After all, I was part of a rather casual 10 person raid team, and we'd been clearing Wrath's version of Naxxramas, the Eye of Eternity (aka "The Malygos raid"), and Obsidian Sanctum (aka "The Sarth + Drakes raid"). We'd hit a wall trying to down Sartharion with all three Drakes alive, but given that apparently the 10s version of Sarth + 3 Drakes is much harder than the 25s version, I wasn't too concerned about it. I mean, I felt bad that we weren't downing the 3 Drakes on 10s when 25s teams were doing it with aplomb, but apparently teams with full 25 BiS Phase One gear were failing to down the 10s version, which made me feel much better about the supposed "EZ Mode" that 10 person raids are in Wrath Classic.
With Ulduar opening up, all this was destined to change.
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| Oh, so THERE it is! |
As I'd never raided in the original Wrath, I never knew where the entrance to Ulduar actually was. After all, it's not something you can ride to from the flight point, unlike the Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning 5-person instances. And yes, I got lost trying to figure out where the entrance to Ulduar was on that first night's worth of raiding. I guess that is the same sort of thing that would have happened if I actually was able to raid Black Temple in TBC Classic, because I once spent a half an hour flying around, trying to figure out the entrance to Black Temple, and I still don't know where the entrance is.* I think I used to know, because I have a hazy memory of soloing BT back in 2014 or so, but burn me if I can't find it now.
And I thought the entrance to the original Naxxramas was a puzzle.
Ulduar is the instance where Steampunk and World of Warcraft collide in a big way. While there's a ramp up in TBC Classic --such as Netherstorm or my questing buddy's 'copter, which she absolutely loves-- it was Wrath of the Lich King where Blizzard went all in on a steampunk setting for World of Warcraft. From the design of Warsong Hold --my oldest explicitly mentioned to me the Steampunk elements to the complex the first time she saw it-- to the vehicle oriented World PvP in Wintergrasp** you can't avoid the overt Steampunk to the game. But really, once a player reaches The Storm Peaks with its Marvel-esque Nordic vision of the Titan Keepers, down to names such as Freya, Loken, Mimrir, and Thorim, you realize that the Steampunk in Azeroth wasn't just a "flavor of the month" design but rather Blizzard consciously deciding that Azeroth was created by tech beyond what the current inhabitants could achieve.
Kind of like an MMO version of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, complete with dragons.
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| The cover art for Dragonwriter, a tribute to Anne McCaffrey. Art by Michael Whelan, who painted almost all of the Pern cover art. |
The centerpiece of The Storm Peaks is Ulduar, what appears to be a titan city, but is in fact something else...
Oh come on, I'm not gonna spoil it for you, despite Ulduar having been out in Retail WoW for over a decade now.
But that time interval also means that Ulduar is --like almost all of WoW once something is released into the wild-- a solved raid. There are already tons of articles and videos on how to optimally raid Ulduar, from the raid composition to the Best in Slot (BiS) lists to even the boss order you should take to blitz through the content.
Due to that, and since I wasn't doing as much DPS as Fire Spec compared to Arcane Mage in the raid, I was asked to switch to Arcane in early January.
I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as to where this might be going. I knew that my Fire Spec for a single target boss isn't as good as Arcane Spec, although AOE damage for a Fire Mage is superior to that of an Arcane Mage, but I liked playing as a Fire Mage. The way a Fire Mage has to run into melee range, drop some casts in the scrum, then blink away so I can then rain fiery damage from distance just suits my playing style. But even the difference between Arcane and Fire aside, my fellow Mage had been running 25 person raids and whose gear was decently superior to my own, so it was only natural that her damage was also greater.***
But like a good teammate, I set aside my internal concerns about the raid creeping toward the hardcore, saluted, and switched to an Arcane spec.
