Business update: I heard news that you can no longer trade inks in Dalaran. I don't know if it's true, but Blizzard announced it long ago. If it's true, it's too late for US players, but EU players still has a day to trade in their inks.
Green Armadillo mentioned and interesting problem: "the majority of players (who choose DPS) have dramatically less access to actually playing the game because the guy with a healing off-spec no longer thinks he can handle healing the instance and decides to queue with all the other DPS instead. It's going to be very interesting to see whether Blizzard sticks to their guns if the increased difficulty (of healing) leaves the highly popular random instance grind unplayable. "
We can repeat his claim with tanks: tanks can no longer hold aggro on infinite number of enemies without effort, therefore several DPS who queued using his tank offspec will stop doing so.
Green Armadillo seems to be right, Blizzard made a huge mistake: in their quest to make Cataclysm less of a faceroll than WotLK, they made tanking and healing harder, while DPS became easier due to the removal of armor penetration (which required reading or thinking to decide), and the largely increased health pool that made standing in the fire easier. Considering that majority of the players already play DPS, driving people away from tanking and healing seems to be the dumbest idea since the zombie event.
Blizzard was between a rock and a hard place about difficulty since Vanilla. They made vanilla not really complicated but very grindy. People complained that only no-lifers see content, people with life are stuck in Scholomance, Stratholm, DiM, maybe after lot of farming their guild could do some bosses in MC. In BC they replaced grinding with tactical difficulty. You could go Karazhan almost instantly after lvl 70, heroic dungeons rained epics on you if you managed to not stand in the fire, CC the trash-pulls, interrupt the bad spells, hug the horse and so on. Despite the instances were accessible, most people were stuck in Karazhan, due to lack of the skills mentioned above. Surprisingly, they kept saying that is because they have life and cannot farm gear. Was it old habit or simply the only option besides the unimaginable "I suck because I don't read, don't think and don't practice"? Doesn't matter. People complained that most content in BC is inaccessible to people with life.
Finally with WotLK Blizzard gave in and made every content (except the hard mode raids and endbosses) facerollable. They also offered latest-raid-ready gear from really-really easy 5-mans via badges. Did this made everyone except a few elitist happy? No! People complained that they have to grind facerollable content, that they have to carry arthasdklol's 600 DPS or alternatively have to suffer elitists who complain about that, people complained that 5-mans became completely asocial, people complained that everyone has the same gear, people complained that the game lacks immersion, people complained that their "hard earned" gear is crap after the next patch. QQ reached higher volume than ever, and in the first time since WoW start, subscriber numbers did not elevate significantly. To make things worse, WoW got serious competition from Farmville and other browser-based free games, so they couldn't just nerf the game more to allow every unemployed burger-flippers and short-bus riding 12 year olds to play it.
Easy did not work. Complicated did not work. Grindy did not work. Nothing works. I guess they finally figured out why: because most players don't want easy, complicated or grindy gameplay. They want social recognition, they want unique status symbols, preferably without skill or effort. Obviously this is impossible, because if everyone has it, it's not unique, so players won't be happy, if it's unique, some people won't have it and they will be very unhappy.
How to solve an impossible social task? Simple: don't solve it, just find someone else to blame! Who else can be blamed in a game than the developers? The other players of course. arthasdklol won't have "l33t geer" in Cataclysm and he'll keep playing because he won't see the game bad, inaccessible, no-lifer or elitist. He will consider those selfish, elitist, whiny tanks and healers bad!
He will spend most of his time idling and chatting while waiting for the queue, cursing the other players for not doing the tank and healer jobs. He will be in a "freindly social guld" which perpetually recruits tanks and healers, and "surely cud pwn all bossez if we wud hav som gud tankz and hilz who r not selfish asses an leave after WE geard them up". He will do random stuff to get his guild's XP up, hoping that a lvl25 guild will be a magic magnet for tanks and healers.
How come that he won't stop subscribing?
If you want to see morons here, send screenshots to me!
