The Glade 4.0

Firefighter:

Mimiron... BUT WITH FIRE! and a 10 minute hard time limit.

Haven't been to Yogg personally. But from all of the other hard modes I've seen or done, Same mobs, similar mechanics, bigger numbers/ae/raid damage/tank damage.

Hodir? Kill him faster.
XT? Break the heart, and don't get destroyed by the raid damage.
FL? More HPs and AE damage.
Kologarn? HE IS VERY LARGE

They're all the same, just moreso.

I will say though, Firefighter looks at least entertaining. Most of the Uld stuff was at least challenging. ToC has been a joke pretty much the whole way through. And having to do all the easy modes to unlock the way it *should* be is a lazy and cheap way of extending the useful life of the content before ICC comes out.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Council? You kill in an entirely different order and they have different abilities depending on the order.

Firefighter is far more than just Mimiron WITH FIRE. It's doomfire and it constantly spreads. It changes positioning and movement drastically. It also adds more and more **** with each phase - water bombs, fire bots, ect.

Yogg without keepers takes away all the protections and damage buffs you get in the fight. You also cannot regain your sanity. Yogg+0 makes it so his adds can't actually die which drastically changes how you handle P3.

They hit harder as their hp is higher, you have to keep them all DPS'd and they constantly spawn, they also get targeted for AE heals which will gib your tanks if the targeted mobs aren't pulled away.

Freya+3 Adds all 3 of her protectors abilities into the fight (and each tree up gives a huge boost to the damage abilities of all the mobs) . It's a pretty huge difference.

Thorim's an easy fight, but it changes it a good bit too - adding in a rotating Blizzard and Siff into the fight who frost novas, AE frost blasts, ect.

Vezax hardmode takes away your healers/casters ability to regain mana in the fight and adds in an extra mob.

Same model means dick all - the fights change a lot. There's not a single person who has actually done the end Ulduar hardmodes that would say the idiotic **** that you do. You've seen the beginner's stuff, that's it.

If you insist. I bow before your wonderful 1337ness and am humbled as a true n00b should be.

You're still not getting my point, but whatever.

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Holy shitsnacks!

And Yes, ToC easy mode is a joke - it's meant to be. Ulduar's easy modes were set too high for the general audience to consume.

And so what if you have to do easy mode once to unlock the Heroic mode? They're on separate lockouts and you want the loot from both anyways and guilds will be doing it both ways every week.

If there wasn't a difficulty split then the content would be far less accessible. It's a good thing. Easy mode is the throw away so that anyone (even you!) can see it.

And no - you're the one who doesn't get how this **** works nor do you get the point of it. This is straight from the developers.

And its apparently also there so elitists can look down their noses at casuals.

I'd wager a dollar if the bosses in ToC weren't released one a week for 5 weeks, it would have been cleared the first night (Normal and hard) it was released.

As it is, the coliseum lasted for 5 weeks. Artificially limited of course. Imagine if they did that fir Ulduar... Or if they do it for Icecrown...

Sure, on 25's we got stuck on the PvP encounter for a couple of weeks, but week one and two, we had people come raid, and stay for the good loot out of ToC and bail because Ulduar loot is now "outdated".

<3 my guild, but sometimes I think they're a bunch of pussies when it comes to raiding past 8pm.

All of this brings up an interesting question though... which comes first? Normal or Heroic mode?

Does Blizzard design the encounter to be hard mode first and then say "Hm, how can we make this /faceroll so the whinyass casuals won't whine too much? Or it it more the other way where they design it to be /faceroll and then add in the hard mode so the elitists have something to do?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Anub wasn't beaten until the last day of the week with 4 of 50 attempts remaining and required ridiculous raid stacking and they also had a fair amount of ToC loot by then. One guild managed to do this.

So no, it wouldn't have been beaten the first night it was released.

You do know about the Attempt limit on Heroic mode, right? You can't just throw people at it until it dies. You have 50 attempts to clear the instance, period. After those 50 are used up the instance locks you out regardless of which boss you are on. The number attempts left also determines what you get from the Tribute chest after beating Anub.

Encounters will be beaten though - this isn't EverQuest. If the encounter works, people will kill it. Bosses are meant to be killed.

If stuff was tuned around it only being possible for the top 5 guilds having absolute max gear from the instance then no one else would kill it. Even hardmodes are meant to be beaten.

It's stupid to think that there would be something the entire game would be banging their heads against until 3.3 came out. If people aren't killing it, they **** up.