We were then dealt a blow when we lost our Warlock, who decided to play fewer characters in Wrath Classic, and our raid got the short end of the stick. Still, we had 11 players on the team, so despite missing a Lock we could still field a full raid. That was good for us, since the raid leads had personally reached out to people that they liked to raid with and had agreed with our focus for this particular raid team. While most people raided with other toons, 25 person raids, or both, a few of us --myself included-- kept to only this particular raid team. After what I dealt with in TBC Classic, I was happy to have low expectations and a casual attitude toward raiding. This time around, I was not going to get sucked into the Meta and hardcore progression grind.
And I thought our little raid team was insulated from that grind.
We got into Ulduar last week and... It felt weird. I'll have to go into it more on another post, but unlike Karazhan --whom I have issues with the internal logic of the entire place-- Ulduar just feels like an inflection point in WoW's history.
***
I was online, doing something on Neve, when the post appeared in the raid's Discord on Saturday night.
The Pally Healer and the Hunter were leaving the raid team.
They were running 25 person raids together, and they wanted to also push into 10 person hard modes**** much faster than we were. For our raid team, hard modes were something we'd like to eventually do, but it wasn't a priority; we had people in raid with young families, and people like me who burned out on the hardcore progression, so getting all sweaty in pursuit of the hardcore wasn't something we were interested in doing.
Since our raid team wasn't going to progress into hard modes fast enough, the two decided to leave our raid and join an "in house" raid team composed of members of their 25 person raid. Several classes have BiS items that are found in Ulduar's hard mode 10 person raids, so if your 25 person raid demands you get your BiS gear you have to get as quickly into 10 person hard modes as possible.*****
The Meta caught up to our little raid team after all.
Monday evening before the raid we had a meeting with the raid leads. The Pally healer was there for one last time, but we were still a person short: our Shaman.
It was then that the raid leads had announced that our Shaman had begun ghosting them over the week, and didn't bother signing up for tonight's raid. My heart sank.
Based on all that and that neither raid lead wanted to spend time recruiting, vetting, and bringing new raiders into a raid that was designed to be pretty laid back and a friends' raid, they decided to shut down the raid instead. Given that we only had 9 people we went into Naxx, Eye of Eternity, and Obsidian Sanctum one last time, but that was the end.
***
And so ends my Wrath Classic raiding.
I have not much desire to go raid any further, as it seems that even casual raids have to work hard to keep from backsliding into a more hardcore stance. I do know that my old friend Jes has been running 25 person pug raids of her own, and I know she'd be happy to have me sign up, but I really have no desire to join a raid that is nominally hosted by the franken guild, pug or not. Even if I was so inclined, I noticed who was signing up for the raid and some of those are people I don't care to ever raid with again.
It's not as if I'm giving up on Wrath Classic. The new Heroic Plus 5-person instances --what I've dubbed the "Mythic Plus of Wrath Classic"-- are sufficiently difficult enough that I'm happy to run some of those and scratch that group content itch. Beyond that, there's plenty of things that I can do that have nothing to do with raiding, so I'll be fine. In spite of what the majority of the Classic playerbase seems to think, endgame raiding isn't why I play Wrath Classic. It never was.
*No, I didn't break down and look up where the Black Temple entrance was on Wowhead, either.
**For Wrath Classic, Wintergrasp became an instanced battleground, but originally it was designed as a World PvP event where the winning faction gained access to the Vault of Archavon mini-raid. If you were on an imbalanced server --and most people were-- if you were on the wrong faction you never got into Vault of Archavon. Of course, now everybody can get access to VoA, because all it takes to gain access to Vault of Archavon is having exactly one person on your faction on the server having won Wintergrasp to gain access to VoA for your faction.
***In Wrath Classic, both sets of raids --10 person and 25 person-- drop their own gear. Due to the supposed increased difficulty of 25 person raids --and more people to gear for-- the 25 person raids drop gear with supposedly superior stats. That doesn't mean that an item from a 10 person raid might not be BiS for your toon and your spec, but a 25 person raider going down to a 10 person raid is going to have better gear than someone (like me) who kept to 10 person raids. The two types of raids don't share the same lockout, so Cardwyn could theoretically join both a 10 person raid and a 25 person raid of Ulduar that same week without issue.
