I had no doubt that the original raiding plans "no fixed team, no schedule, no voice" failed (relatively, we are world #17K) because of WoW raiding becoming a scripted dance, where DPS/HPS is irrelevant. However it goes both ways. So instead of whining how this terrible design is responsible for our failure, let's turn it upside down and prove that "no fixed team, no schedule, no voice" system can destroy the dance! Please note that "no fixed team, no schedule, no voice" are needed to make transient content, aka "let casuals play".
Let me explain: We started FL raiding pretty good. Beth #5500, Rhyolith #7000, with the achievement "not an ambi-turner" World #600! Not bad at all. Shannox was #11K but then silence for months. HoW? Did we start sucking after such a start? No, we started farming. For a fixed team, a farm kill is oneshot, or 1-2 wipe due to someone fails. For us every kill was a firstkill since the raid team changed, key people changed (whenever we had someone new Beth upstairs that's 5-10 wipes straight), so in the next months we had weeks we couldn't even pull Alysrazor.
You don't need a fixed team to firstkill bosses, but you definitely need a fixed team to farm them effectively. However the dance raids need no gear. So why should we farm at all?!
The "Kill dance from raids!" project starts with the next patch but will go "serious" in Mist of Pandaria. The plan is to kill bosses one by one, extending the lockout. By the end of the project, everyone will have 2 bosskills of the current tier raid: 1 in normal, 1 in HC of each bosses (see update #2). This system worked pretty well in Undergeared. When we were on boss X everyone who came online learned boss X, so sooner or later the boss died. The team could change between raids, because everyone was raiding the same boss. The Undergeared used blue gear only. We will use every available gear outside farming the current tier normal and hard mode bosses. You can craft, you can use PvP, you can buy BoE, get Valor, go LFR, farm the nerfed-to ground FL and use the drops from the firstkill (still gold bid).
This project finally focuses the real problem of current raiding: the dance. We will simply brute-force the dance by trying on the same boss until he drops dead. That doesn't look revolutionary, right?
Wrong: it's more revolutionary than anything before. This time we won't prove something to the M&S or the socials supporting them. We will destroy the dance design by proving that in dance raids farming is counter-productive. Farming is the heart of MMOs, as no game publisher can create content as fast as players consume it. To keep players in the game you must make them farm the same content. However this project will prove that farming hurts your progress as it simply wastes dozens of tries on "old" bosses with new people. Unless you are in a fixed hard-core team, you can progress best if you don't farm. Again: we will prove that the best way to "win" WoW is to not play WoW. This will force the developers to return to the "real" raid design: output based bosses with minimal dance.
This time I aim for nothing that haven't been tried. The Pug killed bosses fast until we started farming and Undergeared kept progressing despite no gear. So we simply recreate Undergeared with a very slight under-gearing: we will only miss items from the current tier farm raids.
To support this effort, I'll organize FL farm raids every Tuesday (day before reset in EU). Want Vanilla-BC back? Join and prove everyone that they are much better off in raiding if they stop doing current tier farm raids (old tier is nerfed to the ground, so oneshottable). Free repairs, feast and cauldron to every participants. Raids will probably go in Wednesday, Sunday and Monday, as Thursday, Friday and Saturday are RBG and Tuesday is old tier and group-LFR farm. Of course still no attendance, voice or fixed roster. Rerollers are also welcomed.
Update: we will prove something to the players after all. I got lot of comments (most of them are "u suck HMz need gear and skill lol" level trolling) that show that players who completed the dance believe that they are "skilled" universally and not just learned a stupid scripted dance. Someone who doesn't die in Shannox fire is not having any skill that helps him play WoW anywhere else than at Shannox, but they think otherwise. Let's cut the l33t down to size!
Update #2: The new lockout system just came to my mind. If I have a 5/8 save, you can join it if you killed a few bosses this week. So one can join /trade pugs to farm first bosses if it's his heart's desire. I won't, for sure.
Let me explain: We started FL raiding pretty good. Beth #5500, Rhyolith #7000, with the achievement "not an ambi-turner" World #600! Not bad at all. Shannox was #11K but then silence for months. HoW? Did we start sucking after such a start? No, we started farming. For a fixed team, a farm kill is oneshot, or 1-2 wipe due to someone fails. For us every kill was a firstkill since the raid team changed, key people changed (whenever we had someone new Beth upstairs that's 5-10 wipes straight), so in the next months we had weeks we couldn't even pull Alysrazor.
