World of Warcraft: Current Year

Aside from Vanilla, I've only ever done casual 2-3 night raiding and it's been enough to keep me pretty much consistently subbed aside from Cata which I just sort of lost the will to log on. I was moving / having my first kid too so that factored in heavily. If the minivan starts getting to low on sign ups, I'll ask some of my guild if they are interested. We're pretty much on pace progression wise, though a couple new people coming back has put is in the same spot. Normal is mostly trivial but heroics are slightly out of grasp. Darmac is pushover easy on heroic so I guess we have 1 on farm. We had like 6 sub 10% wipes to thogar heroic on Sunday which was frustrating since the numbers were all seemingly there, but a derp death here and there just made the whole thing fall apart at the end each time. Gruul seems to be hit and miss (we have killed him but it's not consistent) but I think that's mostly the tanks getting cooldowns and shit figured out.

I'd still like to get Heroic Imp and normal blackhand!

sorry the last few saturdays have been shitty for me, my GF is bringing me my windows cd finally, so once i reformat i wont miss it, but the last 2 saturdays ive woken up and have had to re-install and its kinda impossible to raid while its still downloading i tried.

some rogue in lfr BRF was pulling 58k was in maidens wing, using dual maces.

WTB DPS raiders. 2/10 Mythic BRF - 6/7 Mythic Highmaul. Turalyon Alliance. Wed-Sun-Mon 8:30-12pm EST.

Need everything but mage, rogue, spriest.

At least some heroic BRF experience is preferred, as well as 670 ilvl.

High emphasis on not being fucking stupid and/or a flake that just stops showing up. If you can complete a fight without eating the mechanics and still do competitive DPS I will suck your dick.

PM if interested yadda yadda

Oh, we have one of those guys that likes to yell "jew American Inventor" and just be overall offensive because he thinks it's funny (it's not), so if that shit bothers you nobody cares.

Gorehack_sl said:

WTB DPS raiders. 2/10 Mythic BRF - 6/7 Mythic Highmaul. Turalyon Alliance. Wed-Sun-Mon 8:30-12pm EST.

Need everything but mage, rogue, spriest.

At least some heroic BRF experience is preferred, as well as 670 ilvl.

High emphasis on not being fucking stupid and/or a flake that just stops showing up. If you can complete a fight without eating the mechanics and still do competitive DPS I will suck your dick.

PM if interested yadda yadda

Oh, we have one of those guys that likes to yell "jew American Inventor" and just be overall offensive because he thinks it's funny (it's not), so if that shit bothers you nobody cares.

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Change your raid days to a tues/wed instead of sundays and mondays like a savage!

So, I've already quit WoW and a friend is about to. He's the "lonewolf" type who can't really get into raids because his preferred play-style is solo. Obviously, MMOs in general are likely to be a poor fit for him. We got to discussing why Blizzard hasn't tried to target that demographic. I'm curious what y'all think: is there a demographic worth targeting here in the first place? I.e., people that want to exist in an MMO but enjoy their own progression without being tied to groups, and could Blizzard actually provide them what they want without unplanned side-effects?

I'm always hesistant to armchair-dev. I don't think Blizzard hates money and I don't think they're incompetent -- I'm having a hard time brainstorming why theyhaven'tintroduced some solo region where people can do hard solo fights and build cool items like, for example, a set with bonuses like (2P: increase to open world move speed, 4P: combat buff for open world shit...). Some type of progression that wouldn't impinge upon the raid scene.

Thoughts?

Eidal_sl said:

So, I've already quit WoW and a friend is about to. He's the "lonewolf" type who can't really get into raids because his preferred play-style is solo. Obviously, MMOs in general are likely to be a poor fit for him. We got to discussing why Blizzard hasn't tried to target that demographic. I'm curious what y'all think: is there a demographic worth targeting here in the first place? I.e., people that want to exist in an MMO but enjoy their own progression without being tied to groups, and could Blizzard actually provide them what they want without unplanned side-effects?

I'm always hesistant to armchair-dev. I don't think Blizzard hates money and I don't think they're incompetent -- I'm having a hard time brainstorming why theyhaven'tintroduced some solo region where people can do hard solo fights and build cool items like, for example, a set with bonuses like (2P: increase to open world move speed, 4P: combat buff for open world shit...). Some type of progression that wouldn't impinge upon the raid scene.

Thoughts?

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Already did it, Kasarang bases/thunder island/ Timeless Isle in MoP. This expansions endgame is raiding or logging on once a day to hit your garrison.

Out of that list, I'm only familiar with timeless isle. It was a catch-up mechanism to bring returning players up to the current tier of raiding. I don't think its accurate to call that progression in its own right. Regardless, Timeless Isle lasted, what, a few weeks tops and it provided gear with terrible stat allocation.

