raiding
Latest
Would you bring back "boss must die!" quests?
Once upon a time it was common for there to exist daily (for dungeons) or weekly (for raids) boss-kill quests in WoW; think Archmage Lan'dalock during Wrath of the Lich King. User Frozenclaw, over on the EU forums, is wondering just what happened to those types of quests? Why don't we see any in Mists of Pandaria? It would be a great way to drive players to some of the lower-tier raids (such as Heart of Fear or Terrace of Endless Spring) these days, as well as a way to gain some reward for being willing to step into old content. I think this would be a great idea! I still regularly hit up some of the initial MoP raids for valor and the like, but sometimes the queue times are, uh, depressing. The addition of an extra reward for killing certain bosses might help drive people into these older raids--great if you're trying to gear an alt in LFR, for example--and give them something nice for doing so. Would you like to see the return of these types of quests? Would you run them if they did come back? What kind of rewards would you like to see out of them?
Potentials and pitfalls of Warlords of Draenor's proposed gearing system
Not long ago Blizzard posted a long and detailed post about the gearing system that they are planning on implementing in Warlords of Draenor. Many aspects of it represent significant departures from what we're currently familiar with, particularly the ability of primary stats to morph with class and spec, the removal of spirit from all but non-armor pieces, and the addition of the randomized tertiary stat system (along with chances for sockets and a higher ilevel). As a result, there has been a lot of discussion, speculation, and debate about how the new system will work, and ways in which it may or may not be an improvement over the status quo. I personally am excited for the new gearing system, and I'm eager to see how it will work out. I think there's a great deal of potential in it. While we can probably envision endless possibilities as to how the new system will affect gameplay, two major aspects of the change jump out at me in particular: It's extremely friendly to hybrids It's extremely unfriendly to min-max optimization The latter refers to the fact that whether the gear has a socket, a tertiary stat, or a higher ilevel is determined by chance and there is no guarantee that a given piece of gear will have any of those things. I think there are both good and bad sides to be had here, so let's look at them in a bit more depth.
Aura Kingdom reveals guild towns, endgame
Aeria Games is sharing more information about Aura Kingdom's endgame as the fantasy free-to-play game inches closer to its Founders beta that starts on Monday, December 16th. High-level players who enjoy PvP can queue up for two different 5v5 experiences, either a battle to the death (available any time of day) or a capture point mode that utilizes vastly different terrain (available only at certain times). PvE-wise, players who want to collect the best battle companions, called Eidolons, will need to group up and raid the bosses in the high-level dungeons to collect rare key fragments. Additionally, guilds that level to a high enough rank can create their own towns that guild members can visit. Guild towns will spawn unique Eidolons that guild members must group up to defeat. Once defeated, those Eidolons can drop key fragments that, when combined, will allow players to summon that companion as his own. [Source: Aeria Games press release]
Officers' Quarters: 20-man misconceptions
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Several weeks ago I wrote an article about how Blizzard could help guilds make the transition from 10-man heroic to 20-man mythic raiding. The comments on that article were eye-opening to me. In the interest of promoting dialogue about the new raiding system and supporting the guild officers who will make it work, I'd like to clear up some misconceptions. Who deserves extra rewards? Many commenters expressed the opinion that hard mode raiding and the best loot in the game are reward enough. No extra rewards are required. For your average heroic raider, that is certainly true. But your average heroic raider doesn't have to do much outside of raid times, and then it's mostly just a matter of showing up prepared. The people who deserve the big incentives are not the average raiders.
Warlords of Draenor: Blizzard's Group Finder will allow leaders to filter applicants
Blizzard Community Manager Lore has been all over the forums talking about how Blizzard will build their cross-realm group finder. The latest update for the would-be cross-realm raider, world boss killer or PvPer is as follows: Lore Quote: But with OQ you can put restrictions, view how well they've done before, and how well they're liked with the public. Openraid had a reputation how well people liked your raids and gave you upvotes. Is there any way they will add something like that to help people avoid groups lead by bad players, mean leaders or elitist jerks? We do want to provide some options for group leaders to put some restrictions for who can and can't request to join their group. We don't want to do it in a way that encourages people to be too heavy-handed, but we also want to make the system easy and intuitive to use, and feel it's better for everyone if the system lets leaders be upfront about who they're willing to bring along. Basically, we want to avoid a situation where you can be invited to a group and then immediately be kicked when the leader inspects your gear and finds you're 10 item levels lower than he or she is looking for (and then have to repeat that process until you eventually either find a group that will bring you or give up entirely). We'd rather do our best to make sure you only see groups that you've actually got a shot at running with :) source
Officers' Quarters: How Blizzard can help guilds adjust to 20-man mythic raids
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. A week has passed since BlizzCon, but the arguments over mythic raiding's single 20-man size have not abated. BlizzCon has always included controversial announcements, and it seems that the raiding changes were destined to become the big one among 2013's batch. It's easy to understand why. For current 25-man Heroic guilds, they have to choose between cutting five players from the team or making a bunch of people sit on the sidelines. It's not nearly as bad as the 40-man to 25-man transition, but it still stings. Heroic 10-man guilds, however, will have it much worse if this change goes live (and it very much seems like it will). It's too early to make sweeping changes to your roster, but rest assured in the future I will cover different strategies for making that transition. For now, I'd like to talk about what officers and raiders should ask Blizzard to do to help us adjust. Now that this decision has been made, however, Blizzard should not stand idle in this process. They can make this transition easier on guids.
