Since Spinks wrote about the "gimmicky" fights, the idea was in my mind but couldn't do anything with it. Tobold stopped raiding because of it. Many-many bloggers stopped playing. Blizzard acknowledged that more players stopped playing WoW than currently playing. The puzzles matched when I was re-reading the comments and forum posts about Undergeared. You see Undercommunicated isn't going well at all. Despite the huge interests, very few players transferred. I's weird, as the Undergeared had hoards of players to start. So I read the Undergeared materials, the posts, the comments and the various forums to see what changed.
What hit me is that not a single one mentioned voice chat. I mean, the Undergeared rules had a clear no voice chat part, yet no commenter or forum poster said "it will fail because of lack of communication". Not a single member of a guild said after a wipe "we should consider voice chat, blue gear is hard enough, don't make it harder".
Many commenters on the undercommunicated post mentioned that other guilds raided successfully without voice chat, even Ensidia did so doing World first. I couldn't verify these but no one bothered to call them wrong, so they are either true or at least believable. Yet now I can't make an Undercommunicated project running.
How does it combines with what Spinks said? The difficulty style of the fights have shifted seriously since WotLK. WotLK was easier, but the same style as TBC and vanilla: you have to do "enough" output, healing, damage, survival, interrupts. If you did not do enough, you wiped. Your output depends on your rotation, class knowledge, reaction time (summarized as skill) and your stats coming from gear and enchants. While every boss had some form of dance, it was simple compared to the output demand. Of course you couldn't fail it, but you had to be really bad to fail it. I mean how hard is to "run from fire" or "run right with gravity bomb"? Everyone but the hopeless ones could do the dance, the difference between average and good was in output. Only the fail pug wiped on Gruul because of the falling floor. The average guild wiped because they did not have enough DPS to kill him before he grew too big.
In Cataclysm it's the direct opposite. Only the hopeless noob does so little output that it causes a wipe. Due to the simplification of talents, gear decisions, the wide availability of gear, and the very lenient enrage timers, the average player has more than enough output to clear the normal content and even some hard modes. What separates the wipe from the kill is the dance. You wipe because people die in the various amounts of fire, fall off the net, stand in one of the millions of traps, doesn't know how to drive, can't fly trough hops (literally).
How does voice chat come to the picture: simply by boosting. You can simulate the dance-knowledge by yelling to the failer. If voice chat was about "coordination", it would matter in TBC/WotLK too. It's clearly about boosting, telling the player what to do, because that makes the difference. It's shocking to see when the players I kicked from raids for being fail-bots, perform well in voice-chat using guilds, obviously because someone tells them what to do. Voice chat couldn't boost someone's output, you couldn't yell someone rotation every GCD.
On the front it's very casual friendly. The one who just leveled to 85 and did some trolls has the same chance to perform well on a new boss as someone who raided since vanilla and killed 4.0 HMs and several FL bosses too (just not this one). The problem is that it kills the "progression" concept. And due to the design of the game nothing else is left. You can't affect the story, you can't affect other players, you can't even phase the story anymore, you can only "progress your character". But if your gear and your overall experience has minimal effect on your win chance, where is the progression?
I mean the guy who did enough damage on Prince Malchezaar had much better chances on Gruul than the one who did not. By earning gear and learning and using his rotations, enchants, consumables he became stronger, he "progressed". Doing all these and killing Shannox is just that: killing Shannox. Tells very little about your ability to kill Beth'litac. It merely tells that you are not a hopeless idiot. But to kill Beth, you have to learn Beth dance and this is just as hard for you as it is for the total (non-retarded) newbie. By killing Shannox you did not progress your character, even if you had loot from him. You are just as strong as before.
With the dance fights Blizzard managed to do almost total resets per boss. In Vanilla and TBC you constantly gained strength compared to the ones who did not raid. In WotLK the non-raiders got an opportunity to reach your strength every major patch. In Cataclysm every boss is an individual challenge and everyone, regardless of previous playing has similar chance to succeed.
