Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Paths of Progression and 5.2's Lack of 5-man Dungeons

Today it was announced (or perhaps just confirmed) that when 5.2 comes out, the 5.0 Raid Finder raids will have an increased drop rate, to help people catch up in gearing.

Throne of Thunder, believe it or not, will actually be the first raid to be added to an expansion before additional 5-man dungeons since Ulduar. Trial of the Crusader brought Trial of the Champion, Icecrown Citadel brought the Frozen Halls dungeons, While the raid and dungeons were not related, Firelands came after 4.1's addition of the revamped Zul dungeons. Dragon Soul came along with the Hour of Twilight dungeons.

While there are some who prefer to raid and only raid, or some who PvP, or even some small few who really do like to play the game solo and just stick to dailies, I would argue that 5-man dungeons are the very backbone of World of Warcraft. One plays through them while leveling up, and it is the smallest group in which the three player roles are relevant.

With the introduction of the raid finder, Blizzard let it be known that they were very happy with the idea that Raids would become the core PvE progression method. Of course, it had already been so for those in raiding guilds, but with the relative ease of Raid Finder, players of all stripes would now be able to see all the biggest, most epic content Blizzard puts together.

Now, I love the Raid Finder (even if you often get crappy groups.) I would probably still have never seen Madness of Deathwing if it weren't for LFR (I still have not seen Firelands' Ragnaros fight, or really any fights there other than Shannox, Beth'tilac, or Alysrazor.) As my guild's raiding core has dissipated since Wrath, Raid Finder is a great way for me to see the content when it's fresh, rather than having to wait to the end of the expansion before I get through the first tier of raiding.

That said, I also really like running heroics. Nowhere do you feel more in control as a tank than when you are tanking a 5-man (in the days of Vengeance - have I mentioned my dislike of Vengeance? - the first tank in usually will hold entire trash mobs until they are dead while the next tank will desperately try to get aggro on a single target.)

Blizzard's frustration with the late-expansion 5-mans was primarily based on the idea that one could "skip over" content rather than playing through it. Most notoriously (though I think this was really more because of the raid than the dungeon,) many were able to gear up to Trial of the Crusader entry-level gear without doing Ulduar, a sin that Blizzard is loathe to repeat.

Heroics can be run once a day, rather than once a week, so if given a handful of 5-mans versus the previous raid tier, and the two shared iLevel, most players would focus on running those dungeons for their gear. A lucky player can get a full set of previous-raid-tier-quality gear in only a few days.

So, of course, this sparks the problem of "too much to do" versus "too little to do." Some will resent the "need" to run these heroics every day to make sure they're gearing up, or feel that they've missed out on the previous raid because they outgear it so easily, thus shrinking the game in their eyes.

Yet I would argue that the lack of dungeons is worse. While I really like that the LFR loot system prevents loot drama in a giant PUG, the fact that you only have (as of tier 14) 16 bosses to kill per week (versus, for example, a max of 56 per week if we use 3.3's Frozen Halls as an example) means that, regardless of the percentage chance of getting a drop in LFR, it is such a small sample size that you'll get some wide fluctuations in actual drop rates.

I've often thought that I'd like a system that emphasized currencies - providing a little more predictability, without losing the randomization of a loot table. In Cataclysm, my Enhancement Shaman was my Horde main, and I went through most of the expansion without replacing my 346 blue weapons in both hands. In fact, it was not until I got to Deathwing himself that I finally replaced the fist weapon from Ozruk and the Justice Point (as in, always was a JP piece) off-hand axe.

Dungeons are also a lot easier to fit into one's schedule. Setting aside queue times (for DPS, this expansion, I've found queues for RF and DF fairly comparable, for Tanks, RF can take an hour while DF is usually less than a minute,) a raid finder run typically takes considerably more time. A raid boss, after all, can take up to ten minutes, and while wipes are meant to be somewhat infrequent in RF, they certainly still occur. The point is, you need to set aside a very large chunk of time, usually over an hour, to run the raids, and if you are expecting to maximize your chance at gear, you have to set aside (at least this tier) 5 such chunks per week.

Dungeons are much more flexible - Mists dungeons rarely take more than a half-hour. Even if you might spend the same or more time in those dungeons in a week, each individual run is easier to squeeze in.

But let's set aside gear. I know that the game doesn't really work if we can all gear up instantly, and it's fine that there are some speed bumps to keep us running things. They haven't really been able to come up with a way to keep us from gearing up too fast through 5-mans, but I don't think that's a very good excuse to not have the 5-mans in the first place.

The Frozen Halls were a brilliant series of dungeons, letting us see different parts of the Scourge infrastructure as well as serving as a great lore introduction to Icecrown Citadel. Also, one cannot forget the sense of panic one felt as the Lich King slowly marched toward you, sending wave after wave of Undead to kill you before you could escape, and then the awesome Big Damn Gunship moment when the Skybreaker/Orgrim's Hammer came to rescue you. Likewise, seeing a Bad Future in the post-apocalyptic Dragonblight or witnessing how Illidan kind of saved the world were both great experiences that wouldn't have really fit into the Dragon Soul raid itself.

New 5-mans can be a great infusion of lifeblood into the game, so I'm sad we won't be getting any in 5.2.

So what's the answer? You could adjust the iLevels of the new dungeons so that the previous tier's raid finder is still attractive, but that would discourage those who had kept up with the tier from wanting to go in there.

What I think this goes back to is the question of what the Raid Finder is there for. As a method for people to see the raid regardless of their guild status, I think you couldn't expect any more from it - it does a great job at that. As a primary form of progression, though... I don't know about that.

The key is options. If someone wants to see the raids, they have a great way to do so. But if they decide, for example, that they don't really like Mogu'shan Vaults, I don't think it's a terrible idea to give them some alternate method to move on through the content. If you were desperate to make sure they at least saw the place once, you could make it a prerequisite to beat it before you could try the other raids.

Oh, right. That's already the case.

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