Green Armadillo mentioned and interesting problem: "the majority of players (who choose DPS) have dramatically less access to actually playing the game because the guy with a healing off-spec no longer thinks he can handle healing the instance and decides to queue with all the other DPS instead. It's going to be very interesting to see whether Blizzard sticks to their guns if the increased difficulty (of healing) leaves the highly popular random instance grind unplayable. "
We can repeat his claim with tanks: tanks can no longer hold aggro on infinite number of enemies without effort, therefore several DPS who queued using his tank offspec will stop doing so.
Green Armadillo seems to be right, Blizzard made a huge mistake: in their quest to make Cataclysm less of a faceroll than WotLK, they made tanking and healing harder, while DPS became easier due to the removal of armor penetration (which required reading or thinking to decide), and the largely increased health pool that made standing in the fire easier. Considering that majority of the players already play DPS, driving people away from tanking and healing seems to be the dumbest idea since the zombie event.
Blizzard was between a rock and a hard place about difficulty since Vanilla. They made vanilla not really complicated but very grindy. People complained that only no-lifers see content, people with life are stuck in Scholomance, Stratholm, DiM, maybe after lot of farming their guild could do some bosses in MC. In BC they replaced grinding with tactical difficulty. You could go Karazhan almost instantly after lvl 70, heroic dungeons rained epics on you if you managed to not stand in the fire, CC the trash-pulls, interrupt the bad spells, hug the horse and so on. Despite the instances were accessible, most people were stuck in Karazhan, due to lack of the skills mentioned above. Surprisingly, they kept saying that is because they have life and cannot farm gear. Was it old habit or simply the only option besides the unimaginable "I suck because I don't read, don't think and don't practice"? Doesn't matter. People complained that most content in BC is inaccessible to people with life.
Finally with WotLK Blizzard gave in and made every content (except the hard mode raids and endbosses) facerollable. They also offered latest-raid-ready gear from really-really easy 5-mans via badges. Did this made everyone except a few elitist happy? No! People complained that they have to grind facerollable content, that they have to carry arthasdklol's 600 DPS or alternatively have to suffer elitists who complain about that, people complained that 5-mans became completely asocial, people complained that everyone has the same gear, people complained that the game lacks immersion, people complained that their "hard earned" gear is crap after the next patch. QQ reached higher volume than ever, and in the first time since WoW start, subscriber numbers did not elevate significantly. To make things worse, WoW got serious competition from Farmville and other browser-based free games, so they couldn't just nerf the game more to allow every unemployed burger-flippers and short-bus riding 12 year olds to play it.
Easy did not work. Complicated did not work. Grindy did not work. Nothing works. I guess they finally figured out why: because most players don't want easy, complicated or grindy gameplay. They want social recognition, they want unique status symbols, preferably without skill or effort. Obviously this is impossible, because if everyone has it, it's not unique, so players won't be happy, if it's unique, some people won't have it and they will be very unhappy.
How to solve an impossible social task? Simple: don't solve it, just find someone else to blame! Who else can be blamed in a game than the developers? The other players of course. arthasdklol won't have "l33t geer" in Cataclysm and he'll keep playing because he won't see the game bad, inaccessible, no-lifer or elitist. He will consider those selfish, elitist, whiny tanks and healers bad!
He will spend most of his time idling and chatting while waiting for the queue, cursing the other players for not doing the tank and healer jobs. He will be in a "freindly social guld" which perpetually recruits tanks and healers, and "surely cud pwn all bossez if we wud hav som gud tankz and hilz who r not selfish asses an leave after WE geard them up". He will do random stuff to get his guild's XP up, hoping that a lvl25 guild will be a magic magnet for tanks and healers.
How come that he won't stop subscribing?
- He can't blame Blizzard for other people not being tanks and healers. The content he wants to play is accessible to him, he is on the LFD, waiting for a team to assemble (what will never happen).
- He believes that his lack of group (while other DPS have group) is merely effect of luck. His bad luck can't last forever, right?
- He definitely won't recognize that that his lack of tank/healer is not a random effect, but the logical consequence of him being useless and no tank/healer wants to carry him.
- Blizzard seemed to learn to give "cool stuff" to them. There will be always a new mount, pet, achievement or tabard for them to keep them busy.
If you want to see morons here, send screenshots to me!
