And what with the ridiculous number of things you can buy with heroic badges these days, all you would really need to do to the drop tables would be to take the purples off. People would complain, but hey, they're going to anyway.
 

> I was a bit surprised in recent discussions to see so many comments that said (paraphrased) "you can't make raid boss encounters easier, because they require strategy". I think you got that one backwards. Raid boss encounters require strategy, because they are so hard.

If you make an encounter easy enough compared to the level/gear of the players, then yes, even MC, a 40 man @lvl 60 instance, can be 3-manned.
But those players still needed to decurse. Still needed to switch to certain classes for different bosses. They still needed to arrange, gasp, strategy. The larger the gap between the level of the players and level of the raid is, the less strategy you need. But unless you want to totally trivialize the encounter (last post you mentioned a 1HP boss), you can't make the gap too big. Which brings me to my next point...

> But they could train how to do raid encounters in a less unforgiving environment, and earn something like raid points and raid badges that could then be used to buy equipment.

What kind of equipment and at what rate could they earn the badges/points?
If you make the ability to earn gear relative to the above mentioned "gap difference" too easy, you will ruin the game. If you make the gap huge, you must make the rewards trivial, or the game becomes boring and it will quickly be ruined for everybody playing it. If you make the gap small... well, that's the current situation, no?
You could make the gap large and give "gear points" at a very very slow rate. That would make it into a grind, which again, would be boring.

You've brought it up in the past, the big enabler of PvP is that you don't need setup time, you don't need a pre-arranged group, you don't need 1.5-4 hours of dedicated play time. All you need is to login, signup for a match, and be done in 10-30min max and even then you can go AFK if RL calls and the only thing that will happen is that you might lose and get less honor/tokens/points.

*These* are the things that you need to bring to PvE, *not* "easier dungeons". How to bring them to PvE without trivializing the instance/raid is beyond me, but I know what you suggested is not the way. There is no way on Azeroth (hehe) where you can make a 4-hour Kara run take only 10minutes and still give out meaningful loot and not ruin the game totally.
 

I should add, the reason why PvP is not trivial, is because you're fighting against other people. If you look for example at the PvE aspects of Alterac Valley, they are trivial.
Nobody I know would be happy if doing an instance run was like doing AV without horde resistance (ride in, burn down 2 towers, kill Drak).

I guess that suggests the (now to me) obvious solution of making instances/raids into mixed PvE/PvP encounters. Easy-mode Attumen with players from the other side assisting him? Now *that* would be fun! :)
Hey I guess I did have an idea after all... although it's a bit on the wild side :)
 

You've brought it up in the past, the big enabler of PvP is that you don't need setup time, you don't need a pre-arranged group, you don't need 1.5-4 hours of dedicated play time. All you need is to login, signup for a match, and be done in 10-30min max and even then you can go AFK if RL calls and the only thing that will happen is that you might lose and get less honor/tokens/points.
*These* are the things that you need to bring to PvE, *not* "easier dungeons".

I don't see how you can achieve the former without having the latter. I can easily imagine a zero-setup time system without pre-arranged groups working similar to battleground queues. I can imagine Karazhan having multiple "entry points", effectively subdividing it into parts that can be done in 1 hour or less. But the random groups you'll get for these raids will by definition be worse than organized raid groups, because they know each other less well, and the class mix won't be optimal. The difficulty of the "easy mode" trash and boss mobs must be adjusted downwards to give these PUG raids a chance to succeed with anything.

And yes, an organized raid group entering such an "easy mode" raid dungeon will find it trivially easy. They should also find it gives them much less reward than the "heroic" raid dungeons of the old difficulty level. They might want to use the easy dungeons to practice new raid bosses on easy mode before trying them on hard mode. But otherwise they'll prefer the heroic raid dungeons for the better loot.

How much loot should the easy mode raid dungeons give? Easy rule of thumb: X hours spent in easy mode raid dungeons should give about the same reward as the same X hours spent in PvP. Players should play what they want, and not do the activity which maximizes rewards for minimum effort. Thus PvE and PvP PUG rewards need to be the same.
 

