World of Warcraft: Current Year

its a lose lose argument imo. People complained about vanilla mage ( warrented: I taught my 7 year old brother how to raid, i told him to just press 2 ( frost bolt ) until the boss died. ) So having too few meaningful abilities sucks. Then you have eq 2, where you aren't playing a game you are playing whackamole with abilities.

Personally I really liked the deathknight skill set in cata. Enough buttons to not press 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,2,2,2,2,2,2,3 etc but not having to have 26 macroed key binds and using 12 different abilities based on positioning. You had to be mindful of how long your diseases had. When to use situationals. Had good avoidance / mitigation abilities. Imo the perfect blend of not enough shit to do and eq2.

Mages have always had some boring as shit rotations until they really messed with fire and you had to get really goddamn lucky with combustion. I really think theorycrafting / numbercrunching / wtf ever you want to call it, has ultimately ruined mmo's. Unless dev's make everything entirely equal. There is always going to be a "best" and of course the 18 year old masters of the universe will yell at you if you aren't using / doing the best.

Any guild which portrays itself primarily as a 'progression guild' isalwaysgoing to be full of rampant pillocks. The trick is to find a guild that doesn't see itself as a 'progression guild' but is still actually good at raiding.

I wouldn't progression raid now if my life depended on it.

Abilities - I always loved my DK. All specs felt just right to me, but I was one who really felt bored with guild wars 2's approach to minimalizing the amount if abilities you're managing. Warlock doesn't seem bad nor do pally specs.

Right now I'm at that eerie point where I've been offline (new house, no cable or phone lines until the 18th) long enough that I'm thinking no thanks to Mmos in general (despite buying that tsw deal right before I went dark).

The problem though is hard modes exist and it isn't satisfying enough to beat the pathetic pussy mode that they turned 'normals' into because I can't break out of that completionist mindset. I don't know why - I'm not the type that would play some JRPG for an extra 100 hours past the ending to beat the optional bosses and shit like that. But when it comes to MMOs I'm either all the way in or not at all.

I've tried to play with casual guilds in other games before. Oh my god. There is just no happy medium - if the guild isn't a progression guild, they are so fucking terrible that I'd rather claw my eyes out with a spoon. They aren't terrible because they don't raid often or don't try as hard or don't do every aspect of the game to ensure they have the best gear available - they are terrible because THEY FUCKING SUCK AT VIDEO GAMES. I just can't just accept spending 15 minutes talking about leeroy jenkins between pulls, with people doing sub autoattack damage and dying to fucking everything with a raid schedule of "whenever" that fucks you because you never know when you can make plans or not. (the last bit being the #1 reason why I finally quit FoH - I blew off plans for a raid that didn't happen one time too many and our schedule was almost entirely weekends, fuck that)

The EQ2 guild I played with for Sentinel's Fate, haha holy shit. I mean, I had this great crew that I progressed through the dungeons with. (dungeons are actually a progression in EQ2 instead of free loot as soon as you ding maxlevel) Finding people who even do that shit in that game is a rare gem. So we join a guild together - the highest end guild available in fact, just one step down from the only guild on the server that was actually clearing shit. And yes, Leeroy Jenkins was still a punchline there - and this wasn't more than a year ago. I very quickly decided that beating the group content was the End for EQ2. Hell that was why I played the Illusionist anyway.

And then there was the time I played EQ during SoD/Underfoot. Fucking disaster. In EQ I could have probably taken a bazaar geared 200 AA character and gotten into an end game guild just because they are so fucking desperate for warm bodies, true. Plus my name does open doors still. But I had zero interest in actually playing the game 'for reals' so I joined this casual guild for shits. And it is best described thus: Two to three boss attempts per raid. And this was content an expansion behind, when you could easily obtain loot that was much better than the raid rewarded, thus anyone who even attempted to spend time on group content could overgear the shit out of it. (and by group I mean "find someone six boxing and hope they aren't too selfish to allow you to roll against their six accounts") Oh, and their loot distribution method was /random 1000, no matter what class the item was best used for.

If you are wondering why the fuck I played EQ, btw - writing macroquest scripts so the game plays itself while you catch up on years of movie/tv backlog is fun. It's the part where you have them working and you are left with playing Everquest that you realize its quit time.

Rift - nothing bad to say there really, there were good people in the Rift guild. Very little asshead drama that I can recall. The game kind of sucked at the time though. There were free transfers and all the PVP faggots would all pile into one server and roam around in these giant raids making doing daily shit or rifts impossible. The guild had like 3 people who gave a fuck about PVP and they were the ones keeping us on those dogshit servers. Hammerknell was buggy as shit and my class had just been nerfed across the board because of PVP where two or three warriors working together could maybe kill a Cleric and that was unacceptable. But odds are, I'll try Rift again before long - maybe when they get rid of that fucktarded forced PVP shit they put in.

