Ah…here’s the rub. Epic is, somehow, a subjective definition…Though I’m not sure how it came to be that way…

You define a whole bunch of people taking on 1 big boss (and maybe some little bosses) as epic. To me, that’s not epic.

Epic is 1 man or even 5 men taking on a god, or taking on a thousand and winning. The exploits of Hercules, and Frodo are epic. Hell, Frodo is more epic because until the end of the 3rd book, the idiot he had as his helper was more hinderance than aid.

I enjoy WoW. I enjoy it far more than any other MMORPG I have played (DDO would have been good it it weren’t for all the forced grouping, and the Korean ones that I have liked fail because of the RMT environment, which ALWAYS sucks beyond imagining). But there is nothing in WoW that is all that epic.

Flaimes last blog post..The sphere around us

Sorry, your comments kept getting caught by Akismet as spam, so I had to manually recover all your comments.

“The respawn of trash usually results in “end of raid” and everyone slunks off unhappy and bummed, tons of consumables wasted, and a big fat repair bill. I don’t think trash should ever respawn in a dungeon.”

I believe there is a nice balance in trash between bosses right now in end game raiding. For example, in Sunwell, it takes 25 minutes to clear trash to first boss, 5 mins of trash to the 2nd boss, no trash to the 3rd boss. Good time to take a break. 15 minutes to clear to 4th boss, 10 minutes to clear to 5th boss, and no trash for the last boss. The timer on all the trash is about 2hrs.

I think Blizz usually makes the first set of trash the longest, and first boss is usually the test of “are you ready for this instance?”

Yes it is very frustrating when you put in a bunch of attempts on a boss, then trash respawns (been there many times). Clearing trash again (which many of us actually look forward to) isn’t the end of the world though, and the drops are more than worth the extra time to clear. Some of the “best” pieces of loot drops from the trash clears.

About repair bills, maybe it is just in my guild but for progression fights (bosses not on farm), the guild pays our repair bills. They also pay for all respec costs for any players that are asked to respec (due to lack of dps or heals). Again, all guilds are run differently, and all players have different experiences.

Wasting raid consumables has never been an issue at all for me. Most raiding guilds have characters of all professions, so an hour of farming mats will last you a week or two of raiding.

“Or even separate wings not connected to bosses that were designed for single groups to fight respawning trash and 5 man bosses.”

At first this idea seemed very good to me, but the more I thought about it, it seemed a bit off to me. Maybe because I’m looking at it from a different perspective. To me, I think reputation should come naturally as you progress through the instance.

For example, I hit exaulted with the Ashtongue on the Illidari Council (due to my human racial) and the rest of the guild hit exaulted when we got Illidan down.

To me, trash has to be cleared on the way to the next boss. It gives a sort of flow to the instance, and is usually a good indication of what kind of boss you are about to clear (lots of AoE on trash usually means AoE is required on boss).

“The very fact that someone feels it is legit to compare working to maintain a raid guild and working to maintain a marriage means the importance people attach to raiding has gotten out of hand.”

I didn’t mean to make them out to be the same, I meant that both have their ups and downs, and some people think it is worth it, some don’t.

When M’uru died, I thought it was a huge accomplishment, in a video game. Some people could care less. My younger sister just graduated college. I think that is a huge accompishment, to others, that might not mean anything at all. “Graduate college!? PShh! Try giving birth!”

“What would you recommend we did? Just go ahead and roster normally and dest the token? Incidentally, the mage/hunter/warlock token DID drop the next raid, so if we hadn’t adjusted our roster accordingly it would have been wasted.”

Since it was on a boss you have already mastered, then sure it’s to swap out players to allow others a chance at loot (we do it all the time). I only meant on progression fights, or fights which you still have difficulties on.

Even so, I agree that loot shouldn’t dictate who you should bring to a fight. You would still bring tanks to a fight even if all of them don’t need loot off the next boss. There will always be a time where no one needs loot, and drops will be disenchanted or destroyed.

“I’m fine with there being bosses were certain classes shine. I’m not fine with there being bosses where if you don’t have the right class combo, you absolutely fail every time.”

It is harsh that some fights need the right class combo, but if you have gotten your guild to a point where you can do 25 man raids, then you *shouldn’t* have a problem with not having the right class. You *should* have at least one of each class. If Blizz designed it so that you *didn’t* need to bring a class, I think it would be poorly designed. Your core 25-35 raiders of *all* classes should be all you need.

“No, we replaced a hunter with a shadow priest, and it went from super hard to a breeze. It was the exact same player who played the hunter and then swapped to a shadow priest.”