---------------------------------
Quoted from Tobold's post:
"I was a bit surprised in recent discussions to see so many comments that said (paraphrased) "you can't make raid boss encounters easier, because they require strategy". I think you got that one backwards. Raid boss encounters require strategy, because they are so hard."
---------------------------------

I was one of the persons who disagreed with Tobold. But my point of contention (which seems, by the looks of Tobold's post, I have not made sufficiently clear), is NOT "you can't make raid boss encounters easier, because they require strategy". It is rather this - raid boss encounters require strategy, simply because they MUST in order to be fun and challenging!

I have not done Molten Core with level 70s, but I have done Onyxia with a raid of about 10 level 70s. It was the first time I did Onyxia, and let me describe to you what happened. I pulled aggro 3-4 times in the first phase (despite being warned of the fact that Onyxia's knockbacks reduces tank threat); and I was hit by the Deep Breath twice as did many of the other of the raid members; and still we proceeded to kill Onyxia. The point is that the encounter has been trivialized to the point of being not fun! Very minimal strategy, execution, and teamwork required. I have also done UBRS with level 70s, and it was even worse, being reduced to a pointless zerg-fest.

So essentially what needs to be achieved is this, "easy mode" raid dungeons must be sufficiently easy in order for the PvE raid-queuing system touted by Tobold to work, yet rich and complex enough to be fun. The problem then is that this fine balance cannot be achieved by the sort of "lazy" tuning Tobold is describing.

---------------------------------
Quoted from Tobold's post:
"reduce for example his health, dps, and damage from specials all by 20%, suddenly many groups that would wipe at that encounter before would be able to do it."
---------------------------------

Certainly agreed that a 20% reduction will make ALL encounters easier. However it will also trivialize some of the encounters, and yet others will remain un-doable by a raid formed via the PvE raid queuing system. I have used the example of Aran in an earlier post. It is almost certainly true that Aran cannot be tuned by this 20% method. If Aran's arcane explosion is reduced by only 20% it will still one-shot anyone in range. And if Aran's trash is reduced by only 20%, from roughly 20 pulls to roughly 16 pulls, it is still not viable. The nerf have got to be hell of a lot heavier. In fact, in many cases, what would be better is not a numerical nerf, but some mechanics change. Aran's arcane explosion should still one-shot just about everyone, it is part of the fun, but more leeway should given to the casual raid to be able to move out of it (for example, more delay between his emote and explosion, adding an automated /rw style alert etc).

Note that I choose Aran not because he is anomaly that proves this point, there are many other BC bosses which are similar (I have never raided pre-BC so I cannot really comment on those). For example, Prince's special reduce your health to 1, 20% reduction to his dmg will still one-shot you; Netherspite's beam must be grabbed as soon as possible (the margin of error for the green beam for example is maybe 2 seconds, raising that to 2.4 seconds is not enough to make Netherspite casual-friendly, either needs to be heck of a lot higher or even better make it easier to locate the beam early). On the other hand 20% nerf to Curator and his adds will almost certainly trivialize it. Curator and his adds is very tightly tuned in terms of dps required. A 20% nerf will be like having a dps team with full Tier 5 doing it.

In any case, I strongly believe the tuning has got to be at least partly manual, and it will require more than just pure numerical changes, sometimes necessitating mechanics change. And further it is not without precedent.

---------------------------------
Quoted from Tobold's post:
"The importance of numerical boss stats is very visible in heroic 5-man dungeons. The heroic bosses do not have any different abilities than the non-heroic ones, they just have higher numerical stats."
---------------------------------

Contrary to what Tobold said, a number of heroic bosses that are tuned via mechanics changes. For example, Capacitus' polarity shift is replaced by reflective shields in normal; Murmur's thundering storm is removed in normal, essentially making it such that in heroic mode everyone have the same difficulty that a melee dps faced in normal. And even when there are numerical changes, it is clear that some are "manual" huge changes while the majority are more like the "standard" 20% change, for example Murmur's Touch received a 100% delay.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Mechano-Lord_Capacitus
http://www.wowwiki.com/Murmur

My conclusion remains that while "easy mode" raids are a lot more difficult to do than what Tobold thinks, it still should be done simply because it will open up raiding to so much more people. Even if the PvE raid queuing system is not viable (but I don't see obvious reasons why not), "easy-mode" raids will still open up a lot of content to casual guilds, which is a very good thing.
 