You don't need a fixed team to firstkill bosses, but you definitely need a fixed team to farm them effectively. However the dance raids need no gear. So why should we farm at all?!
The "Kill dance from raids!" project starts with the next patch but will go "serious" in Mist of Pandaria. The plan is to kill bosses one by one, extending the lockout. By the end of the project, everyone will have 2 bosskills of the current tier raid: 1 in normal, 1 in HC of each bosses (see update #2). This system worked pretty well in Undergeared. When we were on boss X everyone who came online learned boss X, so sooner or later the boss died. The team could change between raids, because everyone was raiding the same boss. The Undergeared used blue gear only. We will use every available gear outside farming the current tier normal and hard mode bosses. You can craft, you can use PvP, you can buy BoE, get Valor, go LFR, farm the nerfed-to ground FL and use the drops from the firstkill (still gold bid).
This project finally focuses the real problem of current raiding: the dance. We will simply brute-force the dance by trying on the same boss until he drops dead. That doesn't look revolutionary, right?
Wrong: it's more revolutionary than anything before. This time we won't prove something to the M&S or the socials supporting them. We will destroy the dance design by proving that in dance raids farming is counter-productive. Farming is the heart of MMOs, as no game publisher can create content as fast as players consume it. To keep players in the game you must make them farm the same content. However this project will prove that farming hurts your progress as it simply wastes dozens of tries on "old" bosses with new people. Unless you are in a fixed hard-core team, you can progress best if you don't farm. Again: we will prove that the best way to "win" WoW is to not play WoW. This will force the developers to return to the "real" raid design: output based bosses with minimal dance.
This time I aim for nothing that haven't been tried. The Pug killed bosses fast until we started farming and Undergeared kept progressing despite no gear. So we simply recreate Undergeared with a very slight under-gearing: we will only miss items from the current tier farm raids.
To support this effort, I'll organize FL farm raids every Tuesday (day before reset in EU). Want Vanilla-BC back? Join and prove everyone that they are much better off in raiding if they stop doing current tier farm raids (old tier is nerfed to the ground, so oneshottable). Free repairs, feast and cauldron to every participants. Raids will probably go in Wednesday, Sunday and Monday, as Thursday, Friday and Saturday are RBG and Tuesday is old tier and group-LFR farm. Of course still no attendance, voice or fixed roster. Rerollers are also welcomed.
Update: we will prove something to the players after all. I got lot of comments (most of them are "u suck HMz need gear and skill lol" level trolling) that show that players who completed the dance believe that they are "skilled" universally and not just learned a stupid scripted dance. Someone who doesn't die in Shannox fire is not having any skill that helps him play WoW anywhere else than at Shannox, but they think otherwise. Let's cut the l33t down to size!
Update #2: The new lockout system just came to my mind. If I have a 5/8 save, you can join it if you killed a few bosses this week. So one can join /trade pugs to farm first bosses if it's his heart's desire. I won't, for sure.
39 comments:
Will be interesting to see how you do. I have no doubts you'll be able to do normal modes fine, but moving into heroics, any boss that is a gear check will stall you for a long time.
Thumbs up for finally starting to work on your lacking PvE progress instead of complaining. I don't see how you're going to prove anything, though. Everyone knows gear is only a fallback method in case you're not good enough to outplay the mechanics (which takes practicing the fight). You won't kill Hard Modes in 380s, just like you wouldn't kill Beth'tilac or Baleroc HC in 370s. May be after they nerf content into irrelevancy, but Blizzard is generally fairly good about making gear checks matter in hard modes.
If only there were a guild like yours on my US server, I'd join in a heartbeat. Your raiding philosophy and my raiding needs match perfectly, and that is one reason I'm a fan of this blog. I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor.
My 2 copper: the main threat of the "dance" raid is having to maintain the dance for an extended period of time. Imagine a tank that has not done heroic Stonecore, but he has seen Ozruk on youtube. Would you rather pit that tank against Ozruk for 90 seconds, or for 3+ minutes? The point I'm trying to make is that the longer a fight lasts, the more likely someone will screw up the dance. Multiply this by all the dps in a raid, and you can see why a H Rag kill is a pipe dream for 98% of guilds.
