Gear or Skill: What Separates Great Guilds from Mediocre Guilds
by Trouble on January 15, 2010 under Idiots
From a reader comment over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog we get this little gem:
“I think the core of this casual raid vs hardcore raid debacle that WotLK is turning into lies with the age old Gear vs Skill thing. Hardcore raiders prefer to attribute their success to skill. Rather than better geared than casuals, they are better skilled, and the gear is only a symptom of that. The reason that people are reacting so violently to easy Naxx is that it is making it plain to see for all is that gear is really the ONLY thing that matters in WoW.”
“Naxx at 80 has all the same skill requirement as it did at 60 (Plus or minus a very very few changes). You still have to get away from anub’arak, stay out of the slime and behind the boss on grob, change sides on thaddius, dance on Heigan, be smart with healing on Loatheb, and get behind the Iceblock on Saph. If you aren’t “skilled” enough to to those actions, you can still fail in naxx. The ONLY real thing that has changed is the gear requirements (From “Have to have perfect gear” to “You can get by as a fresh level capped character”). Wow is and always has been about the gear treadmill.”
Absolute rubbish. First off, a lot of the difficulty that top end guilds encounter is in defeating content that hasn’t been analyzed and strategized and movieized a thousand times over. Naxxramas is old content and it is thoroughly understood. Having an encyclopedia of information available about every encounter significantly trivializes them. Second, the tuning is quite different. Naxx originally DID have a decent amount of easy fights which are still easy. But there were a lot of fights that used to be much more tightly tuned (Patchwerk, Gothik, Thaddius, Four Horseman, Sapphiron, Kel’thuzad). To say they’re the same encounters now just because the base mechanics are nearly the same is to show how ignorant one is about how much tuning effects the difficulty of an encounter. As an example, original M’uru (the hardest fight in the game ever) and M’uru with 30% less HP are completely different fights. The names of the mobs and the graphics are the same, but it’s not the same fight. Not even remotely close. The same can be said for Naxx at 60 and Naxx at 80.
Beyond that, this read is ignorant of the changing paradigm of measuring raid progression. Blizzard is making content accessible and inclusive while retaining difficulty through the addition of achievements. It’s a genius move on their part. The content itself is easy but hardcore guilds can still demonstrate their prowess by completing difficult achievements. Sure all the mediocre guilds have cleared Naxx and Malygos, but they haven’t killed Sartharion with three drakes. They haven’t gotten Immortal. They haven’t gotten Heroic: Glory of the raider. Wowprogress.com is still doing a fine job of ranking guilds by progression despite the fact that most raiding is easy.
It always amuses me to read posts on the front page of guild sites like “Malygos down, all content cleared!”. No, no you did not clear all the content. Go kill Sartharion with three drakes. Go get Glory of the Raider. You’re not done. People need to wake up and realize the paradigm of how progression is measured has changed. Ulduar will drive this point home when Blizzard makes a hard mode for every encounter that gives additional loot and rewards and all the major progression sites count towards progression rankings. People will realize that clearing the zone is just the first step, an easy step that every half decent guild will complete. Completing the achievements will be the true competition and is what will separate the great guilds from the mediocre ones. Not the gear.
It’s doesn’t take gear to get Immortal. It doesn’t take gear to kill Sartharion with three drakes. It doesn’t take gear to kill Malygos in five minutes.
01/15/2009
1:44 pm
Whether the boss is nerfed to be easier, or the raid is powered up by more gear, is in many respects the same. Patchwerk with a raid completely geared in green/blue armor is hard and requires lots of skill, Patchwerk with a raid in full Naxx-25 gear is very easy.
That is why I never understood that skill vs. gear debate. Obviously you need both, and the more you have of one, the less you need of the other. In both directions.
