Everything Blizzard did since TBC was under the flag of accessibility and casual friendliness. Here I'm not telling my opinion about accessibility and casual friendliness or talk about the people who really benefit from it. I just point out that the dance-based boss mechanics are the worst thing for accessibility. Brutallus was more casual friendly than Alysrazor.
The old raiding was output-centered. The boss died if the DDs did enough damage to kill the boss before enrage and the healers could keep the raid alive until it happened. The output was determined by gear, enchantments, consumables knowing the proper rotation. It was called "inaccessible" since players had to farm to get gear and read up on rotations. If the raid did not farm BT clear, they had little chance at Brutallus.
The new model is dance centered, the boss dies if the people did not die before him in the various forms of mechanics. While "fire on the ground" existed since Vanilla, it was straightforward and non-obtrusive. Practically it was a visually obvious fire on the ground that people had to run away from. Only "morons standing in the fire" failed on that. Compare it with even Shannox: there are several kind of traps while there is a grid of little fires everywhere, covered by the various healer AoE textures.
The dance model is called "accessible" because anyone can jump on it. A new lvl 85 in some 353-JP-PvP mixture doesn't do significantly worse than the same player in full 391. Consumables are coming from guild cauldrons, potions can be used once every battle, so you can come raiding without preparation.
Except that you'll die in the first mechanic. I've yet to see a player who finishes Shannox alive in the first few times he sees it. I've yet to see a new tank who doesn't do atrocious movement on Shannox wiping the raid. And it's just damn Shannox, the first boss available in Firelands.
Gear, consumables, enchantments and rotation reading can be done outside of raid. One can be prepared for Patchwerk without ever seeing him. You cannot be prepared for Alysrazor outside of fighting her. Learning Alysrazor can only be done wiping on her. And by doing so, wiping the raid. A new player on the boss means several wipes, unless it's so undertoned that it's 9-mannable. Bringing a new player, I mean someone who did not kill that particular boss, not a new 85 is a curse. I saw raids of individually weak or outright terrible players killing bosses that we couldn't. Why? Because they had a fixed roster, the same 10 people tried and tried again, until they learned the dance. It did not matter that in mixed BH PuGs our average players did 50-60% more damage, as we always had 2-3 new people who kept wiping us. That's why Rhyolith became the prime monster, receiving multiple nerfs. We first killed him #7000 after 4 tries pre-nerfs. We wiped almost 100 times in the following weeks because of people not being the same group, failing in lava, not knowing how to drive, switching too late and so on.
A guy in Karazhan gear could do 70% of the DPS of a full BT guy. So he worth 70% of him. After the rest of the raid got some SWP gear, doing 102% of BT performance, they could accept a new guy on Brutallus.
A guy who did not kill Alysrazor yet, worth exactly 0. He will die in P2, if he did not die in the fire of the rotating lava worms in P1. The problem is not that 0 is a smaller number than 70. The problem is that it is zero. The Kara guy worth something at Brutallus. No sane raid leader would try to 24 man Brutallus if they had a Kara geared applicant online. Maybe the raid did only 101% BT-DPS, so his 70% wasn't enough. But maybe it was. Definitely worth a shot. The new guy at Alysrazor is worthless. Actually less than worthless. He wastes feathers, a combat res (if someone is dumb enough to combat res him) and rolls on loot / receives DKP. It's better to leave a spot empty on a dance raid than taking a new person. Tell me, how many times you 9-8 manned Baradin Hold rather than giving a chance to someone?! Why? Because 9-man means 8 eyes, a newbie means an eye away from the raid.
And it's not just the numbers. It's also the personal experience. Imagine that Brutallus dies with the Kara guy. 6 seconds into enrage, but dead. If anyone, including the Kara guy would do just 1% less, they would wipe. The Kara guy knew that without him it couldn't be possible. He killed Brutallus agains all the odds. He proved himself to that guild and to anyone who knew that he did it. The others, who carried him also had to outdo themselves and could be proud of their damage meter position.