I would like to point out that nerfing is, and has always been, a part of PvE raiding anyway. It happened in WoW 1.0, and instances and raids have been nerfed in TBC as well.

So I don't really think that it would be a big deal to, say, nerf Kara for a PvP-like queuing system. Properly-executed, it would simply be an extension of the current system of initially tuning raids to the hardcore, then nerfing them over time - like Kara was initially for the hardcore, and now is run by weekend PUGs and casual guilds.
 

Trevor is certainly right that creating easy-mode raid dungeons requires a little more fine-tuning than just slapping a general 20% nerf on everything. The 20% were just an example, not a general proposal.

If you would make a list of all possible groups that could exist in World of Warcraft, and sort them by power level, you would get some sort of Gauss curve distribution. On the top end are the currently existing best raiding guilds. On the bottom end are the kind of groups that never even start, or where half the members are AFK. The idea is not to make raiding viable to those AFK groups (and Blizzard should do more against those AFK PvPers). The idea is to make raiding accessible to the average Joe, or the casual guild. By placing the easy mode raid difficulty in the middle of the curve, and not at the top end, the top end people will automatically find those raids too easy. But that doesn't matter, because they still have the old difficulty preserved in re-labeled "heroic" raid dungeons which are in fact the same as the normal raid dungeons before.
 

Trevor is certainly right that creating easy-mode raid dungeons requires a little more fine-tuning than just slapping a general 20% nerf on everything. The 20% were just an example, not a general proposal.

If you would make a list of all possible groups that could exist in World of Warcraft, and sort them by power level, you would get some sort of Gauss curve distribution. On the top end are the currently existing best raiding guilds. On the bottom end are the kind of groups that never even start, or where half the members are AFK. The idea is not to make raiding viable to those AFK groups (and Blizzard should do more against those AFK PvPers). The idea is to make raiding accessible to the average Joe, or the casual guild. By placing the easy mode raid difficulty in the middle of the curve, and not at the top end, the top end people will automatically find those raids too easy. But that doesn't matter, because they still have the old difficulty preserved in re-labeled "heroic" raid dungeons which are in fact the same as the normal raid dungeons before.
 

It's simple. since they trivialized the old content the model broke for anyone that wasn't hard core. PreBC by the time NAXX came out there were guilds that were pugging MC and ZG and AQ20. Other guilds were hard core raiding BWL and Naxx. There was something for everyone from casual raider to hardcore raider and everything in between. There really isn't anything like that in BC at 70. They really need some raid instances that have enough reward to them that a Pug raid could go into and have a shot at some sort of progression.
 

I really like Tobold's perspective on these things. The thought is simply, why should a game which you play for fun require the amount of effort that raiding does? When I read people's objections to these ideas I can't help but feel a desire to feel superior. I think part of the raider mentality is feeling superior because you are in a dungeon others cannot do. Gear is important because then people can look at you and see you do things that they cannot do. Seems pretty stupid and self-centered to me.

I think it would mess up raiding as it currently exists because people would do teh easy ones and fewer would want to do the heroic, but that is the point: I think there are many people raiding and playing like they do not want simply because they are forced to to progress.
 

With this easy/hardcore raid modes, one month after release, every raider worth his salt would have killed Illidan in easy mode and thus would be forced to go back to wipe on Attumen in heroic mode. But for what? Some better gear? Part of the fun of raids is to explore new content, this system would kill content just too fast.
 

I can't agree that this sort of nerf to raiding (or increase of accessibility depending on one's perspective), would kill content too fast if properly executed.