42 comments:
I actually think it encourages a market system. Want access to the new content? Pay for it by either hiring a tank/healer (commonly seen since LFD started) to skip the long queues, or 'pay' by taking the effort to tank or heal oneself.
Actually even the job of the DDs were made harder compared to wrath.
When CC matters, they have some responsibility to do it (and do it right).
When mana matters, they have some responsibility to not get so much damage and at the same do as much as they can to bring the boss down before the healer is oom.
And at the same time the rotations/prio systems of pretty much every DD is at least somewhat challanging.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that those bad players will blame their fault to the healer/tank who can't hold aggro on everything or keep the tank/group alive.
It wasn't that hard to pug heroes in BC where CC mattered a lot more (even compared to cata), and I guess at least a few morons will start to learn a few things if facerolling doesn't get them to their shiny epixx anymore.
Being a tank (and somewhat social) I think the lack of tanks has actually been good at increasing the recognition for what we do. If someone sucks at DPS or is obnoxious with the tank, just kick him out and let him queue for hours! They need the tank, but the tank doesn't need them (healers availability is the only limiting factor for us).
It's a pity, though, if DPS is really limited to inflicting damage. Crowd control, movement, debuffing monsters, and interacting with the environment are really aspects of fights that DPS players tend to forget and I think it should be pushed on them again.
Actually, both tanking and healing in WoTLK was amazingly boring (except high-endgame encounters like LK HC or Halion HC), that's why so many good players just rerolled dps. So, with Cataclysm changes to tanking and healing, we should expect a large part of aforementioned rerollers to get back to their original roles/toons. Therefore, overall numbers of tanks and healers will stay the same, but average skill among these roles will increase.
I agree with this post except for 1 thing. Zombie event was fun. I could avoid infestation when I wanted to or I could join it. Elemental event is step back. It is more annoying than fun.
You assume people are being truthful when they say they don't like stuff being too easy. WoW has always been extremely easy from 1-59, and people loved it way before anyone had reached the level cap. People complain about heroics being super easy, but they still flood the dungeon finder queues.
People want to think they are skilled, even if they are not. They want to think they facerolled that content because they are so awesome. No one thinks "I suck at this game," but by definition half of all players MUST be below average.
They will SAY they wish it was harder, but that is a lie. You must let them faceroll things, to let them keep thinking they are skilled.
Ignore what people say. Their actions say they want stuff to be easy.
Fun read ;)
About Blizzard's problem: People do not want social recognition. They want the possibility to gain it!
That's why they play. Once they have reached their goals, most players leave!
Consequently, Blizzard just has to fool all players to think that they are able to gain social recognition. With grindy gameplay this is easy: They just need to invest enough time. Everybody can do it.
With skill-based gameplay this is very difficult, because people realize that they are unable to reach the social recognition: "I will never kill LK heroic".
Since I´ve heard healing is going to be more difficult I´ve startet to think about my paladin as potential main character in cataclysm. In the start I´ve feared that healing would stay in the actual state, plain boring.
@lancore: taking a mob into focus, and press the right button every X seconds to refresh CC and not touching it seems actually to be above the skillcap of plenty dps.
But I don´t feel difficulty at the priotylist kitty-play (press the blinking buttons).
"When mana matters, they have some responsibility to not get so much damage and at the same do as much as they can to bring the boss down before the healer is oom."
I´ll quote here 5-6 crying dps at my last ICC raid I did (3 month ago) "LOL where´s my heal? fucking n00b!" while they stood in blue flames casting at the whirling boss. We´ve kicked them all and got the same typ again...
This will go on until the learning is done, about 2-3 month after release.
And actually I say dps / healing / tanking was boring. The only interesting thing was the math behind.
I think another big reason for people complaining about content is because they are bored with it; they played the game too much. WoW is a game that alot of people put alot of time into playing - even if they are "unsuccessful" in end game raiding or PvP-ing. Since the content is static (changes are only introduced with updates and expansions) it's natural that people get bored, and some of the bored ones will complain.
"You could go Karazhan almost instantly after lvl 70, heroic dungeons rained epics on you if you managed to not stand in the fire, CC the trash-pulls, interrupt the bad spells, hug the horse and so on."
