The Difficulty of Raids or Why Care About Nihilum/SK Gaming?
Didn't you hear? Nililum and SK Gaming, the two top guilds in WoW, merged and beat the game.
Personally, I love how the news sites claim the entirety of the game has been beaten when there are still raids that are going to be put into the game before the next expansion.
News came out last night that not only had the merged guild beat every raid in the game, but they had now done one of the hardest raid achievements out there.
Good. I hope they all get bored and quit the game.
WoW needs a paradigm shift and I believe it has come with WotLK. I'm going to make the prediction right now that this expansion is essentially the death knell of hardcore raiding. If you are looking for level 60 Naxxramas or Sunwell difficulty, look to another game because you won't find it here, and I couldn't be happier.
World of Raids and Tobold's blog are afire with discussions on whether or not the game is too easy and if Blizzard has "jumped the shark" with this expansion. The complaint is that if the top guild in the server can do one of the hardest achievements in the game, the game is too easy. If a guild that raided Black Temple before Wrath of the Lich King can hit level 60, quickly grab some blues and clear Naxxramas, the entry raid, in a week or two this OBVIOUSLY means the game is too easy.
To look to the future, I think it is best we analyze the past. In Tobold's post on the subject, he did say something that stood out to me:
Imagine I could measure the skill/dedication/hardcoreness/whatever-you-wanna-call it of every single WoW player on a scale of 0 to 100, and make a graph of the number of players in every skill category. Such a curve would most likely be a Gauss bell curve, with lots of players of average skill, and decreasing numbers of players toward very high and very low skill levels. Now consider having to design an expansion, and having to choose a difficulty level. Unlike single-player games, which often have a selectable difficulty, the difficulty has to be the same for all players. You can try to cover an as wide range as possible, but it is impossible to design a difficulty which is both challenging and achievable by everyone. The Burning Crusade, pre-patch 3.0.2, was designed in a way that even the most skilled and dedicated player would find the raid endgame challenging. Lowering that difficulty level in Wrath of the Lich King would make the raid endgame more accessible to more of the average skilled players, but risks making the game too easy for the most hardcore players.
So this is what we're going to do. These following graphs are all my personal opinion so you may disagree with me on difficulty. Imagine the tip of the curve as the most average player. They play at most 10-20 hours a week. They don't usually go out and look at guides or read FAQs or blogs. Most of the time they're playing online with a group of friends and prefer to do everything with this group of friends. The red dots are where I would say the amount of "hardcoreness" or dedication is needed to beat the content. Those behind the dot on the curve will see the content as out of reach, inaccessible to someone like them and just plain too difficult. Those beyond the dot on the graph will see the content as much too easy and not worth their time.
Starting with the original launch we see that raiding is mainly a hardcore sport. With probably less than 8% of the WoW population ever seeing C'thun and less than 3% ever seeing Kel'thuzad. Raids in WoW vanilla were a exercise in rigid structuring and consumable abuse. After clearing all the bosses in Molten Core before Ragnaros, guilds would often zone into Upper Blackrock Spire to mind control a caster there and give a fire resist buff to all their members. Guilds would be running lower level instances just trying to find some resist gear for fights like Huhuron and Ragnaros. When you're having to run Mauradon for gear for a fight in AQ40, there is something fundamentally wrong with the design of the game. The ladder was rigid. You couldn't just skip a step. Instances were filled with gear checks and fights like Vael and Twin Emperors KILLED guilds. Having AQ20 and ZG as the only 20 man raids and everything else as 40man put these instances just that much further out of reach.
Moving forward we see what happened with Burning Crusade. Raid sizes were slashed down to 10man for Karazhan and Zul'aman and 25man for everything else. The barrier of entry, however, was still set far too high. All of the raids had rigorous attunement process (a tradition carried over from the WoW vanilla), more resist fights, and more consumable abuse. There were still incredibly difficult bosses. Hardcore guilds could easily spend a month trying to beat Kael'thas in Tempest Keep and more to beat fights like M'uru in Sunwell. Up to the point of patch 3.0, less than 5% of raiding guilds ever stepped into Sunwell. Less than 1000 guilds in the United States beat Kil'jaeden. Sunwell became an exercise in stacking Shamans for Bloodlust and having everyone reroll Leatherworker for Haste drums. Attunements were relaxed over time and out of all of Burning Crusade, Karazhan was easily the most popular raid for it had the lowest barrier of entry.
Patch 3.0 came around a month before Wrath of the Lich King and slashed raid boss health across the board by 30% while giving people access to their talents and skill updates with WotLK mechanics. Buffs went raid wide. Debuffs were put on Bloodlust and drums. Potions got limited to only one per 5. Most classes saw an across the board DPS increase of at least 50%. All of the sudden people were running instances right and left. It was light a going out of business sale on raid loot. The Sunwell geared raid guilds would see bosses die before the boss could even use all of it's abilities. They saw this as Blizzard bending to the will of the casual.
So far we have Naxxramas. The hardcore guilds hit 80 and immediately began farming it. People cried out that the game had become to easy based on a handful of the most hardcore guilds out there speeding through the content. People forget that this is what those guilds do. Nihilum and SK Gaming also spent about two months on beta learning these raids. This wasn't the first time they had seen these places. It was nothing more than another raid lockout to them. Also, the gear reset wasn't as big of a leap in WotLK as it was for BC so since they're in full Sunwell gear that will last them until these tier 7 epics.
I hope that the difficulty increases slightly in the followup raids, but nothing to the degree we've seen before. I want majority of the players out there to be able to complete every raid in the game. Will the hardcore burn through it and complain about being bored? Yes. But they would do that anyway. I want to be able to burn through it. That way, I can play some other games when not in WoW. When you're raiding 5 days a week and farming on off days, that leaves little time to play anything other than WoW. I have Fallout 3 and an assortment of other games I'd really like to play while maintaining the dedication to raiding.
Easier raids and accessability is nothing but good for everyone. The casuals that don't get to play as much can see all the content. The hardcore that are on all the time can finally have some time to do other things. With raids at the difficulty they were at, raiding wasn't fun. It was a second job. Friends would be excluded because they didn't have the right class or spec or skill. Raids shouldn't be so hard that they kill guilds. Raids should unify guilds in a fun atmosphere.
So the question is: Should we care about Nihilum and SK Gaming? No. We shouldn't. The buzz about these top guilds is getting as bad as the celebrity gossip buzz and it is making me sick. I just hope that Blizzard keeps up this raid trend and doesn't buckle to "hardcore guilds". We need to usher in the age of casual raider.
Wyrmrest Temple Deathmatch! READY! FIGHT!
Just a quick aside for you all while I'm working on another blog post:
Go to Wyrmrest Temple's central interior on main floor and pick a fight with someone. Don't get near the guards near any of the exits but just pick a fight with comeone in the central area near the innkeeper. If you die here, you'll instantly respawn right at the innkeeper. The other night on my server we had a huge fight of about 50v50 in that room. Being instantly back into the action just makes the place chaos. Just avoid the guards. They'll start pushing through the crowd slaughering everyone. If you're in the center circle though, you should never get near them.