Raiding is much the same. There is a little forgiveness, but not much. You do it wrong, you pretty much die.

As you grow the gear, it does become easier (especially heroics), but it’s still very unforgiving. You might be able to get away with more though.

One thing Spinks mentioned struck a chord – instead of requiring people to find the dungeon entrance before they could queue for the dungeon, they should have made you locked out until you did the regular version of the dungeon (exceptions might need to be made for SFK and DM).

Many fights in WoW that were considered very hard for their time might not have been that conceptually hard. For example-Vael was a huge guildkiller in Vanilla. His concept? Kill him in 3 minutes. It was just an intense ass DPS race but it tore raids apart.

Gothik the Harvester in Naxx 40 was considered widely to be one of the top-tier fights in that instance; below only 4H and the endwing bosses(YMMV there, but I know a lot of guilds who were stumped on him.) The concept? Balance the adds. Don’t kill to many Liveside so Deadside gets overrun. Liveside needs to kill just enough to not get overrun themselves. But in practice that fight turned out to be one of the toughest in that instance for many.

Now I can say back in ICC, our FIRST NIGHT in ICC we downed the first four bosses. We got Deathbringer at the end of the night, but we still cleared out the entire first tier. This was pre buff. Our first night in BWD we cleared Magmaw and Omnitron. That was it. We got Halfus in two shots our first time into BoT, but the double dragons we didn’t get-we got them the following week. Conclave we nailed the first night as well. So I guess looking at it, ICC had four 1st night bosses. This tier had four first night bosses as well, they were just split among the instances. I’m…not sure what that says. xD

I do think one thing I read rings true for me-it seems that while maybe the difficulty isn’t terribly hugely far apart in the Normal mode stuff, the margin of error is just so damned small this time around. I mean I’m cool with Heroic modes needing a measure of perfection, but I also feel that there should be room for error. I remember doing, for example, some hardmodes in Wrath where one screwup didn’t necessarily spell DOOM for the entire raid. (LK25HC or Yogg No Light notwithstanding-those fights, yeah, you needed perfection.) Nowadays if your interrupter on Nef lags or their finger accidentally slides onto the wrong button-aka, just human mistakes(lag not even being a mistake) and two Blast Novas creep through due to this you might as well just pack it in.

I guess I feel there can be a balance between ‘challenge’ and ‘allowing a little wiggle room’ at the same time. In other words, an encounter can still be challenging WITH some wiggle room in there.

This especially applies to party size and make up which has had a really detrimental effect on my small social WoW guild. We are all bored / stuck without much to do now because often were are just four online (not always the same 4 ofc) which means we simply can’t do heroics.

Pre Cataclysm we always found something to do, whether group quests (remember those!?), hunting rare spawns or undermanning heroics. Now that seem impossible because you have to do the dance which of course assumes 5 players. Even the seasonal special bosses can only be accessed via DF which means pugging extra people or not doing it. We haven’t always been this low, in TBC we regularly did guild runs of Karazhan.

So for me it’s not that the content is too hard, but that we can only play it if we fit in the little pidgeon-holed group (size) that Blizzard thinks is needed.

Personally, I view Cataclysm raids as slightly overtuned. I’m in a guild that has a fair chance to possibly clear all heroic content before the next real content patch (4.2). On the other hand, even if so, we’ll probably not have a lot of time left afterwards for relaxed 1-2 night/week farming “farm” content. That may be a good or a bad thing. (Less gear, but some people tend to get bored if you just farm for too long).
On the other end, if I remember correctly, there’s several bosses that really aren’t that hard. I understand how Omnotron might be difficult with all the special abilities and how they can intertwine, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about with Magmaw. Halfus was relatively simple too, and Valiona & Theralion are basically a “you defeated Halfus and a couple more trash pulls, here’s your additional free loot”. Maybe the difficulty gradient is a bit uneven in Cataclysm, and therefore it’s easier to get stuck. I don’t think that’s been much different in earlier content cycles either, though. You mentioned ICC and Ulduar as examples of instances that started out very easy and got pretty hard towards the end.

