Welcome to The Daily Fan, where you get to see what we are reading, listening or tweeting about in our community of fan blogs, podcasts and other sites that cover Console, PC gaming, and much more.
This Friday, July 29, 2011, Rawrcast is hosting a Healing Round Table Special Episode. To prepare for what is shaping up to be our biggest round table yet, take a minute to get to know the guests who will be seated around the virtual table with today’s Daily Fan.
Get Involved with this Special Episode of Rawrcast…
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Derevka is a mainly Disc priest in the guild Edge(US-Garona), currently ranked in a top #100 US. Recently retired from TalesofaPriest.com but can still be caught tweeting about progression raiding and a regular poster on the Plus Heal forums.
Twitter.com/derevka
www.PlusHeal.com |
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Our healing shaman,Vixsin is in Pie Chart (US-Firetree) currently ranked #19 in the US. Writer for Life in Group 5, Vixsin is a go to source for raiding, great insight on patches seen from a shamans point of view and anything else that crosses Vixsin’s mind.
Life in Group 5
twitter.com/Vixsin_LiG5 |
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Eade is a holy pally in the guild AIE’s raid group, If Looks Could Kill. He is also one of the host of the new healing oriented podcast, My Epic Heals. Along with the podcasts, you can catch his own views on healing pallies at My Pally Heals.
My Epic Heals Podcast
My Pally Heals Blog |
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Foofy is a long time friend of the show and long time progression raider as a Resto Druid. Currently in a top #200 guild in the US, Crisp. Foofy has her hand in a lot of pots, including moderator at Moonkin Repository, video creator and blogger. Go give her a read, listen and watch!
Moonkin Repository
Foofy’s Youtube
Foofy’s Cupcake Blog |
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Send it to Fondre@Rawrcast.com or twitter @Fondrewow
By now, your vent chat has surely filled with the pleasant rumble of excitement and chatter about 4.2. New raid content and the promise of wiping your way to victory await millions of eager raiders in the Firelands. All of that slogging through hard modes will finally pay dividends to your most reliable raiders when they step forth into a brand new raid instance. But what about the rest of your raiders, the ones who aren’t consistent or dedicated?
Read more…
There are a handful of stereotypes that populate most every raid roster. Below is a quick list of some of the most obvious ones.
The Professor
You’ve seen this raider before. He’s more than happy to talk ad nauseum about the mechanics of a fight. He clears his voice before entering into his speech about the finer points of the fight mechanics and helpfully corrects those who misspoke before him. “That fire actually ticks every 2 seconds…not every 3 seconds. Ironically, the damage is nature damage, not fire damage…”. You can almost hear the weary sighs that follow these useful proclamations. However, this pearl of knowledge would not be complete without the Professor dying to the mechanic that he just explained over vent. He may know every facet of information about the fire mechanic itself..but he is helpless when it comes to not standing in it. A strict vent policy and a wealth of patience will go a long way with this raider type.
The Executor
This player forms the silent majority in the raid (hopefully). He doesn’t frequently talk on vent and rarely pipes up in raid chat. They let their performance speak for themselves. You can usually find these players forming the back bone of your DPS/HPS. Find and stock your raid with these players.
The Silent Failure
These players are the source of constant headaches for raid leadership. “Catnap, please move out of that fire…Catnap, you there…CATNAP!!”. This player will silently fail all night long and is seemingly immune to any efforts that you may make to try and help him avoid dying. Fear these players and try your hardest to weed them out of your raid team.
The Helpful Raider
This player is a shrewd operator, spending his night sending out whispers to other players that they feel are under-performing. Their feedback could range from anything to an impromptu examination of your rotation to an in depth analysis of your talent choices. Maybe this player knows what he’s talking about…but the receiving player hasn’t asked for, nor wants to hear any of this critique. These players can be an irritant to the raid and should have an eye kept on them.
A recent focus of many of my posts has been the amount of content that Blizzard has been releasing, how that amount compares to what they’ve done in the past and the potential reasons why the content has slowed. I think many players feel like there simply isn’t enough content with this expansion and the sentiment that Blizzard is not moving fast enough/producing enough to address players’ concerns is a fairly common opinion expressed on the forums.
That said, it’s always been a principal of mine that you can’t simply criticize something that you see as flawed without providing a solution to the problem. It would be easy to say that the solution is “Hire more artists and engineers!” and call it a day. It feels like we can offer up a more thoughtful solution that is in line with Blizzard’s previous attempts at creating content.
For better or worse, Wrath of the Lich King offered up content to players that they had already seen before. Naxxarams and Onyxia both made triumphant returns and helped to flesh out the amount of raiding content that Blizzard had to offer to players. I propose something similar; there are tons of old instances and raids that are no longer being used. Blizzard could simply start at the oldest raid content and begin tuning it for level 85 raiders. All of the gear in the instances could have their stats adjusted to be in line with gear at level 85.
