Can we just have the Wrath of the Lich King Raiding Scheme?

[Magis]

T1-T4, Hard Primals, and 4-man dungeons teach nothing now because the second you walk into these encounters at level 50, you are either overgeared for them or 7 other players are overgeared for them. You definitely don't repeat them afterwards because their loot is now worthless. A new player can literally die to the first attack these bosses throw out and get a clear from 7 other veterans doing a roulette or alt relic runs. Back in 2.1 and maybe 2.2 these encounters were challenging learning experience, but now they teach nothing. This is an extremely unfortunate result of overdoing the 'returning players need to catch up' design methodology. Because returning players log back in, have little or no experience, catch up to another red-hot iron wall when they hadn't even beaten the last one at-level, then quit again.

I agree with you 100%, and comes back to my point that constantly nerfing dungeons causes people to just be unprepared for the next set. There was a reason why attunements existed in TBC and Vanilla WoW, they were to block people who could not pass the previous content's difficulty. When coil 2 is nerfed, I expect even more complaining because it's not like things get any easier than T5 and lower.

PF users are actually a minority of the game, and Excalibur is actually considered one of the liveliest servers in the game when it comes to active SCOB pugs. I'm sure if you've actually used PF lately, how repeat failures to clear these fights even in 'farm groups' have resulted in a pretty cold cynicism in randoms toward the attitudes of other players as well. Which is, believe it or not, not the norm, for this game or many MMO's.

Well then I may be a bit biased in that spec then. I've mostly play with my static, however the few runs I pugged depended on the group. If everyone was knew what they were doing and it was just general minor mistakes, people push till a clear or time ran out. If it was obvious that someone just didn't know the fight, it would get negative there. This is in clear parties of course, which people expect you to know the fight at the minimum. Learning parties are pretty chill because people expect failures to happen.

The MMOs I played were FFXI and WoW from vanilla to the end of TBC. The former I didn't get into end game content and the latter required guilds to do raids, so the players sorted that out amongst themselves.

[Havenchild]

Source? Citation? Proof on the first part? Please pray tell how would an "easy mode" help someone get better? If you need to practice a raid, you have something just for that.... it's called that specific raid.

Several MMOs have had various takes on how to bridge the gap between the hardcore and mainstream, and many were spot on with the way they tackled the issue.

My most recent MMO, Dungeon Fighter Online for example, end game focused on difficult content while also limiting the amount of times party members could resurrect.
If you had newcomers in that kind of situation, usually it was a incredibly difficult to solo any of those fights. So the game had 4 different difficulties as a norm for all of the in-game dungeons anyway, Normal -> Expert -> Master -> Kings. Different gear also dropped on each level.

What they did was if you ran the dungeon on Normal, you were allowed to ressurect infinitely, free of charge. The difference between the levels was simply mobs hitting harder, and more HP, all the mechanics still intact. This one act immensely boosted the amount of players on the high end who participated on the Kings Road level.

The difference between that MMO and this one is, le gasp, we don't really have anything that can be called a practice mode, not even a decent stepping stone until you reach T5, and by then its not even a stepping stone its a 2-story building climb.

The curve of difficulty is not steep. You are doing the same actions that the game taught you in the dungeons and then in T1-T4. Watch markers, do a thing. With the echo buff, all the DPS check parts have been removed so it comes down to basic mechanics. The same way T1-T4 teach you how to do T5, the whole first coil teaches you how to do T6 and so on. It's actually really neat how SE set it up.

We are going to have to disagree here.

T1, emphasizes the same thing you already know. See AoE marker? Dodge.

T2? Enrage takes away everything from that fight. T2 actually teaches you more about T7, of multiple full map scenarios happening at the same time.

T3? Nothing.

T4? Largely this is what Echo effected the most. This is a rush down instance, with simply the mechanic being, winning before the next drop. At one point in time you had to make sure you had an optimal DPS rotation to overcome this trial simply because people weren't over gearing the hell out of it. Factor in Echo? This is not even worth talking about anymore. Not that it taught much anyway, there's no insta-kill mechanics.

T5? No AoE markers whatsoever. Not even warnings for something like the Lava Plumes which are shot out instantly and randomly.

Introduced your true first tank one shot mechanic, (unless you count Mountain Buster from Titan HM), Death sentence. The damage difference between the two is quite large.

Show me the instance that shows you even something remotely similar, to Conflaguration + Fireballs, or how to handle them.

Divebombs? You can see it in ST for the first time now, however they don't even function fundamentally the same and ones LARGELY more unforgiving then the other. (I've also yet to see someone marked with a Divebomb in ST get to dodge it.)

Aetheric Profusion + Neurolink - No instance has something similar up till now, unless you count something like Garuda EX and Spiny, and guess what you can do coil without touching EX primals.