Higher dps output means less time having to concentrate on the dance. In this way, it may not be as trivialized as you think.
On the other hand, focusing on one's rotation to maximize output may detract from dance concentration.
Would I be right to say that your ideal WoW would be one in which fight mechanics are not dance heavy, but rotations are complicated (PvE sub rogue) and players have to actually practice to improve their output?
"ICC in full blues, spending no more than 3 hours per week" was an extremely impressive goal.
"ICC in full Frost badge/ToC/Wrathful/Toravon/BoE epics, spending as many hours as it takes to bruteforce the system"? Not so much.
I have been running no fixed team; mostly extension runs (4 Shannox kills vs Glotan's 13); mostly once per week (and at most twice), gold bid runs.
The gear levels of toons are all over the shop. My gear is better than most; being BOE. I don't kill anything enough for valor points gear.
I can categorically state that there is no significant DPS requirement to Firelands bosses 1-6.
I had a look at Ragnaros for the first time last week. I will be back there in a fortnight, and have no intension of resetting the raid till he is down.
The problem I see you having with you proving your point is that bosses under LFR will already be "casual" (stand in the fire) friendly, and that 'harder' modes will simply add more dance steps.
You will be able to show an undergeared approach works; the same as you did in Northrend; for much the same reason. Unless you are in heroic mode; dancing is as important (or more important) than class competance.
"This will force the developers to return to the "real" raid design"
Don't be silly Gevlon, even if the developers notice you I doubt you'll be the deciding factor.
But I'm looking forward to watching you progress through heavily nerfed bosses one at a time. I can't imagine you'll have any problems at all. Then you'll get to heroics and that will be more challenging.
Genuinely though, I'm glad you're getting back to some PVE.
If the difficulties of the Hardmodes wont change and stay at the level of 4.2 or 4.0 you will kill the nm and maybe 1 HC and will wipe for month.
Need prove? And of course we look at the none nerfed versions of the bosses (not the jokes right now!).
Nef HC: You wont survive any crackle where you dont have a raid cd active. Why? Because of your lacking gear you miss to much hp, that your dd's can survive it.
Baleroc HC: Try get the original DMG requirements with 368 gear. You ll notice, that it is close to the theoretical maximum.
Majordomus: Enrage timer, Max hp -> dead.
In Hardmodes you need your dance and output. Tell me 1 HC you killed with your PUG (shannox doesnt count) and the kills are only a shadow of the non nerfed encounters!
Will be interesting to see how this will fare. Undergeared was a success, because it attracted some good players. I think some of them might come back and maybe you could get some new ones to join as well.
However, if you really wipe 5+ times on Beth, because you have new people going upstairs, there is very little chance you will succeed this time (at least with HC), if those same people will continue raiding with you. Going up on Beth is basically "don't stand in fire", which is the most basic raiding "skill" ever created.
interesting i have to say.
i agree vehemently about the distaste for dancy content, patchwerk is not fun ad infinitum but the dance is to far, esp dance that is scripted completely.
Random dance would be less bad (sindragosa ok, safety dance while fun and in of it self not bad, as the defining description. No
just No.
People are saying HM's need the gear and they are very right.
I could add that on the first week of Firelands we cleared 5/7 bosses with our mains that had half HM gear from t11. It took about amonth before our alts could regularly clear 3 bosses or so... and it was the same people playing, only on poorly geared alts.
So yeah, even in Firelands normal, gear does make things so much easier... and on HM you ca't do without. I don't think your project will succeed with the HM part, or if you do, I'll be quite impressed. After all, you'll be clearing HM bosses with less gear available than Paragon...
You can do most Heroics with previous tier's heroic pieces, which basically are only slightly inferior to current raid normal pieces.
If they keep the FL model the first version of the encounters in 4.3 will be pretty difficult and a significant nerf will hit afterwards. This means you will most likely need this first nerf to Heroics to ease your progress.
Also you have to hope they keep the 10man versions much easier than the 25man, but given thant 10man is becoming the de-facto standard format I doubt they will change this.
I also would count the last boss out. The last boss in Heroic is usually much, much more difficult than the others and is tuned to be killed only by the very hardcore.
MMO without farming, I like it!
(to be fair you will farm only stuff you can one shot)
And as a prove gear was irellevant, first kill of Ragnaros HC was in 3rd reset.