Officers' Quarters: Officers of Draenor
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. BlizzCon 2013 gave us a glimpse into WoW's future. As officers, it's never too early to plan and adjust for the evolution of the game. Let's take a look at the some of the issues that could affect your guild next year. No new perks It appears that guilds will remain capped at level 25, which also means no new perks. In the systems panel, Blizzard said that they don't see the point of piling on perks. They said, "The system accomplished what we wanted it to accomplish." That's good news, in a way, for smaller guilds or people who plan to start new guilds in the future. For those of us who hoped for more, it's a bit disappointing.
Major raid changes coming in Warlords of Draenor
During the World of Warcraft - What's Next? panel, Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas unveiled the way raiding will be unveiled going forward. As you can see above, the term flexible raid is no longer used to describe a difficulty setting, and the flexible raid scaling system has been more widely implemented. Here's how it will basically work: First up, the raid finder (LFR) will still aim for a fixed group size of 25 players. However, if you're in an LFR group and players drop before the next boss, that boss will scale to the size of the current group - as an example, if a raid of 25 players is fighting Paragons, then four players drop on the way to Garrosh, Mr. Hellscream (if you're nasty) will scale down to a 21 player size. What we now call the Flexible difficulty will become Normal in patch 6.0 - it will scale just as it does now. What we now call Normal difficulty (10 and 25 man) will scale flexibly and will be called Heroic difficulty. It will scale just as normal does. Finally, Ion pointed out that scaling the most challenging encounters in terms of design requires a fixed raid size, and so, they've chosen that size to be 20 players. This difficulty, analogous to what we now call Heroic will be called Mythic difficulty. I find it interesting that they chose to lock the most difficult raiding at a 20 player cap - I've always felt that we should have gone 10/20 at Burning Crusade's launch instead of 10/25, but I wonder why they didn't do a 10/20 split on Mythic for the dedicated 10 man guilds. I didn't expect that, but otherwise, I totally called it and I'm definitely excited. (I know for my guild, 20 man Mythic will be a lot easier to adjust to, but for dedicated 10's it won't be as easy a transition.) Also, please forgive me a moment of smuggery, but I called it.
Officers' Quarters: Creating a casual raid team
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. This week, a former officer gets sucked back into a leadership role in a new guild. After a bad experience with her previous raid team, she's debating whether or not to bring casual raiding to her new home. Good morning Scott: Early this year, I wrote to you about a problem I was having with a fellow healer in my casual raid group. Since writing to you, and receiving your awesomely helpful answer, I tried to work with the guild. I worked with the troubled healer to get their overhealing numbers down, educated and trained the raid leader, trained replacements, and finally stepped down - both from healing and from being an officer. I just couldn't find happiness there. But I was happy with my decision. In late 5.3, ready to progress towards something new, I found a new server and faction changed my characters. At a friends request, I parked myself in a new guild to help level it up. Said friend accidentally mentioned my previous officer and raid experience and the guild leader promptly bumped me to an officer position... and has been asking me to start and lead their (very casual) raid team.
OpenRaid adds new features
For those who haven't tried it yet, OpenRaid lets you create and join cross-realm raids for everything from achievement runs to Siege of Orgrimmar flexible raids. It serves the same purpose as the oQueue addon, but with the added option of scheduling events ahead of time. I've joined quite a few flex raid groups through the site and have had success in most of them, including some Garrosh kills. OpenRaid has just launched version 2.2, adding some nice features to an already great site. The biggest feature is the new "Quick Raid" tab which lets you see raids happening at this very moment who still need more players. Previously, this type of group forming was done in the chat room, which could get a little hairy when you had thousands of people spamming the groups they're looking for. Chat is still there for those who prefer it. Quick Raids work much like existing OpenRaid events except they aren't planned ahead of time. Event creators will see a new option for repeatable events, which can automatically invite the same people if you want to do the raid again. Head over to the OpenRaid site to see the rest of the new features.
