Agree with you here Geoff. I have played less since the expansion released and I am really enjoying it. It's not going anywhere, so no need to rush.

71 Main, 70 alt, 66 DK

Mcclary

I think this is why I have not felt the "need" to log on lately like I did in TBC. I'm one bar away from 77, and was formerly in a Kael raiding guild previously.

I know it's there when I want to play, it's not the hardcore rush it was formerly.

"If your guild can beat the endgame, grats -- why shouldn't other guilds be able to do the same thing? And why shouldn't they get congratulated when they do?

"But that makes it meaningless," you say. "Everyone can win." And now you're getting it: it's an MMO. Everyone's the hero. Whether you take your sweet time questing around the new zones or push straight to the endgame to topple the big bad bosses, you too can see all of the dungeons and all of the encounters in the expansion. Nothing wrong with that at all."

A-fucking-men.

"Someone call the waaahmbulance. A casual guild has the same pixels I do in a video game, and thus my e-peen won't appear as big right away!"

Why, Cyanea, is it so hard for you to comprehend that people enjoy challenging content, and that it isn't all about being better than somebody else?

Two weeks in, and all the 25-mans are on farm. How long will I want to play that game before I get bored? Hopefully the first content patch comes out before that, but I can see me getting bored with the current raids in 4-5 resets. The quantity of loot that drops is massive. Rep gains are trivial to obtain. Honestly, I could care less if casual players can or can't see the same content. All I care about is that it was easy, I've seen it, and once there aren't any more upgrades I'm going to be bored.

There are 10-man version of every raid instance. Those would have been fine for casual players.... They could have made it so that the 25-mans were signifigantly harder (hard enough to require the 10-man loot to have a chance at), and everybody would still have been able to have the type of game they enjoyed. Instead, the 25-mans are significantly easier than the 10-mans, and guilds like the one I'm in who had nobody in beta, and nobody who raided Naxx pre-BC, have already cleared everything...

Because I'm frankly...tired of hearing this. I'm tired of this "controversy" on every one of the previously enlightening and entertaining blogs I usually read. Wrath has not even been out for a full month. QQing raiders can't get their heads around the concept that the "endgame" they're so desperate to have is not over. It hasn't even BEGUN yet.

Sunwell was not shipped with TBC. The Black Temple wasn't even open on BC's release date. The people who are complaining seem to be dead set on the idea that this is it. There's gonna be no endgame beyond what's already in the game.

Blizzard has been on record saying several times that they felt the introduction to raiding in Burning Crusade was too much of a brickwall. They stated a ton of times that they wanted Wrath to have a more gradual, easier transition to harder raiding content. Why is this bad? Why? Not only were BC raids a brickwall in terms of gear, they were brickwalls in terms of knowing how to play in a raid. They're a much different beast from 5-mans played with a PuG. You need to know HOW to raid in order to raid...but you need to raid to learn how. A more educated, skilled playerbase working their way to the inevitable harder endgame content will only serve to enrich raiding as a whole. More strategies, more tactics, more debate, more fun. How is this a bad thing?

It's pretty easy to bash on Blizzard for being sell-outs, idiots, etc...but WoW's the most popular MMO in the world, and has kept that title for nearly half a decade now. They obviously know what they're doing and I'm willing to give them the chance to do it. If not, I'll eat my Bloodsail Admiral's Hat.

Ivan, the problem is, the challenge wasn't doing the content, it was keeping a guild together long enough to get a decent enough chance at completing the content.

Not to mention the fact that the initial "starter" raids in BC seemed to be tuned (in terms of experience and skill) for people who had been through the old Azeroth endgame, putting players (such as myself) who started the game after BC's release at a serious disadvantage because no one runs Onyxia, Ahn'Qiraj, etc anymore. I think Blizzard wanted to prevent the same thing from happening to new players who joined the game after Wrath's release, who would then be two endgames behind. I think players are going to have to get used to the idea of "restarting" the difficulty of endgames with every new expansion.

