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Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

InD_ImaginE

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Pathfinder: Wrath

Ninjerk

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Had a blast with Classic. Anyone still playing?
I've realized probably the only part about playing Classic that I really enjoyed the hell out of was that first 3-6 months of a server's lifetime. As soon as I have to start farming dungeons and trying to figure out shit to farm for raids, I get disinterested for some reason.
 

anvi

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Yeah but that's what I mean, it sucks that raiding has to be the ultimate. I had more fun doing tough group content in games like this, or pvp, than I ever did on a raid. But I had to force myself to do raids for the uber gear. It wouldn't be so bad if raids were more fun but they are just so goofy to me.
 

anvi

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I wasn't describing how the game is, but my own preference.
Me too mostly, but what I'm hoping to see is some end game sometime that is different to everything. Something more like EVE but in a fantasy world. I love Battlegrounds but they are so 90s.
 

Avarize

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Raiding is so stupid.
Raiding is the only thing that matters. Even in retail arena and m+ only matter as sources of gear for raiding.

It's actually the other way around now, raiding gears you up for m+.
High end m+ is dumb because the difficulty comes entirely from scaling. If the dungeons were as good as Legion's I could still do it, but even there it should have been capped at +25 with speedruns being the meta after that.
 

Avarize

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Can someone explain raiding in detail?
20 players go into a dungeon with several bosses, the group consists of 1-3 tanks (usually 2), 1-5 healers (usually 4), with the rest being melee and ranged damage dealers (ranged preferred). The bosses have several mechanics that the players will have to learn to stay alive while dealing damage and healing unavoidable damage. Your average raid will have ~10 bosses. A good guild will one-shot the first 3-4, take 10-30 tries for the next 3-4, the two penultimate bosses taking 50-200 tries and the last boss taking 200-500 tries. There are exceptions of course but that's how it usually goes.

Kil'jaeden V2 is one of the harder bosses I've killed, here's an overview you can skim through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbf87mPWuA
 

Farewell into the night

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I liked it all. Questing, exploring new areas, leveling professions, dungeons, raiding, world pvp, pvp. Man, I have many nice memories from WoW.
 

Avarize

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A good guild will one-shot the first 3-4, take 10-30 tries for the next 3-4, the two penultimate bosses taking 50-200 tries and the last boss taking 200-500 tries.
Wow, these kind of games are shit indeed.
It's not that bad. A good guild will take a 3-5 weeks to clear a new raid, raiding 3-4 nights a week. The road to a good guild can be a slog though. Of course this is only concerning retail, all classic raids are brain dead easy.
 

Dawkinsfan69

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A good guild will one-shot the first 3-4, take 10-30 tries for the next 3-4, the two penultimate bosses taking 50-200 tries and the last boss taking 200-500 tries.
Wow, these kind of games are shit indeed.

well people who play wow are literally lowest common denominator human(?) beings and for them, not standing in some obviously marked circle of death is a near insurmountable challenge so you constantly end up in situations where half the fucking raid needs to be reminded every pull to move the fuck out of said circle of death and even when reminded each individual in that half of the raid has around 50% failure rate causing a wipe.

then you get "oops xD pull again :)" 200 times until you just get a lucky pull that happens to never put those individuals in line of fire
 

KeighnMcDeath

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Did PWI try to emulate raids. I recall from waay back the first time I got into one of the dungeons and the mobs were so damn unreal I thought the game was broken.

of course the continent was weird and you could swim anywhere, never drown and sun bathe/walk on lava. I literally swam the entire ocean avoiding the high end mobs. Even rested deep in the whirlpool afk for a day.
 

anvi

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Can someone explain raiding in detail?
A good guild will one-shot the first 3-4, take 10-30 tries for the next 3-4, the two penultimate bosses taking 50-200 tries and the last boss taking 200-500 tries.
Wow, these kind of games are shit indeed.

There isn't a kind of game really though, because each game does it their own way. It bothers me how little innovation there is but still, raiding especially is pretty different from game to game.

Raiding in WoW is a lot more of an arcade game version of the process compared to some other games. Ultima Online had a very different type of raid, and I played EverQuest in 1999 which was different to how it is now too. It changed quite a lot in 20+ years, and each game has their own spin too and their own mechanics. That 500 times thing sounds brutal but they do it because they want to. How many times have you played a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat match? If failing 500 times isn't an issue then people can just enjoy doing it until they nail it. I guess. For me it wasn't very long.

My raiding was mostly in EQ which was more like a survival game, so it was more decisive.

EQ didn't even need raid content because it already had some amazing high level dungeons and some of them if you went deep enough, there was raid content in them. Raid content being big scary stuff that would kill even a full group of people, so you need a lot of people. Just the high level dungeons needed a group of 6 people to make progress. And even then it was generally too dangerous to do a dungeon crawl, so players would just do one area.

