Defining a casual raider as someone who pugs icc-25 is completely broken. My guild is 8/12 normal mode, and we're ranked in the 10,000s as a guild. That's beyond a commonly available pug, as commonly available pugs don't get 8/12 bosses in ICC. Yet the difference in my dps, as a 5750 gearscore hunter, and someone in a 6/12 heroic mode guild, is less than 1k dps. I can hit 9-11k on any given boss, and someone geared to the hilt can hit less than 10% more dps traditionally. Those are marginal differences. I've still got a fucking 5-man trinket on. I looked at a DPS parse from Vodka, and their best raiders are hitting 12-13k dps. I can hit 10-11k dps. Where's the huge difference? I raid 2-3 days a week at most, and I put no time into my hunter outside of raid times. The amount of time invested between me and whoever they have in their guild is massive, and yet that only yields a 1-2k dps advantage?

How is that relevant at all? The *last* tier of content is worse or comparable, at best, to the middle-level i264 gear that guilds like mine can easily attain.

Show me the DPS parses of the tremendous difference between these guilds. At the end of the day - if the gearscore advantage is trivial, the performance via dps parses is trivial, and the set bonuses are identical... Just what the fuck about the gear level is so wildly off the mark in your mind?

Whatever. I can tell no one is really going to try to respond to any of my points, so I'll just leave it alone.

If you don't like the game, then you should quit, that's obviously the best thing to do. But don't be surprised when people chuckle a bit when your reason for quitting boils down to, "Man, I was just too leet for that game."

Edit after seeing the above post:

Ok, even if we went by your numbers, you don't think 10% is a significant difference? Oookay. It's funny that in your previous post you went on about the 10% ICC buff being this big deal:



But now 10% is just "marginal".

And for the record, I'm looking at parses with hunters in ICC 25-heroic doing upwards of 17k DPS. I'm not sure where you're seeing 13k as being top-of-the-line or something.



It's relevant because people keep chanting how easy everything is, how it's all dumbed down, how mouth-breathing retards can do anything a pro raider can do, blah blah blah. And yet even plenty of dedicated guilds still couldn't even finish the last tier of content...and many still try, because there's still a lot of decent gear that drops from there, especially if you're not looking at trying ICC 25-heroic any time soon.

Show me a dps parse, don't look at theoretical records on WoL. Sustainable dps.

I already said I wasn't complaining. I'm merely countering your point that there's a huge difference between top-end and casuals. There's not. It's smaller than it's ever been. You still haven't addressed that. Are you saying that the gap between top-end and casuals now is MORE than it was in TBC, when most guilds couldn't even get past Magtheridon and into SSC and TK until it was nerfed / removed as a requirement to zone in? Recall that the reason Naxx was re-introduced is because no one could even get into Naxx in the vanilla WoW, and that Sunwell had a similar, though less serious, issue.

You do? Let's speculate here. how much time do you think the average player from a top-50 guild puts into WoW vs what, say, you and I put in? I'll quantify my own time investment - 6-9 hours per week. When I'm not raiding, I'm not even playing my hunter. Now let's speculate on the other guys investment. Double my own? More than double? What about time spent theorycrafting and min/maxing their gear outside of the game. More than triple? Quadruple? The point is - super hardcore players are probably putting in just as much time now as they had to back in TBC and pre-TBC. The casuals are putting in the same time, if not less time, and the difference between the two is marginal. Casuals couldn't even *see* top-end content, and emblems for i-level equivalent gear hasn't even been in-game until around Sunwell.

For a 10% dps gain across a raid? That's a huge difference, in your mind? Furthermore, with the zonewide buff at 10% and going to be even higher, it further reduces the gap in the capabilities of the casual raider, allowing them to see and attain gear previously available only to hardcore players. What was the limit that blizzard communicated on the buff? As high as 35%, eventually?

Who has said any of those things, in this thread?

Neesha: "But everything gets nerfed to hell"

Venen: "They've really dumbed that aspect down to the point where even the casuals themselves are getting bored and feeling little sense of achievement."



You're just guessing and speculating here. I personally know plenty of raiders in the top-end guilds on my server that don't put in quadruple the time I do. A select few people in the WoW community as a whole put in a lot of time and effort into theorycrafting and such as a hobby, but you don't really think that every individual player sits there and does it, do you?