Dreadknights + Twisters, again, two one shot mechanics going off at the same time, not to mention Death Sentence. No other instance up till now has this many deadly mechanics at once.

The difficulty jump from T1-T4 to T5 is way higher then many vets seem to think nowadays. However, its demonstrated by the masses in DF or hell even PF on most servers. It's not the whole first coil, its T5 largely that is the stepping stone for T6-T9 and that difficulty increase between the two, actually makes sense.

Why would people who have cleared T5 be doing T5? They are in T6 doing the current content. However, I and my FC mates do help out people in our FC who need a clear.

To get other gear from it? What else? Plenty of T5 vets run the dungeon continuously to bring there characters up to speed with pre-SCOB BIS. These are the people I'm largely talking about that were so against echo appearing in coil because they felt it made the content too easy and yet when they run it again for their alts, they don't remove the echo because they want a challenge.

Maybe Excalibur is different, but PF is full of 2nd Coil parties, not T5 parties... so I dunno who this "mainstream" is.
No one calls themselves elites unless they are world first types of people which hey, they deserve the title.
The only time I am "crying" is when some guy comes into a T6 or T7 clear party, and can't do the most basic of mechanics cause they got carried/bought their clear. And hey! That's ok on the first try, but when you refuse to listen to people much more experienced than you, or keep screwing up because you just can't do basic "jump rope" then make a learning party.

It's not to demean your comment but your situation is nowhere near defining for other servers. Saying your on a high pop server such as Excalibur or Gilgamesh for examples then imagining this is the norm on many other servers is disenfranchised. Many servers suffer from even PF not being any different from DF.

Perhaps you took my comment a bit more personal then needed. It's mainly targetting those that continuously say such and such isn't needed when it is in fact needed. Perhaps the white cloak over your eyes is a result of your playing on Excalibur, but the situation is better reflected in say, Duty Finder. Go single queue in Duty Finder, I can guarentee you, 90+% of the time you will not come close to a win.

[RiceisNice]

...

How did LFR promote laziness and lower motivation for players who want to clear content on higher difficulty? The raid dungeons weeks after they out on LFR were still booming and being done on normal and heroic difficulty. The exception to this like I said before was the last dungeon that was released in MoP, which was overly undertuned compared to what heroic raids used to be. That's less than LFR killing raiding content, and more on the raiding content itself being too easy on normal (and even heroic/savage) difficulty.

And you very well know that no amount of numberical buff/echo would make something like T5 easier, since its mostly one-shot mechanics on spot checks, espesically when there's no prior boss fights that use the same mechanics, not even Titan EX.

[skaterger]

How did LFR promote laziness and lower motivation for players who want to clear content on higher difficulty? The raid dungeons weeks after they out on LFR were still booming and being done on normal and heroic difficulty. The exception to this like I said before was the last dungeon that was released in MoP, which was overly undertuned compared to what heroic raids used to be. That's less than LFR killing raiding content, and more on the raiding content itself being too easy on normal (and even heroic/savage) difficulty.

And you very well know that no amount of numberical buff/echo would make something like T5 easier, since its mostly one-shot mechanics on spot checks, espesically when there's no prior boss fights that use the same mechanics, not even Titan EX.

It's simple really. By dumbing down fights so much in LFR that even a 3 year old could do it, players were preconditioned to think that its ok to stand in fire, its ok to not interrupt "1 shot moves", its ok to do terrible dps or afk and still win the fight. If this were in the case in isolation it would be fine for the most part, but many players after clearing LFR went on to do normal and heroic raids, and carried these thoughts with them. Then when they failed, they went to the blizzard forums and QQed about raids being too hard when it was the same all along and the problem actually lay with them.

Now imagine if these players came to ARR. They think that they should have the right to use LFR, click 1 button, pray the matchmaking system finds 7 other players to carry them and go afk or stand in fire and still hope to win the fight. And if they didn't win they would continue whining till they got what they wanted.

There are other reasons, but this is the main reason why players have gotten bad and lazy over the years. I saw how it ruined Wow and the reason why I quit after cataclysm. and will not let it happen a second time to FFXIV.

[Fendred]

It's simple really. By dumbing down fights so much in LFR that even a 3 year old could do it, players were preconditioned to think that its ok to stand in fire, its ok to not interrupt "1 shot moves", its ok to do terrible dps or afk and still win the fight. If this were in the case in isolation it would be fine for the most part, but many players after clearing LFR went on to do normal and heroic raids, and carried these thoughts with them. Then when they failed, they went to the blizzard forums and QQed about raids being too hard when it was the same all along and the problem actually lay with them.

