Raid tuning

[goris]

Have you ever played on a server that tried to make bosses harder, or tune them to better represent their difficulty on the relative conent? I have. People were already reporting and complaining that not every single ability is used according to their bossmods' timers, so messing with spells' frequency was out of the question. The only other option was increasing the bosses' health pools and/or decreasing players' damage and healing done. So they did that. And while the raids did take longer to clear, most of the people were only pissed off and they hated the damage/healing reduction (and the people who implemented it).

It's one thing to crave failure and frustration (gratz on being a masochist btw) in order to enjoy the game. But it's a bit dangerous to put the realm's staff in the position of being responsible for it.

 

[jmorfeus]

Me, for one, would also love to have all encounters as hard as possible (yes, even MC), because of the original vanilla feeling, and because the real challenge, struggle and the fact that only well coordinated guilds succeed, is the main point of interest for me. I would 100 times rather be frustrated and spend weeks killing Nefarian, than cruising through all raids with no problem.

You all also forget one factor - we don't have the luxury to add new content after guilds clear the top raids. Once it's all cleared by majority, the server is done. Blizzard doesn't have to care about this, because they don't need longevity of one specific patch.

 

[ironervousides]

Me, for one, would also love to have all encounters as hard as possible (yes, even MC), because of the original vanilla feeling, and because the real challenge, struggle and the fact that only well coordinated guilds succeed, is the main point of interest for me. I would 100 times rather be frustrated and spend weeks killing Nefarian, than cruising through all raids with no problem.

You all also forget one factor - we don't have the luxury to add new content after guilds clear the top raids. Once it's all cleared by majority, the server is done. Blizzard doesn't have to care about this, because they don't need longevity of one specific patch.

If you want the original vanilla feeling, lobotomize yourself and your 39 other raiders.

Then it'll be a challenge.

 

[Aieris]

I will repeat myself one last time. BWL is challenging as it is now, i have already raided it and it just is. MC is not challenging and will never be. Bosses here use max 3 mechanics and even trained monkey is able to learn 3 things. I don't understand how incrasing dmg/hp will make it more "well organisation" dependent or more skill dependent. It will just require 40 green/blue people instead of 30 to clear most of the bosses.

Adding abilities and altering skill timers is out of question. If you want it, then go to feenix, where they already done it to some bosses.

 

[Hagson]

So the argument against editing timers of some boss mechanics seem to be that the addons will no longer be 100% accurate. I don't see why this is a bad thing, this would make it even harder and force people to think outside the box.

Eventually someone will make a Kronos-specific fork of the addon and it wont be a factor anymore, but until then we will have to rely on visual signs and such instead of blindly watching a bar tick. This is also more "vanillalike" since bossmods weren't a thing in the very beginning.

 

[Omni]

Trying to artificially increase the difficulty of vanilla raids is a big no-no. We're here for the vanilla experience, and emulating as best we can is the most we can hope for. The minute you begin tinkering, to get back that "it was harder, back when we didn't know anything" factor, then you begin losing what is / was not vanilla. You can not recreate the noob factor in vanilla wow. You can only recreate what was, and was not.

 

[jmorfeus]

If you want the original vanilla feeling, lobotomize yourself and your 39 other raiders.

Then it'll be a challenge.

Yeah, that'd work. Although we could just play with one hand, without buffs or anything. But having "a challenge" is not everything. There is also the social aspect and comparing with others. Being better/faster that other guilds is what drives the raiding.

Adding abilities and altering skill timers is out of question.

Of course. I agree with this.

You mix up "hard" with "gear dependent".

In this context, I thing these are really almost interchangeable. When a boss is more gear dependent, the same group will experience more difficulty defeating him - more efficient mana management, more dps, longer fight=more possibilities for "random" mistake, thus it requires more concentrated and coordinated group. But even if not, already everything in WoW is about "gear dependency", that just is the type of progression in this game. The boss mechanics and tactics aren't so important now(as you don't have to discover them for the first time), it just comes down to gear check and how well can you bring your tactic to practice.
You mix up "mechanically rich/interesting" with "hard". "Hard" = mechanically challenging + gear dependent. But mechanically, bosses across all raids don't vary that much.

MC is not challenging and will never be.

