I don’t know about all of you, but for me Firelands and in a broader sense, Cataclysm progression, have failed horribly. As with anything perception based, your mileage may vary but so far I have not found a single person who has come out and said they love Firelands with a passion. Going with the very unscientific method of asking people around me and reading blogs, most people impressions of Firelands range from very mild enthusiasm to utter disgust and quite a few people have talked about how they’re reminded of Tournament of Champions, arguably one of the most hated patches ever.
So, I’ve decided to put on my detective hat once more and try to find out exactly what’s bugging us so much about this patch.
First clue: The progression path is not what we expected
If you’re anything like me, you would reason the following when it came to raid progression:
T11 normal –> T12 normal
T11 heroic –> T12 heroic
But it’s not what we got. Turns out that Firelands was initialy tuned with T11 heroic gear in mind plus what you’d get from dailies and VPs. Don’t believe me? Blizzard let it slipped recently when it announced the nerf to the Firelands
…and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can.
What I get from this is that if you were coming in from normal T11 progression and tried to do Firelands normal right away, as we did in Eff, you were looking at a very steep curve in difficulty. While that progression might have been fine for the more advanced guilds, middle of the road guilds like Eff have been struggling more as a result.
In the end, having Normal mode Firelands be a continuation of T11 heroics made raiding less accessible and brought us back to the days of Vanilla and BC where raiding past the introduction tier was only accessible to a minority of players… something Blizzard has admitted they are trying to get away from.
Second clue: The VP and dailies discussions
The one topic we’ve seen the most debated about Firelands is how badly you need to grind VPs and dailies. One camp, which I’ll call the moderates, argued that you should grind some, but that you could get by using the T11 normal gear. In short, play as usual, grind some stuff and it will all work out, like it did in the past. Another group, which I’ll call the maxers argued that you should max VPs and dailies all the time because it was needed to complete content.
Who was right? Well a few months in I’d say the maxers had it right if only because of the mix up in progression difficulty, doubly so if you were coming off normal modes. For a lot of players including me, the thought of having to regrind heroics all over again for points is not the definition of fun. In fact it’s as far away as you can get from fun.
In the end, our efforts were for nothing and no one told us
I think this is why Firelands if coming across as a bad patch. When 4.2 was launched, Blizzard effectively wiped all the progress of those who had done normal modes and to an extent, the work of those who had T11 heroic too. Suddenly, we had to grind all over again to be able to beat content. It was like being slammed with a new expansion only this time, we didn’t realize it at first.
Eff, as well as many other moderate guilds, hit Firelands the week it came out thinking we could carry on with the same kind of progression we had in the past and we were denied. Instead of good times, Firelands has been a source of frustration and burnout. Frustration at struggling and not fully understanding why and burnout because redoing heroics all over again is not our definition of fun.
I wanted, like many others, that the efforts I had put into T11 would carry on in Firelands and it didn’t. I think that this, more than anything else, explains why there’s so many of us dissatisfied with the 4.2 patch. Hopefully, Blizzard will learn from this for patch 4.3 and tune it so that T12 normal leads to T13 normal mode.
I think you’ve really nailed what’s wrong with Firelands. I don’t quite feel the same way about Cataclysm overall, because I felt like things went really well in T11. We got off to a late start, so we didn’t get to finish T11 and get our titles and everything prior to release of 4.2, but I feel confident that if we had started earlier in the expansion we would have been farming tokens from Nef and Cho for several weeks prior to the release of Firelands.
Sadly, continuing our progression into Firelands was like hitting a brick wall at full speed. I do kind of like the interesting mechanics and gimmicks, but even when we were able to master the gimmicks in a fight we would still have trouble. I thought it was just generally overtuned, but I think you got it right in saying that they had tuned it more towards heroic T11 gear than normal.
Perhaps it would be different if we were more of a hardcore raiding guild, but I think that most of us just don’t have the available time that requires. So instead, it just felt like no matter how hard we tried, we were no longer making any progress past the first two bosses. Hopefully, things are better after the hotfix this week, but at this point I really just want to get through Firelands and move on to the next raid (which had better not have this same issue when it’s released).
Pardon me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Blizzard use high end raiding guilds to test content before it is released sometimes? If not, the group they tested with may have just been in Heroic gear and it may have skewed the raid difficulty because of it.
Even so, the comment there does make it seem like it was an intentional design decision, which is depressing to say the least. With only two avenues of advancement in their game, one would think allowing as many people to be able to experience Normal mode would be a goal.
This “heroic mindset” for raid design also comes up in one of the recent Dev Watercooler posts on the main WoW site (can’t find it right now, dumb work Internet).
Anyway, in that post, they mentioned something along the lines of “we polled our developers who currently raid in heroics (which is all of them)…”. I was kind of surprised that so few blogs and forum posts picked up on this little tidbit that seems to indicate that _all_ of the WoW developers think primarily in terms of heroic-mode raiding. As you point out, this could easily be the reason for Firelands being overtuned for those coming from normal mode T11.
I don’t necessarily agree with all the points (I do think Firelands normal was targeting T11 normal gear) but my experiences are different. I do agree with the grinding.
Heroics – I’m done with them.
I proved I could do them when I was in 333 gear trying to gear up for raids. I proved I could do them with better gear from the raids so I could get more gear. I proved I could do them when I was in T12. Ugh… am I going to have to grind them again for T13?! (I know, tokens for T13 is the latest word).
Troll heroics didn’t last long either. Last one I ran we rolled through with 6 (or 9?) minutes left on the timer for the bear. It was crazy.