Kreugen_sl said:

I've tried to play with casual guilds in other games before. Oh my god. There is just no happy medium - if the guild isn't a progression guild, they are so fucking terrible that I'd rather claw my eyes out with a spoon. They aren't terrible because they don't raid often or don't try as hard or don't do every aspect of the game to ensure they have the best gear available - they are terrible because THEY FUCKING SUCK AT VIDEO GAMES. I just can't just accept spending 15 minutes talking about leeroy jenkins between pulls, with people doing sub autoattack damage and dying to fucking everything with a raid schedule of "whenever" that fucks you because you never know when you can make plans or not. (the last bit being the #1 reason why I finally quit FoH - I blew off plans for a raid that didn't happen one time too many and our schedule was almost entirely weekends, fuck that)

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It's pretty easy to spot the WoW guilds that are going to be serious when they raid even though they are not on the bleeding edge. If they have a website, a core of members that have been in the guild for multiple expansions and require you to actually apply before they just tag you and promote you to officer then they'll probably raid halfway seriously. Sen'jin is a good server for horde guilds, look around there are quite a few 10 man (maybe that doesn't jive with the completionist in you) guilds that are 16/16 normal and making their way through heroic content.

'Progression' raiding is essentially the only reason I remain subbed to the game. It's the one area of content that is done exceedingly well IMO.

I suppose I live in a bubble with respect to community and the typical 'guild experience. I've been in the same place for ~3 years and, by some miracle, ended up with a bunch of other players (particularly the guild leadership) who are also older, have careers or mortgages or kids or all of the above. Not sure how long I'd put up with the American Inventordick-speak, but I doubt I'd last a week elsewhere if shit imploded suddenly. Thankfully, burnout levels seem relatively stable, despite Blizz doing their best to piss off most of our players with stuff like dailies, valor upgrades (gone in 5.2 wooo) etc. Like Kreugen's old guild, we keep a 12 hour schedule and (at least personally) don't have much time beyond that to dedicate to what is basically a hobby.

Having said all that, Sha has been a fucking grind and I'm looking forward to the tier being over.

I played serious progression in vanilla. Was with a stellar guild and got to do all sorts of fun shit. They were the rare elusive mature group of people doing some end game raiding. Raided with the godfather of Ilvl Hyzenthlei, and Creedeki, Etoille, and Brahma ( all Rerolled / FoH posters ). Had a blasty blast. Then TBC happened. I was like the 4th horde side to 70, did the dungeon grind, got keyed and burnt out. Played ultra casual for the remainder. Decided to harcore it again during wotlk. Got a dk up quick got into a progression ( so they thought ) guild. Those clowns were wiping to naxx crap AGAIN. ( oh god the memories ). They decided to *cut the fat* from the 25's and we moved to 10's in ulduar. Regretably most of the *fat* were the 3 officers that played. So I left when the idiots couldn't move in / out on iron council. Just played alts till Cata came out. Decided to switch to alliance during cata. Leveled up etc, joined a guild that had token "Hay guys ima girl so when i fuck up and wipe a raid its okay, right?". I never fucking knew so much drama could exist with 9 other people. We got to Heroic Back Ride and fell apart becuase our rogue who had the goddamn legendaries couldn't out dps my LFR geared ret pal.

TLDR - Yeah it seemed like the guild experience has devolved since vanilla. You had the mature players that migrated from eq that were cool. Played the game well, and got shit done and kept a cool head. Then as wow progressed in age the younger kids that were still level 40 in vanilla got a little older figured out how to play the game but not actually have any social skills / cool head's. Every wipe is the end of the world. Every wipe is some one else's fault. Any chick that plays the game that tickles thier peen through chat is immune to any and all criticism and showered with loot. Uses Xbox language and refuses any and all sane advice "because they saw a strat on line".

Mythas_sl said:

I played serious progression in vanilla. Was with a stellar guild and got to do all sorts of fun shit. They were the rare elusive mature group of people doing some end game raiding. Raided with the godfather of Ilvl Hyzenthlei, and Creedeki, Etoille, and Brahma ( all Rerolled / FoH posters ). Had a blasty blast. Then TBC happened. I was like the 4th horde side to 70, did the dungeon grind, got keyed and burnt out. Played ultra casual for the remainder. Decided to harcore it again during wotlk. Got a dk up quick got into a progression ( so they thought ) guild. Those clowns were wiping to naxx crap AGAIN. ( oh god the memories ). They decided to *cut the fat* from the 25's and we moved to 10's in ulduar. Regretably most of the *fat* were the 3 officers that played. So I left when the idiots couldn't move in / out on iron council. Just played alts till Cata came out. Decided to switch to alliance during cata. Leveled up etc, joined a guild that had token "Hay guys ima girl so when i fuck up and wipe a raid its okay, right?". I never fucking knew so much drama could exist with 9 other people. We got to Heroic Back Ride and fell apart becuase our rogue who had the goddamn legendaries couldn't out dps my LFR geared ret pal.