Bosses are indeed meant to be killed.

One would think though, there's a balance between /faceroll and nomnomnombrokenglass /quit that isn't quite being met. For us, the encounters are either way too hard or one shot fests. I don't want the game to be Press Button, Receive Purplez... but I'd also like the end boss of an expansion patch (An00b) to be softer than a marshmallow treat. By the same token, going in after such a win to the "hardmode" content and getting absoutely roflstomped by the same mobs we just kicked in the jimmy and took their loot is no fun either.

It seems to me that Blizz has taken an all or nothing approach to the encounters and said "Hey, we have something for everyone!"

We're not Ensidia, we're not Vodka, we have jobs and other responsibilities that prevent us from working to beat world firsts/server firsts, etc. But we don't *suck*.

Ah, the lament of the casual hardcore.

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Holy shitsnacks!

2 guilds have killed Anub on Heroic (Stars just got it today, TW guild).
81 guilds have killed Twins on Heroic.
308 guilds have killed Faction Champs on Heroic.
428 have killed Jaraxxus on Heroic.
465 have killed Northrend Beasts on Heroic.

If you're getting rofflestomped going in there - you do kind of suck.

Thanks for that. ***.

We had about an hour in there after beating Anub. Maybe 4 or 5 tries at it. NR Beasts seemed based more on luck than anything. If you don't get a snobold and a fire at the same time, you might win. If you do, you lose that person. If that person's a healer, you wipe. Has nothing to do with "skill". I don't care how good your computer is, how good your connection is, how good a player you are, if you get a snobold and a fire, you die.

So, 465 guilds have beaten NR beasts on heroic... Say those are all 25 man wins. that's 11kish players that have done it. Out of the 11 million or so subscribers. How many guilds are in WoW?

Right. So we're not in the top 1% of the playerbase.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The capture the 3 pvp towers in Hellfire gives you a PVP trinket if you havent completed it previously...

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There's that one too.

Or you can buy one with stone keepers shards.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

And this is a totally non-pvp way to get a pvp trinket.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Stone Keeper Shards will get you 2,000 honor per 30. I had 390 shards which means I got myself 26,000 honor in about 30 seconds. Easily enough to buy one of the honor trinkets.

Exactly! What better use for all those extra shards sitting around?!

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Started off in VoA today. I got my T9.5 legs off of Koralon, woot! After that, we went into ToC 25 and one-shot the whole thing. Went on to do FL +4 for the first time, won after the third shot, and we're now something like 4th on our realm.

Pretty good night.

Renewed my account, did some ToC pug's (well, not really PUG's since I know the players). Bought dual spec, checked out some of the changes, considered moving my old school war over to horde on my new realm.

Stuck dick in cheese grater. All in all, about an average day. Nope, nothing captivating enough to bring me back. Maybe I'm not giving it its fair chance, maybe I'm disenchanted with treadmill multiplayer games. Not sure which, but I can't get back into it.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

World of Warcraft isn't a treadmill. People have successfully made 80 without ever killing a mob. Likewise, people have successfully made 80 without ever doing a quest. If there's nothing captivating for you there, then don't play it.

I, for one, enjoy the various raid encounters and other things to do.

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I may try Cataclysm, it looks interesting enough. Simply, I realized my favorite part about WoW are the quests, though I don't feel the need to complete all the content in a zone. On the other hand, I wouldn't say I skim the cream of the crop of quests either.

I think I only grinded badges and then raided for gear in denial that the content was over.

Also, none of the (anecdotal) points you made describe why it isn't a treadmill. Not that treadmill is necessarily bad, after all, the quests I were engrossed with were the same thing; you had to level to continue through the content in Northrend.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

While I enjoy levelling when the expansions come out, it's the raiding that keeps me playing, and the people I'm raiding with. I find I actually look forward to getting to hang out with the people I've been raiding with for awhile more than the raids themselves. However, that enjoyment when we drop a new boss is also wonderful, but if you don't have something to keep you going during progress I would imagine it's less than enjoyable.

Are there really enough courier and collection quests to ding 80?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Probably not, but as a Healer with a decent partner, it would be completely possible to not actually kill a mob directly.

Aizle:

You can solo to 80 without ever killing a mob or receiving kill exp.

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Without FAF bonus?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Interesting. How? (high level, just have me curious now)

I find the people are the most important part.

I don't have a cohesive guild, or a good group of friends, so it makes things tire out for me a lot faster than they otherwise would.

There are a lot of #$%'s in WoW PuGs.....

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.