achievements, gear, hardcore/casual, progression, skill, Ulduar

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.” click here to read entire article

achievements, News, progression, wowprogress

WoWProgress added more detailed ratings earlier today. This update includes finer granularity for its main listings and a new second listing that includes most of the heroic dungeon achievements.

Sartharion’s Drakes

For its main listing it will now track Sartharion with one and two drakes, however each of these will be superseded by doing the next higher up one. This is so as to not punish guilds who skipped doing less drakes in order to do the more difficult version first. This does, however, give finer granularity for guilds who have yet to kill Sartharion with three drakes up. Sartharion with one and two drakes is still a primary measure of a guilds progression and it’s a great thing to be tracking. The values are thus:

• Three Drakes - 7
• Two Drakes - 5
• One Drake - 3

This puts one drake equivelent to killing Kel’Thuzad and two drakes just behind killing Malygos. I think this is a pretty good measurement of their difficulty.

Listings With Achievements

They have added a second listing that adds a lot of weightings to the various heroic achievements. People voiced their displeasure of all these achievements counting towards official progression because they aren’t actually boss kills. Still, it’s interesting to track the info and you can discern how much initiative and perhaps how “hardcore” a guild is based on its non-progression achievements. Here is a list of the scoring for achievements:

• 10 - Glory of the Raider
• 10 - The Immortal
• 10 - You Don’t Have an Eternity
• 8 - The Twilight Zone (Normal)
• 7 - The Twilight Zone (Heroic)
• 3 - Make Quick Werk of Him
• 3 - Shocking!
• 3 - Spore Loser
• 2 - The Safety Dance
• 2 - Arachnophobia
• 2 - And They Would All Go Down Together
• 1 - Momma Said Knock You Out
• 1 - The Hundred Club
• 1 - Just Can’t Get Enough

I think these scores are a good start, but they need work. First off, The Immortal is significantly harder than You Don’t Have an Eternity. You can practice killing Malygos in 5 minutes, there are strats and vids available, and it’s honestly not all that hard. In three attempts using the correct strategy we came within 20 seconds of doing it. If we hadn’t accidentally killed him we would have done it within a few more attempts. Something you can knock out in a couple hours should not be worth nearly so much. It’s only valued high because so few have done it, but many will do it in short order as the strategy to do it becomes widely known. The Immortal, on the other hand, cannot be practiced over and over again. There’s no real strategy to it. It simply requires your entire raid to play extremely smart and very conservatively. If I had to score it, I’d put You Don’t Have an Eternity around 5 or 6 points and The Immortal up to like 15 points. Yes, it’s really that hard.

Next, I’d probably up the value on normal mode Twilight Zone to like 10 points. This is a very hard encounter which most agree is harder than the heroic version. There is some debate in the comments of the site as to whether normal mode achievements should be included at all. It is my opinion that the difficult ones should. If the encounter is difficult enough to challenge top guilds then it is worthy of being rated. Just because it only takes 10 people instead of 25 should have no bearing on its inclusion.

The final thing I’d do is reduce the value of all the 2 point achievements to 1 point, and all the 1 points to 0.5. The fact is that all of these achievements are extremely easy and can be done without too much effort on top of normal. The total value of these achievements put together should not be enough to outweigh even a single one of the more difficult achievements.

On the whole I think it’s great to have this more detailed listing available. Personally, I would like these achievements added to the main progression, though probably at a much lower weighting than is listed here compared to actual boss kills. Hopefully in the future WoWProgress will come up with an elegant way to integrate the ratings in.