At the time QSS was rolling through the content at a good pace, and hadn’t really gotten stuck on anything. And that was a problem. A huge problem. I’m now happily being challenged by playing DDO permadeath style, and it at least makes me sweat the way WoW raids used to.

The guy up above – Renaissance Man? – who claims that WotLK fights are on par with TBC fights clearly didn’t raid TBC through the middle of its time. Maybe post-nerf you can make that claim…. but there’s no way that out of the box that is even remotely true. If fights seem harder, perhaps its because the bad habits instilled by easy-mode WotLK raiding have deteriorated raider skill to the point when minor challenges seem monumental. I know that QSS got sloppy sometimes, and a lot of that had to do with getting used to easy game play and forgiving fights. Also, the selective memory about availability of boss guides, etc is patently absurd.

Finally, the tired old assertion that people who want a challenge should just skip to hard modes are missing the point. WoW raiding is about progression, and you follow the progression curve: normal modes, then hard modes. In fact, hard modes SHOULD be tuned to assume normal mode gear if they’re done properly.

Anyways….. reading crap like his makes my blood start to boil, and reminds me how thankful I am to have quit.
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Also bringing back the attunement or keys in a sense would be a great boon to the community in terms of lore. Those questlines in-between and in instances were interesting and descriptive of why we actually had to go kill end boss X in instance Y. I am not saying it should be the last boss in an instance to drop the key to open the doors of the next instance, especially with yogg being as hard as he is for most casual guilds, but i feel that there should still be a similar system, so that people would actually have to run through some portions of old instances to get the keys and maybe bring along some newer lvl 80-s to help them gear up.

Currently i feel that blizzard really shot themselves in the foot by making higher lvl badges available from heroics – since now there really is no incentive for new lvl 80-s or old one-s at that to get into naxx. I mean you can just farm your heroics for ilvl 200 epics from those + get almost every slot on your character filled by the very nice Emblem gear (t8.5 pieces and other 226 ilvl goodies from EoC, 213 ilvl pieces from EoV etc). And now they are trying to fix the problem with weekly raid quests, which well feel a bit like yet another grind for badges to get Tier x, from badges that is mandatory for any kind of guild that feels a even a bit serious about raiding. And daily quests are just ,well wrong.

Sorry about the rant.
Falc.

In Larisa’s post, she mentions that the kill to wipe ratio for Yogg means fewer people want to do him. Well, what does this mean then? KT Kill/Wipe Stats. Look at that, then look at Yogg (Yogg Kill/Wipe Stats). Sure, that can be easily explained away with “Aww, the data wasn’t there for KT!” What if people just don’t want to do full clears? What if people want to hit the boss’s that ARE loot pinata’s?

Alternatively, maybe there’s just not enough time in a raiding guild’s schedule to hit the end of raids. *shrugs* I can’t say.
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One point I keep coming back to is self control, self discipline and taking responsability for your choices. I don’t think the idea to release one boss a week was brilliant. It was a rather lazy way to try to make the content last a bit longer. But if you’re so keen on not getting bored from doing the normal modes, you could have kept working on Algelon achievment stuff in Ulduar while they released them one by one. Then just make the whole instance ONCE on normal mode. And after that immediately start doing the heroic modes, working for the most difficult achievements in there which very very few guilds have done.
Why blame Blizzard over and over again because YOU choose to grind normal modes until you’re bored. Pretend that those modes don’t exist and you’ll be fine.

Hm… I may just be repeating what Renaissance man said in his comment above in a better way.

Anyway. Cheers for some really good discussion!

But I mean, I truly believe 99% of the issue here is perception, rather than reality. Think about it this way, if it weren’t normal and heroic mode, or normal mode and hard mode? What if it were explicitly normal mode and easy mode? What if Mimiron starts out with the self destruct switch active and you have to go push the button in order to deactivate it?

In fact, that’s already how some of those encounters work. Think about Yogg-Saron. Alone in the Darkness is the normal Yogg-Saron encounter. It’s bleeding edge hard. The hardest fight Blizzard’s ever put into the game. It’s too hard for almost everyone. So they included easy mode, all you have to do is walk around and beg these npcs to buff you. You didn’t ask for maeve’s help against Illidan, or the Blue Dragonflight against Kil’Jaeden, those were fight mechanics present in the encounter regardless of your actions. However on Yogg, you must make the explicit choice to take the assistance of the keepers. And it really changes the fundamental nature of the encounter. Simply bringing Thorim down makes the fight exponentially easier. Empowering shadows are no longer an issue, phase three is a cakewalk with him. Bringing Freya down with Thorim makes the fight almost trivial. Not only do you no longer have the 90 second soft enrage in phase 3, now sanity management isn’t an issue. Hodir doesn’t quite change the nature of the fight like Freya or Thorim, but he does give a literal get out of jail free card for the healers. Mimiron does the decursers job for them. And that’s ignoring the 40% health increase, 20% damage out increase, 20% damage in reduction, 20% healing increase, and 20% movement increase. If you’re looking for a challenge, I suggest Alone in the Darkness, if you believe it’s anywhere near the same encounter as three lights then hitting phase three will be an eye opening experience.

I firmly believe that if a return to BC style progression is something that your raid group desires, and the solution to your qualms is to ignore easy mode. As a fellow raid leader, I know it’s difficult to rouse the troops for hard modes when they can farm normal mode. But with the upcoming patch, you have the opportunity to start fresh. Don’t give the raiders a chance to see just how easy easy mode is, all they’ll know is just how “Heroic” normal mode is. It’s all perception.
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