People PvP-ed for Arena 1 and General gear. Then again for Arena 2 and Veteran's gear. And now Arena 3 and Arena 1 + Vindicator's gear has made PvP as popular as ever. All that accomplished with the same arenas and BGs for the life cycle of TBC, with only a minor tweak to AV in a year.

So I don't think that PvE would kill content too quickly if properly implemented. After all, Hyjal and BT were pretty much DOA for me and my guild and circle of WoW friends anyway, and those carrots play no role in my willingness to continue to play WoW. I'd guess that most casual players and guilds are in the same boat. So why not allow a path to accessing them that doesn't involve what casuals see as a second-job level of commitment?
 

I find it funny that people say that such changes will "ruin the game".

What's the precedent? I remember hearing in FFXI and Everquest that having instanced raids would ruin the game, because it takes away that key competitive element for grabbing spawns. I remember hearing that fast leveling would ruin the game, because everyone would level to max too quickly, and then quit for lack of things to do.

Saying something will "ruin" the game by making it more accessible without seriously knowing the implementation is foolish. If anything, you have to look at the implementation options. Most of the time, when they say "ruin the game", they mean "ruin the game for me".

Not everyone likes playing the same way, and people are very jealous and possessive... they all want to keep playing the same way they have been playing, and if something threatens the possibility of more of what they like, they'll complain.

--Rawr
 

I have to say that Rawr sums up the situation very well. People are going to complain either way because we are not all the same and each have different expectations. Companies spend millions trying to figure out what consumers want and they still get it wrong some of the time. Blizz is no exception, but I wish they'd get off this whole "end game must be raid" kick and open the game up for the other 90% of the population. Seems like such a waste of money to develop content only 1,000 people in the world actually see.
 

There really hardly seems to be a subtle discussion about this but there are lots of good points here.

From my perspective the problem still is that things are tuned slightly too hard. The devil is in the detail. Or the setup or what Blizz didn't think about.

For example when Kara came out Romulo could seriously gank most tanks, certainly standard 5-man normal drops did not prepare a tank for his burst potential. Hardcore would have their tanks already in top crafted gear and mass pot, so there was no problem for them, but for those that got in there with the old MC attitude of entering with quality 5-man drops, they were in for a surprise (and early Kara groups praying to not get R&J (google and you'll find the old posts). That was fine detail that mattered. Romulo hitting for just a bit less so that a 5-man normal geared tank (the natural preparation for raiding) had a more realistic shot to live through unfortunate burst sequences.

But people completely forget that, given that knowing all tactics and having full epics they steamroll Karazhan. So suddenly Karazhan is "easy" and "puggable", when in reality even today people wipe on Moroes.

Blizz does tend to like to err on the too hard side of things.

I still remember Tigole saying that Magtheridon should feel like Onyxia a couple of months into the game. Magtheridon even today, post nergf, is nowhere like Onyxia ever was. Onyxia is still raided today for comedic value, while lots of raid groups have dropped Magtheridon like a hot potato or won't ever bother.

I do believe that raid encounter designers have misjudged difficulty levels in their design at various points (might well be that the MCing Vashj was seriously intended to be that way).

If challenging encounters are so fun, why are literally all guilds who progress past Kael'thas dropping the encounter as fast as their attunement/recruiting allows?

Because Windchill and Najertus are more challenging hence more fun? Hardly.

Truth be told one can have a lot of fun without being pushed to the extreme. Buru or Hawk boss in ZA are examples in my book. And truth be told that even those that proclaim to wanting challenge seem to often do a whole lot to avoid it.

They thought that people would embrace the attunments, instead of seeing them as the logistic nightmare they are. And they thought that people would accept the low vial drops from Vashj instead of getting an outcry from the very hardcore. They thought people would like challenging trash, but even the cutting edge would decry the concept (Death and Taxes famous black temple prediction of trash vs boss ratio).

I think there are many many lessons learned from TBC raiding and I do hope it'll be better next time around, both for hardcore and casuals.
 