I think Blizzard actually noticed that dance is bad - there were some blue posts about making the raidbosses less gimmicky and removing random one-shots. So it might be that your project will fail simply because you won't get it off the ground before Blizz fixes the raids.
"By the end of the project, everyone will have 2 bosskills of the current tier raid: 1 in normal, 1 in HC of each bosses. This system worked pretty well in Undergeared."
I dont remember you doing any hardmodes in Undergeared project. I dont even remember you killing all normal bosses with 30% buff in undergeared project, if I remember well you didnt kill any of the end bosses and LK obviously and that was the goal of your project. Then the project was more or less ended because of lack of interest. You blamed it on summer, I blame it on the fact people realized it might be a waste of time.
Now I am not saying you didnt do well, killing Saurfang and Putricide was a great feat but you shouldnt make up things that didnt happen. Undergeared was as much successfull as a football team on world championship that claimed that they would win all matches but they only got to play off where they lost first half of the first match and then they didnt even play the second half. Your goal was to kill LK, you failed.
Now with this new project: no doubt you will kill at least 4/8 on normal mode. But I just wonder where from comes self-confidence that hard modes are easy from a man that havent done any of them un-nerfed (in Firelands, I know and congratulate you to you two T11 HM kills).
Basically what you now want to do is in 378ish ilvl kill T13 HM bosses, do I get it right.
AS far as I know that would be greater achievement than what Hardcore guilds do. They will enter T13 with full 391. Then they will attempt HMs in that gear. They are communicating stuff on voice comms, they have more or less fixed teams.
I wonder at what stage of this project people will stop show their interest, just as they did it with Undergeared and The Pug, thus rendering the project failed and you claiming it successfull and blame the lack of interest on external matters such as summer, football WC, winter, spring or whatever.
Good luck, though
Well, there is one skill (or perhaps "talent" would be a better word) relevant to dance-raiding: The ability to learn new dance moves quickly.
Brute forcing down raid bosses will provide very little return for raiding for so many wipes. I believe that this might cause significant burnout in your raiders.
To offset that perhaps you should offer a gold reward for progress kills. In addition to that offer a rather large one for a heroic rag kill.
If you'ree not going to offer gear for raiding offer the next best thing, gold.
@Deepfriedegg: no, not in 378, we will use every "welfare" gear that can be gained. Baradin Hold drops, PvP gear, valor gear, daily quest rewards and so on.
Also, we won't play strictly 1 day/week and can do other activities than raiding together, decreasing burnout.
This project will as undergeared did proove nothing. Every raider with even a moderate amount of experiance knew the bosses with the buff could be downed in blue gear as they were doing it on their alts regardless of the undergeared project. Of course they included parts beyond the heroic blues but the principles were the same that gear is irrelevant over ability.
Considering your endevours to remove your self from the M&S of the playerbase you seem permanently incentivised to proove yourself to them. Prooving your own self worth to a moron has zero reward.
Regardless if you kill the bosses or not, your reward for doing so is a less enjoyable experience for yourself and your companians with this ruleset and ultimately rewards absolutely nothing.
...players who completed the dance believe that they are "skilled" universally and not just learned a stupid scripted dance. Someone who doesn't die in Shannox fire is not having any skill that helps him play WoW anywhere else than at Shannox, but they think otherwise.
Indeed we do.
Why? Because we know that there are two primary ways to do any non-Patchwerk encounter:
A. The Path of the Dumb Scripted Robot.
1) Read/watch/try out the encounter.
2) Memorize input signals (boss shouts, spell effects, DBM alerts).
3) Practice rote responses to said signals (run out of fire, collapse to yellow mark, etc.) until muscle memory develops.
4) Kill boss.
5) Proceed to next boss, repeat everything from scratch.
That's the 'dance' model that you and Tobold hate so much. And as you've correctly noted, it doesn't allow for skill transfer between encounters. Fortunately, if you're raiding with intelligent people (and not dumb robotized monkeys), there's a different way of doing things.
B. The Path of the Smart Analytical Human.
1) Read/watch/try out the encounter.
2) Analyze the abilities, reduce them to abstract concepts and determine patterns.
3) Apply "meta-raiding" skills acquired from previous experience.
4) Kill boss.