01/15/2009
2:01 pm
In response to the original commenter, I was referring to any currently available gear. His contention was that Naxx is easy because there's very little gear gap between the hardcore raiders and the casuals and that's why the progression gap between hardcores and casuals is non-existant. My basic response is that he's right on the gear front, there is very little difference, but on the progression front there IS a large gap between the good guilds and the mediocre guilds.
I completely agree with your point though. You can get a ton of gear and overpower fights with sheer numbers (or if the fight is nerfed) but the point is that great guilds are able to beat the content without overpowering it with gear. Mediocre guilds need to wait until the next tier of easy loot (or next round of nerfs) is available to beat the harder content.
01/15/2009
4:25 pm
Love the blog and follow it daily. Keep up the good work.
01/15/2009
8:53 pm
01/16/2009
4:52 am
at the achievments: i hate them, generally. there are a lot of them, which should be now the excuse for missing content (for example "do 100000 quets"), but for the pve-competition it's an good idea and i like it to kill sartharion but still have an aim to get higher on this content
01/16/2009
3:15 pm
01/20/2009
9:03 am
I entirely agree with your thoughts on achievements and Naxx difficulty.
01/21/2009
3:06 pm
01/21/2009
3:22 pm
I unfortunately don't have access to a top guild on my server, and can't leave due to my responsibilities to my friends, but dedication and skill are things that came easy to me when I wanted to see content.
Therein lies the problem, though, because "content" to me doesn't mean achievements. It means new fights, new instances, and new loot.
I believe the first ever "hard mode" boss was the beetles in AQ40. Lord Kri, Princess Yauj, and the small one (The name escapes me). Whereas this fight was optional, few guilds ever bothered with the "hard mode" of this fight, in favor of progressing through to C'thun.
--Note: C'thun was the hardest encounter ever created in wow, not M'uru. Until they nerfed C'thun considerably, not one guild worldwide had killed him.
This was my idea of a perfect instance (minus the size, god it was huge.) because it offered a linear progression of bosses, along with optional encounters with optional difficulty levels. Killing Loatheb with spores, and killing him without? I just don't see the fun in that. The fight is the same, the fight mechanics are the same. To me, there is absolutely no merit in killing a boss you've killed before, but having it take a little bit longer. Of course though, It's only one man's opinion.
I would prefer that "hard mode" be translated into a new boss, rather than making the same encounter play out in a slightly different fashion.
01/21/2009
4:43 pm
1.) They have finite development resources. They cannot simply add an unlimited number of bosses. They have to compromise. My guess would that it is much cheaper to retrofit a fight to add achievements to it than it is to design whole entire new fights. All you have to do is tweak the mechanics whereas a new encounter requires all new art resources, map design, full loot tables, etc. It probably costs 5x as much to create a new boss as it does to add an achievement to an existing boss, or design a boss with achievements in mind.
2.) Blizzard wants a broad swath of people to experience all of their content. They don't want to develop bosses that only 0.1% of the population see outside of videos. Look at Sunwell, they nerfed the hell out prior to the expansion for no other reason than to give more people a chance to see it. From a business standpoint it's ludicrous to dump mountains of resources into something that only a very small percentage of your customers will be able to get access to.
From this perspective, the achievements idea thrills me. First off, I hate when they go back and nerf old content. It feels like it devalues my accomplishments. With the new system, they tune the base encounters easier so that they are accessible, and the achievements are much more difficult. They never need to go back and nerf achievements because they don't need to let everyone complete them. Everyone can see the fights, they just can't do the achievements. It excites me that "low level" instances will have achievements in them that other guilds on my server may NEVER complete because they're so difficult.
Don't look at it from the perspective of the simple achievements like spore loser. Most of the raid achievements that shipped with Wrath were very simple test case type things. Look at Sartharion 3D and Malygos Five Minutea as examples of progression achievements. They are difficult enough that only a small subset of guilds can complete them. I expect we'll see many more achievements of that variety in Ulduar. I'm sure we'll see the dumb "flavor" achievements like most of the Naxx ones too, but they'll also likely not give any additional rewards and not count towards "official" progression. Killing Sarth 3D and Malygos in five minutes DID feel like an accomplishment to me, just as much as any other real boss kill did.
