Comments on: Swtor raiding overview for WoW raiders

By: Boxerdogs

Boxerdogs — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:17:16 +0000

I guess sometimes people just have to agree to disagree, but I have a hard time understanding why anyone would think that the links between the story and the raiding became more disconnected in WotLK. Sartharion had no link to the game, that is true, but Ulduar had an entire zone dedicated to it (with events in the Storm Peaks being echoed in the raid, also the Freya lines in Sholazar provided lead-in), the LK in ICC was the theme of the whole expac, Naxxramas floated above Dragonblight and there were other Undead floating ziggurats we sieged in two other zones I can think of. It wasn’t THAT hard to understand that we sailed to Northrend to fight the LK and all his undead minions, and that our first raid might be on… a floating citadel of undead minions of the LK! Plus my character visited Naxxramas before it moved to Northrend. I knew that Naxxramas was bad in-game.

Compared to TBC? Mount Hyjal made no sense to the story aside from getting a vial from KZ (why not zone out after that and go fight Illidan in BT?). Karazhan had a very small breadcrumb chain from Shatt which had no relevance at all to the main storyline of Illidan. Sunwell Plateau was a tack-on in a daily hub, after the boss of TBC had already been killed. ZA was utterly unrelated to the main storyline of TBC, so far as I can remember. SSC and TK had vague relations to their 5 mans, but I would say SSC bosses were far less referenced in Zangamarsh than Ulduar bosses were referenced in Storm Peaks. Same for TK bosses and lore in Netherstorm.

For me, TBC (BT aside) was the low point of raids being connected to the flow and lore of the game. It was a big let-down after the War Effort leading to AQ40, MC and BWL leading on from UBRS and LBRS, and Naxx being above Stratholme. I was happy when WotLK had raids that seemed more related to the zones they were in. Compare that to TBC or Cata (DS lol, teleporting around the place with no context at all, Firelands being slapped into a portal hidden in Mt Hyjal, BoT, the worst geographic representation of an instance ever, where the hell was the dungeon on the other side of that damn portal on top of the tower?).

Apologies for the defence of WotLK. I know it predominantly has detractors, and on many issues I would not care to defend it (even though I enjoyed it myself), but I must insist that I knew *exactly* why I was in Northrend, in a way that wasn’t true in Outland, or Cataclysm.

To each their own though, I don’t play either SWTOR or WOW any more heh.

By: lonomonkey

lonomonkey — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:55:59 +0000

Yeah I agree here. I do feel too that the sotryline became more disconnected around wotlk. I mean, Ulduar was fine but the way they inserted it in the story was weird,

By: Shintar

Shintar — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:15:59 +0000

The Lich King himself was done well, but why did we have to kill Sartharion again? Why, as a Horde player, was my first goal after hitting 80 to help an Alliance Keep besieged by a lich? Why, in 1.1, did conquering Ulduar become a priority over the undead? (Oh, because of a video on the official website…) WotLK was where they phased out actual raid quests (not counting the weekly), and IMO that definitely made the endgame a lot less intuitive than it was before. I’m by no means saying it was bad, just that it wasn’t all that obvious where you should be going at max level unless you looked it up somewhere.

By: [SWTOR] Winding up the plague, and in which Bioware starts to build a ‘raid style’ « Welcome to Spinksville!

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:57:42 +0000

[...] lonomonkey discusses SWTOR raiding in more detail and concludes that this type of originality is something that is increasingly marking out Bioware boss encounters. I think I agree with him, although SWTOR raiding has a lot in common with WoW, the encounters are different enough in style to make it more fun in many ways. The comments on that post also raise interesting points because dps have a slightly different focus in SWTOR fights because you don’t always expect the tank to be able to grab all of the mobs. The tank needs to get and hold the elites, but the dps initially focus on getting the lower health mobs down first. So the initial stages of a fight tend to involve everyone busily doing their separate thing, rather than waiting for the tank to get things under control. Although obviously if dps can co-ordinate kill order, adds go down very fast indeed, which makes a big difference. [...]

By: Boxerdogs

Boxerdogs — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:07:15 +0000

Urgh, lacks an edit button, I mean I think this may be why SWTOR raiding feels less cohesive in some respects with many elements to it, but more rewarding as a result (contrasting it with the WoW model of relentless efficiency in dungeon design).