What about the same with Alysrazor? The new guy died in first tornado phase. His damage is below healer. He was dead weight, literally as he spent 90% of the time dead. The others also did nothing spectacular. They did the same as normally, just the fight last one more cycle longer. Which raid had more fun?
Raids that demand out-of raid preparation can be done by casual players, just after longer preparation time. Raids that demand learning inside the raid need veterans. Cataclysm was the most inaccessible raid since the existence of WoW, despite it was designed that way exactly to make it accessible.
But fear not, LFR-salvation is coming!
The old raiding was output-centered. The boss died if the DDs did enough damage to kill the boss before enrage and the healers could keep the raid alive until it happened. The output was determined by gear, enchantments, consumables knowing the proper rotation. It was called "inaccessible" since players had to farm to get gear and read up on rotations. If the raid did not farm BT clear, they had little chance at Brutallus.
The new model is dance centered, the boss dies if the people did not die before him in the various forms of mechanics. While "fire on the ground" existed since Vanilla, it was straightforward and non-obtrusive. Practically it was a visually obvious fire on the ground that people had to run away from. Only "morons standing in the fire" failed on that. Compare it with even Shannox: there are several kind of traps while there is a grid of little fires everywhere, covered by the various healer AoE textures.
The dance model is called "accessible" because anyone can jump on it. A new lvl 85 in some 353-JP-PvP mixture doesn't do significantly worse than the same player in full 391. Consumables are coming from guild cauldrons, potions can be used once every battle, so you can come raiding without preparation.
Except that you'll die in the first mechanic. I've yet to see a player who finishes Shannox alive in the first few times he sees it. I've yet to see a new tank who doesn't do atrocious movement on Shannox wiping the raid. And it's just damn Shannox, the first boss available in Firelands.
Gear, consumables, enchantments and rotation reading can be done outside of raid. One can be prepared for Patchwerk without ever seeing him. You cannot be prepared for Alysrazor outside of fighting her. Learning Alysrazor can only be done wiping on her. And by doing so, wiping the raid. A new player on the boss means several wipes, unless it's so undertoned that it's 9-mannable. Bringing a new player, I mean someone who did not kill that particular boss, not a new 85 is a curse. I saw raids of individually weak or outright terrible players killing bosses that we couldn't. Why? Because they had a fixed roster, the same 10 people tried and tried again, until they learned the dance. It did not matter that in mixed BH PuGs our average players did 50-60% more damage, as we always had 2-3 new people who kept wiping us. That's why Rhyolith became the prime monster, receiving multiple nerfs. We first killed him #7000 after 4 tries pre-nerfs. We wiped almost 100 times in the following weeks because of people not being the same group, failing in lava, not knowing how to drive, switching too late and so on.
A guy in Karazhan gear could do 70% of the DPS of a full BT guy. So he worth 70% of him. After the rest of the raid got some SWP gear, doing 102% of BT performance, they could accept a new guy on Brutallus.
A guy who did not kill Alysrazor yet, worth exactly 0. He will die in P2, if he did not die in the fire of the rotating lava worms in P1. The problem is not that 0 is a smaller number than 70. The problem is that it is zero. The Kara guy worth something at Brutallus. No sane raid leader would try to 24 man Brutallus if they had a Kara geared applicant online. Maybe the raid did only 101% BT-DPS, so his 70% wasn't enough. But maybe it was. Definitely worth a shot. The new guy at Alysrazor is worthless. Actually less than worthless. He wastes feathers, a combat res (if someone is dumb enough to combat res him) and rolls on loot / receives DKP. It's better to leave a spot empty on a dance raid than taking a new person. Tell me, how many times you 9-8 manned Baradin Hold rather than giving a chance to someone?! Why? Because 9-man means 8 eyes, a newbie means an eye away from the raid.
And it's not just the numbers. It's also the personal experience. Imagine that Brutallus dies with the Kara guy. 6 seconds into enrage, but dead. If anyone, including the Kara guy would do just 1% less, they would wipe. The Kara guy knew that without him it couldn't be possible. He killed Brutallus agains all the odds. He proved himself to that guild and to anyone who knew that he did it. The others, who carried him also had to outdo themselves and could be proud of their damage meter position.
