I’m in the minority of people who liked Oculus though.

I remember when we first ran Hellfire Ramparts on Heroic. We wiped three times on the first pull. By the time The Burning Crusade ended, we were zipping through all bosses in the instances in less than 15 minutes, chain pulling or crowd-pulling the mobs in the instance to our heart’s content.

In sharp contrast, Occulus’ last battle remained the same in difficulty because of a very simple mechanic: no matter who you were, your “gear” and “abilities” were forced to be at a constant.

I was actually told not to hex anything by the tank on a normal Grim Batol run, and on a run of Lost City this morning, every hex I threw down was interupted by a hunter spamming volley. This, of course, made it that much harder to heal, and led to lots of sitting about waiting for my mana to come back.

Maybe I’m becoming less patient, or, as I suspect, the better players are moving onto heroics, leaving those without the skill, gear or guildmates to battle it out in the normal runs. Either way, I want the old playstyles back!

Team that with weaponry that has bonuses vs certain types of mobs and you’ve got the potential for multiple alternative tracks, none which invalidate the others.

Guilds could also be different in regards to what content they are focussing on – you could have a dragon slaying guild in the frozen tundra of the north, a demon vanquishing guild tackling the under deeps, and another dragon slaying skill retaking the fiery slopes of Mt Doomy Doom. Each equal in power and progression.

Players would hate it.

But also, since there’s no special reason why tank players would be worse than anyone else, if you’re right then it implies that dps are getting an easy ride again this expansion.

For all the DPS standing in the fire jokes, what I ‘ve been having more trouble from tanks in heroics than anything. Mostly because the difference between a good tank and a bad tank is so utterly binary and at this point, there isn’t a comfortable layer of gear to insulate us from it.

So any tank execution dependent fight has turned into a kind of endless death march as people keep dropping out and being replaced until none of the original group are there and a tank shows up who knows what they’re doing and Karsh Steelbender finally goddamn dies.

I just wanted to say that you brought up a very good point and I agree that if someone has an interest in playing their off-spec role a bit more that they should absolutely say something to those in charge.

I guess where I was going with that was that I see people who constantly drop hints that they want to do that, the officers thank them for informing them and may politely say it isn’t happening and they still keep pressing the issue. That’s where I was coming from.

Badgering people to do your off-spec role is never a good thing.

Thanks for stopping by and I appreciate the comment!

Might not be that reliable though. A friend of mine got it by dying before the fire came out.

A better design (and much harder to execute) is to make the rewards comparable but slightly up the difficulty of each tier of content. Being in tier 1 gear for your level wouldn’t automatically bar you from attempting the tier 10 raid dungeon – but the player needs to have the skills and experience to succeed at that tier. Raiding guilds would have to ‘train up’ new players rather than ‘gear them up’.

Of course, I’m not sure how many players would run the harder raid instances if it was for the challenge and the glory, rather than the loot. Some, definitely – but not all. And it’s probably too late for WoW to take this approach after 6 years of luring their players to the dark side