The dance changes the gear progression nearly cosmetic, therefore kills this aspect of the game. And what other aspects left? Blizzard practically turned WoW raiding into an arcade jump-to-the-platform game with minimal/irrelevant/cosmetic character improvements between bossfights. This is why so many raiders are leaving the game.
Tomorrow I discuss the effect of this on The PuG.
What hit me is that not a single one mentioned voice chat. I mean, the Undergeared rules had a clear no voice chat part, yet no commenter or forum poster said "it will fail because of lack of communication". Not a single member of a guild said after a wipe "we should consider voice chat, blue gear is hard enough, don't make it harder".
Many commenters on the undercommunicated post mentioned that other guilds raided successfully without voice chat, even Ensidia did so doing World first. I couldn't verify these but no one bothered to call them wrong, so they are either true or at least believable. Yet now I can't make an Undercommunicated project running.
How does it combines with what Spinks said? The difficulty style of the fights have shifted seriously since WotLK. WotLK was easier, but the same style as TBC and vanilla: you have to do "enough" output, healing, damage, survival, interrupts. If you did not do enough, you wiped. Your output depends on your rotation, class knowledge, reaction time (summarized as skill) and your stats coming from gear and enchants. While every boss had some form of dance, it was simple compared to the output demand. Of course you couldn't fail it, but you had to be really bad to fail it. I mean how hard is to "run from fire" or "run right with gravity bomb"? Everyone but the hopeless ones could do the dance, the difference between average and good was in output. Only the fail pug wiped on Gruul because of the falling floor. The average guild wiped because they did not have enough DPS to kill him before he grew too big.
In Cataclysm it's the direct opposite. Only the hopeless noob does so little output that it causes a wipe. Due to the simplification of talents, gear decisions, the wide availability of gear, and the very lenient enrage timers, the average player has more than enough output to clear the normal content and even some hard modes. What separates the wipe from the kill is the dance. You wipe because people die in the various amounts of fire, fall off the net, stand in one of the millions of traps, doesn't know how to drive, can't fly trough hops (literally).
How does voice chat come to the picture: simply by boosting. You can simulate the dance-knowledge by yelling to the failer. If voice chat was about "coordination", it would matter in TBC/WotLK too. It's clearly about boosting, telling the player what to do, because that makes the difference. It's shocking to see when the players I kicked from raids for being fail-bots, perform well in voice-chat using guilds, obviously because someone tells them what to do. Voice chat couldn't boost someone's output, you couldn't yell someone rotation every GCD.
On the front it's very casual friendly. The one who just leveled to 85 and did some trolls has the same chance to perform well on a new boss as someone who raided since vanilla and killed 4.0 HMs and several FL bosses too (just not this one). The problem is that it kills the "progression" concept. And due to the design of the game nothing else is left. You can't affect the story, you can't affect other players, you can't even phase the story anymore, you can only "progress your character". But if your gear and your overall experience has minimal effect on your win chance, where is the progression?
I mean the guy who did enough damage on Prince Malchezaar had much better chances on Gruul than the one who did not. By earning gear and learning and using his rotations, enchants, consumables he became stronger, he "progressed". Doing all these and killing Shannox is just that: killing Shannox. Tells very little about your ability to kill Beth'litac. It merely tells that you are not a hopeless idiot. But to kill Beth, you have to learn Beth dance and this is just as hard for you as it is for the total (non-retarded) newbie. By killing Shannox you did not progress your character, even if you had loot from him. You are just as strong as before.
With the dance fights Blizzard managed to do almost total resets per boss. In Vanilla and TBC you constantly gained strength compared to the ones who did not raid. In WotLK the non-raiders got an opportunity to reach your strength every major patch. In Cataclysm every boss is an individual challenge and everyone, regardless of previous playing has similar chance to succeed.