The advantages to this approach are pretty straight forward. Blizzard wouldn’t have to create any new assets/ animations, encounters or mechanics for any of the fights. The majority of the work would come from tuning the encounters to ensure that new abilities and talents don’t overpower old content. Tuning would also have to be done to ensure that many of the hyper difficult encounters from Vanilla WOW and TBC are not too challenging for players.
The disadvantages to this approach are pretty obvious as well. The main issue here is that many players have seen and played through this content when it was relevant. I personally played through all of the content in TBC and there are some fights that still give me nightmares when I think back (Kael’thas being at the top of the list). Additionally, some may argue that this is simply a band aid over a much more significant problem. Namely, Blizzard’s production pipeline has significantly slowed down and there isn’t much indication that its going to improve.
The approach taken by other games is to allow players to create their own content and then crowd source that content so that the best material is showcased for players (see City of Heroes). What do you all think? Are you disgusted by the notion of playing through old content again or would you rather have more content at the expense of originality?
Something is missing in this expansion and about half a million people have walked away as a result. The absence of a sufficient amount of end game content is having a nasty effect on Blizzard’s ability to keep its players playing. The biggest gamble that Blizzard made with this expansion was to focus all of their resources on fixing Vanilla WOW. After having leveled several characters through Old World content, I can’t help but feel that they’ve succeeded. The content feels fresh, the leveling curve is much less steep and the quests are interesting and compelling.
An unintended side effect of this focus on Vanilla WOW has been the absence of enough end game content. Further, the pace of additional content releases has been significantly slower than previous expansions. A couple of examples. The Burning Crusade was released on 1/16/07 and the Black Temple was released with their first major content pack roughly five months later (5/22/07). With the exception of the Sunwell, Black Temple and Zul Aman, the Burning Crusade was release with the following raid content: Gruul’s Lair, Tempest Keep, Karazan, Magtheridon, Serpentshrine Cavern and Battle of Mount Hyjal! Wrath was released on 11/13/08 and their first content release, which included Ulduar was released 4/14/09 (about five months later). With the exception of ICC, Ulduar, Ruby Sanctum, Onxyia’s Lair and Trial of the Crusader, Wrath released with Naxxaramas, Saratherion, Eye of Eternity and Vault of Archavon.
Cataclysm was released on 12/7/10 and the first content patch came on 4/26/11. Raid content included Baradin Hold, Bastion of Twilight and Black Wing Decent. The new patch included….Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub…and no raids. Instead of releasing MASSIVE raid instances like Black Temple and Ulduar in a span of 4-5 months, we’ve received…2 heroic 5 man dungeons.
A good friend has reminded me that WOW has been going for 6 years and maybe their decaying release pace is a result of the amount of time they’ve been working on the project. I countered that if anything, they should be going FASTER than they’ve gone in the past! Content should be flying out of Blizzard instead of slowly plodding onto the PTR. What’s become clear is that WOW has finally plateaued after six years. The long tail effect has begun. In order to extend that phenomenon as long as possible, Blizzard needs to be releasing content much faster than what they’ve currently done in this expansion.
Links to topics discussed this week:
One of the false assumptions that players make when they first down a boss in progression content is that they’ll have little difficulty defeating the boss the second time around. This almost never occurs. There are a number of reasons why your raid will have difficulty with an encounter that they defeated the previous week. The biggest impediment that I’ve come across is that there are new players in the raid that week (Here comes a shocking revelation: They have to see and learn the fight just like you did!). Also, these bosses are supposed to be difficult! If you could reliably step into an instance and down a boss every night, raiding would quickly become boring.
In a perfect world, everyone would wisely sit back and constructively work towards a solution to their raid woes. Again, this almost never occurs. Players often cannot understand how after several nights of work, the boss that they defeated last week is causing them so much trouble this week (these are often the raiders who feel that they have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in learning the fight). This can cause a disturbance in the raid as players loudly decry the mistakes of others over vent and in raid chat. We’ve all seen it before, “How can we still be getting hit by X?!!” It’s incredibly important that progression raiders follow the cardinal rule of progression: Be Patient.
Whenever I start to lose patience while raiding, I try and come up with an analogy that helps me process the pattern of events. The one that I use most often is that every raid night counts as an investment in your raiding team. Each wipe that you experience counts towards the collective experience and exposure of your raid to new bosses. Just as your raid team will hang in there with you if you have an off night, you have to be willing to hang in there with your fellow raiders when they aren’t playing to the best of their abilities.
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