Heck, if my time in a endgame guild in EQ (and my short stint in an endgame guild in WoW) was any indication, I spent LESS time because we didn't fuck around, stuff got dead and we moved on.

As for the TBC/Pre-TBC references...I think many people would agree with me when I say that the real barrier to entry back then was managing to get 40 people together. =(

Neither statement is equivalent to the wild hyperbole you posted. But the points are completely true. Both of them. The curve of the buff getting bigger and bigger is just a reverse nerf, planned and announced over time. It's literally no different than slowly scaling down boss damage, just in the opposite direction. And I, for one, am pretty bored. I wish there were more to strive for once you run out of emblem upgrades and waiting for raids to start.

Most casual guilds raid 3 days a week for 2-3 hours. When I was in a "hardcore" guild I raided 5 days a week, for 3-5 hours each night. I don't know any hardcore guilds that raid only 3 days per week. That alone is almost double. And are you really suggesting that top-end (which you still haven't defined, btw) put in only the time they spend raiding?

You're 8/12 ICC and wish there were more to strive for? Do you PvP at all?

Maybe if you had some progression in ICC 25-heroic or something I could understand where you're coming from, but when I see people who haven't even cleared normal mode complaining about things being dumbed down, nerfed, saying heroic gear isn't worth it, and other stuff...well, it's just silly. It's like having a 50-pin handicap in bowling and saying it's too easy.

Anyway, this is just pointless. It's a game, we should just do what we like in it and leave it at that. I'm just debating for the sake of debating at this point anyway, since I'm at work and bored.

everquest

Dude, how many times do I have to tell you that I'm not complaining? I like the content where it is. I got used to it long ago. Are you reading the same fucking thread I am? I *like* the buff and it getting bigger. But it is a nerf. Period.

I'm rebutting your terrible point that the gap between hardcore and casuals is huge.

Ok. Cool story, bro.

I quit WoW because the game has been so dumbed down. 3 months into ICC, well over 1,000 guilds are at least 6/12 on heroic mode. WoW as a whole is ridiculously easy. It's like the training wheels of MMOs. Just because 2% of the game may be challenging, doesn't mean the game as a whole is.

Were you one of those guilds, or are you just sitting there wiping on Putricide and saying, "God this game is so ridiculously easy."

I don't say that to be a jerk, although I know it sounds that way. It just boggles me when people who haven't even cleared normal mode raid content go on about everything being so easy.

Also, Icecrown Citadel is going on 4 months, not 3. December 8, 2009 was the release date. So you're saying that in nearly 4 months, 1 raid group has cleared ICC 25-heroic and maybe about 1,000 have cleared lower citadel? Out of how many? Heh. That's not exactly compelling evidence toward "ridiculously easy"

No, I quit when Blizzard decided to nerf Ulduar a week after it went live even though it didn't need to be.



Yes, 1 raid group has killed all of the hardmodes. But a fuckton have done most of them. It may be almost 4 months in, but it didn't take a majority of the guilds that long to beat 80%+ of the last raid of this xpac. One hard boss on gimmick mode does not a hard game make. I'm not bashing you for liking WoWlite, but the absurdity of you trying to argue that the game isn't ridiculously easy compared to other MMOs and even it's former self is silly.

The statistic you gave was "~1,000 groups are 6/12."

6/12 means they cleared Lower Spire and Festergut/Rotface, at most. They might have actually skipped Deathwhisper heroic and done Princes instead to get the 6th.

So basically, after ~4 months, 0.005% of the population has beaten some of the less demanding encounters in heroic. 0.00005% have cleared the whole thing. (Assuming 5 million subscribers, which might be low, might be high, oh well.)

Apparently you find this to be a compelling argument for it being, in your words, "ridiculously easy".

Maybe it's ego that makes people do that. I don't know. People insist on pulling this, "Well, I didn't actually clear anything, but I quit because it's just sooo easy." card.

I wonder if people do that in other fields.

"Yeah, I dropped out of medical school. I failed my mid-term exam, but come on...like 0.00005% of people have passed before, so I just think it's too easy for me."

"Yeah, I stopped playing golf. I mean, I never even qualified for any tournaments or anything, but that Tiger Woods guy is really good, so I think it's just too easy for me."

Note that I'm not comparing WoW to golf or being a doctor...just illustrating how silly it sounds when a person calls something "too easy" based on watching other people, but also apparently has not/cannot/has failed to do it themselves.

