstones in the raid, world buffing to the extreme and all that jazz.
What Blizzard basically did -and what some folks in for example former Unleash complained about- is remove the "serious hobby" part from the game.
It's like being a car enthusiast and not needing to tinker with your car yourself spending several hundreds of euros on upgrading parts of it, tweaking, tuning till you get it just the way you want it.
Instead the local garage'll do all that for you for a measly 25 bucks (and the requirement that you'll do maintenance there till your car's truly dead).
So now everyone has a turbo charged pimpmobile.
And the serious hobbyist is one of the common folk; a schmuck who does it all himself and gets nasty greasy hands by doing so.
I've taken another look at wowjutsu and there are 1752 guilds in the western hemisphere of the planet right now who've killed Illidan.
This is still chalked up as 4.4% by wowjutsu, but it can and should be normalized to more realistic numbers.
If you take a look at the worldwide percentages for Magtheridon kills and Hydross kills you'll see that Hydross kills are at 38% of all guilds. Magtheridon's a little bit higher.
I see Hydross (and possibly Magtheridon) as the baseline for any serious guild - since it requires very thorough understanding of threat mechanics, taunt immune mobs and the potential to fuck up the encounter by making such a single overnuking mistake.
It also has a pretty strict enrage limit for guilds that haven't had any previous raiding experience and it requires a considerable guild effort to get the gear on two reliable tanks.
And, up till 2.4, doing SSC is required to see MH/BT - and so it's required that every single person doing MH/BT has done Hydross or at the very bloody least Vashj and Kael.
Normalize Illidan kill percentage to Hydross and you'll see this percentage rise to 11.6% of all "serious" raiding guilds killing Illidan.
And this number'll only rise till WotLK hits.
Another interesting piece of drama in that EU thread is the following comment from an anonymous low level alt from Magtheridon:
"Id feel abit sorry if it wasn't for their guild master being a complete @%%!%%%#%@. "Sunwell is to easy" yet they wiped for two nights on Kalecgos after they had killed him once before, and couldn't even kill the pre-buff Brut and Felmyst? Yeah they sound great. Over-reactions ftw. One scrub US guild down, another has taken it's place already." -Sulli, Level 12 Rogue
I agree with Kozu though, figuring out how to make encounters work requires a lot of time and effort.
Though, in all fairness, I honestly think each top guild out there has at least one lua script monkey that's capable of making a DBM module for the timers and they sure as hell have people who go through combatlogs and recording to analyse what's going on in order to come to a certain timer cooldown.
Otherwise you wouldn't be at that top end.
Also, here's Neg (which I called a vinegar pisser in an earlier raid) talking about Nihilum's warglaives: 36 kills, 0 glaives.
Now let's add, what, 14 resets to that figure to account for all the instances they spawned while learning all the content up to Illidan and we'll see 50 kills, 0 glaives.
Wowhead's clocked only ~400 kills of Illidan, so that's not really a good statistical sampling, and they place droprate of main and off-hand at 6 and 3% respectively.
Nihilum should've received about two to three glaives, statistically speaking.
How do you tune content so that Nihilum doesn't run into a wall while not making it easy for Forté with their gazillion glaives?
And how about that quest reward from Kel'Thuzad which is probably better then any other out there for the Sunwell Plateau?
Well, I feel for Risen in someway, but on the other hand - I don't get why this statement gets stated now and not before. I mean, if I would be serious and hardcore raiding, I would in general be VERY disappointed with TBC, especially MH/BT.
I mean, seeing all these constant encounter nerfs, even made me disappointed in the start of TBC. I've tried killing both pre-nerf gruul, and pre-nerfed mag - and they were both VERY hard - on Naxx level atleast, if not higher (if you ask me). So seeing encounters being nerfed constantly would make me (in their situation) very disappointed.
If I were a high raiding guild, I would also be disappointed about seeing all casuals being able to get these amazing gems aswell - but, I would find it fair that "serious" PvPers would be allowed to get them.
