Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Response to my response...

Okay so it's a little conceited to respond to your own post but honest the last post I did "Problems with Linear Progression" started a bit of discussion in the comments. I did think up a few points related to this topic while reading Rillfane's post that I also wanted to touch on, so here it goes:
Thank you to everyone that responded, I had a very strongly opinionated response to the contrary of my post, and I'm quite happy to see those as well!

One interesting thing that Blizzard did with ToC and ICC was they made the heroic gear from ToC better than the normal gear in ICC (iLVL 258 vs 251). This is something that they seem to have turned their back on in Cataclysm (Firelands gear from the list I have seen is higher iLVL than heroic Bot and BWD), however I think it's very important for a few reasons. (OMG not another list...)
  1. Blizzard has stated that the heroic modes are designed for progression "high-end" guilds, which means that they don't expect your average PVE player to clear hardmodes, and in fact hardly even see most of them, as they should only be clearing endgame normal mode bosses slightly before the release of the next tier. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view point), they have gated heroics by requiring all normal mode bosses to die first (at least in that raid). This means that guilds like Paragon, Method, etc. still must spend a week clearing normal modes, which for them isn't that huge of a deal, but for guilds not QUITE as hardcore they may spend multiple lockouts getting there. I see the style of iLVL done with ToC and ICC as being a good way to allow those progressed guilds to get into their preferred level of raid a little faster, give them a gear boost so that if they were in heroics to start with, they can get there quickly again.
  2. I see this as a bit of a hybrid between the linear raid style and the "gear reset" (as it was called in one of the response comments), while it doesn't mean you have to climb from the very bottom rung of raids all the way step by step to the top, it does mean that there should always be two tiers of raids that stay quite important all the way through (again, think about all the Solace of the Defeated, etc. that were farmed once ICC was already out).
  3. It allows those guilds that worked really hard to get the handful of heroic bosses down to feel like they had more of an achievement by giving them an advantage over those guilds that up and decided to start raiding at the end of the last tier/beginning of the current tier.
Is my view skewed? Absolutely, it's my blog, not a newspaper article (which are SUPPOSED to be impartial, even though they rarely are), however I really see that the fully "on-rails" raiding scheme does more to punish new players that want to raid, by leaving them with the "entitlement-sloths" than it does to reward hardworking progression guilds.

I really do appreciate all comments, even if I do pick on some respondents :P As a final response to the response to my response (lost yet?) I really want to ask: How do you expect a new player to learn to raid if they are stuck in "Naxx" with all the "entitlement-sloths" that don't know how to/aren't capable raiders?

1 comment:

  1. "How do you expect a new player to learn to raid if they are stuck in "Naxx" with all the "entitlement-sloths" that don't know how to/aren't capable raiders?"
    If you're in Naxx and are hoping to do progressive raiding then I sure hope you're looking for a guild that's in the same boat as you. Inevitably this guild will have a larger-than-normal turnover of players as they sort the wheat from the chaff but that's entirely normal for any budding raiding guild. Once that guild has found 10/25 dependable people and have cleared Naxx and got the key for EoE/Ulduar they will then naturally progress to the next tier of raids.
    Conclusion to the question: I expect a new player to learn to raid in exactly the same way as everyone else, by going into the lowest current-tier with a lesser progressed guild and DOING IT. The only difference in "set-path systems" and "gear-reset systems" is that a newer player has to spend longer proving themselves on slightly older mechanics, but I see that as a good thing. Would you want your doctor to have been in medical school for 6 months or 1 year? That's a bad example, but an example nonetheless.

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