What about the same with Alysrazor? The new guy died in first tornado phase. His damage is below healer. He was dead weight, literally as he spent 90% of the time dead. The others also did nothing spectacular. They did the same as normally, just the fight last one more cycle longer. Which raid had more fun?
Raids that demand out-of raid preparation can be done by casual players, just after longer preparation time. Raids that demand learning inside the raid need veterans. Cataclysm was the most inaccessible raid since the existence of WoW, despite it was designed that way exactly to make it accessible.
But fear not, LFR-salvation is coming!
34 comments:
This post struck a cord.
We're a 7/7 Heroic Guild, and while we need a 10th person to get 1 meteor in phase 3 H Rag...we're better off with a new person just dying in p4 instead of potentially causing a Geyser and wiping us.
I'll give you Rhyolith who is a very annoying boss for sure. Although perhaps having voice communication would help on him.
Alys is nasty to bring new players to, sure. But in my guild we dug up some tronado dodging videos and posted those on the website, that helped a lot. And if newbies still die, well, as long as you have two good flyers it doesn't matter much, the boss will die in one cycle. In my personal opinion Alys was also one of the most fun fights this tier, but I do get i might not be so for the PuG.
Shannox I don't get though. What does it matter there are two kinds of traps? DBM says move, you move. The fire stuff is easy to avoid as long as you're not hanging out by Riplimb. there is a very easy tactics of a kite path with 3 ground markers. How can you say everyone dies on it when the traps are easily outhealable even?
I would agree that the raids have become far less accessible, however there is a counter to this that our team often used since the early WotLK days. We would send the new guy the tankspot or other appropriate link and delay the fight long enough for the person to review the fight before starting it. It would not be 100% effective but it oftened changed the fight from being 5-6 wipes down to 0-2 wipes with a new player since he at least would be aware of what he was up against.
I have to agree that the recent approach to raiding has left me with such a bad taste for the game that most of the raiders I knew have dropped out, either tired of seeing pointless wipes by the constant influx of new people due to attrition or just not having fun anymore since gear enchancements have little to no effect on raid gameplay and since they are the only bonus for going through raid gameplay making raiding pointless.
I somewhat agree with you and your campaign against the "dance" which seems to be your pet hate at the moment. However the dance has always been present, and looking at your example of Brutallus, if you had chosen the boss either side of him (Kalecgos or Felmyst) most of your arguments against the dance could have applied to them. I never saw a first timer survive to the end of either of those fights, and first timers often had negative effects on Felmyst draging the laser through the raid or stuffing up skeletons. I think that dance has always been a part of raiding, the problem is not that this tier has dance, it is that it has ONLY dance, and no Brutallus style gear gatekeeper bosses.
I think that really the problem is having a gear reset every tier, meaning that it becomes much harder for them to create meaningful difficulty based solely on player throughput. Take your example of Brutallus, if you couldn't kill him you kept farming BT until you had the gear needed to squeeze out those last few percent (which was usually how you wiped to him once you learned the mechanics). These days everyone would have the gear needed to kill him after a couple of weeks of badge grinding and thus I think makes "gear & rotation check" bosses harder for them to create with the right difficulty. So instead they just go for the dance bosses.
Is there more dancing in Catalcysm than there was previously? Maybe. But I'm honestly bewildered by this pervasive idea that raiding is now all about dancing, and it used to be nothing like that.
Ever see a new melee player survive their first fight with Baron Geddon in Molten Core? No? They all failed to dance out of the fire. And if they got the bomb? Bad news for the raid.
Remember arranging the five tanks on Vael? Now that was an epic dance. And the other 35 people just had to wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe until the tanks got their aggro dance perfect (in the days before threat meters, no less).
