A very interesting take on blizz and hard mode raidingFollow

I posted this in another thread. It is an article by a member of Ensidia (Nihilum + Curse merge guild)

For those of you who need a tldr version, it basically shows that Hard Mode content has been scaled to levels that are impossible with Ulduar gear sets to beat, unless you find almost exploitive ways around them. Killing Hodir hard mode is one step needed in unlocking Algalon, it also requires your dps to do 12k dps.




Basically Blizzard has buffed hard modes to the points that even with full Ulduar best in slot, they are unattainable by any conventional sense. In order to stall progression and artificially extend the shelf life of raid content.

Kudos Blizz!

Why is it OK to insult or demean Bodhi?

A quote from another friend.

A post so nice I rated it twice, rated it up that is. I know its hard for some of the posters here who are having trouble with easy mode and heard me ******** about Naxx for so long to have any sympathies over impossible hard modes. However as much as I would like to think this and every other issue with the game directly rotates around me and how it affects my gameplay, it isnt about that at all.

What we have, clearly defined with absolutely no doubt is that Blizzard has in fact balanced certain hard modes to be impossible with current gear sets. Roll it over in your mind, 12k dps, 12,000 damage per second in a raid with 22 dps in order to kill a boss hard mode. 11.5 wont cut it, 12k for 2 minutes sustained. Worse this is the content being used to justify easy mode nerfs. Really think about it, think about the implications to raiders at all levels of play. Think about what it says about Blizzards new design philosophy for raiding and how underhanded and completely unblizzard it is.

Edited, May 2nd 2009 11:35am by bodhisattva

I can't stop laughing at this.

It didn't get past them though. I believe Hodir was released with a 3 min timer, which was taken of almost immediately, so they smartly realized "wow we made that too easy" and lowered it to 2:30 while nerfing the bonuses the NPCs give. And then another guild downed it, so they were like "STILL TOO EASY!" and nerfed it to two minutes.

They're only just now slightly buffing it.

If Ensidia can use a mechanic that Blizz doesn't want them using, combined with lots of practice with trying to beat the encounter fairly so they sure as heck know what they're doing, then further combined with a mage doing 40k DPS, and barely make the timer, something is wrong.

Blizz has better tools than any of us can probably even imagine to figure out what average raid DPS is. There is little reason that hard modes should be so hard that what is arguably the top guild in the world could never do it. I would go so far as to say there's no reason hard modes should be so hard that the top 250 guilds would find them impossible.

"Let's make content accessible" should never have meant "let's make content easy." "Let's make content appeal to a variety of raiders" should never have meant "let's make content easy on one end and impossible on the other end."

I will give them the benefit of the doubt that this is their first time building a raid around the concept of hard modes. I will give them further benefit because as far as I know, this concept is pretty new to the world of MMOs as a whole. However, if they're willing to knee-jerk balance hard modes to make them harder, they should be just as able to make them reasonable.

If they want to force people to get Ulduar gear before hard modes are even beatable, that needs to be encouraged in some manner.


Edited, May 2nd 2009 4:30pm by CBD

Why does the gear level matter, then? If it is impossible, no one will be acquiring it.



I think most people wouldn't bother, except if they want the achievements. But, if they couldn't clear hard mode, they will have done it on easy, and their gear will have to be way better to make up for the difference in skill. Maybe they could do it once it has been nerfed more with Arthas level easy-mode gear?

I agree that Hodir is currently impossible (or close enough), what I disagree with is your opinion of motivation, the part I bolded. I don't think they purposefully made Hodir impossible to stop progression; I think they were trying to make him hard enough that people need to actually GET GEAR FROM ULDUAR before fighting him, and overshot. People have had 2-3 weeks to get upgrades to their Naxx gear, and especially if they're party-swapping to try and do things optimally, I doubt everyone's gotten many items.

Although I do think bodhi really hates that poor dead horse, I actually feel the same way as he. My 10 man team is actually pretty good, I see most of us having an spot on top guilds if we wish to really compromise ourselves to that. But my guild doesnt have more than 15 to 20 people between ok player to good player. And have a lot of inexperienced in raids (I don't count Naxx as "getting to know how to raid") and a lot of really terribad.

That being said, this week I was for the second time on Ulduar, both 10 man and 25 man. On 10 man, I was really sad with the changes. I was expecting to have some challenge, but we pretty much one shotted everything till Ignis last week(wich we didnt one shotted last week because of me being terribad on rooting, but we one shotted him this time after I practiced) and this week one shotted everything till Iron Council (wich we are having some problems due to raid composition).

But, the worst, was on 25 men. IMHO, my guild really shouldnt be able to get razor and XT with the people we run with. I usually fraps our raids, to help me and ppl out (and to show off a litlle too, off course) and I get to see some real nasty stuff. People not moving on razor, people getting killed with gravity bomb, melee dying because of light bomb....That was last week. Yesterday we went there again. Guess what happened? We one shotted razor, 2 shotted deconstructor. And we shouldnt. Really shouldnt. And I know that there was quite some people that found themselves thinking they were really great for killing nerfed to ground stuff. When what that really means is we shouldnt have killed those because we will only be able to kill the next ones when we are way overgeared for it anyway.


ps
I'm pretty sure I'm not a top raider as bodhi seens like to be, taking in consideration all that implies (knowing maths, knowing possible setups, seeing not so clear ways of doing bosses...). But I do think I'm quite competent on what I do, aka "dont die, keep dpsing, sometimes offheal and get people rezz'ed".