-------------------
Solidstate:
If you make the ability to earn gear relative to the above mentioned "gap difference" too easy, you will ruin the game. If you make the gap huge, you must make the rewards trivial, or the game becomes boring and it will quickly be ruined for everybody playing it. If you make the gap small... well, that's the current situation, no?
You could make the gap large and give "gear points" at a very very slow rate. That would make it into a grind, which again, would be boring.
-------------------

I don't see why Solidstate deems it impossible for Tobold's proposal to work in principal. Let's ignore the PvE raid queuing system for the moment and examine the below scenarios.

Current raid situation rated roughly in terms of difficulty level (which should correspond to gear quality) -
1.0 : Normal 5-mans
1.5 : Heroic 5-mans
2.0 : Kara, Gruul, Mag
2.5 : ZA
3.0 : SSC, TK
4.0 : Hyjal, BT

Proposed raid situation -
1.0 : Normal 5-mans
1.5 : Heroic 5-mans, Kara easymode, Gruul easymode, Mag easymode
2.0 : Kara, Gruul, Mag, ZA easymode
2.5 : ZA, SSC easymode, TK easymode
3.0 : SSC, TK
3.5 : Hyjal easymode, BT easymode
4.0 : Hyjal, BT

I don't see why the proposal would not work. Casual guilds will get to see a lot more content, and they will likely not skip difficulty levels, meaning slowly progressing and gearing from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0 to 2.5 etc. Hardcore guilds will use the easymode raid dungeons to quickly get a feel, and then quickly move on to do it on "heroic". So this alone (without the PvE raid queuing system) is a big gain for a lot of WoW players.

Now on top of this now imagine a PvE raid queuing system (I think it will be easier to implement it for 10 mans, and harder for 25 mans, but even just for 10 mans, suddenly a whole lot more people will be able to experience Kara, and perhaps ZA). One can either segment Kara so that it is in smaller "lumps" with new entry points like Tobold proposed, or one can allow people to join a raid midway much like joining BGs midway. So if a raid killed Attumen after one hour, and a couple of members have to leave, the queue system will port in replacements, and so on till Kara is cleared. Most likely Blizzard will have to remove raid ids for easymode, but I don't think that is a problem.

Is Kara at the 1.5 difficulty level clearable by raids formed by the queue system, and yet not be trivial and retain the fun factor? I am guessing yes, but effort must be made to tune Kara for that purpose. Only way to confirm is for Blizzard to run field tests on this proposal. No doubt it is a lot of development work, but surely the payoff for both Blizzard and subscribers is worth the effort it if it succeeds.
 

> don't see why Solidstate deems it impossible for Tobold's proposal to work in principal.

Trevor, you make some good points and you idea sounds workable, at least in theory. It might be hard to "tune" certain encounters so that a PuG can do them (you made that point yourself earlier), but let's ignore that point for the purposes of this discussion. With the kind of money Blizzard is raking in, I think they can afford to hire more devs and implement even hard to-do things :)
However you still don't address the issue of gear-vs-difficulty. If "Easymode Gruul" (or "easymode Kara") drops the equivalent of normal mode gear, all that farming him in easymode will do is get you geared up in *normal level gear*. That's not going to get you to normal Kara...
If easymode Gruul drops better gear then normal dungeons, or easymode ZA drops better gear than normal Kara (following your suggestion here), you're suddenly giving people "welfare epics", to use a phrase recently battered to death in the WoW blogger community and Blizzard forums :)

For those people who think giving gear that is too good compared to the level of the encounter will not ruin the game, think of it this way. Have you ever turned on "God Mode" in Doom, NWN2 or any other game where this existed, or used a hack or cheat to become all-powerful? Once you did that and killed everything in sight with impunity, was there any fun? Was there any challenge left?
Giving too-good-gear for too-easy encounters will be like turning on God Mode in WoW for all players. WoW will die a quick sudden death. It's not a matter of "play style" or "running out of content".