Officers' Quarters: Tanksplosion
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. A good tank is a precious resource to a raid team. Few players want the responsibility and the pressure. Those who not only want it, but thrive in it, are rare indeed. This week's email asks, what do you do as a guild leader when your tank goes off the deep end? Hello Scott. Im a long time reader and I have implemented a lot of your suggestions in my own guild and it has helped sort out many of the issues, but I once again find my self at a crossroad and I have many doubts on which road to pick. In many of your blogs, you talk about the behaviour of one member within a guild, that is having a very negative effect on the guild as a whole, and Im sorry to say, that my problem concerns one such individual. [...] This guy is our guilds main tank, and he does suffer from the old: "I'm a tank, so therefor I AM GOD!" complex, but we can deal with that, since it has been contained to his tanking and not spread to the rest of the guild. That was untill a few months ago, when things suddently took a turn for the worse.
Pathfinder Online dev blog explores outpost raiding
Goblinworks celebrated its third major Pathfinder Online milestone with a detailed blog centered on the game's PvP raiding system. While the company was careful to note that raids are still in deep development and may change in scope and design, the blog dives into the rewards and risks of raiding along with the consequences to other players. Raids are short, small skirmishes initiated against player outposts. Since every outpost produces goods, there is always something worth stealing at any given outpost. To challenge an outpost, raiders must kill NPC guards in addition to any defending players. Raiders can stock up on an outpost's goods after its defenders have been bested. According to Goblinworks, NPC guards for outposts are "few and far between." Stealing items from outposts disrupts supply chains to local settlements. If raiders hold an outpost for over 10 minutes, they can then strip mine it. Strip mining increases the output of goods but deals damage to the outpost until it is destroyed. You can read more about raiding, strip mining, and how each affects your hostility rating over on the official post.
Is your guild bank going dry?
I raid with an extremely generous 25-man raiding guild that is chugging along quite nicely through the Siege of Orgrimmar. They are kind enough to provide not only guild repairs, but potions, flasks, and feasts -- now noodle carts -- as well. The guild is pretty good about keeping everything managed, and raiders do a pretty good job about keeping the guild bank filled with materials for all the stuff that the guild supplies on a typical guild run. But we've had a problem recently that picked up in patch 5.4. Someone mentioned that the guild bank wasn't making quite as much gold as it used to, and player repairs are bleeding the guild bank of gold almost faster than it can be put in. This seemed odd to me at the time, but I re-doubled my efforts to continue sticking herbs, gems, and whatever other useful items I came across into the guild bank, figuring it would all balance itself out. It turns out, however, that we aren't alone with our weird little problem.
Flexible raiding's magic numbers
Blizzard Community Manager Bashiok has blue-tagged an interesting discussion on the US forums today, asking for more feedback on Flexible raiding's numerical breakpoints. Bashiok Right now there are some assumptions being made about mechanical breakpoints in Flex, but there are also some valid concerns. The orbs on Norushen for example may need tweaking. What would be super helpful is if people have examples of breakpoints they think limit them to having a certain number of people, and what those are. It's in everyone's best interests to be able to invite whoever they want, and not feel like they're limited to some number because of mechanic scaling. source The forum thread in questions certainly brings up some valid concerns. Bashiok mentions the Norushen orbs, where going over a breakpoint by just one player can provide a substantial DPS or healing boost for a boss which can prove a tight DPS requirement for some groups. The Sha of Pride's prisons are another one which seems reasonable -- over a certain number and you'll get three prisons as opposed to two, so it'd be easier for some groups to just not bring that one player who tips the balance. What's more, on AoE mechanic-heavy fights like Dark Shaman, simply having more people standing in bad is a problem, if they're not able to put out the DPS, or are failing at mechanics. Crawler Mines on Iron Juggernaut could well be another problem, as could Malkorok's swirls and Matter Scramble in Spoils.
How do we define 'melee friendly'?