The dance changes the gear progression nearly cosmetic, therefore kills this aspect of the game. And what other aspects left? Blizzard practically turned WoW raiding into an arcade jump-to-the-platform game with minimal/irrelevant/cosmetic character improvements between bossfights. This is why so many raiders are leaving the game.
Tomorrow I discuss the effect of this on The PuG.
30 comments:
ICC had fights where voice communication was good as well - for example Putricide HM and spreading the plague. Sindragosa and healer communication would also come to mind. Also, while most normal mode fights in firelands don't take much gear, Ragnaros does. You have to kill it before being overwhelmed by meteors, and a lot of guilds have had problems with getting enough dps for that. On hard mode gear rather does matter, excluding Shannox, of course.
In any case. Undergeared was a very interesting project and I remember reading your blog with a lot of interest during that time. In my opinion, this crusade against voice chat is just not that interesting. Pugs raid without voice chat all the time, everyone knows it can be done, there is just no novelty value to it.
On the other hand, even if I thought voice chat had no value whatsoever during a fight we'd still use it in the guild on raids just because I and many others do not want to spend massive amounts of time to type things (tactics) into chat that could be discussed on vent in two minutes.
Pretty ofen our vent is quiet during the actual fight, full of chatter during trash clears and tactics discussion. I guess the social side of it won't mean much to you, but most guilds want to have a close, friendly atmosphere and voice chat is a great part of it.
The other factor at play here too is that by changing the timbre of the difficulty of raids you effectively change players' abilities relative to each other; players who used to be good (at maximizing output) are now unsuccessful (at the dance.)
This, in turn, forces guilds that are focused on progression to reorganize as they find themselves with formerly good players than can no longer handle the content, as well as having players who are improved in the new environment seeking greener pastures.
It's funny, but I see the parallels between Blizzard's increasingly obtuse raid boss designs and the gyrations in Magic: the Gathering card design.
In Magic, new sets were released every ~4 months, and each set generally had it's own "gimmick." The issue was that while this initially pushed the Magic devs to innovate in ways that resulted in novel gameplay ("I play this creature face-down" or "This creature can level up/evolve after this triggering event"), years of this arms race has led to some pretty horrible designs. In their latest Magic set, the devs have creature cards that are printed on both sides of the playing card. In other words, they made a card you cannot even use in a deck without black plastic sleeves or a stand-in card.
I believe WoW is entering this sort of batshit crazy point, at which complexity for complexity's sake gets in the way of compelling gameplay.
A very confused post. You seem to be mourning the loss of the gear centric raid, yet you were openly critical of the same when it was current.
Blizzard stated their intention to make Cataclysm about the player, not the character and they have succeeded. Firelands is, as you say, a dance per boss and that's far more interesting than the gear feeding frenzy of ICC.
I'm wondering if you're trying to excuse the Pug's very average performance in current content ? There isn't anything to excuse. You set up the Pug during ICC and it addressed the game at that point, the experiment is no longer applicable, so perhaps you should reconsider its bounds.
A bit of a side note, but it is interesting that it is almost exactly this that caused me to leave Rift.
Character strength growth through gear was so minimal compared to the base abilities of each class that other than the boss dances there was almost no feeling of advancement.
When I played I was the top DPS of the world 5th guild at the time, and as relatively geared as I was, there was MAYBE a 30% difference between my DPS naked with only my weapon, and fully geared. NAKED - not just levelling greens, but actually with nothing in any gear slots.
Since I stopped playing after killing Nefarian, I cannot comment your thoughts on dancing. But the lack of players for the undercommunicating project is pretty clear to me. When you started the undergeared, there was a pretty clear problem - the gearscore madness was so rampant, that to attend a certain raid you had to have the gear earned from the said raid. "To open a box, you must use the key, locked in the box" problem. The (lack of) voice chat is not a problem at all - (almost) everyone agrees that the chat is not NEEDED to clear the normal content at least, maybe heroic too, at least in wrath it was not. What bothers everyone and the reason why everyone argues with you is your point on the voice chat, not the chat itself - that the voice chat is somehow ebil and makes you IQ <= 80 when you are using it. Hence the lack of players - why do I join this project, which attempts to prove me something, which I know is correct?