5) Analyze your performance.
6) Proceed to next boss, using newly acquired skills as a valuable asset.
This mode of raiding is far more efficient *and* more fun. However, it required a functioning intelligent mind and the will to use it, so it's not for everyone.
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(Continued from the previous comment)
So let's look at Heroic Shannox again and see what can one learn from it:
1) Face Rage.
"I learned how to quickly press my "nuke Rageface" macro when DBM does the Face Rage alert. This is a totally new skill, so I had to wipe a lot before I memorized it. Alas, this skill is totally useless against any other enemy using any other ability." - A-type Raider.
"I practiced my "rapid target switching" meta-skill. It's fundamentally similar to nuking tentacles on Cho'gall, breaking Maloriak's frost tombs, destroying chains on the first boss in BRC or killing Saurfang's bloodbeasts. And this practice will come in handy on Alysrazor's Molten Meteors and Ragnaros's Sons." - B-type Raider.
2) Immolation Traps.
"I learned how to avoid immolation traps on the ground. This is a totally new skill, so I had to wipe a lot before I memorized it. Alas, this skill is totally useless against any other bad stuff on the ground." - A-type Raider.
"I practiced my "voidzone dodging" meta-skill. It's fundamentally similar to avoiding Atramedes's flame patches, Theralion's Dazzling Flames, Slabhide's falling rocks, or, for that matter, any other fire in the game. And this practice will come in handy when I'm navigating Rhyolith's lava trails and Majordomo's flame puddles" - B-type Raider.
3) Freezing Traps.
"I learned how to kite Rageface into a freezing trap to reset his stacks. This is a totally new skill, so I had to wipe a lot before I memorized it. Alas, this skill is totally useless against any other kitable enemy." - A-type Raider.
"I practiced my "kite mob to Zone X" meta-skill. It's fundamentally similar to running to chains on Jin'do, kiting Atramedes's breath in either phase, or pulling your little slime to second tank on Rotface. This practice will help when I'm fixated by a Drone/kamikaze add on Bethilac or chased by a Living Meteor on Ragnaros" - B-type Raider.
4) Jagged Tear.
"I learned how to kite Riplimb/Shannox long enough for the bad debuff to fall off. Furthermore, I discovered that all raiding is scripted and stupid and I hate it" - A-type Tank.
"I practiced my general kiting skills. Doing quick sprints while waiting for a debuff to fall is something that I've learned when running away from Erudax in Grim Batol or that Scourgelord guy from Pit of Saron. And this quick refresher on how to kite something through traps on the ground will make Alysrazor's Hatchling-driving much, much easier" - B-type Tank.
And so on, and so forth. Any fight, any ability can be approached in these two ways. The sooner you convince yourself and your raidmates to switch to B-type thinking, the more rewarding your raid experience will become (in terms of both kills and fun).
P.S. One final example from my personal experience:
We've been struggling with post-nerf Heroic Baleroc. People kept making the same mistakes, spreading Tormented debuffs all around and killing each other. Finally, I spoke up:
"Guys, pretend that it's Alysrazor, and everyone else in the raid is a Brushfire. Unless you're countdown-linked with them; then they're a static Meteor during Firestorm".
We killed him cleanly on the next attempt.
A system where any boss kill is an actual guild first kill? Where I don't have to learn the fight from 9 other people who already know this and are getting frustrated because "this is nothing, look, we can all do this"?
Count me in.
I had an experience that actually proves your theory about only boss skills, which are not universanl in game.
After our 2nd or 3rd ragnaros kill, we had still much time till we call the raid so we decided to kill nefarian, since someone had a save for him from a pug.
The result was we wiped more times in nefarian than ragnaros. We all had killed nefarian in the past, and we had many 378 pieces from firelands. Though nefarian proved "harder" than ragnaros, because we were working on ragnaros and players were more familiar with his dance mechanics.
There are some requirements that become more strict in heroics in terms of DPS and HPS but the fact is that those requirements are far below what a class can do at it's best.
I would like to know one thing. Why the "dancing" is "gimmick and scripted" while pushing several keys in some order to make dps is not. I understand it can be fun to watch you cooldowns and pushing keys in the right moment. But I can't see why is this different or better than watching the encounter and make proper movements.
Or is it just the fact some stupid mistake can wipe the raid? The bad feeling of responsibility when you make a mistake or helplessness when someone other makes a mistake?