Eidal_sl said:

So, I've already quit WoW and a friend is about to. He's the "lonewolf" type who can't really get into raids because his preferred play-style is solo. Obviously, MMOs in general are likely to be a poor fit for him. We got to discussing why Blizzard hasn't tried to target that demographic. I'm curious what y'all think: is there a demographic worth targeting here in the first place? I.e., people that want to exist in an MMO but enjoy their own progression without being tied to groups, and could Blizzard actually provide them what they want without unplanned side-effects?

I'm always hesistant to armchair-dev. I don't think Blizzard hates money and I don't think they're incompetent -- I'm having a hard time brainstorming why theyhaven'tintroduced some solo region where people can do hard solo fights and build cool items like, for example, a set with bonuses like (2P: increase to open world move speed, 4P: combat buff for open world shit...). Some type of progression that wouldn't impinge upon the raid scene.

Thoughts?

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There have been plenty of times where this might describe my playstyle. Much of that having to do with playing at work for several years where I had to alt-tab out at any given moment. I'm not sure how you could incentivize this though. LFR might as well already be you and 24 bots for how much conversation and coordination occurs. Brawlers guild I think is supposed to be the solo end game but that does nothing for me.

I think any "solo" content has to tie in with the world and lore, something that brawler's guild doesn't do. What keeps the soloers subbed is that fact that it is a warcraft universe and you get to fight with and against characters you know.

Having dungeon/raid bots that you had to coordinate via target markers or something might be interesting. With blizzard's history in RTS's it seems like something they could do; karazhan chess event but without losing your character's identity.

Eidal_sl said:

So, I've already quit WoW and a friend is about to. He's the "lonewolf" type who can't really get into raids because his preferred play-style is solo. Obviously, MMOs in general are likely to be a poor fit for him. We got to discussing why Blizzard hasn't tried to target that demographic. I'm curious what y'all think: is there a demographic worth targeting here in the first place? I.e., people that want to exist in an MMO but enjoy their own progression without being tied to groups, and could Blizzard actually provide them what they want without unplanned side-effects?

I'm always hesistant to armchair-dev. I don't think Blizzard hates money and I don't think they're incompetent -- I'm having a hard time brainstorming why theyhaven'tintroduced some solo region where people can do hard solo fights and build cool items like, for example, a set with bonuses like (2P: increase to open world move speed, 4P: combat buff for open world shit...). Some type of progression that wouldn't impinge upon the raid scene.

Thoughts?

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My initial thoughts were that the games for your friend are not MMO's but RPG's like Skyrim and Dragon Age. However then I thought of some things that D3 and Anarchy Online do which is relatively random dungeons. Perhaps they could reuse old assets from previous dungeons/outdoor areas to create increasingly difficult levels in endless dungeons and the best clear times/depths could get rewards.

I think instead of the old raids becoming trivial it would have been interesting to have them made into solo encounters with rewards similar to the current challenge mode dungeons. It might even be cool to take a party of 4 (maybe even more for a raid) garrison followers with you on your dungeon/raid run. Perhaps even have a Warcraft style pvp scenario where you challenge other Commanders in a garrison seige.

There's a lot of options but also the risk that very few people will use up that content because they get better gear rewards from raids. Perhaps vanity items might be a better reward.

It's hard to know anything without player data. I hope Blizzard is a data-centric organization and the things they change are based mostly on the metrics they see from the players. When they added the free level 25 pet tokens I actually got more into pet battles, I'm betting they saw very little pet battle activity in their data and thus tried the free level 25 tokens incentive to get that number up.

Eidal_sl said:

So, I've already quit WoW and a friend is about to. He's the "lonewolf" type who can't really get into raids because his preferred play-style is solo. Obviously, MMOs in general are likely to be a poor fit for him. We got to discussing why Blizzard hasn't tried to target that demographic. I'm curious what y'all think: is there a demographic worth targeting here in the first place? I.e., people that want to exist in an MMO but enjoy their own progression without being tied to groups, and could Blizzard actually provide them what they want without unplanned side-effects?

I'm always hesistant to armchair-dev. I don't think Blizzard hates money and I don't think they're incompetent -- I'm having a hard time brainstorming why theyhaven'tintroduced some solo region where people can do hard solo fights and build cool items like, for example, a set with bonuses like (2P: increase to open world move speed, 4P: combat buff for open world shit...). Some type of progression that wouldn't impinge upon the raid scene.

Thoughts?

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So... Play Diablo 3?

Yea, he played D3 pretty extensively but the direction they've taken that game is inscrutable to him (and me).

TecKnoe_sl said:

some rogue in lfr BRF was pulling 58k was in maidens wing, using dual maces.

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One thing to note about the maces is he is probably using dual crafted 675 Ilevel ones like my shaman is using. being able to get some nice crafted stuff with the stats you need helps a ton DPS wise.

Always cracks me up to see guilds recruiting for sunday nights.

Combat or Assassination for Rogue's these days? Or does it just depend on the encounter?

Rogosh_sl said:

Always cracks me up to see guilds recruiting for sunday nights.

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Yea I hate raiding on days that work best for all of our current members.