I don't think you could keep most of the players for more than 3 years in a game so there must be more players who stopped playing than is the number of current players.
But I am sure making a good output is not simpler than it was in TBC. In TBC almost every class could make a single macro and spam it to make a good output.
Yes gear is easy to obtain and the dance is important now. But it means the players are separated by their skill not by their luck on drop. It was really surprise for me how many players I raided in TBC with were unable to adapt on WotLK changes where more complicated rotations and procs where introduced. And Cataclysm where you do not have rotations any more and must be able to move properly was complete disaster for them.
@Chewy: I mourn the output based game what morons wrongfully assumed to be gear based. With undergeared I proved that output is skill based mostly.
I can't think of a single normal mode fight where the dance is actually challenging. Normal modes were simply made for the lesser skilled end of the player spectrum and are meant to be completable by anyone. That means no or easy dps checks and less stuff to watch out for.
Blizzard also stated at some point, that the now more complex fights are merely meant to offset how easy DBM and the like make handling these things. The complexity of fights hasn't gone up much since ICC imho.
There are plenty of difficult to meet dps checks in hard modes.
I think that this gimmicky stuff is actually the only way to accomplish two important things:
1)New mechanics. If all you have to do is step out of whatever-colored-crap on the floor, nuke some adds, and interrupt when DBM tells you to, every fight kinda becomes tank and spank, because after killing 10 similar bosses, you don't really have to learn much.
2)Slow down progression. Too many players have reached near-optimal output. Jiggling class mechanics about a bit does not set them back enough. They read EJ and are back on near-optimal rotation a week after patch. Gimmicks make them learn something new every fight.
You also can't put in dps checks into fights meant to be completable by anyone, when we all know, that skill affects dps more than gear ever could.
What is it that undercommunicated is trying to teach me?
I dont understand how your undercommunicated project is different from your standard rules.
The "no voice chat" was always a rule in my guilds, including Undergeared. What is new? I just recognized that it is itself an interesting point, it is considered "needed" by most, therefore worth falsifying by its own.
I already know that communication ranges somewhere between desirable (eg 'arcane mage - as you don't have much to do - watch for adds', or even something as simple as 'taunt'), to boosting (eg 'FFS move out of the damned fire people')
Communication is a method that many players use to learn skills. Some players do their own theory crafting; most are told it by someone. The following are all communication :
* Defining possible strategies;
* Agreeing on which strategy to use;
* Being told to what to avoid in the middle of the fight.
* being told after the fight where you failed.
All of the above can be done in either a written or audio form.
I need communication during a fight. I prefer this via audible clues because it's easier for me. My eyes are largely (but not completely) glued to healing meters.
Icy Veins (website), /raid, dbm, ensindia fails achieve the above, at least for normal modes.
Voice chat also provides the above.
I use both.
You want me to kick the weakest links. I understand the values and shortcomings of doing this.
What is it that your undercommunicated is meant to show me, that you have not already shown with 'the pug'?
I disagree with both the general concepts of your theory: First the basic assumption that output is not the key element in cataclysm fights. This may be partially true for normal mode fights, but all fireland hard mode fights maybe except Shannox have relatively steep dps/hps requirements. Secondly I think that that
http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/09/08/the-overachiever-reconsidering-achievements-and-raids/
hit the nail on its head with his article.
Shortly summarized he says that in order to defeat a boss you have to kill him 3 times, once in normal mode, once in hard mode and once with the achievement. So the first time you kill him it is not the real deal anyway and once you have the achievement kill and hard mode kill you saw him dead multiple times anyways. So you do not have the feeling of progression by defeating bosses and this is what burns people out.