So far, TBC PvE have been quite a joke - there've been VERY few good fights - the rest is either really shit, or just nerfed to eternity. Sunwell however, seems to be pretty well tuned (still a bit unsure as you can see Vis Maior already cleared first 4, 5? bosses). These days I just enjoy PvEing, from the lore perspective as in 'Well, atleast I've killed the silly demon, Illidan'. The only fights that I've actually REALLY enjoyed was: Pre-nerfed gruul, pre-nerfed Mag, Leotheras (was pretty hard in KZ gear), Essence of Souls, Archimonde and Kael'thas was pretty fun the first kill.
I mean, tbh, MH was one big disappointment... the first 4 bosses was just pure scrub (tank n' spank with simple abilities). The best fight in TBC is mostlikely Essence of Souls.
I mean, seeing all these constant encounter nerfs, even made me disappointed in the start of TBC. I've tried killing both pre-nerf gruul, and pre-nerfed mag - and they were both VERY hard - on Naxx level atleast, if not higher (if you ask me). So seeing encounters being nerfed constantly would make me (in their situation) very disappointed.
If I were a high raiding guild, I would also be disappointed about seeing all casuals being able to get these amazing gems aswell - but, I would find it fair that "serious" PvPers would be allowed to get them.
So far, TBC PvE have been quite a joke - there've been VERY few good fights - the rest is either really shit, or just nerfed to eternity. Sunwell however, seems to be pretty well tuned (still a bit unsure as you can see Vis Maior already cleared first 4, 5? bosses). These days I just enjoy PvEing, from the lore perspective as in 'Well, atleast I've killed the silly demon, Illidan'. The only fights that I've actually REALLY enjoyed was: Pre-nerfed gruul, pre-nerfed Mag, Leotheras (was pretty hard in KZ gear), Essence of Souls, Archimonde and Kael'thas was pretty fun the first kill.
I mean, tbh, MH was one big disappointment... the first 4 bosses was just pure scrub (tank n' spank with simple abilities). The best fight in TBC is mostlikely Essence of Souls.
There has been alot of crap and alot of good stuff in raiding. But i guess you can't expect every encounter to be amazing.
Naxx had alot of fun fights that took some good players to beat. And I think many of the bosses where the pinnacle of inventivness from blizzards side, Patchwerk was intense and Maexxna was fun as hell. But some of them where also crap. Faerlina and Razuvious comes to mind (hi2u encounter based on randomness) and Heigan... an encounter where the essential player stat is fantastic ping is just stupid.
But I agree that MH is kind of a snorefest. And Illidan was kind of a letdown, especially after Vasjh and Kael (my favorite fight so far).
Overall I guess Naxx was the best Blizzard has done, and they think so themselves what with it making a reappearance in WotlK so that more players can enjoy this fantastic dungeon.
Naxx had alot of fun fights that took some good players to beat. And I think many of the bosses where the pinnacle of inventivness from blizzards side, Patchwerk was intense and Maexxna was fun as hell. But some of them where also crap. Faerlina and Razuvious comes to mind (hi2u encounter based on randomness) and Heigan... an encounter where the essential player stat is fantastic ping is just stupid.
But I agree that MH is kind of a snorefest. And Illidan was kind of a letdown, especially after Vasjh and Kael (my favorite fight so far).
Overall I guess Naxx was the best Blizzard has done, and they think so themselves what with it making a reappearance in WotlK so that more players can enjoy this fantastic dungeon.
Anna Navarre: You're wearing sunglasses on a night operation?
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
JC Denton: My vision is augmented.
I kind of enjoy the somewhat easier stuff, gives you time for other stuff irl ftw
altho I do think they're taking it a little too far, should be some stuff that a casual just cant get, no matter how many badges they farm (still waiting for warglaives for 1000 badges on PTR
)
altho I do think they're taking it a little too far, should be some stuff that a casual just cant get, no matter how many badges they farm (still waiting for warglaives for 1000 badges on PTR
)Paladin is man or woman with holy light, liek angel from god paladin hold up holy light so you see in dark and not be scared. You CANT play naughty paladin coz it not fit with paladin holy light ok?
As a sidenote btw to Fenz and Kozu's argument about what's needed for a successful guild.
