The Fall of Theramore, the debate rages on. The Grumpy Elf waded into the fray and actually came out with a totally different conclusion than I was expecting. I was going to reassess my feelings towards Theramore's Fall but first I wanted to examine some of the points raised by Grumpy.
- Too Long, the Alliance version appears to be longer than the Horde version (no shock there we know Blizzard loves Horde).
- Queue Times, Why does it take 30 - 60 minutes to find 3 of anything. LFR suffers from Healer shortage, and LFD suffers from Tank shortage. 3 DPS = 60 minutes??? There is obviously something not right with the system and with more scenarios lined up for the new expansion this is something that needs to be fixed pretty damn quick.
- Easy, Grumpy says not.
- Prelaunch Event, we all know it is not a prelaunch event, but have we been short changed? All other expansions have had an event, quests, bosses. The players all know that 2-4 weeks for a one-off event is a lot of development work for something that will never be seen again, but somehow 10 months without anything new as made us hungry for anything that does not smell as stale as Dragon Soul.
- The Reward, there is little to go on to persuade people to invest the time on multiple attempts. Worse than the tabard was the badly phrased Horde gloating of the wanton destruction of innocent lives, which brought back memories of the Twin Towers.
Now the thing works as intended I can see it the scenario concept for what it really is. It is a nice time filler and should sit underneath LFD in terms of time requirements. It should be a sign up and a couple of minutes later off you go, with a 10 minute maximum time to complete, with a total time requirement of no more than 15 minutes. This is definitely not the case, with long waiting times and some poor groups having to go slowly and carefully.
Ghostcrawler has recently stated, ""this is what scenarios are like", they're a new feature, a way to do content quickly, in a your lunch break, to get some more valor or gear." If this is Blizzards intention then they need to do some serious work on the matching up process, or make more resources available for running concurrent scenarios.
Level 85 mobs with some Elites is not a big issue, they will nibble away at your health. The main problem is the sheer numbers involved in some pulls. A load of nibbles adds up to a big bite.
My main characters have not had any problems, but my lesser known alts who are more in need of any potential loot, and are still way over the iLevel requirement have still encountered problems.
My Warrior and Death Knight both assumed pulling roles and played a small meat shield for some of the feeble cloth wearers, and they have had mixed results. My unholy Death Knight was able to hold aggro in Unholy spec and survive once I changed to Blood Presence. My warrior needed to eat or bandage after the bigger fights. Plate wearers rock scenarios would be my general finding.
I have mentioned that I am the world's worst Rogue, although Grumpy thinks he is worse. I can now state that I have seen a worse Rogue, unless Grumpy also has a European account. In a group comprising of 2 Rogues and Warlock, which would be nice for PvP, it resulted in nobody being able to pseudo tank. The Warlock and myself were doing considerably more damage than the other Rogue so naturally we actually more attention. The other Rogue was skilled in stealth, vanish and sprint. The result was several deaths to the Warlock and Myself. There is no penalty for dying in a scenario, except the usual repair costs, so dying and running back to your body is not a big problem. There are no respawns to worry about and you can just continue where you left off. In some respects it would be better to have a timer on some of the activities just to create a little bit of a challenge.
If I am a bad Rogue, there is one other class that I play far worse, and it happens to have seen some major gameplay changes. My Gnome Destro Warlock was placed in a party with a Warlock and a Mage. In an attempt to provide some tanking abilities, we both ended up popping Voidwalkers. After that it was a nice smooth run.
The scenario concept is not easy and neither is it hard, the objective is always obtainable it is merely a question of how long it takes to complete. It is interesting how they will stack up in the level 90 versions.
Nope, I do not have an EU account, but we both better step it up (or is that down) if we want to claim the title of worst rogue.
ReplyDeleteI have done it a few times and have seen a few deaths here and there but have not yet gotten into a super bad group.
I am sure there have been a few of those in randoms that this turned out to be a wipe fest in. Hence the reason I say it is still too hard for the masses.
Remember, by blizzards own numbers, only 7% have ever raided and this includes looking for raid and over 50% do not even have a max level character. This means there are roughly 43% of the player base I can see having a huge problem with this content.
If you look at it just as the half that are at max level, that means for 86% of the players at max level this will still be challenging content. So I will keep saying I believe it is a little to hard for the 86%. All you need is one run with people at the minimum item level to see what I mean.