You probably made a mistake in your example then (you said priest switched to s.spriest). Even so, a S.Priest isn’t required to beat the boss. The fact that it helped make the fight easier was because as a raid, you guys didn’t have the DPS to take him down quickly, and mana was becoming an issue. It could be other factors as well. You could have added a Rogue instead, making sparks easier, giving you more DPS time on Curator, which takes him down faster, and so on.

“The WoW-style raid encounter basically REQUIRES wiping over and over to learn their abilities and practice reacting to the random and arbitrary uber-death-attacks. I really dislike this. It feels extremely fake and frustrating.”

To me, this is the fun part about raiding. Doing a boss, seeing what abilities he does, discussing and figuring out ways to counter each ability. That’s is the best part of progression in my opinion. In end game raiding, strategies you find don’t give you a step by step on how to win. They merely tell you what abilities the boss can do. It is up to you to figure out how to deal with them.

If the boss happens to do a double aggro dump, then the third tank should pick him up until the first two can regain aggro. Or if the 3rd aggro on the list was a Rogue, he could pop Evasion and tank him for the duration until tanks can get aggro again. If Priest clones spawn on Kil’jaeden, then all DPS switch off Kil’jaeden and concentrate on the clones and keep them stunned or silenced.

Yes random things like this can happen, but it doesn’t mean it is an automatic wipe. You learn to react to this on your own. No boss guide told us to do this for Kil’jaeden, it’s something you learn for yourself.

“They see Attack X happen and know from their instructions that when Attack X happens they have to execute Maneuver B. They are never thinking of completely new and imaginative tactics or actions on the fly.

It isn’t reacting to things when you know about it from reading 12 stratgies online and having the raid leader explain it 10 times over vent. “

You can’t say this about the first couple of guilds who have down a boss before everyone else with out the aid of boss strategies. If it was impossible to do these bosses without a strategy telling them what to do, then how did these guilds do it?

This isn’t the fault of the game design, it is the fault of the community. When people find out that a certain strategy works, they use it, even if there are other ways to doing it. The first successful boss strategy is usually the last, and this shouldn’t be the way. But it is.

Even if Blizz designed a fight to have 20 different ways to handle the fight, the first way discovered will be “the way”. People would think, “Hey, they did it first, it must be the best and fastest way.”

“I find it super frustrating to have my favorite powers constantly getting “shut off” in the battles that matter most. “

The way I see it is, it is a boss that takes 25 players to take him down, some abilities of the players (which works on enemies of the same level), *shouldn’t* work on the boss. For example, Illidan shouldn’t be able to be stunned by a player. You are not as powerful as him to be able to stun him. Later on in the fight, Maiev Shadowsong (who is powerful enough to be compared to Illidan) IS able to stun him and help you out. She can and should be able to, because she is a “boss type” NPC.

BTW, if you have been through Black Temple, and don’t think this fight is an “Epic” fight, then I am not sure WoW can provide you the “Epicness” you desire. This fight, in my opinion, is one of the best fights in the game.

“They expect daily farming of mats and gold. They expect 3-5 nights a week of raiding. They expect this if people want success. When you expect and demand that level of committment from your players, they are going to quickly develop an exaggerated sense of importance and accomplishment from raiding.”

“No sacrifice, no victory!” I think that was a quote from the Transformers movie (lol) but it works Everything in life requires an amount of commitment and sacrifice if you want to achieve.

If a person gets a big promotion at work, but at the cost of family time (staying late at work everyday, not spending time with kids, etc.), would you consider that a false sense of accomplishment? I don’t think it is worth the chance at destroying your family for. Yea this is an over exaggerated point like yours, but it still applies.

All achievements in life are different, and can’t be, and shouldn’t be compared. And they are labeled as such. That’s why we hear “medical achievement” or “career achievement” or “personal achievement”. To me, beating a difficult boss would be a “gaming achievement”, but an achievement nonetheless.

In the gaming blogosphere, it is to everyone’s benefit for writers of interesting blogs to link back and forth to each other and generate discussion on each other’s blogs.

This is a good thing!

I enjoy his participation on my blog and I hope he enjoys my participation on his.

-Cambios
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com

> maybe you should pick up an easier game, like chess.

Chess easier than WoW? *chuckle*

You realize WoW is the easiest MMO on the market, right?

-Cambios
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com

Most of these people lament how far behind they got with work, career, or school. Some are even worse off: ruined relationships, lost friends, etc.

But hey, keep using that superior attitude to feel better about yourself. Success at raiding is more important than success at life, right?

-Cambios
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com

I hate to break it to you, but folks who have succeeded at end game raiding just don’t end up as bitter as you are. Regardless you *all of a sudden* throwing out you’ve cleared BT after not mentioning anything past Kara before.
Regardless, your opinions mean little to me, maybe you should pick up an easier game, like chess. But you’d find stuff to bitch about there, too. LOL!