1. "Rained epics" is, frankly, an exaggeration. At the beginning of TBC, chaining different heroics was rarely a feasible option, due to reputation requirements (and, obviously, you couldn't do the same heroic over and over again without waiting for 24 hours between successful attempts). And getting 1-2 drops per premade group per day is hardly what I'd call "raining epics".
2. Furthermore, TBC heroic drops were very poorly itemized even in comparison to normal ilvl 115 blues, not to mention crafted sets. If you were sufficiently geared to do heroics, you didn't really need any drops from them anymore.
3. As if that wasn't bad enough, quite a few heroic encounters were initially highly overtuned. An example of this is the pull with 4 Felguard Annihilators near the end of Heroic Blood Furnace. They randomly and unpredictably dropped aggro, and their damage was high enough to one-shot a cloth wearer in full ilvl115 gear with a single autoattack crit.
@ Alexander: "Actually, both tanking and healing in WoTLK was amazingly boring (except high-endgame encounters like LK HC or Halion HC), that's why so many good players just rerolled dps."
Not from my experience. Most of the healers I know switched to heals/DPS (i.e. DPS'ing while healing) because they were that bored. I've heard of Pally heals doing 6k+ DPS in random (undead boss) heroics post 4.0.1.
I think the new system will be great for "real" dps. I have been playing a warlock as main since classic.
With the new flood of faildps every half decent player will stick out and get on more friendlists. So you have to build your rep as a player who knows what he does.
I think the first month you see all the great players in lfd but when all the faildps will get 85 and are able to queue for heroics this will switch to closed guild/friendlist groups.
"heroic dungeons rained epics"
Umm, at the start... not really, and a lot of classes had quite some trouble to do random heroics.
I rememeber when druids had no resurrection spell, save for combat res. 9 out of 10 groups refused to take me along as a healer because I couldn't res.
It took me weeks to gear up my druid till I could finally go to Karazhan.
The jump from Karazhan to SSC was quite easy as a healer but to get there took me 3 months.
@Ephemeron: you could easily get 1 epic per day or at least in 2 days without raiding. If you hadn´t the rep to do 5+ hc´s per day you simply leveld wrong.
And now compare that to classic, how mouch epics were you able to get there without a drop ratio of 0,1%?
In the comparsion to classic TBC was raining epics.
Good post Gevlon, I concur with almost everything you said in here. The only thing I disagree is that the huge amount of HP on DPSers will not make any difference if they prefer to stay in the fire. But this doesn't really change the ideas you posted here.
I already mentioned in a previous comment that I've bene playing on the beta for a while. And I already expressed my hope of getting rid of M&S in Cata because the content is going to be harder, they will eventually quit since not getting any good feeling in wiping a lot.
What's curiuos is that I started to see such a thing on the beta. Sure, it's a smaller world, but still...
My main is a tank, healer off-specced (I don't like easy things). The first times I queued with the LFD I had some really bad experiences, both as a tank and as a healer. DPSers attacking random mobs and not my targets, sometimes doing a lot of AoE freeing CCed mobs, people staying in the fire and so on. I started saying at the beginning of every run "I will not help you if you get aggro" or I will not heal you if you stay in the fires".
Someone may think that maybe I'm a bad tank/healer, well, if grouped with good healers or tanks, one good DPS has been so far sufficient to kill many heroic bosses, leaving to rot those that were acting poorly. And when I say "one good DPS" I'm not measuring him on recount, but by the way he moves out of danger zones and checks on his threat.
One more thing I would say, I foresee most of the good players making guild runs, not queuing for random groups, this is something else that will kill M&S in my opinion.
"Blame the healer... The tank... Not me!"
I can say, I rarely met such plain bad players that blamed everyone and everything else on my old Realm. Most were simply silent. If you asked them about a mistake they made not once, but multiple times, they often responded in a manner of: "Oh... Yeah, ok..." and often didn't improve at all. As in: Friendly but only (below) avg. players.