BTW: Great summary Ephemeron.
Gevlon, post after post you complain about the "dance." You have still failed to explain why the dance is so bad. If people want to see if they can maximize their DPS/HPS output, they can heal themselves standing at the AH in Orgrimmar or shoot at a training dummy. The only difference between that and a Patchwerk boss fight is the dance. Most people are bored off their asses in Patchwerk fights, so why knock the fact that you have to learn some choreography for each fight?
They will design encounters that require both dance and a certain non-trivial level of output.
Good idea, but won't work in hardmodes. Unless these hardmodes will be much easier than current ones (pre nerf).
Really, you get comments like that? People are more retarded than I thought.
What I don't understand is how are the developers be made aware of your project.
But, it seems like a good idea. I kinda miss output based raids. I don't have time to spend 4 hours 3 nights a week to wipe endlessly on Elemental Council...
>why the dance is so bad
It wouldn't be if used sparingly. But when it is the *only* challenge in raiding, it overtakes everything else. Are you good at DPSing as a mage? Too bad, you need to be good at dancing instead. Are you great at CC and protecting healers? too bad, this fight is all about the dance. Are you an awesome offtank who can still put out high DPS when you aren't tanking? Too bad, this fight is all about the dance.
Actually, this is the approach our guild took.
In our guild we have so many irregular scheduled players having a consistent group to practice a fight never happened.
The only way we succeeded was to hold the lock and kill the bosses one at a time.
If we had reset, we would never have seen the last boss before the next raid was introduced.
You have nothing to prove because Blizzard has already announced the 5.0 raids will be more PuG friendly. Therefore, your announcement is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since they said their changes for this won't be reflected in 4.3 I doubt this refers to LFR.
On normal FL and 4.0 normal I am right there with you, I agree with you. On HC, you are wrong. There is no way you, with your non-farm raid, would have killed Baleroc HC pre-nerf without having farmed the other bosses. Even if you were very lucky with drops and had the same people coming back, it is impossible to kill that boss pre-nerf without having farmed a lot of HC gear. On both 10m HC and 25m HC that boss is a gearcheck, with very little dance. If you believe that boss has a lot of dance on HM then I find that quite retarded given it is a similar fight to Mother Shahraz or the new BH boss. There is also no way you could've done this on Ragnaros HC. The reason Paragon did it is because they had BiS gear from 4.0. E.g. they farmed trinkets like Shard of Woe (that is just one example); whereas you specifically forbid any farming whatsoever. Paragon also did farm (they did not kill Ragnaros in the first week). So, you are essentially saying The PuG is better than Paragon.
Finally, you cannot judge on any dance in FL HC since you have not done the encounters. Every post complaining about too much dance in FL concerns about FL normal; therefore your claim about HC is wishful thinking, and far fedged. Even your HC progress in 4.0 is only 2/13: Halfus and Maloriak. I wish you had more experience because I do value your viewpoint (even though I don't always agree), alas.
"And as a prove gear was irellevant, first kill of Ragnaros HC was in 3rd reset."
Which means they had significant gear drops in their 25m (= almost nothing sharded). They also had the BiS HC gear from 4.0. You know why? Because they farmed it.
"I kinda miss output based raids. I don't have time to spend 4 hours 3 nights a week to wipe endlessly on Elemental Council..."
You either have time to raid, or you don't.
I understand what you're saying - you don't want to wipe. But you either have time to raid - or you don't, regardless of wipes.
"Are you good at DPSing as a mage? Too bad, you need to be good at dancing instead."
You need to be good at DPSing _and_ dancing on Rag HC! On the other fights if there is a DPS/gear check then there is virtually no dance.
There is only 1 fight where what you say is true: Alysrazor (even pre-nerf). Shannox HC does not require that much dance (don't stand in the trap) but it does require raid movement and communication on resetting debuff. There is individual skill required for rage (2 ranged can do that), slowing (1 ranged can do that), kiting (tanks; communication recommended). You could add Majordomo to the list, but the key to Majordomo is keeping your concentration high and that requires skill, awareness, and tactical raid positioning (latter is pre-planned).
