It has now been a month since we got 5.4 which brought us the Siege of Orgrimmar and the Timeless Isle, so I thought it was a good time to review the patch.
The Timeless Isle has proved to be anything but Timeless, people are now avoiding the place like the plague now they have geared up all their alts, got a gazillion Timeless Coins and nobody wants to kill the Celestials or Ordos unless it is Wednesday (I guess that would mean Tuesday to you folks on the western edge of the Pond) and oddy I think that is because of the lack of dailies.
The rep grind for Emperor Shaohao is amazingly Old Skool vanilla style and to be honest that sucks more than a Dyson. Added to that annoying rep grind is the fact that there is only a mount at exalted really makes the whole grind rather pointless unless you're rep and/or mount obsessed OCD freak like me and even I'm doing it so slowly I don't know if I'll bother until 6.0 and the next level cap when I'll be able to solo AoE farm the mobs there because currently the competition for the few mobs that are there is either nothing to kill or only you there which makes pulling a single mob both tricky and time inefficient. Blizz really dropped the ball on this one.
I'd much rather seen ANY mob on the Timeless Isle give rep and vary the quantity based on the mob so the rare elites, Ordos and Celestials gave a load of rep say 250, normal elites a rep based on their HP say 25 to 100 and non-elites a tiny bit say 10 rep, give rep from ALL quests (and special events) and finally give us the option of handing in Timeless Coins for rep, this gives players choice on how to gain the rep and will also get rep while going about their business on the Timeless Isle.
On the raiding front, Heroic Garrosh has died already, many guilds are blitzing through normal modes still and there is a lot of bitching about Flex Raids and LFR. It saddens me a little that the mystery and excitement of the race to world first is over so fast. I remember progression in Naxx being a weekly thing rather than daily and I'm convinced that the reason stuff dies so fast is because the top guilds spend so much time testing raids oin the PTR. While I agree that this testing is needed to avoid the bugfests that existed in Vanilla it does spoil the game and I'd love to see the heroic bosses remaining untested on the PTR.
Normal raiding for the majority of guilds is progressing much faster than I expected too which is currently another worry. I'm still convinced we're destined to be raiding Orgrimmar for at least 9 months and that is if Blizzard annnounce the beta launching in the few weeks after BlizzCon 2013 and if that is true my guild (currently 9/14) are likely to have cleared heroic Siege and with all respect to the guys and girls I raid with we're not that good and would make it a snoozefest like Dragon Soul and Icecrown Citadel before it which were great raids spoiled by their difficulty and the time we spent in them.
However, the biggest drama is the Flex LFR debate. LFR is really awful right now and stories of 6 hour wing runs are all over the forums. Which is crazy and many people are whining that LFR is too hard while others are citing that a lack of normal raiders in LFR is occurring because they run Flex instead of LFR. I have experienced great one great LFR run (on a Wednesday) and attrociuos LFR runs (at the weekend). The difference in each was the presence of highly geared raiders. In the weekend runs there were a number of DPS doing less than 30k DPS and healers that were being out healed by enhancement shaman and shadow priests both of which is awful regardless of gear level. This really shows that a small number of people simply log in to LFR and then do as little as possible or worse actively try to hinder the group.
The best example of the deliberate acts to hinder groups is to be found on General Nazgrim, By repeatedly beating on him during defensive stance, you can, even on LFR, wipe the raid. There is no way to prevent this without kicking the offender who can simply do the same to the next group which doesn't fix the problem, just moves it to the next unfortunate group.
I'm unlikely to run LFR much, even on alts, this patch as once I have gained an ilevel of over 510 I'll simply join a flex raid where I can be among competent people who want to earn theior progression and loot rather than, dare I say, lazy scrubs who simply want to be carried through content to get their loot. The game has been plagued for too long by "entitled casuals" and I think Blizzard have given the truly dedicated people (hardcore and casual alike) a way to avoid having their playtime impaired by the idiots.
I'm not hoping to have offended anyone with the last paragraph but I'm sure there are people out there that will see this as an "elitist prick" statement and my response to that is that I'm not a bad guy. I'll gladly help anyone in this game and will give everyone a 2nd chance. But for every 9 genuine folk out there that want to play the game and help benefit the other 24 people in their LFR group there is always that 1 person that wants to get their kicks from wasting the time of everyone else in their group and those people simply don't deserve a 2nd chance as they'll only spit it back at you. As the proverb goes, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".
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"we're not that good".. .not sure what you mean by that remark Ian. I think, given the amount of time we spend raiding each week and the amount of disruption we've had (particularly with our healers) so far we've made pretty decent progression. For our guild to be in the top 30, let alone the top 20, on the server is pretty remarkable for a guild like ours if you ask me.
ReplyDeleteWe may not be clearing HC yet but that's not solely down to ability it's got a lot to do with the fact we didn't spend 20-30 hour clearing the raid instance in the first week and then the same every week progressing on HC modes.
As for the potentiality of Elitist prickness in anything you've said I think anyone that reads your blog is probably in the group of "better players" and agree with what you say. I've had all sorts of stupid things said to me in 5-mans, including a DPS DK barely managing to put out 20k DPS accusing me of buying my account on ebay cos I wasn't pulling the entire instance. Bit my tongue responding but the crap DPS of the group was a major reason for limited pulling of trash (only a couple of times was I, as tank, not top DPS). My attitude has become to either ignore these morons or, if they're being super stupid when I am healing I either let them die or just leave the group. These people really are a major reason I am struggling to bring myself to RF - having tried it once and had a number of major fuckups on Norushen makes it even harder since the following fights only get more and more difficult and less likely to work on RF given they are "execution-based" fights more than "just avoid shit and kill shit and you'll be ok" fights
When I say that "we're not that good", I mean that we're not the heroic raider type of guild. As for disruption with healers we've a top notch group of healers and with 4 classes available we're inccfredibly resilient to switching the team around as all have their strengths in different situations.
DeleteYes, for a 6 hour a week guild we're doing well, heck we're out performing other guilds that raid longer each night and raid 3 or 4nights a week so we're no fools.
It is clear to me that the majority of the "good raiders" are moving to Flex and interestingly Blizz are heavily nerfing the LFR encounters already by removing huge amounts of HP from adds and/or bosses.