@Gevlon
You'd like the game to be output based such that gear makes a more significant difference in order that you can prove it doesn't matter ?
The dance changes the gear progression nearly cosmetic, therefore kills this aspect of the game.
As you point out Blizzard have taken away any confusion from gear scores etc that leads some to believe it's anything but a dance. You won - But you don't seem to be magnanimous in victory.
So why is skill that increases output a good thing, while skill that increases spatial awareness a bad thing?
Apart from the obviously subjective 'because voice chat is bad because it is social'.
There's empiric evidence that voice chat did not really help boosting.
If voice chat was such a miracle tool that allowed even complete nubcakes to be boosted by raidleaders, we'd see a surge in % of guilds that cleared content.
The proof is exactly against this.
Source:
http://wow.guildprogress.com/
Take it by expansion.
8.81% Sunwell Plateau
18.27% Black Temple
16.22% Hyjal Summit
16.34% Tempest Keep
13.83% Serpentshrine Cavern
24.35% Magtheridon's Lair
28.69% Gruul's Lair
Burning Crusade. Oh what's this? SSC has been completed by LESS people than BT? Vash had no enrage timer but a lot of dancing. As opposed to Illidan which only had limited dancing (only 3 or 4 people needed to do stuff. The fire tanks, the MT and the warlock tank.)
It is obvious that the gimmicky fight was completed by less people then output fight despite the output fight being one full tier above and blocked by several more output bosses like Bloodboil and Gorefiend. Not even voice chat could boost that.
Next:
WOTLK:
29.97% Onyxia's Lair
51.94% Eye of Eternity
55.20% Naxxramas
63.41% Obsidian Sanctum
Surprise, EoE was completed by less people despite being more of a dance fight than Kel'thuzad. (And one boss short, surely in the raiding affordability of skilled 'casuals')
Onwards.
8.50% Planetarium Normal
14.67% The Descent Normal
26.26% The Keepers Normal
45.59% The Antechamber Normal
54.19% The Siege Normal
Do not let the low % of Algalon fool you, to access it you would have to execute a lot of dance fights. Iron Council HM was pretty intense, as was its Medium Mode. And not even getting into Keeper Hard Modes.
Other than that, we see that Yogg, a dance fight, was killed by only 14.67%, especially compared to:
53.24% Trial of the Crusader 10
Woh, would you look at the gap difference between a dance and an output tier? Not only that, but check this out.
Anub'arak 53.24%
Twin Val'kyr 53.70%
Faction Champions 54.21%
Lord Jaraxxus 57.07%
Northrend Beasts 57.32%
It seems that our friends, Acidmaw and Dreadscale were the block of the instance. Northrend Beasts was the most obvious dance fight in there.
28.66% Ruby Sanctum 10
47.54% Icecrown Citadel 10
More to the point:
Lich King47.54%
Sindragosa58.36%
Rescue Valithiria 68.45%
See the 10% drop between Vali and Sindra? And between Sindra and LK? To put into perspective, the drop between Marrowgar and Vali is of 10%. An entire instance worth of output bosses were beaten in difficulty by dance bosses, even with 30% buff and the 'miracle' of Voice chat.
And now go back to Ulduar. Yogg-Saron was killed by 14%. Compare that to Lich King.
TLDR: Voice chat has negligible impact of making a 'bad' player being able to be carried by raid leaders. The fact that, without exception, dance bosses were killed by less people than output bosses shows that.
You're just looking for scapegoats. A bad player cannot be boosted by 1000 voice chats.
To be honest I don't agree with your premise, output still makes a huge difference. My guild is a 4/7 HM25 guild and if as a guild we put out 15% more dps it would of made Rhyolith Heroic and Bethtilac Heroic massively easier as it would allow you to ignore aspects of the fight or at least handle them less effectively.
It would also make a huge difference to Majordomo heroic as you could bring extra healers making the whole fight much more forgiving. On Shannox heroic if we mess up and don't reset the stacks on rageface it doesn't matter anymore as we are able to brute force through it with the gear we have nowadays.