As always, the devil is in the details. if you manage to give gear that is just good enough to make the effort put into the raid worthwhile, without making it imba, you've done a good job and everybody goes home happy. Current PvE effort-vs-loot seems to most of us (me included) skewed too much in the "too much effort" side. I caution you all to remember however that erring in the other direction is not just as bad - it is much much worse. And making the fix so that you don't err on the side of "too little effort" is not so easy I think as reducing all trash/boss stats by 20%... :)

>If challenging encounters are so fun...

Abel, there's a fine line between making an encounter too hard and making it hard enough to be enjoyable. People enjoy challenges. That's why we try to solve Rubik's cube or crossword puzzles. But if a problem is too intractable, most people tend to give up in disgust. Blizzard don't always get this perfect, but they do a pretty good job I think.

Blizzard tend to err on the side of too hard for a very good reason - once you've given people gear you cannot take it away. Imagine if Gruul or Mag were released too easy so that every group just wiping on Moroes could kill Gruul or Mag in parallel and people started getting "free epics". If that happened, people who should not have had access to those gear drops would have gotten them and gear progression would have been all screwed up. Whatever Blizz does now will cause rage and outcry. If they make the encounter harder they cause people to wipe on bosses they could previously kill. If they don't, they basically give up on gear progression for those levels of the game. But the one thing they cannot ever ever do is suddenly remove gear from the people who earned it rightfully under the rules of the game as they existed at the time. I hope you agree with this view :)


To summarize, I still like my idea of making encounters easier but balancing them with PvP elements. Add a queuing system like Tobold suggested and remove the need to physically travel to the instance entrance and I think you've got a winner! :)
 

However you still don't address the issue of gear-vs-difficulty. If "Easymode Gruul" (or "easymode Kara") drops the equivalent of normal mode gear, all that farming him in easymode will do is get you geared up in *normal level gear*. That's not going to get you to normal Kara...
If easymode Gruul drops better gear then normal dungeons, or easymode ZA drops better gear than normal Kara (following your suggestion here), you're suddenly giving people "welfare epics", to use a phrase recently battered to death in the WoW blogger community and Blizzard forums :)

What I meant is that BOTH the difficulty and gear are "in-between". Meaning that easymode Kara will be harder than normal level 70 5-mans, and easier than current Kara; and the gear dropped will be better than level 70 blues, and worse than current Kara loot.

So, easymode Kara serves the purpose of opening up content for more people; and potentially also preparing more people (gear wise and experience wise) for higher level raids. Perhaps Blizzard's intention was for heroic mode 5-mans to serve this very purpose, but surely more options and content for all is a good thing. Furthermore, heroic 5 mans is a very different experience from raids, and does not do as much to prepare you for raids.
 

Ooops forgot to identify myself.

Anonymous above = Trevor
 

However you still don't address the issue of gear-vs-difficulty. If "Easymode Gruul" (or "easymode Kara") drops the equivalent of normal mode gear, all that farming him in easymode will do is get you geared up in *normal level gear*. That's not going to get you to normal Kara...
If easymode Gruul drops better gear then normal dungeons, or easymode ZA drops better gear than normal Kara (following your suggestion here), you're suddenly giving people "welfare epics", to use a phrase recently battered to death in the WoW blogger community and Blizzard forums :)

I think the rule of thumb for gear from easy mode dungeons has to be that it should be equivalent to what you can earn in a similar time in PvP. Of course if you consider the current PvP system to give out "welfare epics", then the new PvE system will also give out "welfare epics". But the important thing is that people shouldn't say "I play PvP because it gives the better rewards". They should make a choice based on what is more fun to them, or even mix and match, and end up with the same reward for the same effort.
 

The root of the present problem in raiding, IMO, is directly related to the PvE "drop & roll" luck model + the endgame grind.

In WoW 1.0, people were willing to do the instance / raid grinds because the one path to the best gear was obvious: Instances, then raids. Period.
In TBC, with multiple gear improvement paths available, classic WoW raiding is much less palatable to the masses - especially since the raids are even harder than WoW 1.0, and the gear isn't clearly better than that obtainable through other gear paths.