Yeah, it definitely was an issue. However, the issue that I'm trying to address with my suggestion is a bit different. Before we had a lot of LFG tools, doing dungeons meant communicating a lot with other players. This eventually grew the hardcore community that all of these other games keep trying to grab. To succeed at growing hardcore players locally, the game must reward players for putting together groups and slowly increase the challenge over time. The game would thus benefit tremendously by having an entry level raid that requires that kind of socialization. The transition from looking for group tools to a true raiding challenge is too hard a wall for new players, and so the game's local raiding community is very slow to grow in comparison to the elder gamers who come from elsewhere (who make up the bulk of the raiders).

Just as an example, back in vanilla WoW, if you stood in Orgrimmar or Iron Forge, you would see people asking for a raid group or teams advertising for raiders on a daily basis. The difference between FFXIV and WoW Vanilla end game community was that this phenomena continued far into its three year life and only got rekindled by Burning Crusade. In FFXIV, its gone almost silent, and you'd be lucky to see such advertisement once a week. In WoW, the process of getting to end game caused players to grow strong social circles and gain confidence through successive victories of increasing difficulty with the same group of people. In FFXIV, what we saw were the arrival of veteran raiders who hit max level, but few that are home grown.

[Colt47]

Well, commenting on an earlier posting by Magis, the problem with the nerfed content and lack of learning is directly linked to the gear ramp that has become common place in these games. In an ideal world the Developers should never have to ramp gear up in power level every patch: in fact, in an ideal world the developers shouldn't even do that in an expansion, as gear level has little to do with making interesting content. Fighting for cosmetics, mounts, and achievements are more then enough encouragement given the kinds of comments you can typically hear from those completing content.

However, at this point it's all that most game devs in the AAA industry seem to know how to do. No matter where I go those developing MMOs keep going back to this idea that they need to build a gear ramp at end game to keep people interested in playing.

[skaterger]

snip

True, which is which I support your idea of tiered raids. That reply was to the idea of LFR, which is a totally different ball park, where you can stand in Deathwing's fire for 6 seconds and still come out alive.

[Colt47]

True, which is which I support your idea of tiered raids. That reply was to the idea of LFR, which is a totally different ball park, where you can stand in Deathwing's fire for 6 seconds and still come out alive.

As much as I might complain about T6 and T5 being a wee bit over tuned for the average after work unwinding session, Raid Finder in World of Warcraft gave fights that were just way too under powered. Heck, it got to the point where even the developers at Blizzard saw this and added a sort of go between difficulty level where people with partially formed groups could join together like in party finder.

I've got a feeling if they had a difficulty level for coil that was between current coil and party finder and just scrapped the entire echo buff idiocy we'd see the majority of players stick to that. The trouble with Echo is it's a slap on quicky solution that doesn't work with a number of design choices in the current end game fighting line up. Many of the bosses are tuned to fire off specific behaviors once they hit a specific percent of life, and if they changed it to "at this point in your HP percent or LOWER do this", we'd see spam like behavior on a number of bosses, including Twin Tania. (Think "Lets have Dive bombs with Twisters!" insanity).

[StateAlchemist]

Back when first coil offered bis gear I beat it without devoting tons of time to it. All it too kwas a little teamwork and people actually listening to what someone who knew what to do had to say instead of being an idiot and doing whatever they wanted. coil is even easier now with ilv90+ gear being pratically hand out for free to everyone... i dont see how it needs to be nerfed anymore then it already was.

[Colt47]

Back when first coil offered bis gear I beat it without devoting tons of time to it. All it too kwas a little teamwork and people actually listening to what someone who knew what to do had to say instead of being an idiot and doing whatever they wanted. coil is even easier now with ilv90+ gear being pratically hand out for free to everyone... i dont see how it needs to be nerfed anymore then it already was.

I'm sure it didn't take you too long, but I got the feeling that we both have been around the block before with raiding and have prior experiences to draw upon. When you got a bunch of former static raiders teaming up the difficulty of many of these fights becomes manageable, but when we start ending up getting mixed bag crowds due to people taking breaks from playing and getting behind that front line curve, you end up with experienced players having to deal with people who are not as experienced in end game. This drastically ramps up the time sink and difficulty level of the fights more than the actual mechanics of the fights themselves. I really wish people would start correlating difficulty with the TEAM they are using as well as the fight. Twintania for example is not easy! It requires a ton of experience to handle many of the mechanics it presents, it's just that many of us have said experience from prior games. Throw two or three people without that experience into a group and a 30 minute encounter quickly draws out to 2-3 hours of dieing repeatedly, often ending with no one clearing any content.

May the Eorzean gods have mercy when that poor group reaches Turn 6 of all things. Talk about groundhog day on roids. Trying to teach new people how to do a fight can be like doing unpaid overtime at a job given how there's no reward for TRYING to clear content, and the incentives for taking a new person through a fight only get rewarded if the fight is cleared.