TLDR - Yeah it seemed like the guild experience has devolved since vanilla. You had the mature players that migrated from eq that were cool. Played the game well, and got shit done and kept a cool head. Then as wow progressed in age the younger kids that were still level 40 in vanilla got a little older figured out how to play the game but not actually have any social skills / cool head's. Every wipe is the end of the world. Every wipe is some one else's fault. Any chick that plays the game that tickles thier peen through chat is immune to any and all criticism and showered with loot. Uses Xbox language and refuses any and all sane advice "because they saw a strat on line".

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Yeah in Vanilla anyone who played EQ even casually had all the skills to own WoW PvE. My guild transfered to WoW from EQ having been maybe 3rd or 4th ranked for progression on our server, which was by no means bleeding edge, and wound up being miles ahead of the competition in WoW. After we absorbed a couple of guilds who were also competent we killed Rag by the time the next guild behind us was on the 3rd boss in MC. We cleared BWL before the next guild cleared Rag. AQ is what burnt us out because fuck mauradon and nature gear. I tried the progression route for a bit in TBC, but unfortunately I just didn't like the people all that much. There was a lot of shit talking and arguments over strats and the one or two asshats who were going to "quit the guild" after every raid because they'd like to see how we did without them and blah blah blah. So I took a break until WotLK joined the guild I'm in now which is super casual and haven't left. I have a good time hanging out with them and really the whole reason why I ever stuck with MMO's in the first place was to play the game with people who are actually fun to play with.

Wait, are you saying 5.2 gets rid of the fucktarded "grind valor FOREVER" upgrade system? Good for them for at least recognizing when they've crossed the line into FUCK THIS SHIT levels of burnout.

Kreugen_sl said:

Wait, are you saying 5.2 gets rid of the fucktarded "grind valor FOREVER" upgrade system? Good for them for at least recognizing when they've crossed the line into FUCK THIS SHIT levels of burnout.

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Maybe not forever, but enough people have shit on the idea for them to reconsider.

The actual tweet:

Greg Street ?@Ghostcrawler
@Dristereau ATM, we are planning on no upgrading during 5.2. Too early to evaluate how well it worked. I'm sure it will need tweaking.

It sounds like they are going to retire it for current tier gear and probably just reserve it for prior tiers. So in theory, 5.2 gear will be upgradable in 5.3. I guess that makes sense...gives you a boost on certain pieces until you can replace them.

Oh okay, so full retard it is.

Well they have to give valor some value somehow.

I can see letting you upgrade old gear while you're working on new stuff, but making you upgrade current gear is shitty. If they are changing it in 5.2 so only last tier and older is upgradeable then awesome. That gives VP a useful function in letting people progress while they wait on RNG for new stuff.

Well when I saw that 5.2 was coming soon along with new raid I thought "pfft" why spend any Valor now when I should just save up and spend it all to update my first 5.2 item? This concept changes that and gets me to spend and thus continue to want to acrue (aka play the game) now.

It makes sense from a carnie point of view.

While I agree that hardmode is not the correct way to do these things, I think the way Ulduar did them IS the right way to reward a "harder" version of the fight. I have to disagree with normal modes being "pathetic pussy" mode. This might be the hardest normal version of a tier since they went to the "UI-menu-switch" mechanic for hardmode, fight for fight. There are a ton of guilds that are stuck still at 4/6 MSV, let alone much else.

Honestly, playing in a guild that supports multiple mutually-exclusive raid groups, anyone calling normal mode too easy vastly underestimates the mouthbreather-level of the average MMO player. Half of the auxiliary teams (hell, most of the teams on our server) still haven't *completed* normal mode Mogu'shan Vaults, much less Heroics.

Half the people on a given server can't find their asshole with both hands and a mirror, and you think they're going to dodge the giant dust cloud of Annihilate?

Kuro_sl said:

Honestly, playing in a guild that supports multiple mutually-exclusive raid groups, anyone calling normal mode too easy vastly underestimates the mouthbreather-level of the average MMO player. Half of the auxiliary teams (hell, most of the teams on our server) still haven't *completed* normal mode Mogu'shan Vaults, much less Heroics.

Half the people on a given server can't find their asshole with both hands and a mirror, and you think they're going to dodge the giant dust cloud of Annihilate?

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Or if they can, then the issue is only two of the dps break 50k. That's been my casual guild's issue. Mechanic wise, they're okay.