Where did the phrase "the dance" come from? Naxxramas of course. Heigan the Unclean. Of course Naxx was pretty hardcore back then, so it wasn't until 3.0 that the Heigan dance caused true hot tears of rage as one new player failed it and ruined an Undying attempt. I should know: that was me, once, and I wasn't even new! Just coming back from a few months off raiding.
How about Karazhan, which seems to get so much love as being the pinnacle of raiding? RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL! First time doing the Big Bad Wolf? You just failed the dance and died. Shade of Aran cast Flame Wreath while you were running away from the Blizzard? You just failed the dance and blew up the raid. Trying to tank Malchezaar for the first time? I guarantee you just failed the infernal dance, got walled in, and wiped the raid.
Don't even get me started on Gruul. He was the first incarnation I can recall of the Cataclysm-favourite "everyone run away from everyone else" dance.
No, the dance has always been there, because after about three fight into Molten Core, raiding would have been excruciatingly boring if it was just about the numbers, not fight-specific mechanics. So fight-specific mechanics is what we have gotten ever since. You need to learn the fights, and do the special things that fight demands, whilst pouring on the dps/hps/tps. If you want to call that "dancing", fair enough. If you want to say it's a new thing in Cataclysm, I can't agree with you.
OK, how would you explain HC baleroc then? ITs significantly less mechanics into it then into HC alysrazor, yet much much more guilds have killed alysrazor HC then baleroc HC?
In general I tend to agree with what you said.... though I think the problem isn't so much that "the dance" exists, but that every fight is based around it. I was talking to my guild-mates and wife about this not long ago, but I phrased it more as being upset that so few fights felt like a test of your character's setup, and more like a test of action/platformer skills. I love those types of games, but that's not an MMORPG.
Ultimately, I think the solution is something more like Karazhan, where some bosses had dance style mechanics, but others were power checks and still others were endurance checks. There's nothing wrong with a Heigan the Unclean, but he was preceded by Noth and followed by Gluth, neither of whom had much of a dance going on. They've lost their sense of balance in raid design... though the fact they've cut the number of bosses per tier in half doesn't help much.
Many people could give you info about how much dancing there was in Vanilla or TBC. And Brutallus? You spread flames on other = wipe.
What you clearly do not understand is current Cataclysm raiding model was born in TBC. WotLK was a mistake. Easy raids from start without nerfs. People got bored very soon. ICC was a step back with its increasing buff. Now we are back in the TBC
mode only we have more options and raids are pugable after a first nerf.
Gear reset? The badges were introduced in TBC and every patch there were better rewards while 5 man heroics were nerfed at the same time.
Hard raids? The whole TBC was constant stream of nerfs. Gruul before nerf? If only three people stayed together after the kick they died. Two if they were cloth wearers.
You try to compare current normal modes with TBC raids. TBC raids required performance like current hard modes. That's why every boss was nerfed several times. You wouldn't have a chance with a pug in TBC. Even now after the first nerf pugs are doing better in Firelands than they were doing in TBC 6 months before end of the datadisk. To go with a pug into the BT was impossible unless some very good guild invited you to join their alts.
People have short memory.
Blizzard learned their lesson... or at least acknowledged it:
You're spot on, and while we were coming to some of those same realizations not too long ago, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your outlook) it's not something we realized in time for Dragon Soul. But we do plan to act on those realizations before too long.
That was Bashiok replying to someone essentially talking about The Dance and how in a 5-6 year old game, the disparity between a brand new raider and a seasoned one is enormous, and only getting worse.
I expect the next expansion's raids to be significantly easier/more accessible.
Your opening idea that the new boss mechanics make Firelands less accessible I agree with but your subsequent reasoning is hypocritical.
Gear doesn't make that much difference - You debunked the fallacy that it ever did with the undergeared project.
You might as well not bring anyone as bring an inexperienced player - After all your complaining about M&S you're now disappointed that they can't be carried ?
The "dance" as you call it makes the raids less accessible to the casual, you're right. But this definition of casual is someone who doesn't expect to have to do anything more than accept a summon to be victorious. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that kind of casual missing out.