Here are few of my thoughts on the burnout:
One thing I’ve noticed about raid areas that people liked – they had variance. Ulduar had different wings with some themes to the fight or area. Naxx did as well. ToC? No, not really. You’re in the same ring until the last boss. ICC? It’s mostly the same decorator. I think some of the burn out on Firelands was due to all the fire.
Grinding dailies in a fiery area. Raiding in a fiery area. Even in the previous tier the major raid stream was mostly fiery looking/themed. BoT and TotFW were different, but also pretty short.
Fire, fire and more fire. Zzzzzz….
Another reason (for me) that I’m burning out on Firelands is that we’ve had player retention issues – mostly because they didn’t fit. Since we run a tight crew without a lot of bench-warmers (if any), we’ve had to recruit and PUG spots which greatly limited our progression. It also meant we had to hear the explanation of each and every fight over and over again because each time we were training a PUG on what to do.
Just wondering then. If we admit that T12 normal was meant to be done with T11 normal… why not put the vp items at the same level as the T11 normal items like they did in the past during Wotlk?
The obvious answer would be “So the heroic geared people still have incentive to run heroics” right? But then you have to to put VP gear above T11 heroic gear wich in turn leads you to tune your raid for VP gear… wich is way above T11 normal gear.
Just writing this it seems like a likely scenario. They wanted everyone to have reason to run heroics again and as a result they ended up overtuning T12 normal. Vp gear by itself is not enough and whether you fill the holes with normal T11 or heroic T11 makes a huge difference in the difficulty of Firelands.
It’s a stepping stone to Heroic attempts, but not entirely needed. A guildy posted these stats when we were looking at which to target as Heroic mode ‘soon’.
Here are the numbers of guilds that killed each boss (note the heroic following the normal):
Shannox: 33373 (98.12%)
Beth’tilac: 30791 (90.52%)
Lord Rhyolith: 29333 (86.24%)
Baleroc: 27169 (79.88%)
Alysrazor: 22879 (67.26%)
Majordomo: 21576 (63.43%)
Ragnaros: 13481 (39.63%)
H: Shannox: 10710 (31.49%)
H: Lord Rhyolith: 6249 (18.37%)
H: Majordomo: 4011 (11.79%)
H: Alysrazor: 3442 (10.12%)
H: Beth’tilac: 2762 (8.12%)
H: Baleroc: 2537 (7.46%)
H: Ragnaros: 192 (0.56%)
Real interesting numbers, thanks!. Assuming they are accurate I was curious to see how much of the player base had actually made progress in Firelands.
So, assuming that A) players only beat a boss with one guild and B) there’s around 10 million players (Not sure about number but I prefered going with less) we get this. I also went with all guilds doing 25 mans to get bigger numbers
Shannox : 834 325 players (8.3% of playerbase)
Ragnaros: 337 025 players (3.3% of playerbase)
I suspect the reals numbers are even lower because most guilds do 10 man over 25 mans. So even with inflated numbers we’re under 10% for the first post and under 5% for people who have cleared it. I’d think it would be realistic to cut these numbers in half though to get real numbers.. so we get 4% for Shannox and less than 2% for Rag…
These look an awful lot like Vanilla numbers that Blizz said they wanted to avoid. If they were shooting for accessibility, they failed. Do you have the source on these numbers?? I’d like to dig some more there.
“I think this is why Firelands if coming across as a bad patch. When 4.2 was launched, Blizzard effectively wiped all the progress of those who had done normal modes and to an extent, the work of those who had T11 heroic too. Suddenly, we had to grind all over again to be able to beat content. It was like being slammed with a new expansion only this time, we didn’t realize it at first.”
Nail, Coffin, Etc.
I have a fleeting feeling that they did this to ensure they would have additional time to develop 4.3. It seems development cycles are getting shorter and shorter.
They admitted to wanting to reduce expansion to around one year lifespan down from the previous two of Vanilla, BC and Wotlk. Cata seems to be headed for a year and a half tops and the next one could very well go down to one year.
If at each patch we have to regrind everything… well, I just don’t see how that could go over well with everyone.
It doesn’t and won’t go over well with everyone.
I think the only reason the VP stuff worked in Wrath was that you could run 10 and 25s as an alternative – at least I know I mostly tapped out VP (the equivalent) by running both.
I assume those numbers were from wowprogress, I think your calculation of only 8.3% of the population killing Shannox is pretty inaccurate in that case as I think wowprogress doesn’t include China. I’m not actually sure if they have cata yet but I’m pretty sure they are a large section of the 10million. Also the 10 million figure is a high water mark I doubt it is that many atm. I also suspect that the majority of the 10million aren’t level 85. The concept that everyone should be inside a raid instance does rely on the assumption that everyone wants to raid. I agree that early firelands may of been a little too hard for average guilds in 359 gear but lets not lie with stats
Regarding the problems with 4.2 I think one major mistake they made was making the Troll instances give more valor this meant that when grinding valor in heroics everyone grinds in just two instances which massively increases the sense of burn out I would love to do a Grim Batol or Deadmines run again for a change…
“but lets not lie with stats”.. which is why I went with 25 man in instances to inflate numbers to try to account for China.
But I agree that on the whole the numbers are unreliable. I was just making the calculation in the same vein as we did in Vanilla WoW and back then these were considered low numbers. If anything, Blizz admitted they’re seeing less progress than they would like but I’d like to know the real numbers for sure if only for sheer curiosity.
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