Because everyone that plays WoW is in a raiding guild right?!?! The game is easy. Just because you think it's challenging still, doesn't mean I will. There is a reason the game went from almost 11.5 million subs less than a year ago, to less than half of that now.


I played the game. I quit because it was too easy. It had nothing to do with what other people said or did. Naxx was laughable, but I decided to stick it out till Ulduar to see if it presented more of a challenge. My guild killed Ignis and XT (and beyond) the first week, along with many other guilds. They were both nerfed into the ground the following week because they were too difficult apparently. This is when I lost hope in the game. One week into the instance, random pug couldn't down a boss so they nerfed the shit out of the fight? Enjoy your Care Bear game.

What Bov is failing to realize is that the game may have been easy for some of us, but that didn't mean we were in guilds with people capable of beating even the easy stuff, thus we may not have cleared every single raid mob the game had to offer. I know Vita was still full of 'casuals' who didn't know how to NOT stand in fire, so we were slower to kill some content than we should have been. But I can assure you, for some of us (Magg, Crowde, myself), the only real challenge was getting people to not be idiots.

The content itself was not the challenge. It was, at one time, but that quickly passed when the game was changed. There are strats to beat every mob before those mobs are even released to the public, so let's not pretend there's something more to the game. Hard modes are nothing more than glorified gear checks. We all know that if we had a guild made up of the Solas, the Givins, etc. (hell, virtually everyone from Lanys), we'd be one of the cutting edge guilds. I'm sure Sola will tell you that Oryx's only real problem was with the people, not the content, and that was a year ago (and then some).

It was the china debacle that messed with the sub numbers, not your complaints. Sorry sir.



See, this is what's funny to me. The ego factor, the "I haven't done it because other people are holding me back." the "This is easy for me, everyone else sucks." talk.

You're right, no one has quit the game due to has watered down it is. In fact, I just imagined 3 of the top 5 guilds from the server I played on vanishing. This only didn't happen on the server I played on btw. You can keep trying to tell me how challenging of a game WoW is, but I promise you, all it will do is give me a chuckle because you're pretty much saying "I can't maintain a 3 button dps rotation and stay out of fire".

blah blah why not take this shit to the wow section of the forums where somebody may give a shit about how hard to find wow to be. It seems to need some mouth breathing to wake it up.

That wasn't what I found irritating about WoW, it was the fact that in 1-2 months, Blizzard will dumb down the encounters or put in some other way to get comparable gear that IS easy. It wasn't that the end game raids weren't fun or somewhat challenging at times, it was the fact that Joe Casual can get the same shit with less effort than getting 40 retards to work together.

Well, the difference is significant if the person is in full 277 gear, instead of just a bunch of 264 pieces and a piece or two here and there of 277. I think you're sorta stuck on the term "top end", though. Yes, obviously that would be 277, but I think people(or, at least speaking for myself in terms of what I was saying earlier in this thread) are moreso upset about the balance between mediocre/high and low-end casuals. As it is, a relatively small percentage of the WoW raiding population has even gone past 25 Putricide, and yet those that have cleared through Lich King have relatively little to show in comparison to someone who hasn't even set foot in 25 ICC.

A person in a smattering of 264(from badges, VOA, etc) and 251 gear has a relatively small disadvantage against someone in full 264, per the example above with guilds that have cleared the place(or come close to). Yes, point for point, the person in 25-man gear will always outshine the 251 guy if skill levels are equal, but I think most people are concerned with how small that gap is. Compare it to most MMORPGs, especially EverQuest, and you have a pretty miniscule difference and I'd hardly call it "huge" with them in mind.

In addition, I think the point a few of us were making earlier in the thread was that you have little to show for what you do when you do it. Get a 258 item from the tribute chest? Grats, it'll be gone in a month(IIRC I replaced one of my character's cloaks with the 264 one which you can just toss a few badges at to get). The fact of the matter is that your stuff is replaced a couple months after you get it(with a possible exception now since we're just chilling for Cataclysm to come out for the next iteration of ilevel), and it leaves you with little sense of achievement. If they could make things last just a little longer so that you actually feel like you did something worthwhile in the game, but not so mudflated as EverQuest, I think it would go a long way to alleviating those concerns.

This I'll agree with, content moves SO fast in WoW it seems. Today's, "Wow, this is awesome." item is tomorrows void crystal. =/