This week, we got a special treat - Blizzard released a video with Encounter Developer Ion Hazzikostas (who is seriously my secret crush over at Blizz - my trapper keeper is full of little hearts drawn around his name), Production Director J. Allen Brack and Game Director Tom Chilton (they're dreamy too, but Ion's my fave) and it's got a cornucopia of interesting information in it for you all. However, one line of the interview, summed up by our Adam Koebel, caught my eye immediately. They realize raids need to be more melee friendly in the future and they are working on it, but they feel that Siege of Orgrimmar is one of the most melee friendly raids in recent memory. When I first saw this line, I chuckled bitterly to myself. Siege is melee friendly? This got me to wondering how we define melee friendly. Is it just the ability for melee players to contribute solid DPS? Because by that standard, Siege has some good fights for melee - the Fallen Protectors, Sha of Pride, Galakras and even Spoils of Pandaria are certainly fights where melee DPS can contribute a good deal of positive damage to an encounter. Phase 1 Garrosh is a place where melee with good cleave potential absolutely shines. So by that standard, a case could absolutely be made that Siege is melee friendly. Now, in terms of melee staying alive without making the healers hate every single one of them that the raid brings to the party? Siege of Orgrimmar continues in a grand tradition of blowing up the melee. By that standard, SoO is absolutely not melee friendly.
Encrypted Text: Combat and Subtlety under Siege
Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe. When we last left our devious, poison-festooned heroes, they were assassinating the heck out of every raid boss in sight, much as they have been this entire expansion. Assassination has been the spec of choice for raiders of all stripes in Mists -- but might Patch 5.4 change the balance? The answer may depend as much on you as on the gifts that WoW's designers wrapped up and handed us for the new patch. Combat and subtlety both are looking like perfectly good options in almost every situation. Unless you're with a group that is seriously trying to squeeze every last drop of damage out of its DPSers, and you're already playing your spec perfectly, your main criteria for which spec to use should rely on 1) whether you enjoy it and 2) whether you've got the right gear for it.
Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR's Dread War, part 2
This past week, I finished up exploring all aspects of the new Star Wars: The Old Republic patch save for the final showdown between my guild and the Dread Council. If you have been following my livestreams, then you'll know that we should finish that up on Wednesday. In this column, I've covered everything from the history of how the Dread Masters arrived at this point to the first offensive on the moon of Oricon to the first phase of the attack on the Dread Masters' fortress. Overall, it's been exciting. BioWare concluded this chapter in SWTOR history with as much flare as it started it two years ago. In the final confrontation between the player and the Dread Masters, we understand more about the characters of the Dread Masters and their motivation to conquer the known galaxy. We've already confronted Dread Master Styrak in the Scum and Villainy operation and Dread Master Brontes in the Dread Fortress operation from last week. Dread Masters Bestia, Tyrans, Calphayus, and Raptus remain. And that's who we will study this week.
Officers' Quarters: A sleepy guild leader
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Scheduling raids at a time that's convenient for everyone on your team is one of the toughest parts of raiding. No matter whether you're flexing or taking down Heroic Garrosh, it's an obstacle that every raiding guild has to overcome. But what can you do as the guild leader when you can no longer attend your own guild's raids? Hello Scott, I don't know if you've heard THIS one yet! Short and sweet. Normally, when players and raid times don't fit, the players just go find another guild with raid times that do fit. No hard feelings and I wish them luck. But, what is a Guild Leader of a dedicated raiding guild to do when the raid times no longer fit my schedule?
Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR's Dread War, part 1
When I freed the Dread Masters on the prison world of Belsavis, little did I know that a year and a half after the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I would not only be fighting against these amazing foes but trying to destroy them. As I mentioned the last couple of weeks, the Empire and the Republic found the secret base of the Dread Masters on the planet Oricon, where they have been hiding and experimenting on the local fauna while amassing their subjugated army. Eventually, a strike team will have to invade the Dread Master's fortress, and in the two new operations of Update 2.4: The Dread War, you will get to do just that. Although I'm still not sure where this falls on the fun scale when compared to other SWTOR operations, I can tell you that it is challenging and exciting. I'll break it down for you, and if you hadn't guessed already, there will be spoilers. That said, I will limit the story-related ones.
We interviewed SOE about today's EQII Heroic Characters patch
By now you have probably heard that EverQuest II is launching a little thing called Heroic Characters today; after all, this little thing is kind of a big deal. How often do players get the chance to jump in and experience a game as a permanent high-level character instead of just being teased with one during a brief tutorial? And for two weeks this possibility is completely free to each and every person, be they new players or veterans. Whether you are eagerly awaiting your chance to jump (back) into Norrath and see what things are like in the newest story arcs or you're eyeing the sudden influx of high level newbs with trepidation, there's no denying that EQ II is going through a fundamental shift today. This patch has the ability to change the landscape of play in the game more so than anything since the free-to-play conversion. When you couple these new Heroic Characters with the lifting of item restrictions, there are literally no more gates barring people from joining and experiencing most of what the game has to offer. In anticipation of this big change, I had the opportunity to sit down with Franchise Director Dave Georgeson and Producer Holly Longdale to talk Heroic Character shop, and they shed more light on this upcoming experience. They also revealed a little something extra coming for the raiders in Norrath.