Now, when it comes to undertuned, revamped Naxx was a serious offender. Especially the Four Horsemen stand out for me, if only because I had never seen the fight in vanilla, but worshipped the videos and thought it was such an amazing design at the time. (Not even to mention the fame that comes with the name, as one of the longest-standing roadblock bosses in the game.) In the new version, from almost week 1, you could just zerg through the bosses, mostly ignoring the mechanics. I felt cheated. Yes, I’m still a bit bitter about that, and that’s why I bring it up every time the discussion comes to that point.

That makes balance incredibly important, and in DA:O’s case it’s much more important than tuning. I believe very strongly that if you balanced DA:O the degree to which it is undertuned would become obvious, but that doesn’t really matter because the balance issues make any individual’s experience of the tuning essentially random.

There’s little doubt that you and many others (including me for much of my first game) were playing DA:O “wrong”, but it wasn’t your fault. The “right” behaviours are far more likely to be discovered in a forum than in-game.

Anyway, I think I’m agreeing with you in essence! I just have a very particular view on DA:O tuning after all the modding

I found it too hard to be fun for me with my dwarf rogue on my first playthrough so I put it onto easy mode and had more fun. And I know a lot of reviewers commented on the difficulty in normal mode, so I don’t think it was just me.

Now I’m not sure if I should feel that I was playing it wrong though. I’m taking this as an indication of issues with difficulty and storytelling/ roleplaying games.

Granted this is subjective, but Razorscale was tuned tightly on release and there was a fair amount of running around and situational awareness given that the dps requirements were also high. Omnitron seems like an easier execution fight to me once people have got the hang of it.

I see your point, and I think a lot of the relative difficulty is going to be in whether you are part of a raid group that struggles more with the pure dps races or the conceptually harder fights.

Seriously? You don’t see a difference between Omnotron and Razorscale? Do you actually remember Razorscale? You literally AoE waves of trash (focused down the big guys on release) for the first half of that encounter. There even were friendly NPCs that could get aggro on the trash so that the tanks had some slack in picking up everything. After Razorscale was down it was simply a tank swap and not standing in fire.

In my mind, there is relative difficulty and conceptual difficulty. For example, I know people weren’t one-shotting Razorscale Week 1 – I believe the enrage timer was super tight on release, as indeed XT was overtuned, etc. However, conceptually? Very easy fight comparatively; nothing will one-shot you in Razorscale. Conversely, Poison Protocol will one-shot you, and Toxitron puts out 3 of them targeted on random raid members (including the Toxitron tank, it happened to me). Nevermind Arcanotron finishing off weakened members with his Arcane Barrage if he isn’t interrupted before getting moved out of his puddle, the high raid damage of the Fire one, how much it sets your healers behind if someone gets the Lightning Rod debuff while everyone is piled in the Arcane puddle, etc.

The bosses in ToC were actually conceptually difficult (except maybe Jaraxxas on normal), but they were undertuned on normal mode. These Cata bosses are/were more difficult both conceptually and relatively. As I showed in my adjusted progression chart, any guild that downed Al’akir or Nef 10m should have been able to down 10m LK at 0%-10% buff, based on the numbers and length of time the bosses have been available.

This runs up against the poor balance and the game’s failure to teach itself. You get a very wide delta in party performance, but given a reasonably informed build it becomes very, very easy indeed.

Making a legitimately challenging encounter in the DA:O engine can be rough. I’ve often had experiences where a fight which I’ve nerfed to a point I feel very uncomfortable with is still too tough for some players. DPS checks in particular are risky because they’re entirely absent in the base game and thus some players have no conception of how to build a party for damage.

DA2 is a significant improvement here (for a start the difficulty levels matter – Easy to Nightmare is not a big distinction in DA:O), but no toolset for it yet :<