I knew I could perform better than most of the playerbase when I started WoW. If you want something done right, make it yourself. My thoughts went in about this direction:
- DPS: If a tank screws up they are dead (unless the mob is kiteable). If a healer screws up, they may be able to compensate for it if they are a hybrid for a short period of time.
- Tank: If a healer screws up, I'm dead. If DPS mess up too much and we meet the enrage timer, I'm dead.
- Healer: If a tank or DPS screws up, I may be able to save them with cooldowns/timed heals. If DPS mess up and we probably would meet the enrage timer, I can even throw in some damage.
So as a Healer I can simply correct many mistakes... And if it doesn't matter I sometimes can simply let someone die in the fire.
There are three additional factors to keep in mind here:
A) Justice/Valor points now have a weekly cap. Once a person has reached their cap (through raiding most likely), there is no more reason for him or her to PUG heroics for that week.
B) The shared lockout system means that one can no longer run the same instance with a guild group in 25-man and PUG it with 10-man (or vice versa).
C) Doing an instance (whether heroic or raid) with guildmates gives one guild rep and guild XP.
A plus B plus C equals D, where D is "massive shortage of good players in LFD queues and /trade PUGs".
@Yagamoth: But with the new "mana matters" model of healing, the goal is to prevent the healer from being able to carry morons. If they stand in the fire, either they die and you wipe from attrition, or you OOM and wipe. Someone on the WoW forum put it best: Our only real tool for mana conservation now is yelling at the dps.
Don't be so sure that the M&S would stick around just because they're able to blame the tanks/healers. I think a more likely result would be that they spend hours in LFD, decide that 'the game is dying, for there are no more tanks and healers', and quit to go play farmville.
While a mass exodus of M&S from WoW sounds like heaven for some, first consider that WoW is not Eve, and Blizzard is not CCP. Blizz has built their economic model on a multi-million player platform, not a small niche market like Eve. When they see ten million of their thirteen million players quit, they too might decide that WoW is dead and stop supporting it.
I am pleased of the more difficulty, maybe it is because I often play tanks and the occasional healer...but yes I dps too, everyone likes to smash/freeze/burn/hurt things.
Simplest method to surviving the renewed "difficult era" of WoW will be choosing your party/raid members wisely.
Even for unknown content, balanced and knowledgable groups/people/mental dispositions. It is going to be a long haul otherwise, probably going to be a long haul anyway.
personally i think cataclysm is going to be just great, at least for me.
I don't know yet if i'm going back with my old hard core end game raiding guild or will just stick with my casual friendly guild of friends (who still raids and clears 10 men content).
But the solution for the daily farming is really easy: with dungeons and heroics being hard again people won't waste time witht he LFD tool until the content is overgeared, i'll probably spend the first month or so in orgrimmar (or any other capital city) forming groups to queue up for dungeons. I am a tank, and this makes it a lot easier, but anyone with some brain can form a group for a 5 man dungeon pretty fast, then you can start /w good people in the group to add them in your friend list, after one month you'll have at least 20 competent players in the friend list, allowing you to form fast groups for yuor daily farming, helping you fill your raid slots if a guildie is missing, and making your market bigger, since you have more people on line with professions or willing to farm stuff for you (for a price ofc) without the need to rely on random MS that will do a poor job in more time, while you can have a better job in less, just paying for it
I can't see Blizzard moving from the ICC buff to a "all dungeons are hardmode dungeons" policy overnight.
Give it 6 weeks after launch and group content will be nerfed to oblivion. It's the Actiblizzard way...
I think you are giving people far too much credit.
I think we will still have plenty of players who que for tank/healer because it is quicker regardless of if they are good or not.
The longer the ques get, the more likely people are to off spec and grind that way. It might be a headache early one, but with time we will be back to where we are now.
Not all DPS will complain about long ques. They will have other stuff to do. Which I say is a good thing. If people are occupied while waiting they complain less. Really what is wrong with giving players other things to do? Sure it might suck waiting endlessly, but when they get a new vanity item out of the wait, it does not feel like such a waste of time.
I still remember back at the beginning of Wrath (when heroics were sort of hard). I was a healer, and used to run with this awesome tank. At first he would just blow off dps because "they were easy to find" but the reality became that nearly everyone was terrible. When we did find a dps who was good we'd pester them endlessly to run heroics with us. It's true that if you know your stuff, you'll do just fine.
