He gets a lot of hate, but I love Ghostcrawler. It's a tough thing to be the lead systems designer of a game that people play with such passion as WoW. Any time I find myself upset with something he or his team have changed, I remember that before them, the guys in charge didn't even want every spec to be playable. Ret Paladins? Balance Druids? The actual, real philosophy of the designers in the days before GC was that people should just learn to shut up and re-roll a Rogue if they wanted to be melee dps. (Disclaimer: ok, it wasn't quite like that during BC, but still pretty darned close.)
Anyway, the guy (and his team - we should emphasize that he's in charge, but not the only one there) has done great things for the game, but not everything has been perfect and flawless. (Cough, Vengeance, cough.)
Anyway, it was nice to see Ghostcrawler do a little post-mortem (mid-mortem?) analysis of what they should have done differently in Mists.
The first point, about the Golden Lotus gating, was a fairly simple one. Golden Lotus was probably the longest daily grind (KTO/SO might be the same) but was required in order to even start on August Celestials or Shado-Pan. I totally understand the logic behind gating - make sure that people don't feel they have to grind every faction at once. I wonder, however, if GL had been as it was first described - or, more accurately, as I understood it when it was first described - where a different part of the Vale would be under attack each day and we'd get a standard 5-6 dailies in that area and that would be it per day, if the gating would have been less painful.
Still, the real point was that double-gating (needing to get rep to get rep to get what you want) is kind of a pain in the ass. And it doesn't make things feel "optional."
The second point is the number of difficulty options, and how those options are too few.
My thoughts on this might be skewed by the disintegration of the raiding contingent within my guild, but the common criticism of raiding in Mists is that Normal Mode is too hard. Frankly, I have nothing against Heroic raiding being just as ball-crushingly difficult as Sunwell Plateau or Naxxramas-40. If you want to go in for that, that's you thing. But it seems to me that if you're a normal-mode raider, there's no better model for difficulty than Icecrown Citadel in terms of difficulty. The place wasn't easy, exactly, (Naxxramas 10/25 would probably fit that description,) but a dedicated group would eventually clear the place, or at least be able to progress through about half of it.
Right now, the Normal-Mode raids seems to have such high damage and dps requirements that fairly few people are completing it.
The super-easy solution I see is that the LFR difficulty should become an option for those who are not using LFR. Sure, you'd have to scale some of those fights down to 10-man-size, but it would mean that those who hate LFR but don't have a raiding team that can handle normal modes would be able to run that place in a guild group. The gear would be the same as LFR, but you could run it like an actual raid, with your guild's loot system and the joy of not having a bunch of douches who want to kick the tank every time anything whatsoever goes wrong.
Likewise, with "heroic dungeon" coming to simply mean "level cap dungeon," we've effectively lost a difficulty of 5-man content. Challenge Modes don't give anything new, loot-wise. But we'll address that later.
The third comment talks about "direction." I actually don't think this was such a failure. It's pretty clear that when you hit the level cap you can start running heroics or dailies, and the clear direction is to gear up there and then get into LFR (or real raids.)
However, the side comment there is that Ghostcrawler admits he wishes that they could add more 5-man dungeons.
I couldn't agree more.
It's not that I dislike LFR. Frankly, it's awesome to be able to take alts into raids who would never be able to come in a guild group, and to see raid content that my guild might never get up to. But I also think that sometimes, a 5-man is just more fun. Tanking a 5-man makes you feel far more in control of a situation, and every person there knows that they are providing a serious contribution to what's going on.
There are only two strikes against 5-mans as continuous content. One is that it's difficult to produce, and takes resources away from raid design. That's totally fair, but at the same time, Blizzard is always talking about how they're expanding their team. My hope is that they can divide the PvE instance team (or whatever it's called) into dungeons and raids, so that there's always raid content being developed and always 5-man content being developed. Sure, you'd need someone to coordinate the two (for one thing, you don't want two fights that are pretty much the same) but if you throw more bodies into the mix, which they say they are doing, there's no reason I can think of that we can't just get big, ToT-sized raids on top of new 5-man content. (Hell, the best content in 4.3, other than the artwork on Vagaries of Time and the Time Lord mage tier set was End Time and Well of Eternity.)
The other strike against 5-mans is the trickiness of gearing. In 3.2, 3.3, and 4.3, the new dungeons brought gear that was equivalent to the previous raiding tier. Blizzard was upset that this allowed people to skip the raids. Here's my counterpoint: With LFR, anyone who wants to see the raids will see them. Sure, you might only run through a thing once, but it's always there for you to check it out.
Blizzard wants us to have options, so give us options. You can either run the new 5-man dungeons in order to gear up for the new LFR raid, or you can run the previous tier of LFR.
So, using a hypothetical alternate-universe Mists, 5.2 would have brought in a couple dungeons with 483 iLevel gear - so that you can either run Heart of Fear/Terrace of Endless Spring in order to gear up for Throne of Thunder, or you can run the new dungeons. When 5.4 comes out, you'd get new dungeons with iLevel 502 gear, allowing you to either run ToT or the new dungeons.
You could maintain the requirement of beating each raid segment to get to the next one if you really want to make sure that anyone who steps into Siege of Orgrimmar has at least seen what the older raids look like.
Hell, you could even revitalize Justice Points by letting you purchase items corresponding to the dungeon-level loot. Not quite Shado-Pan Assault-quality gear, but enough to protect against lousy loot drops in those dungeons.
Personally, even if there were 5-man dungeons to gear up, I'd still hit up Raid Finder regularly - to get tier sets, and to have the fun of taking down those massive bosses.
This is getting to be a fairly long and out-of-control article, but let me leave with this one final thought:
One of the biggest problems in Mists is that the gating makes life hard on alts. Grand Commendations were a great help (especially since new alts will get to Honored with SP and Revered with Klaxxi just by questing in the high 80s) but I think the biggest problem is the way that Blizzard thinks players use alts. The philosophy seems to be that they think people only run alts because they've run out of things to do on their mains.
For us, the altoholics, this is far from the truth. We roll alts because we want to see things from a different perspective. For example, I adore the Worgen. They are my favorite race (though Draenei take a close second,) but Paladins can't be Worgen, and even if they could, I'm too invested in my character to get a race change (though since Worgen are technically also humans, I might bend that rule. It would just be weird for a guy born in Stormwind to have a Gilnean accent.)
This is a role-playing game, and even if I don't hold in-world events or even talk to fellow players in-character, I still feel a great sense of connection with the world by seeing it through different eyes. A fun-loving alcoholic Panda-man doesn't feel the same furious rage at the Horde that a 25,000-year-old undead alien whose daughter was murdered by Orcs does.
And even beyond the roleplaying aspect, there's the mechanical aspect. I love tanking. But I also like to do melee dps. I also like to do ranged dps. I like to play classes that have fast-paced, proc-based rotations, but I also like to play classes with a lot of little things that you have to keep track of and maintain (ok, less so. But I do like Demonology Warlocks.)
Anyway, there might be some people who roll alts because they're bored, but I imagine the vast majority of people just want a chance to see other facets of the game. Don't punish those people.
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