I am not sure about normal modes as we had enough output to make it easy when we first did them but I suspect if we had done 15% less damage we would of had to pay more attention to the mechanics and in general do the dance better.
Here is the thing: hardmodes usually require you to have both output and coordination, so simplifying coordination (and making it more explicit, more on that later) helps you focus more on output, therefore helping you indirectly.
And while it might be related to boosting the bad (how much bad can you afford have while doing heroic rag though ?), but it's also related to what i would call "nonlocal awareness": it's when you have to be aware of things that are not directly related to your assignment or area. Often the possibility of having that fast and direct communication gives you the ability to balance output in ways you couldn't before or those that were too risky before.
To give a few examples (talking 25man hardmodes only):
* shannox is a joke ofcourse, usually just tank saying "melee, i'm turning the boss" when say a spear his behind him or a dog was trapped nearby and we need to be further away.
* beth: if something goes wrong above, then to recover you need to communicate, easier done by saying that typing. when someone on exploding spiders soaking get's fixate from the drone, they need to call for backup often, because people are quite spread in 25man H and it's pretty damn "nonlocal" for everyone to keep track of everyone else.
* rhyolith is doable fine without any voicechat, only maybe raid cooldowns, but with a set rotation and no screwups, it's fine.
* alysrazor: it's much easier to communicate that flyers are up and everyone else (with a priority) can take feathers, than have a swarm of people for them or rotations. Melee need to kill initiates in time and if they fail (output), they need to call for additional interrupts (nonlocal for the hunter or dk who will be providing those). Also if the flyer screws up and takes damage from the cloud, they can fly further down and get healed if they sync positions with the healers.
*baleroc: pretty much doable without voicecomm and even the shard backups can be local, healer switches are in rotation. Have to have more luck for things like "the guy has to take a shard next and get's countdown 2s before it".
*domo: can be done, yeah. but any backups for unlucky orbs will need to be very quick and watching for them will decrease output significantly.
*rag (haven't killed 25H yet): traps absolutely need to be communicated (nonlocal for individual/raid cooldowns and timing) (p1 and leftovers in p2), seeds in 1st transition often spawn in bad configurations, so communicating the grips/knockbacks will significantly help ouput. P2 with seeds dance are pretty much individual responsibility and can be doone without voice indeed. 2nd transition same as 1st, but sometimes your important knock/stun/grip people will get fire on them and quick backups will need to be arranged. P3 meteors on different sides will absolutely need to be communicated and doing so will increase output. P4 never seen yet :|
So to reiterate it again: the voicecomm is very handy for communicating events that occur outside of immediate area of concern for players that have to react to it. And/or reacting to that event will benefit output or reduce healing needed or is outright required for survival (rag traps). Those things are much more relevant now actually, as you put it, the boss dances have become more complicated.
Many people disliked gear score. Far fewer dislike voice chat. And while it is not required, it is certainly helpful.
The main reason I quit raiding in Cata was the raids being so focused on the dance. Saying Cataclysm is $50+12*$15 for forty different fights seems like a console mentality. I am not saying it is a bad game; just something I have no interest in playing and something that does not feel like a MMO.
The MMO sales pitch of progression, including leveling 1-85, is nearly destroyed when how you play your character is much less important than your dance skills.
So you are basically saying that If you could kill Anub-rekan, then you would know what to in Heigan the "dance master", because in Heigan you tottaly did not have to know what to and VC would totally help scrubs avoid the fire, or could kill Thaddius without causing a wipe?
I chose Naxx bosses on purpose since every says it was a loljoke raid, to show that the "dance" existed even at the start of WotLK and the "dance" in cataclysm is not that harder then it was in the previous expansion (at least normal modes).