@Ephemeron - that's an interesting point, but I think the results may be the opposite of what you propose. For instance lets say I've done everything I can do for the week. What do I do? I take an alt out and do all that junk on my alt. Usually I've found someone who is good on their "main" is also good on their alts, so these good players will probably be pushed out into acting as a crutch for M&S sooner or later.
Thanks to dual spec and LFG, finding a group for heroics will still be infinitely easier than it was in TBC.
If the que becomes too long, then more dual spec classes will become motivated to play their dual spec. So it's a self-correcting problem. Perhaps the que will be longer than it is now, but it will still be tolerable. Also, it's not like it's that big of a deal to sit in que while doing dailies, farming, etc.
Back in TBC, any non-tank had to actually spend 15 minutes actively recruiting people from their friend's list, guild, or trade chat to get a dungeon group going.
That old system forced many would be M&S in today's system to actually learn and get better. I think Cataclysm won't make most M&S quit. They'll just have to learn just enough to not wipe in heroics. They'll still only do the bare minimum, but they'll do a better job than now.
I tend to agree with Ax.
In BC my main mage would do guild 5 man heroics and raids. At the beginning running heroics with a guild main tank made them relatively painless. In comparison pugging them was hurtful. Having said that I'd played that mage since start of vanilla, and knew how to sheep and dps. Thus when Magister's came out I was on the friends list of other raiding guilds who would whisper me to run the 5 man.
It thus got to a point whereby I'd either go with people I knew on my main, or pug on an alt, because pugging the main became too painful.Alts tended to be tank or heal.
There is circular logic for the decline of tanks waiting for LFG. Newly dinged tanks will maybe do a few normals, or dps a few hcs. So not providing any extra tanks in the hc queue yet. Then they are geared for tanking, they will spam Hcs, within a fortnight they have enough gear for raiding, possibly even BIS before raid gear. Then they stop doing Heroics. If there were more tanks and they had queue it would take them longer.
So the answer?
Add grindable higher end pieces to Heroic content. Giving those tanks who are pre-raid geared to carry on running. If frostmourne could have been made from doing 500 heroics then tanks would run heroics.
Cons: High end raiders would say it devalued raiding. Well boohoo
WoW was so awesome in vanilla and Burning Crusade. But it's turned into something weird and smelly since then, that I do not even recognize. It's almost like they took the best people from the WoW team and sent them to work on the "other" Blizzard MMO. I think WoW is a lot like Farmville now because both are things I would not pay money for. When I saw that Cataclysm would cost 40 dollars I just laughed a little bit before I turned my mind to something else.
I plan to do a whole lot less Random groups and a lot more premade groups. Pimp myself out as a tank if I have to, and learn to be a dreaded social... but I will enjoy my game experience that much more, i'm sure.
I really liked the Random Dungeon finder at first, but as a tank and with the newly harder tanking, its just more irritating than anything to get into a group that sucks and doesn't pay attention when they play. People need to learn their role as a class in any group, and understand that it is VERY different than playing solo...
HA, like that will happen...
You didn't consider two things:
- archeology gives epics and cool stuff, they'll be busy with that
- battlegrounds can entirely gear you up (weapons too) like it was in tbc, if pve is too hard they'll just grind pvp to be "geared"
That's until the first content patch when people in tier12 will be back boosting bads using lfg tool.
So it's back to the "don't pug" days, and receiving 10 whispers when logging on "hi, up for healing heroic x?". Great.
As with any popular pastime you can never please all of the people all of the time.
Take for example football (soccer) a very popular pastime which people love to debate endlessly, especially when they change some minor rule.
The same is true for WoW, whatever Blizzard do it will be controversial for some. But as your post illustrates there will always be those that blame the ref or the manager but never stop supporting "their" club. It might even be what they subconsciously enjoy about the game (wow or soccer).
But where does this leave the competent but asocial players who simply enjoy the dps aspect of the game and are reluctant to reroll tank/healer themselves? They are very likely to fall out of favour of many competent tanks/healers, who would rather carry their incompetent but "fun" friends.