Your mistaking accessibility for ease. Blizzard found out that accessibility alone isn't enough for people to clear raids. This is why they constantly nerf content into oblivion and will add a 3rd difficulty (LFR) next patch.
Most of the individual mistakes in this tier won't even wipe the raid, but only get the player killed.
On the other hand, the T4 geared guy may take months to reach the SWP gear level, while the dance can be learned in 1-2 nights.
Despite this I agree. The dance must go, this is a bad design.
I have to be honest: I never made it into raiding. Part of that was a lack of time, but the greater part was the fear of embarassing myself and wiping even a boost raid. I watched quite a lot of videos to different encounters, but if you've never been there it is hard enough to make out what's happening most of the time and why. Call me a coward for not even trying, but I was just not motivated.
Taking that into account I know what would've changed that:
Single player instanced raiding!
Say I want to learn any mechanics, I'd like to do it in my own time and to the point where I thoroughly understand them. I don't expect it to yield the same epics, but some blues would be nice. It would be a task for Blizzard to compute 9 NPCs such that it depends solely on you to kill/tank/outheal the boss. But even if they made it such that the battle is non-random (every NPC and the Boss + adds are acting the same in each attempt) it would be great for learning.
This concept could also be used for random dungeons. As a damage dealer I prefer a guild group, but if I can't find one I'd rather try it myself before waiting half an hour in the dungeon finder and wiping the next half. I'd rather go alone with some NPCs.
Again, if the NPCs are just so that your performance makes the difference a good group is preferable, but if you can't find one or need some training it would be a great oppotunity.
A person who kills the raid by dragging an eye away on Occuthar is a person who would kill the raid on Brutallus by chaining Burn.
Raiding is not made with PuGs in mind, so you should stop measuring the quality of raids based on WWPD ("what would pugs do?") philosophy.
I am a raid leader of a pretty average raid with a pretty big influx of people (for my taste at least), probably 2 every month. We are at 4/7 HC.
My experience (of 6 years raiding) is that for 90% of the people that have raiding issues, it has always been, and it will always be harder to squeeze out extra 5% dps (without upgrades) than it is for them to learn the dance. For about 5-8 people in my raids both the dance and the dps is hard - but while they learn the dance in 10-20 wipes, their dps is continuously low from one expansion to the next, even if they accidentally rolled a FotM class.
In my opinion, dancing is easier and faster to learn than maintaining dps in 85+ percentile of WoW population.
Again - normal/heroic raiding is not and should not be made with pugs in mind, since any coherent group will power through it - majority of pugs will have worse issues with dancing, with dps, with reforging/enchanting and gemming than any guild raid.
Salvation through LFR is mostly that people who depend on pugs will stop crying already. Stop blaming design of raids for the fact your own PuG experiment failed - your argument thus just lacks experience and objectivity.
Blizzard said that they know they made a mistake with catas endgame...
"The lead developer did admit that Cataclysm might have been lacking in fresh endgame content: “I don’t think we did a good enough job of evolving the endgame. In terms of adding new types of PvE activities for people to do."
This is nothing new: Shadow Trap. Oops. You knocked me off. However, that is an end boss.
I myself am pretty tired of these DPS checks. It is old. You cannot have such on every fight with only a few, rather archaic, mechanics.
When such is combined with mechanics which require perfect execution and RNG (e.g. Ragnaros HC) then it is fun. Because in order for everyone to execute the movement and the DPS perfect in RNG situation this requires a lot of practice and (again) everyone to be a good player. Both knowing rotation and dexterity.
It surprises me you haven't killed Ragnaros on normal yet, and you'd be surprised how some of the HC fights are. Ragnaros on normal, especially post nerf, is a pretty forgiving fight where a lot of things will almost kill you but otherwise it is by far not as hard as the HC version. Shannox HC is not a DPS check at all.
"I think that dance has always been a part of raiding, the problem is not that this tier has dance, it is that it has ONLY dance, and no Brutallus style gear gatekeeper bosses."