I'd say the key would be to have a solid and steady attendance rate of all of your raiders.
Predictability in that is what I mean.
I'm pretty confident that you can clear all TBC content if you started at TBC release last year with only 3 days a week 3 hours a day.
Problem is that you will need people to all commit to those same days and same hours.
And that still is a major problem for most people.
It's even more hours clocked/committed then being in a football club and having a regular training day and another match day.
I'd say the key would be to have a solid and steady attendance rate of all of your raiders.
Predictability in that is what I mean.
I'm pretty confident that you can clear all TBC content if you started at TBC release last year with only 3 days a week 3 hours a day.
Problem is that you will need people to all commit to those same days and same hours.
And that still is a major problem for most people.
It's even more hours clocked/committed then being in a football club and having a regular training day and another match day.
I'm just happy that Sneek's TBC content raiding timetable was so correct it's scary. Kept everyone in SM motivated (almost!) and still are. Can only imagine how Forte, Risen and all the other 1-day BT farmers feel like after doing the same shit over and over for 8 months. They didn't foresee that badge rewards would grant casual raiders lvl 141 loot and now they see their 8-month sunwell preparing as forfeit. I feel for these guys actually in some way, for all the trouble they've gone through but at the same time I'm thinking "Boohooo! Whiners, you were wrong all along. This game is not about loot, it's about having fun with your friends"
We need Snarky posts from Sneek on EJ:s
never thought of that tbh, nice observation. I've never played a game I didn't finish, even shitty ones. Its a rule that you finish the game.Jhorar wrote:... but on the other hand what other type of successful games are based around a large portion of the buyers not getting to finish it? It's insane...
Edit: never finish Richard Burns Rally.. Insanely hard.. too hard to bother
Finally, an emotion I do not have to fake
While we're not quite a 'zomg imba' guild - we raided 4 to 5 days a week, 19.00 to 22.00 (sometimes 23.00h, but that was rare :p) before we had BT on farm mid august. Keep in mind that 2 of those days were spent on SSC/TK and all that jazz. Most of those hardcore guilds really don't spend half of their life in WoW, at least not after the famous consumables nerf.Fenz wrote: You don't need imba skill to become the best. You just need no life and raid 24/7.
I always like EoS for some reason, never understood why precisely :p Pre-nerf Mother was both retarded and interesting too imo, unlike the free epic version now.I mean, tbh, MH was one big disappointment... the first 4 bosses was just pure scrub (tank n' spank with simple abilities). The best fight in TBC is mostlikely Essence of Souls.
But yeah, BT/MH were more or less a snoozefest from the start :s
I'm surprised you didn't list Hydross - i'm sure some of those famous Nooki-related wipes should've been burned in your memory!The only fights that I've actually REALLY enjoyed was: Pre-nerfed gruul, pre-nerfed Mag, Leotheras (was pretty hard in KZ gear), Essence of Souls, Archimonde and Kael'thas was pretty fun the first kill.
Roses are red. Violets are blue. In soviet Russia, poem writes you.
Hydross wasn't really hard if you ask me, just pathetic in the start. Not a hard boss to beat, but just random 'oh hi 18k crush'. By hard I mean the amount of focus required to beat the encounter, okay maybe hydross was a bit mana intense in KZ gear... but focuswise I didn't find it hard - expect from just being ready to heal these random insane crushes which happend.
Found the encounter to be pretty unforgiving, atleast while learning it. A Hot, a pot or even a fireball Dot could make him fly across the room ignoring the tank. SM had issuse with Hydross atleast, that much i remember.. Not sure it was a combination with of those crushes and gear, but to me that makes for a tough encounter.Kozu wrote:Hydross wasn't really hard if you ask me, just pathetic in the start. Not a hard boss to beat, but just random 'oh hi 18k crush'. By hard I mean the amount of focus required to beat the encounter, okay maybe hydross was a bit mana intense in KZ gear... but focuswise I didn't find it hard - expect from just being ready to heal these random insane crushes which happend.
Character is what you do in the dark. In gloom i work.