And in regards to C'Thun, that honestly doesn't count. It was mathematically impossible, not just "hard".
01/22/2009
6:44 am
They nerfed Gotta Go in this most recent patch, and nerfed the Loremaster achievement as well. That said, perhaps it isn't a "need" but they certainly are doing it.
From a business standpoint you're absolutely correct, however if you look at the history of raiding, what were the instances people regard as the "best" ones? Generally the answer you'll get is Naxx(lvl60) and Sunwell. Being that this is most likely the opinion of the hardcore raiders, this is a player base that blizzard does have to try to satiate.
This is most definitely because I'm an elitist asshole, but if you suck so bad that you can't kill bosses in PvE (Pve is absurdly easy) then I don't really want you playing my game, clogging my AH market, and spewing rhetoric in my trade channel. Unfortunately for me, Blizzard can't look at it from that standpoint because they would lose well over 80% of it's subscriptions.
I suppose my issue is that if I kill Sartharion, and then go to do Sartharion 3D, it feels like the same boss to me, but a little(or in this particular case, a lot) harder. In your Sarth post not long ago, Trouble, you mentioned that Sarth3D is a completely different fight from 2, or even 1 drake. It might be a different fight mechanically, but for some reason I don't feel that a drake and a title are worth the effort. They're meaningless aesthetic rewards when compared to killing Nefarian, Ragnaros, Kel'thuzad(at 60), or C'thun.
If they're going to use achievements as a form of progression, then in my opinion the rewards for completing something as trying as Sarth3D need to be scaled upwards quite a bit.
01/22/2009
9:07 am
To an extent I agree with you on the elitist asshole thing. I relish being able to do things that others cannot and being able to flaunt that fact with either loot or other rewards. I think a lot of people feel that way though many are hesitant to admit it. I enjoy the challenge of difficult raiding, but I definitely enjoy the exclusivity of it as well. On the other hand, it's not sustainable as a business model. They can't cater to the top 1% (or top 0.1% really if you talking about completing Naxx or Sunwell pre-nerfs). That's why I think achievements are so great. It allows them to throw us some bones while achieving sustainable business model for raid content. The way I see it, the more accessible the content, the more people they think will utilize it, the more development dollars they'll be willing to spend on it.
I also agree on the reward part. I like titles and mounts and stuff, but there needs to be concrete loot rewards as well. Based on what Blizzard has said I think we'll be seeing that in Ulduar a lot more. That's why I think we'll see achievements elevated from idle curiosity to a serious measure of progression. Serious guilds will want to complete and farm hard-mode encounters for loot. This is what I see as the difference between one off achievements (most of the current ones) that you only need to do once to get that check mark on your sheet, and ones you do every week because the rewards make it worth doing.
01/22/2009
9:38 pm
I believe you when you say that Sarth3D and 5 minute Malygos had you feeling accomplished, like you'd just killed a new boss. I'm sure if I were among the first to complete that I would have been the same way. I suppose for me it isn't so much just completing it, but doing it before anyone else does. That being the case, I don't have the luxury of that in my current guild, which may be influencing a lot of my opinions.
I appreciate your responses in these commentary sections. I'll keep as up to date as I can in new posts and such, to hopefully gain some more insight to a top 25 progression guild.
Take care.
01/23/2009
12:20 pm
02/18/2009
7:50 am
What i dont agree with is some saying that the sarth + drakes fights don't make it into a different fight.
The addition of each extra drake brings soo many different aspects to the fight that just because it looks the same and some of the perils are the same, it is still a very different.
What i hear of ulduar is the best thing blizz have done for raiding ever!
Most players get to see all content + we still get hard fights to satisfy us suckers for punishment.
Hard mode gives us those hard bosses we want and as long as it makes the fight different enough from normal mode i'll be happy as a pig in....