I did 23k DPS on my undergeared warlock on Baleroc as demonology no less, even screwed up my rotation. Yet I managed to do that. The dance on Baleroc, especially on normal, is non-existent since only 2 people can take the shards post-nerf (it used to be 4 people; still faceroll). I was one of them. Baleroc has very little dance on normal.
The dance on Alys on HC is also not much harder than normal. Which is why that boss has been killed many times on HC.
If you check through WoL you'll notice HC raiding guilds one shotting all up to Raggy except for Baleroc where they wipe a few times. And pre-nerf Baleroc HC was dance + DPS check.
This may have been relevant pre-nerf, but if you can't take a fresh pug into FL now something is either wrong with the pug or wrong with the leadership. Last Thursday night one of our best dd had to leave an hour early. I grabbed a guild member who had zero experience, never even watched the fights but generally has decent raid awareness. I briefly explained the fight, put a big star icon on my head and said just follow me the whole fight while doing what you were told to do. We one-shot Alysrazor and Rhyolith and he never died once.
Use the people that do know the dance to your advantage. You may not get the greatest damage or healing out of them, but it's better than calling the raid or trying to 9-man it.
The dance in Alysrazor is not beyond casuals to pick up.
We use vent and have a core of 5 once/week raiders, and one booster (paid via share of gold bid). The rest are pugs; pre-qualified where possible; trade if not.
Within 4 attempts we were all surviving through to enrage timers; admitidly no flyers yet. (When we hit an enrage timer I read up more)
We then downed baleroc in 3 attempts : 7 of us never having seen the boss before.
Those that don't like wiping dont come back. Those that remain get better.
"The problem is not that 0 is a smaller number than 70. The problem is that it is zero."
Just a nitpick. The problem is that it's below the threshold.
It being zero is only a problem per se if it's about the skill multiplier. Say skill can take the 70% Kara gear to between 50% and 90%. On zero, that variance is meaningless.
The problem here is that new raiders are contributing less to the raid than they cost in gear opportunities. (Which is ironic, given that you're saying that gear is basically meaningless.) Whereas Kara dude may change Brutallus to killable, and thus any gear he soaks up wouldn't have existed at all without him, new Cata raiders do the reverse, sometimes preventing a kill.
Mutatis mutandis gear/kill portrait/experience content/whatever.
If someone would question that this post is true, just remember when was Tier1 Cataclysm pugged - on a normal realm of course, maybe on a high population realm a bit sooner. On my realm, which is a low population one, the first, more or less successfull Pugs started around March, 3-4 months after the release. Any Pug which went there sooner, got terribly smashed at most by Valiona and Teralion (by any mechanic of them). By more or less successfull Pug, I mean, when they kill mostly everything, except endboss, so they finish 70-80% of the instance - like the same Pugs did with ICC: most Pugs at us killed around 8/12. Note that I don't talk about whether accesibility is good or not, just about the time passed with no successfull Pugs.
These Pugs also had to choose people they bring very carefully: asking for waaay better gear the instance needed and/or full clear achievement for the first two bosses.
For the problem which Péter Zoltán mentioned: the gearing up process can be accelerated with various methods.
For instance, Justice and Valor gear is mostly enough to start raiding. Apart from that, they could introduce more powerfull Heirlooms or some kind of legacy gear, which can only be bought with some currency which can only be obtained by raiding. Also 5mans now provide way enough gear for raiding. Tier3 Cataclysm 5mans will bring ilvl378 to everyone in 4.3 - of course not to every slot, but there will be the ilvl365 gear from Molten Front dailies and Zul'zul'gurub'aman: almost everyone will be with some effort around ilvl370-375 at least - this must be enough for the Dragon Soul raid, even on normal.
@Gevlon
If I recall, your guild experiment came about in Wrath to show that ICC could be done in blue quality gear correct? If what you are saying is true about it not being all about the gear in Firelands raid and it really is all about the dance I would like to see you prove it. Slap on some 333 ilevel blues or 346 gear and run Firelands. I think you will find that it is something of a gear check, at least for the healers and tanks.