That is really a shame and it is wrong. Nothing should be "not challenging", it's just bad game design and something should be done about it. Original MC was designed with the state/experience of players at that time, with patch features, with available tools etc. in mind.

Any "goal" player should achieve in the game should be:
1) Challenging enough
2) Easy/doable enough
3) Clear/explained enough
4) Rewarding enough

If there is whole raid which is "not challenging" and is just plain grind, it clearly fails and I ask you: Do you really prefer going through a raid without any difficulty and just grind your way through, over earning every step of your progress by skill and perseverance?
Mind you, the faster you progress to the end, the sooner will your meaningful stay at this server end. This server has limited amount of content and progress potential to offer.

ps. Again, if anybody forgot throughout my post, I am against any timer changes/new ability additions(I'm not discussing technical solutions now). I am for keeping all as nice and blizzlike as possible, while maintaining certain level of fun, difficulty and potential for long future life of the project.

pps. TL;DR: Please let it be challenging, we have just relatively few encounters until we climb the progress ladder and finish all content, let us enjoy every step of it.

 

[ironervousides]

If you're against altering boss mechanic fights, how exactly do you make braindead encounters MC through BWL, "challenging".

They aren't challenging. They aren't difficult. They are "does player X have a pulse" tests.

 

[DavidA]

If you're against altering boss mechanic fights, how exactly do you make braindead encounters MC through BWL, "challenging".

They aren't challenging. They aren't difficult. They are "does player X have a pulse" tests.

The reason why the majority of the Vanilla fights were so much more simple was not only because the game was newer, but because you were also dealing with a much larger scale of players inside of a raid, compared to the 10-25 you're dealing with now. It was difficult, just for a different reason. There's a reason why so many players were unable to see high-end raid content like Naxxramas.

 

[Lharts]

The entry level raid should not be harder then it was supposed to for obvious reasons.
I've seen it on other servers when MC was massively overtuned.
Small guilds just fell apart cause they could not holt their geared raid core together.
Players just grabbed what ever gear they could and moved on to a guild with better progression.

A correct MC will help smaller or slower progressing guilds to sustain their raidcore and keeping them competitive.

You are looking for a challege?
Try competing with the other faction for the world bosses that spawn RANDOMLY on Kronos.
Try beeing the first guild to down bosses in BWL.

 

[costy]

Guys you will never have another opportunity to "relive" the exact retail feeling. That is unique. One of a kind. You can only play on an " almost blizzlike" server and remember some things from the past.Nostalgia can kick in but it will never be the same thing. Even if Blizzard releases today a vanilla server some will whine that is not the same.
Just think about it. When MC was on the tide 95% of the total players were still noobs. There were no addons, no tactics guides and many didn't even use ventrilo/TS. Gear and talents were kinda crappy. And that's why MC was hard back then.
And just to compare, if you look at patch 1.6 when BWL was launched on 12th july 2005 there were so many changes in gear, talents, and also skill and knowledge about WOW. On 13th july ( after 24 hours from release) 6 out of 8 bosses in BWL were killed. Not by all the guilds but still.
So bottom line , you can't recreate the same "World of Warcraft" as it used to be back then. It is simply impossible. If i am ever to choose between original content and some tweaked bosses i will go for the blizzlike option. My challange will be lvl to 60, be a part of a nice guild and enjoy what Twinstar will offer to us. Because what happened 10 year ago on retail servers will never happen again. Not in this "dimension".

 

[Chillbill]

good post, costy <3

 

[Vesc]

You are looking for a challege?
Try competing with the other faction for the world bosses that spawn RANDOMLY on Kronos.
Try beeing the first guild to down bosses in BWL.

Ah, right, because putting more effort into your gear progress, regardless of it being a good thing or not, equals racing for server firsts and trying to compete for a decade old content. I see now, thank you.

:trollface:

 

[Breda]

i want to include another thing to Costy's text.

Lag involves in the nostalgia too.

and the "batching" i think thats how its called. where there were delays in combat.

and another thing i want to mention: there was no fully fixed 1.12.1 server yet. im saying this because, experiencing buggy server, made me always think and figure out that there are factors/aspects that prevents having nostalgia or experience from the past. there are little things having big influence that beeing not noticed or ignored from other servers or they simply dont care at all.

and those who really care about classic wow will notice the difference from other servers after playing a while on Kronos. It will be like "seriously, i literaly wasted my time there" (on other servers).