If you could get to the far back of one dungeon called Solusek, there was a castle full of fire giants that were serious business. They could kill a group in a few seconds. But if you go there with several groups, so like 42 people, you could maybe defeat all the giants and get amazing rewards from it. And then if you could get past all the giants, there was a massive fire dragon called Lord Nagafen. When you attack him he starts breathing fire over everyone and squishy people die instantly. You can avoid it if you know where to hide, etc. Healers focus on keeping the big guys alive. Everyone else stabs and nukes it with all they have and hopefully they win. That is raiding. It was so brutal but with such good rewards, that what tended to happen was 90 people would show up... And the dragon didn't really stand a chance, even against a bunch of idiots. 90 idiots hurt. So in later content the developers did various things to always stay one step ahead of the players with more complex raid design, such as having players choose a faction which basically limits the number of people who will be wanting to kill a particular raid boss, and then some raid bosses would teleport some players to a side room full of killer mushrooms, etc.

Also it is worth mentioning, that EQ was not only doing this complex mind blowing shit in 1999 when most games barely even had a multiplayer mode... and they were dealing with 100 people showing up from all over the world to kill one dragon in one area of the game. (They had to shift server resources to let this work). And the dungeons (or outdoor areas too) were open to anyone. So you might get 90 people together to go and kill a dragon, but in that same area there may be newbies fighting pumas or something.

World of Warcraft was designed by people who played all this and wanted to make their own version. I would say "wanted to improve on it", but I'm not even sure that was true. They improved on some things, but a lot of stuff was much worse. But in WoW they basically made the raid and dungeons an 'instance' which means a loading screen before you load into an area with a dragon or whatever, and they limit how many people can load into that 'instance' of the encounter. They limit it to around 20 but have tried various things. If another 20 people show up then it can just create a copy of that dungeon 'instance' and another 20 people can do the same thing. (EverQuest deliberately resisted doing that until late on.) To people who started in WoW, this is raiding. To people who started in UO or EQ, this is a repulsive Nintendo-ified version of raiding which removes the prestige, excitement, infamy, legends, and raging nerd tears from when guilds deliberately cockblocked each other from even reaching raid content so they could remain the top dog, etc.

I never cared about all this but millions of people do care apparently and the drama and closeness of the old games is sad to be gone. But whether WoW improved it or not, either way raiding in games evolved and is very finely tuned now that can't be zerged. The devs know exactly how much dps will be coming from the players, and how much dps they can survive, etc. So they design encounters to challenge players, and they have fun/contrived stuff like a giant pillar that crumbles and everyone has to run out of the way as well as doing their usual healing job or whatever. And then that evolved into floors that move and all the players have to run in a sequence while also doing their thing. And if you die it doesn't really matter. In EverQuest dying was nasty so it was a different sort of experience.

In Shadowbane raiding was actually firing catapults at a castle, and when you busted the wall down, real players would come charging out to kill you. Other games do different stuff too. I prefer the EQ way but all of it is kinda goofy and time consuming and my point is that it hasn't really ever been redesigned since the 90s. Each new MMO modernises it in some way so it does improve, but it is still basically the same concept of "moar playerz iz fun" and throwing them all at a dragon or something. I would rather they think about other stuff like world conquering, armies holding regions etc. It sort of happens in some games. Eve has a lot to teach the other MMOs. But so does EQ, WoW, Rift, ESO, everything else.
 
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anvi

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90 idiots hurt. So in later content the developers did various things to always stay one step ahead of the players with more complex raid design,
I should say 'the masses' tended to do these big 'zerg' raids where 100 people gank a dragon. Although the downside is that if the dragon has an amazing sword, then there are 100 people who want it.

There were also guilds of people who approached raiding their own way. Some did the zerg approach, but some tried to defeat the raids with a tiny number of people and clever play and tactics instead. They would develop guides and strategies and share it in the private area of their forums to plan attacks on dragons and things that maybe nobody else in the world had ever killed yet. Then they roll up with 18 people and kill it. And there was drama of people falling out and leaving the guild and taking the secrets to other players who then become the top team in the game with their stolen secrets. There were legendary and infamous guilds and stuff in the mmo community. It probably still exists to some extent but back then there was hardly anyone on the internet let alone on the internet and playing games, so these guilds and people seemed kinda 'famous' :P Nowadays there are 100 million people playing MMOs and in guilds and all blabbing about whatever they are doing and it all seems pretty meaningless now. But I still think a good enough game could do something really fun and interesting in the mmo world, but only if something breaks the cycle.
 

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