I do find the quality of players in this expansion lacking compared to that of Vanilla and Burning Crusade raiders. Most I see as being the Wrath babies, the veterans being driven away by the easy content of Wrath and not returning for Cataclysm as they have moved on to something else. This leaves us with the folks from Wrath that expect easy mode, roll face on keyboard for epics and didn't learn to not move when flame wreath was cast or the raid blows up. The Wrath babies are the ones that cried for nerfs to the heroic dungeons rather than figure out how to interrupt and CC mobs. The Wrath game was all about AoE damage and damage output (Patchwerk and Festergut anyone?)and I remember the re-tune of the trash packs leading up to XT-002 before the nerf and how many M&S couldn't figure out what CC was to deal with it.
I for one have enjoyed the boss encounters in Cataclysm with the dance mechanics. What I am finding lacking about this expansion is the variety of dungeons, and the awe inspiring beauty of the raid zones themselves. Naxxramas was a wonderfully done raid and has definitely stood the test of time considering its origination from Vanilla WoW. Ulduar was very well thought out and the method for unlocking the hard modes didn't require a raid to beat their head against a wall grinding the same dungeon in reg. mode before being able to unlock heroic. If you wanted hard mode, you just went for it.
I could go on about the things Blizzard did wrong and what was done right with this expansion but that would require a blog of my own.
Except hardly anyone got to Brutallus. Sunwell was for the elite, the same sort of players who got to Heroic Ragnaros pre-nerf these days. If you managed to get to Sunwell, I'm pretty damn sure that you had to know how to dance.
One of the hardest bosses I have experienced in WoW was Kaelthas in TK. That fight was all about learning a dance. Totally. We wiped there endlessly, over and over and over.
It's a joke to even compare Alysrazor to that, never mind Sunwell content.
I'll agree that dance mechanics are less accessible than simple DPS requirements in a lot of ways, but I think you're overstating things.
For one thing it's completely possible to do out-of-raid preparation for dance mechanics, and people have been doing it since pre-BC. People prepared through watching boss videos and talking to experienced raiders, and during the fight they had voice chat to help them with their cues for timing and such.
For another it's not some totally binary difference. There are still DPS requirements now, and there were dance mechanics in older raids. MC, Ony, BWL, AQ40, Naxx40, hell even UBRS had dance mechanics on at least some of the bosses that needed to be dealt with.
I'm not saying it's the same now as it was back then, but on the other hand it's not totally different either. Lets not forget that Brutallus himself had dance mechanics in the form of Meteor Slash and Burn which, while they didn't require huge amounts of attention or movement, had to be dealt with or the raid would wipe. If your hypothetical Kara geared player didn't know about Burn and didn't get out of the Meteor Slash group then that would be the end right there, full stop.
Once again, I'm not saying nothing has changed, very clearly things HAVE changed. Just not so completely that you can't use the old methods at all, or that older raiders can't keep up and have to learn things from scratch.
Still, not true that Firelands doesn't have any non-dancing fights. There's Baleroc, which is pretty much a burn fight. Movement there is minimal, all you have to do is stand near the crystal when it's your turn and burn the shit out of the boss. Even on heroic mode, the only think that's added is a "kiss your buddy" mechanic. The boss in general is very similar to Blood Queen Lana'thel, which was also a burn boss.
We'll probably not going to see any "Patchwerk" fights again any soon though. A fight you can do one-handed is not really interesting if you ask me.
The "dance" isn't the issue. Old raids had tiny portions of the "dance" stay out of fire. Move out of the group if you get the debuff etc etc.
That is still "dancing".
The Real issue is 2 fold.
1.)the new fireland raid is has multiple dances for each boss. They are overly complex and the penalty for anyone failing any of the dances is a wipe.
2.) the healing model changed and healers CANNOT carry a poor player or save someone that screws up.
Even a relatively easy firelands boss like alysrazor has multiple dances.