 

[Aieris]

Breda and Costy, i agree with you.

One thing I can add is - The main portion of "Vanilla feeling" is created by the players, not by content. I recall my first days in wow 10 years ago and when I played on K2 with Synced guild, I felt nearly the same like that. Raids were two evenings in the week, but the rest of the week we have been just siting in IF and chatting, or doing BGs or farming or doing other stuff without any point.. and it was fun.

Vanilla is just different game than curent wow and if you play it like curent wow, you will be unsatisfied no matter what challenge devs place before you. Just try to search for the "best vanilla moments" - constant PvP in Hillsbrad, ZG plague in capital cities, x days long AVs.. Those are things created by players, not by blizzard.

 

[DavidA]

Breda and Costy, i agree with you.

One thing I can add is - The main portion of "Vanilla feeling" is created by the players, not by content. I recall my first days in wow 10 years ago and when I played on K2 with Synced guild, I felt nearly the same like that. Raids were two evenings in the week, but the rest of the week we have been just siting in IF and chatting, or doing BGs or farming or doing other stuff without any point.. and it was fun.

Vanilla is just different game than curent wow and if you play it like curent wow, you will be unsatisfied no matter what challenge devs place before you. Just try to search for the "best vanilla moments" - constant PvP in Hillsbrad, ZG plague in capital cities, x days long AVs.. Those are things created by players, not by blizzard.

Second this, along with Costy. The things that really took away from the community were, I think, the introduction to Dungeon Finder, and, later, Raid Finder. While there was most certainly a good reason for this to make the game more accessible to players who didn't have time to search for so long to find a group (especially on low-population servers), it feels like it broke something in the community. No point in making friends when they were on other servers, right? Then, with the introduction of Guild Perks, they took friendly groups of players who just wanted to play together (usually) and turned it into a mass farming of gold, and joining guilds for no other reasons than to gain access to perks.

I'm pretty excited for this server, so I hope that the community will be what Vanilla used to be.

 

[Esso]

We already tried "making bosses harder" on our TBC realm (Ares) and in the end we had to make a statement that is was a complete failure and we reverted all the changes to their blizzlike values. There were people - hardcore raiders - who liked this change, but that's maybe 10%? 5%? of all players. That was the time when we realized that people on forums are the most dedicated and most hardcore players but are in minority and we cannot make changes based on forum topics. So I'm absolutely sure that everything is going to be 1.12.1 blizzlike without any tweaks or custom changes.

 

[jmorfeus]

There were people - hardcore raiders - who liked this change, but that's maybe 10%? 5%? of all players.

This is fair and relevant empirical argument to this discussion. I just thought, there would be more than 5%-10% of hardcore players in the Vanilla scene. I guess I'm wrong then and most of the people just don't see hardcore raiding progression as a main appeal of Vanilla WoW. I do though, the rest is totally subjective (community, nostalgia, etc) and you cannot influence in any way whether I will experience those other things or not by any server settings.

The thing, nobody commented on so far, still is: the Vanilla raiding content is not so rich, you have T1->T3 (MC, BWL, ONY, AQ, NAXX) and if you remove MC from this(make it plain grind, "pulse check"), you effectively removed almost 1/5 of the time players can be spending on this server, thus, reduced the server's life expectancy significantly. And I want to enjoy every bit of available content as much and for as long as possible, while it's available.

What I am suggesting technically, as it seems nobody can distance themselves from it in this discussion, is: don't change timers, don't change/add abilities, I want the experience to be truly blizzlike, as it was, no new arbitrary things. What I would suggest are just thing almost nobody would notice (damage numbers of abilities, bosses' and adds' magic resists, armor and stuff like this). Nothing significant, just make it so that brain-dead people won't be able to clear MC.


But if it's all 100% Blizzlike, that's really freaking awesome too(compared to other servers) and I'd love the server nonetheless. I'm not criticizing, just suggesting

ps. OT: For those who played other expansions, if Vanilla is not the place for hardcore raiding, what is? What do you suggest to me if I wanted the most challenging raid progression? Did it get harder after Vanilla? I always thought otherwise.