I just hope it isn't. Blizz has said over and over that they want old world content to stay that way.

Well, I want old patch contents to stay that way. And it kinda makes the final instance a let-down. Think about BC. QD content was HARD at first. And, it was the final instance. People had worked their way up and it was the last hoorah before WotLK.

So, now, you clear Icecrown, get gear for Ulduar, clear Ulduar and get gear for Icecrown?

Seems kinda... not epic.

Or they could just make it so Ulduar's hard mode was just as hard as Icecrown's, which wouldn't really be any better...

I would imagine they did it to show that WotLK raid content difficulty was going to be higher than Naxx. As you'll recall, a lot of people felt WotLK raiding was too easy prior to Ulduar being released. It's possible Blizzard decided to show what they got in store for raid content difficulty to shut the whiners up.

There was an interview with a Blizzard employee about this a while back (it was posted in the news as I recall) where the Blizzard employee basically said they view easy mode content as the PuG-able content and the hard mode content for the actual content that only the progression raiders could do. If I remember the interview correctly, the employee said Blizzard doesn't want casual players to not be able to experience content, but at the same time they want the progression raiders to have something to work towards.

Basically they want to avoid a Sunwell situation. Their solution is have two different versions of each raid instance. The easy one for the whiners and the hard one for the progression raiders. I actually like the idea, as it gives everyone something they want. The whiners who can't (for one reason or another) do progression still get to see the content and experience the story and the progression raiders get their challenge.

Now if the Hard Modes are indeed designed and balanced around Icecrown Citadel content, that is an interesting decision on Blizzard's part.. but it's easier to nerf content than it is to make stuff harder. If you think people complain about nerfs that make things easier... wait until you see what happens if they nerf something that makes it HARDER.

Edited, May 3rd 2009 1:11am by neocronNV

If they want hard mode to be impossible with current gear, they absolutely must make it completely impossible to access and/or state it many times. Algalon and hard modes were very hyped up as being available to fight in this very patch. With Hodir being such a cockblock, Algalon is nothing but a carrot on a string.



Current hard modes are balanced around having Ulduar gear. Doing it in mostly Naxx gear has shown the fights to be harder than Sunwell pre-nerf. That's how it should be. If a guild is VERY determined, they can down them. Most other guilds will need to at least begin to get substantial gear improvements first.

As worst, Hodir is impossible for several reasons:
1. It encourages raid stacking. Blizzard has said time and time again that they don't want this anymore. Hard = challenging. Hard != stupid.
2. 12k DPS/toon is the best possible scenario. The top guild in the world says they wouldn't do it with 1 tank and two healers. It's a completely reasonable assumption that no guild would.
3. The difficulty of hard mode needs to be a DPS race so tight that you absolutely must do everything possible to get every NPC buff possible. This isn't a standard difficult DPS race where one needs to do a perfect rotation while dealing with normal boss mechanics. You have to do the perfect rotation AND position yourself for max DPS AND deal with normal boss mechanics. The only thing that makes Hodir uniquely more difficult is positioning, and that is what should be more difficult. The only way to test your raids ability is through an obnoxiously strict timer. They took it from quite difficult to really damn hard to impossible way, way too fast.




If you're in Naxx25 gear and a bit of Ulduar25 gear, and you find Ulduar10 anything other than easy, there would be a problem. In terms of item level:

Naxx10 -> Ulduar10 = Naxx 25 -> Ulduar10 Hard = Ulduar 25 -> Ulduar25 Hard



Fair enough, but again, this needs to be directly stated.

In general though, it's rather hypocritical to say "We don't want our development time on raids to be wasted because most people don't get to see them" and then turn around and go "Here, we spent a lot of time on these bosses you won't be able to dream of defeating for another year."



Politicians usually have to worry far less about keeping the base happy, and more about winning the independents to their side.

Raids need to be about learning. They need to be about having a crapload of "Well that was stupid" mistakes which cause a wipe, that people can then learn from. Raid boss mechanics are designed around this. Most encounters have some "oh ****" mechanic that will cause a death, which will most likely cause more deaths, which will lead to a wipe. There are ways to make the encounters easy without encouraging players to ignore these basic concepts.

T7 catered FAR too much to bad raiders. Blizz still wants them to be able to experience the content, so they implied we'd be getting hard modes where we could easily choose the difficulty. That would imply that easy will be easy (somewhat puggable), groups that find easy too easy (the vast majority of any organized raiding groups - read as guilds) can begin progressing up to the most difficult version of the hard modes, while the really damn good guilds can cut right to the obnoxiously difficult hard modes.

Instead we have three encounters that middle-ground raiding groups can use to slowly learn the hardest fights, and a bunch of fights that will probably still be insanely difficult in Ulduar gear. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Algalon, however, was supposed to be the soul-crushing content. Not a stupidly buffed Hodir timer.

Blizzard keeps stating that they want raiding to appeal to the full spectrum of people who play their game. They keep saying they want to make the best decisions for the future of the game. They usually do. Their tuning of Ulduar encounters, however, isn't really showing them keeping in line with either philosophy.