1.)dodge fire on phase 1.
2.)drag firechickens to worms to feed to stop enrage
3.)dodge fire tornados on phase 2
4.)stack up behind boss for major aoe heals on phase 4.
5.) fly throw rings to stay in the air.
That's 5 dance like movement requirements in one boss. that's on top of killing anything or running to mobs to kill them. If anyone fails on any of these things your raid wipes because healers can't carry dps that hurt themselves needlessly.
All the people in here commenting that the raid design is fine because there guild is 6/7HC need to realize that hardcore raiders are the smallest minority of players in the game.
A game should NOT be designed for the smallest minority of players.
I think part of the new philosophy of the dance is the idea that healers can't make up for a bad dancer...many dance fails one-shot the player.
Sort of ironic that an expansion about accessibility has also lead to higher frustration in dungeons for more casual players.
I am curious about LFR..it has potential, but I am concerned that there will be too many cats to herd in a 25 PuG...and that the mechanics of the bosses will be nerfed to the point that they can be ignored. We'll see.
This is what happens when you only release 7 bosses for a content patch (8 if you include TB). Blizzard have to make it hard enough that non-raid people can't farm easy inital bosses, so content will be complex.
9 bosses, 2-3 being tank and spank bosses, 3 being difficult bosses before the final boss, then the final boss, lastly 2-3 difficult dance bosses that are optional.
I'm amused by all the people saying that the fights aren't overly complex. I had to boot several raiders who had made it to Sunwell with me years ago. They were great in BC, but Cataclysm was a bridge too far.
As the devs have been noting, people who frequent these types of blogs have no idea of how large the skill gap is. An easy fight like Atramedes required moving side to side and then having to be aware of the breath. For someone looking at raid frames with less than stellar awareness, that fight is a mighty task. The same goes for V&T's second phase. Again, moving out of fire is one thing, but the second another dimension is added to the dance, it becomes too difficult for many raiders.
Blizzard really should start removing these mechanics from normal modes and implement them in heroics.
WoW is dying. Deal with it. The only chance of reviving WoW is if Blizzard will realize that WotLK & Cata was a disaster and would correct the course. Until then I say relax and find a nice warm beach and run after crabs and shoot them
For me, it's not so much the quantity of the dance as it is tuning.
Pre-nerf, the penalty for failure - essentially any failure - was a wipe. On Shannox, one person stepping in an ice trap was usually too much for us to recover from.
1 minor mistake = wipe is more consistent with hard modes. And while the nerf has probably gone too far, it's preferable to having normals overtuned.
What most of the posters are missing is that failing the dance in Cata usually means the raid wiping. Yes Heigan was a real dance. But I remember that we still defeated the boss if people died. In one epic encounter there was just me as a tank and a healer. It took us 28 minutes but heigan still died.
And the Big Bad Wolf might ahve killed one or two that were bad at running away , but you could still eventually defeat the boss.
Now in Cata if one person fails at the dance there is a much higher percentage that the whole raid wipes.
There has always been some dances but the fight was forgiving enough to allow the rest of the raid the cahnce to carry one. The newbie didn't hold up the entire progression. If you were 4/7 back then that newbie meant you were still 4/7 and could work on that 5th boss. In Cata if you are 4/7 and a newbie joins the raid you are automatically 1/7.
A guy who did not kill Alysrazor yet, worth exactly 0. He will die in P2, if he did not die in the fire of the rotating lava worms in P1.
Hm, I might be a girl but when I went back to raiding I had never done Alysrazor nor had I even watched a video of it. Yes, might be slacking but I wasn't expecting to raid that night.
My raid deliberately let me on the ground, even though usually the casters are in the air.
They told me what would happen in the fight, I didn't understand a word but I sort of figured out what was going on, in fight. True, one of our paladins saved my ass one time but other than that, I adjusted and learned the fight while fighting the boss for the first time.
And no, we didn't wipe and yes, that was pre-nerf.
I think it's a matter of how easily a player can adapt to a fight even without having seen the fight.
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