 

[Lharts]

You missed ZG and all the world bosses. There are even too many raids in vanilla then a normal guild can handle.
Unlike in the expansions content never loses its relevance.
You always run MC for Tier pieces or weapons.
You always run ZG for enchants
You run every other raid or outdoor encounter cause you got 40 people to gear.

 

[jmorfeus]

You missed ZG

Yeah I only listed 40man raids, true about the world bosses though.

You always run MC for Tier pieces or weapons.

One more reason not to have it too easy

I can't believe most people actually argue that they want one raid to be total walk in a park, easy grind and no challenge at all :sad: Things changed. But easy epics were always tempting I guess :tongue:

Wait for Corecraft and go for TBC. Its pre-nerf raids are considered to be most challenging in wow history.

Thanks!

 

[Omni]

The hardest part about Vanilla raiding was always getting together 40 dudes that showed up consistently, and that they knew how to press a few buttons and scream into ventrilo.

The preparation for raids -- getting people, consumables, attunements, BiS pre-raid gear / enchants, aquals, and the time to dedicate is like 80% of the battle in MC. It's an entry-level raid, the testing grounds for would-be 40 man guilds. Supposed to wean people into the raiding experience. Of course it becomes super easy when people are in T2, but at the entry level it's at least marginally difficult. Magmadar can prove some trouble, and raggy wipes more guilds than you'd think, even if they have decent gear.

Execution becomes more of a factor in BWL onwards. I don't think having an entry-level raid be preparation-intensive but 'meh' execution-wise is a bad thing.

Sure it becomes boring when you're guild is progressing in AQ40 and the DPS is crazy, but I still like the chatter in teamspeak and the guild bonding, and the rush of adrenaline whenever garr or baron is killed for the bindings, or when ragnaros falls and people rush to his corpse to see if the eye dropped. It could be a lot worse, imo.

 

[Lharts]

I can't believe most people actually argue that they want one raid to be total walk in a park, easy grind and no challenge at all :sad: Things changed. But easy epics were always tempting I guess :tongue:

Try twisting arround what others said even more next time.
You never raided MC on Kronos, but I did.

@Omni word up man

 

[jmorfeus]

Try twisting arround what others said even more next time.

Hehe, yes, specifically this part was a small friendly tease from me, I thought the ":tongue:" gave it away. Not meant seriously.

You never raided MC on Kronos, but I did.

You're right(what else can I say to this ). And I have no idea in what state MC is in any private server whatsoever. But there were statements in this topic, that got me seriously worried. As long as it's as Omni said, that

it becomes super easy when people are in T2

and not that it is super easy even in green quest gear, I am not so worried. But you have to understand my concerns.

 

[Lharts]

I do, thats why I try to share my experience with you from K2.
MC was not hard. In the sense of you had to minmax or get the best possible group setup to raid it.
It still made us wipe more often then I would have like.

Properly linked imp packs and spawns made us wipe so many times (inb4 wipe on imp -> noob, ye I thought so too before). Additionally it made rezz running a bane.

The first runs through MC were always challenging and fun. After a few runs it got really easy though. Not cause of the gear you got, but mostly because your raid learned what they were supposed to do.

I understand your concern.
> MC should not be too easy

To which I reply
> Chero won't let that happen anyways. And from my experience its not too easy. Its already harder then retail, but not too hard either


My concern is
> MC gets overtuned and this demoralizes new guilds or can even lead to breakups if they can't manage to properly (in the sense of how it was meant to be) progress through the entry level raid

Answer:
> We had times here were Ragnaros dealt 6k dmg to T2 tanks (+dots and kick ofc). That was rediculous. Tune it reasonable so it counters the better gear and talent trees at least a bit, but make sure you don't overdo it.

 

[jmorfeus]

Great post! Agree with everything that can be agreed with, the rest just made me happy :yes:

Answer:
> We had times here were Ragnaros dealt 6k dmg to T2 tanks (+dots and kick ofc). That was rediculous. Tune it reasonable so it counters the better gear and talent trees at least a bit, but make sure you don't overdo it.

That's what I was suggesting. Tune it as less as possible to provide appropriate(not grind, but <BWL, etc.) level of difficulty. I guess I should've stated that, that not only I don't want to change abilities, but even the dmg etc tuning has to be in some reasonable scale. Of course 6k+ dmg Ragnaros is over the top.