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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Is Wrath too easy, or are we just better?

In the eternal question of whether Wrath of the Lich King is too easy, Our Girl Friday posits an answer that I've often wondered about myself. Is it really that WotLK is so gosh-darned easy, or could the issue actually be that maybe, just maybe, the players have gotten better?

The wealth of knowledge about the nuts-and-bolts of theorycraft has never been more available. New players and old veterans alike have resources like WoW Insider, Wowhead, WoWwiki, or that juggernaut of theorycraft, Elitist Jerks. There are strategy videos, stategy manuals, and even a few strategy comics. The forums themselves have never been more informative, especially when you consider Ghostcrawler laying down wisdom all over the place. The information about how to play is out there for the taking.

And, c'mon. It's been about half a decade and near 12 million subscribers. Once you've done Nethekurse or Zereketh, you should know that you're not supposed to stand in pink, black, or red circles. Really, just don't stand in stuff. Is that really such a deep and meaningful skill that you have to relearn "Don't stand in stuff!" for Kel'Thuzad? So, if the Wrath raids aren't demanding a gear-based progression (meaning, it's all a gear check), then we should entertain the idea that we've gotten pretty good at not standing in stuff. That's certainly not the only raiding skill, but I'm using it as an indication that we're meeting the basic "skill" requirements.

Of course, even Ghostcrawler has acknowledged that Naxxramas is somewhat the new welfare epics. We know that Ulduar's going to be noticeably more "difficult." But until then, we could probably accept that the current accessibility of content owes some part to us getting better as players.

1 comments:

Hinenuitepo said...

Blizzard changed the game with Lich King. Yes, the points in those posts do suggest a more skilled class of raider.
But, 'regular mode' fights have been designed to be easy by Blizz. Any guild/pug can down Sarth+0. But it's a good, skilled group of players that can down Sarth+3 (similar level of difficulty = Gruul and Magtheridon, which took a fairly similar amount of time for most guilds to defeat).

Example. My guild only raids 2 days a week, about 40% of typical raiding time. Given the time it takes to clear farm content to progression content, my guild probably spends about 15-25% the amount of time as 4-5 day raiding guilds on progression content.

My guild was the 17th on my server to kill Sarth+0.

But this is where skill comes in. We were the 9th to clear Sarth3D, and the 3rd to get a Malygos 6-minute kill.

The 'regular' or 'basic' content is much easier than in vanilla or BC wow, but the 'Hard Mode' achhievements are on a par with previous content.