****Wrath of the Lich King saw the beginning of hard modes for raid content. You could flip a switch in the raid and suddenly the raid entered an increased level of difficulty with the promise of better loot overall for each class of raiding.
*****Okay, one thing needs to be said: if you want to go all in on hardcore, and apparently a ton of people do, that means you're running full Ulduar raids --one 10 person raid and one 25 person raid-- twice a week on your main toon. And if you've got multiple toons, you can easily see where you spend every night of the week raiding in some form or another. I was listening to a YouTube video when it was mentioned that Warcraftlogs had announced that the first week of Ulduar had the most registered parses of any raid, my first thought was "Duh." Alas, I've not been able to confirm that mention independently, so I'd place this as "not surprising but unconfirmed".
EtA: Fixed a formatting issue.
Dang, I only just noticed the updated header the other day and was in fact thinking about leaving a comment on your previous post about how we need an update about how you're doing in Ulduar.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear that your little raid team didn't last. Though I can't say I'm surprised, after my own experience being in a casual guild on a large server. The allure of being able to get more loot faster almost anywhere else is just too great.
I do wonder whether you get sucked in by the allure and then discover that you've made commitments far greater than you expected. The desire to "see the content" is what sucks you in, and then you discover you're raiding 5 nights a week while you've got other life commitments to attend to.
DeleteThe more complaints I've heard about people getting upset and leaving the franken guild's hardcore raids have to do with the "second job" requirements: post raid performance reviews, constant gear checks, Loot Council prioritizing their friends over other needs in loot distribution, etc. While this may be just this particular guild's raid teams, the more anecdotal stories I hear from people I pug with in 5-person instances leads me to believe that the hardcore raiding guilds on the larger servers have this as an endemic problem.
I hate to put this at Blizzard's feet, but they are in no small part responsible for this. They need to keep subs up on a "finished" game, where people are excited to plow through content, both because it's known and because they can get the power they never had or didn't feel they had long enough. What they needed to do was create a different set of servers with specific timelines as to how they were going to release content along with those they might be more flexible on and release faster. Had they done that starting with the original Classic, I think they might have retained more over time, but the current system of reacting to player subs dropping as content is consumed has forced out many players, including myself, who don't have the time to invest in that "second job".
ReplyDeleteI do find it interesting that instead they decided to make the content harder to reduce the consumption, but if they aren't actually seeing guilds support members and instead or just creating a more hard-core environment, this is going to end up badly for them.
One of the interesting things about private servers is the lack of a progression system and how that can create community. The fact that a sizeable portion of the Classic players come from private servers makes me wonder how they have created community outside Classic Era.
Blizz is very much into "give the people what they want", and the people with the loudest voices are the ones clamoring for "more faster faster MORE" in Classic. (And Retail too, for that matter.)
DeleteThe ones who just want to do their own thing and operate in a more casual environment are swept aside, but as we see now with Classic Era those folks are happily sticking a middle finger to the hardcore raiding crowd, if they could even be bothered to give the finger to that crowd in the first place.
If Blizz gets to the end of Wrath Classic and Cataclysm Classic has their subs fall off a cliff, well... They've only themselves to blame there. They could just as easily done what you suggested and stagger the content based on how quickly you wanted to consume it, but I guess that costs money to maintain and they're not into that. I know I'd be fine with going slower in general, because with the world's opening up in a post-pandemic era, I don't have all that free time to just go play WoW. And even if I did have that free time, I wanted to go at a slower pace than what the hardcore crowd wanted. I mean, I enjoyed the Friday Karazhan runs I raid led because it was laid back and casual, where nobody was trying to speed run their way through an instance. Not that people couldn't do so if they wanted, as I was occasionally reminded that they were all consuming current raid tier content when I was unable to do so. (And to be fair, I was also unwilling to do it when I was going to be cajoled for not doing enough DPS.)