About you not having enough ppl to raid, I can only venture my opinion, wich is not fact:
Despite everyone saying "YES, I WOULD TOTALLY LOVE TO BE IN A GUILD WITH THOSE RULES", in fact they dont, they will either be in progression guilds and like it there or they will be in those "LOLSOCIAL" guilds (your expression, not mine) or they prefer to be in the so called middle road, excludind those that do PvP or only live to level new chars, and I do know a few of those.
Think about it and dont make the mistake ytou often make that is:
I dont think it's fun ergo it cant be fun and if someone think it's fun then they are wrong
@Anon
The famed Heigan dance was pretty much just running back and forth across the room. And that was the ONLY mechanic in the fight that required dancing. At that point it was a big deal.
Look at FL now:
Alys`razor - we have brushfires, the worms, the tornadoes and one player has to fly through hoops.
Ryolith - random fires from volcanoes that tend to flow towards players, spark with its aoe.
Shannox - a shitton of traps
Baleroc - just 1 mechanic, but way harder to execute than Heigan dance, no "follow the mark" here.
Staghelm - simple but varied dance moves, still harder than Heigan.
Ragnaros - ...
So yeah, Beth is easier than the Heigan dance... everything else makes it look like RFC.
Most of the fights are actually DPS-output based and in the current tier can range from almost impossible to trivial even with slight dps increases because they are full of "hidden enrages" like "kill the add(s) before the next wave/phase". These "enrages" can wipe you if you are even only a few seconds late.
Small anecdotal example: all the wipes we experienced on Rhyolith Heroic were due to not having enough dps on the adds with only a few bad tries due to steering mistakes or bad luck with the volcanoes. Once you have enough gear and can handle the adds more easily the fight becomes a joke.
Normal modes are pretty lenient but are supposed to be accessible to many and will be nerfed to the ground in the next patch. If you want a challenge and prove that skill matters you have to bite heroic mode.
It feels like a personal crusade of you Gevlon, a crusade to eliminate communication and social interaction in your raiding environment.
And there is no social relevance what so ever. You try to prove, what has been proven thousand times in the past.
There is a lack of transparency for non guild members. No logs are posted. No roster, so we have no idea how frequent people raid (although this post seem to imply that you do have highly infrequent team). There are no in game goals (?). What will measure the point you are trying to make?
For me this project mainly seems to prove that guilds with steady raid teams do better on (some?) content. It seems chaotic.
Undergeared was unique. I did not participate, because I was not on your realm (and my incentive to level new chars is low). It did however create new content. New gear (recycled blue gear) became BiS, new rotations are better with different gear levels so theory crafting was required. You even provided bosses that quite a few of your raid had never seen before (if I remember correctly) in an unique setting. You also did something that has not been done before. The type of players this would attract is different from your current guild.
I do not know the PuG community. Individual choices seem limited and unappreciated (i can remember a guy taking an int flask rather than a resistance one). There is a different vibe from guildies on your blog, it no longer contains the theorycraft it had during Undergeared. This seems to (slightly) support my idea that you currently have a different playerbase in your guild. Maybe a more casual playerbase (in all aspects)?
I agree with almost everything you say, for once, except for one small issue. I think that even now gear + nerfs can eventually "boost" bad players by allowing them to ignore boss mechanics. Consider how much easier the Nef + Ony fight is after the improvement of gear and nerf of the encounter.
This doesn't contradict with your main point; in fact, it strengthens it, in that really Blizz decides who progresses and when by making encounters easier or harder and making various iLevels more or less available. Only the attentive and fast can progress at first (based on your theory of dance being king). While this isn't the same as having good gear that's enchanted, gemmed, etc, I'm surprised that you seem irritated by this, as it seems to me to fit your normal standards.
Thoughts on why it irritates you?
"The dance changes the gear progression nearly cosmetic"
I find this to be an interesting point given that 4.3 is bringing the Transmogrifier meaning that there will be very little "cosmetic progression". This assumption is based on the fact that the current attitude I am seeing is a desire to run Vanilla and TBC raids to pick up old weapons and T2/T6/(insert your favourite tier here).