The other bosses (excluding end boss) all have little dance. The only dance Rhyolith has is don't stand in the fire. In P2 HC, the additional dance is again a variation of don't stand in the fire (without pre-assigned stack position) plus a burn phase. Beth HC requires communication and occasional dance when soakers fail (they will). The dance up is the only dance, same as normal boils down to don't stand in fire. For the rest; rotation/gear check. Baleroc same. Shannox isn't even a gearcheck on HC, and Alys (indeed a dance fight) is easily farmed by guilds.
PS: On my realm, HC is being PuGed ever since nerf, and Shannox was PuGed pre-nerf.
From the patch 3.2.0 notes: "In order to allow for parties and raids to progress through instances at their own pace, players can now extend an instance ID on an individual basis." (emphasis mine)
So, assuming you succeed in killing every boss in both modes before .... before what exactly? You don't say. Before the next tier is released? Before 10,000 other guilds? Before 1000 other guilds? Before enough people lose interest that you can't run raids anymore? Hard to know if you've succeeded or not when you don't define success.
Anyhow. Assuming you succeed in killing every boss in both modes before whatever, why would Blizzard look at your results and think anything other than "they progressed at their own pace. Working as intended."?
@Ephemeron: "The Path of the Smart Analytical Human" doesn't work because of required speed of response. Analytical mind is not that fast if you have to think and match "mental image" to practice for first time... and for second time... actually, it never gets fast enough until it can bypass analytical part entirely.
Just imagine that every mechanic gets extra 3-second delay, and every direct damage is replaced with 3-second dot instead... how much easier will both normal and heroic encounters get? Don't you think that entire difficulty comes from required speed of response, as well as responding to more less-forgiving things at the same time for "heroic" version?
In fact, "speed" is the most common complaint about dancing.
There is also "hidden cost" in learning actual group patterns - which can differ quite a bit from "youtube videos" or "forum tactics" in important details. Groups often start to wipe if just group MT leaves because people start to rely on "learned" movement and positioning based on specific person preferences after running with him for a while.
There are also terrain specifics - especially important for Shannox, because there are some highly unpredictable small stone obstacles that can stop your run - or even los your healer. Not a thing that can be easily practiced beforehand since in actual fight you also need to dodge unpredictable trap placements.
Many people go into heroic raids with boss kills in thousands... and still wipe hundreds of times. If analytical part would actually work, it would never happen.
Gevlon, do I get it wrong or are you contradicting?
"We will destroy the dance design by proving that in dance raids farming is counter-productive."
"We will use every available gear outside farming the current tier normal and hard mode bosses. You can craft, you can use PvP, you can buy BoE, get Valor, go LFR, farm the nerfed-to ground FL"
So, we will prove that farming is counter-productive by counter-productive farming (of worse gear than we could get by killing bosses or of farming better gear in sub-optimal way - via VP)
Also: "So we simply recreate Undergeared with a very slight under-gearing: we will only miss items from the current tier farm raids"
1) No, you would not be undergeared for normal modes if you only had gear from last tier.
2) You will not miss gear from current tier farm raids. Because you said you will wear BoE (that drop from trash, which is farm content right off the bat) and also you will wear VP gear and there is 10 pieces for every class in 4.3.
So what is really the point or goal of the project?
I don't think you'll be able to beat heroic modes (well, I shouldn't say that, I should say that I don't think you would have been able to beat the heroic modes that I've experienced without gearing up - I haven't played any Firelands content). But, that being said, I'm really glad that you don't care that people think you can't do it and that you're out to prove us wrong.
Like your blog. And while I agree that PvE is some sort of the dance, you clearly misunderstand 2 things:
1. DPS and HPS are important on some levels of PvE. You say they aren't only because you play on a level where they are indeed irrelevant. Prior nerfs most heroic enrage timers are very challenging, so you cannot defeat them without gear.
2. Everything is a dance, not only PvE. :) Look at your own guides to BGs. Nothing familiar? It's a script. Maybe a bit more complicated than PvE ones, but still a script. Everything is a scripted dance, the only thing that's different is its complexity. So saying PvE is a dance is pretty much meaningless, since there's nothing new in that.
Oh, and one more very common mistake that you also make: PvE is NOT about beating scripts. Thinking that PvE is about killing monsters is like thinking that olympic competitions of bowmen are about killing targets. They are not. They are about showing that you're a better shooter than the other guys, but indirectly, without blood and deaths.
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