P.S. The correct expression is "between a rock and a hard place"
@Dangphat:
I agree but instead of adding expensive stuff that you must grind hundreds of hcs to buy I think they should add very good items that drop at an extremely low drop rate; this would have the same aggregated effect.
I disagree, on extremely low drop rates instead of very-grindy epics, because you know dps players will just need roll on those, so there goes your incentive for tanks/healers
I can confirm that the Ink Trader requires Blackfallow Ink now
Regarding Ink:
Jessica Sellers is still trading inks in Dalaran. however, the currency is "Blackfallow Ink".
It's too late for us in the US, but if you have time in EU, balance your ink by trading "Ink of the Sea" while you can.
-Cap
Just a comment about one point. I don't think standing in the fire will suddenly become feasible. Blizz raised the hp cap to make healing more interesting on damage they EXPECT the raid to take. They do not have to expect you to stand in the fire. If everyone has 150k hp now, there is no reason the fire can't do 50-80k hp/sec in damage. It's easy enough to make you durable if you are doing your job right but dead if you are not.
Anything is better than the current healing model. Tanking in H ICC is annoying with the yo-yo health bars.
@ Ephemeron
"3. As if that wasn't bad enough, quite a few heroic encounters were initially highly overtuned. An example of this is the pull with 4 Felguard Annihilators near the end of Heroic Blood Furnace. They randomly and unpredictably dropped aggro, and their damage was high enough to one-shot a cloth wearer in full ilvl115 gear with a single autoattack crit."
This was my favourite part of all heroics, as a Prot Paladin. We'd kite the first two Felguards up the ramp, I'd used an exo to tag them, then cast "Holy Fear" on the second, when the tagge'd mob got to me I'd stun it, we'd nuke it down, then kill the other one without any problems.
Then off to the room where there was four, it was pissible to skip one pack but if I remember, the caster could fear causing a wipe, no one interupted in heroics abck then!
So I'd grab the whole room, fear one to pull, then hit 'Holy Wrath' and 'Concecrate/Holy shield.'
I developed this strategy when a walock who was in the group that summond me (They begged for a tank in /2) announced that I didnt have enough 'HP' and left.
I loved proving people wrong that you didn't need to be a warrior with 12K+ HP to tank heroics. I had my dungeon blue set and was proud.
WotLK stole my underdog fame away from me, LFD tool stole away my constant /w 'Wanna tank Kurt?
I used to be able to raid etc the second I logged on every day, weeks afetr hitting 70 without being in a raiding guild.
LFD stole my speed runs away fro me :(
This happen to anyone else?
Kurtizzle
The one thing you also neglected to mention Gevlon, is the regional battlegroup mergers that are occurring. I don't know if this will affect the EU as much as it is the US, but the pool for M&S for random LFG's is actually going to increase as these mergers come online.
The tank and healer shortage will continue only because the M&S are exactly that: and typicaly "Tank not fun lulz" and "hilz sucksors" etc is why the M&S don't play them. Apart from the fact that they lack the capacity to, they also see them in randoms and look at it and think "OMG, tankz and hilz is work! Fuck that shit." What they don't realise is that its only work when we have M&S in the party...
Possibly one really interesting thing is how Bioware have solved this issue with SW:TOR. Well not solved it as such, but how SW:TOR will fail more than WoW does. See in WoW the tank/heal classes are just classes. In TOR, its Jedi and Sith who are the tanks and healer classes only...
I don't know what would be worse: M&S dps or M&S tanks/heals because "Im Darth Vader lulz," is being said by DarthVaderlulz who is your tank or heals..
Grab up midlevel and Outlands herbs for the first few days, before everyone figures out the new supply and demand.
You are totally wrong on the game getting harder only for tanks/healers. Health pools are hugely boosted for pvp reasons (again), the fires you need not to stand in can actually kill you now in Cata, according to beta testers. When tanks and healers have so hard you need to CC, it's usually a DPS's job to do. So it's harder for the dps aswell.
The part about Farmville is right, I like to compare LK to Farmville, it's about the same difficulty on normal level.
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