I see where you going. Sort of.
Raiding in Cata is much more 'Arcady', you jump in, no attunements, womp the bosses - being expert at platform game will pay more dividends than having done TBC.
You progression has pretty much matched ours(a 25 man guild). This has surprised me as the effort you put into recruitment and running the guilds, puts all but the hard core's to shame. I would of expected better progress.
In Firelands we've managed to surpass you, despite 25's being a overtuned. I put this down the fact that our roster may be a bit more stable (this is only a guess - so probably wrong) and each hour we invest has a good investment. And Voice Chat. Voice chat allows you to progress quicker. Tactics are done simpler, and you can discuss improvements, eventually alys will go down.
It should never be used to call people out of the fire. But on a wipe discuss what type of fire killed people. Saying get out of the fire is pointless, they'll be dead. Just get them to install GTFO.
I don't think raiding without voice chat is really a big deal. It's simply an efficient tool for setting up fight execution. You generally can't "carry" someone over vent the way you're suggesting. By the time you see someone in fire and say GTFO on vent, there is enough cumulative lag between your WoW, their Wow, and vent that it's too late. We use vent during fights to coordinate tank swaps, decide who to battle rez, and to time phase transitions, all of which could be done with /y macros.
As far as gear progression, I'm finding it MORE important on my healer this expansion. Mana is tight and I still can't cast all my spells freely in T11. That's in stark contrast to where I almost never had to worry about mana once I was in heroic blues in WotLK or T4 in BC.
Cata definitely requires more WASD than LK and BC did. It's both good and bad. Good, as it keeps you on the toes and bad as heroic modes devolved into "wait until all the raid fails to fail" challenge and honestly it's very boring and frustrating after a couple of months.
@Grim
I used Heigan and thaddius as main example because in those two everyine had move, unlike most of firelands bosses, do not tell me that avoiding traps in shannox is hard or the tornados in aly is somekind of skill check, because ut really isnt.
What I was trying to say on previous coment was that "dance" fights have existed since at least WotLK.
If you train people to get out of the fire when you tell them to they will get out of the fire when you tell them to.
But often stay in it and die if you don't tell them because you haven't trained them to get out of the fire when they're in the fire but to follow your command.
We had that problem long time ago in raids and identified it.
Our solution was to have silent and non-silent encounters. And silent just meant no talking on vent. People who stood in the fire in silent, were quickly identified.
Of course we didn't ban entire vent because it is still valuable. It gives you the ability to take away some awareness issues from a busy player and put them in the hands of a less busy player. And by spreading those tasks out you optimize your raid.
There are a lot of ways of getting information to help you make the right choices in a fight. Why would you want to cut voice and only rely on sight?
regarding voicechat:
it surely helps sometimes, but some people just don't want to use it , or cannot be arsed to install/configure it and you are faced with the fact that half of your guild raid has voice chat and other half doesn't and you end up using yell macros anyway ;) In a small guild , where all people are RL friends it's rather hard to kick them out of raid for not having the TS or Vent ;) Not to mention that it would make it impossible to replace them without inviting complete strangers (PUG).
Also if you practice those dances few times and are not completely retarded you will learn them and overcome them - but it might take several wipes to do so. :)
In my cane, a tiny horde guild where all people are friends from real life, we do raid together, and most of the time we don't use voice chat at all, and it doesn't stop us from completing current raids.
but in order to achieve this, we actually had to spend quite some time wiping on each encounter to learn the right "steps" for each of us in order to perfect the dance. Which can be quite frustrating ;)
I remember when we started fearing our toons in early 4.0 and started first heroic dungeons, and ended up in stoncore hc for the first time... Even though everybode seen the videos on tankspot, it took us several wipes (think it was around 20 - 30) to learn this dance. But since that day - we never wiped there ever again (unless not without tank or healer getting a DC) ;)
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