The "detail", as someone put it above, is that raids in TBC are tuned hardcore, then slowly nerfed. The real frustration issue is summed up, IMO, in the gear upgrade path if I'm gear-poor: With a PvE instance / raid mindset, I will have to run an instance populated with the same mobs, again, and again, with a time commitment of maybe 2-3 hours on average -- with no assurance of the drop or of winning the item if it does drop.

Then applying this "drop & roll" luck model to a casual raiding guild, you likely have a group of people want to raid socially or purely for fun, and DON'T really want to have to...
- Farm for mats and gold for consumables,
- Research alternate gear upgrades via unfamiliar crafting professions or obscure quest chains,
- Farm lots of mats (like primals) for a crafted item they do know about,
- Grind to Exalted with a particularly onerous faction grind (like Thrallmar / Honor Hold or Lower City),
- Manage gold well enough to get money for AH epics,
- PvP.

The result is that you have casuals who feel locked into a situation that raiding is too hard with no way to progress.
 

I understand that they overtune, and there isn't a problem if that happens on occasion, but to be honest, TBC has no entry raid. Karazhan is not one. The whole raiding game is overtuned, still today.

About free loot. Chest in karazhan is free loot, as is attumen. If encounters are deemed too easy they do get buffed, and blizzard has proven to do that (Illhoff is an early example). I personally have 0 issues if a handfull of people get epics before a retune, Nihilum got most BT bosses down before BT got buffed, did they get well-fare epics? Also early Gruul did bug and not shatter. I don't see a problem.

If one or two encounters are too easy and need retuning that doesn't mean at all that someone got a full set of epics and stops playing. It means that some people may have gotten upgrades for 1-2 slots (that's how loot tables work if they are sensible).

Heck Blizz even had a bug where shaman could get a full T6 resto set for free. I don't see a problem either, but I don't suffer from loot envy, which may be the real problem. The fact that some other shaman has full T6 without farming for it has 0 impact what content I did or did not get to see.

This epics talks is really silly. I wish all gear was grey, then we could laugh about wellfare greys and instead worry about if the game is fun for each individual.

Btw. token gear (ilvl 128) and ZA gear is in a sense wellfare epics. It's stuff that gets heroic and Kara geared folks to T5 level quickly.

If however your fun is that you have better gear than others, there is no win because the design demands that people are excluded.

However that isn't "fun" for everybody. Just like benching a hunter at four horseman wasn't fun for that hunter, and gladly Tigole understands that.

However I don't think the silliness of hyper-focus on gear will ever go away. I don't have a single PVP gear item (I didn't collect wellfare it seems) and tbh the whole PVP gearing patch has had exactly 0 impact on my gameplay or my game enjoyment. The fact that the raiding game is overtuned has.

I actually like the tuning of SSC and TK excluding Kael alright. In many ways execution fights dominate (leave enrage timers). Given that people have Kara level gear. The big blunder still is that blizz messed up the early raiding, the entry to 25-mans and tuning of the supposed entry level 25 single-target bosses like Magtheridon.

"Easy mode" may as well just mean not forgetting that not everybody is a Kael'Thuzad killing raid group who will flask and raid stack up the whazoo entering the first instance. It is worthwhile noting that the hardcore breezed through Karazhan exactly because they treated it like Naxx, with heavy stacking and potting.

If that's not horrible design I don't know what is. There should be a learning ground instance "easy mode" for veterans and a good learning challenge for newcomers.

But so far Blizz has been paranoid on waisting any content for the hardcore and on the way forgot to keep accessibility tuned right. In actuality hardcore didn't get much more out of Karazhan by it being tuned the way it is, the tuning only impacted the less hardcore because they don't stack or flask as heavily.

The oddity about current tuning is that the difficulty of encounters isn't the same for more casual groups. The same encounter is harder for various factors. Which casual group would ever consider mass soulstoning?

That's why it's a good idea to have easy-mode and hard-mode. Let people who want to min-max and a challange that requires antics like stacking and full potting have their race, but allow people who want to log into the game and enjoy a fun evening with friends also see the content.

But it's like gear... if you can't allow others to have what you have then someone's gotta be excluded.