I'm pretty much inclined to agree with Ivan... While i think its great that the 10 man raids are so accesible, i agree that they could have tuned the 25's to be much more of a challenge. The system is in place, it seems like they could have used it. I'm almost certainly never going to see the inside of a 25 man raid in wotlk, because i'm a pretty casual player... ZA/TK was as far as i got in BC, but frankly i'm quite happy to only run 10 mans... that way i get to see the content, and i dont need to put in a massive amount of effort doing it. The idea that the 25's would be involved enough, and difficult enough to require a higher level of skill (or at lease dedication) and gear seems like an excellent compromise to me, because that way you get the majority of the population able to enjoy all the content they can, and those who are more "hardcore" get to enjoy what they're looking for, and have missed so far, namely a challenge. Sure, you cant please all the people all the time, but it seems to me that that might have helped.

Boy, I've gone back and forth about this, but I think Evelinda has it right. There needs to be a balance between providing people challenging content, and making sure part of the game isn't inaccessible to players.

I think the concept of 10-man, 25-man content in the same dungeon is brilliant; now you don't need to be 'hardcore' to see all the cool instances. However, I really feel that the compromise here is to tune the 10-man stuff the way it is now, but make the 25-man stuff hard enough that the guilds who want a challenge get it. Casuals win because they see everything the hardcore do, and hardcores win because they have the challenge they desire. Does anyone really have an issue with this?

Cyanea:

Do you even know what your talking about? People starting after BC's release were at a disadvantage because they weren't in AQ and Naxx gear? People were replacing their T3 in a couple of levels. Hell, I started after BC, got to 70, got the best quest gear I could, got heroic gear, farmed Kara, got badge gear, jumped to a MH/BT guild, and ended BC with glaives. But you say I was at a disadvantage?

And yes, BT and Sunwell weren't in release. But at least there was a challenge in place. The problem is that people don't understand the fundamentals of raiding. It's not always about being somewhere first, see bosses fall over, or getting loot. It's about being with 24 other people you know and beating your collective head against something that necessitates it. And then once it down for the first time, the feeling is phenomenal. I have yet to have anywhere near that feeling one shotting new 25 man bosses that 80% of the raid don't even know the strat on.

As for the other two reasons that you say these raids are built like tissue paper: "It's the beginning of the endgame" and "It's content for everyone!" What happens when(if) the difficulty ramps up to a proper endgame? Everyone won't see it, and bad players will cry out that raiding suddenly got hard.

Oh, I forgot your bit about how people need easy content to learn to raid. I didn't when I started raiding, and I'm sure there are others who don't. I don't even think that these raids can serve to teach anyone anything. "Hit any ole' button that does damage, it doesn't really matter!" won't help much for an actual DPS race.

~Driphter

As I have told people in person before when they comment on WoW raiding, "if you never played EQ1 you have no concept of what real raiding is like".

WoW was briefly World of Raidcraft during the MC to Naxx40 days. Blizzard shifted focus away from that in TBC and further in Wrath. Their philosophy is to make the game accessable to as many people as possible, they've said that many times. This not only means to keep the graphics lower-end for wider range of playable PC's, but to also make the content available to all types of players.

Besides wouldn't matter if they made the level cap 100 or 150, you'd have somebody somewhere blitz to the cap in record time and then start complaining about how bored they are because the game is "too easy".

Obviously not everyone's having an obscenely easy time of it.

Just got the messages about five minutes ago about the Realm First Malygos 10-man defeat on Blackwater Raiders. So obviously not everyone in the game is finding it as easy as a handful of people are.

@Driphter

If you reread what I said, you'll see that I said "old Azeroth raiding EXPERIENCE". I did not raid in vanilla WoW as that was before I joined the game. Based on the description of a friend, who is a veteran raider, old Azeroth raids were more scaled at the beginning to the player who's just raiding for the first time as far as gear and difficulty, but the intro raids for BC seemed to assume you had been through Onyxia, AQ, MC, etc etc and thus knew how to work with 39/24 other people in order to raid.

"I didn't when I started raiding, and I'm sure there are others who don't."

I'm so happy for you. Can you say the same for the other 10,999,999 people who play the game?