Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Hardcore players shouldn't mind easier

Some people have been up in arms about Blizzard's decision to nerf current raids.

As a member of the casual masses, I welcome this change but I can't understand why the hardcore players care.

Blizzard wants to have players experience the raid content, a fact made evident by the gear being thrown to players left and right during Wrath. While I loved the harder heroic 5-man instances released with ICC, they ended up being loot pinatas and threw the idea of hard-won gear out the window.

Reducing the difficulty of the current raiding tier with the release of 4.2 is brilliant. Serious players get a new raid, with new gear, while casuals basically get the same. Sure, we have access to the current raid content, but we never really got to the point of being able to consider it farming for gear. If we made it through (and our guild has yet to see many fights), it is tough each and every week. The difficulty has gotten to some of our raiders, apparently, because they stopped showing up on a regular basis.

By allowing for more mistakes during raiding, casuals can get a feel for it and learn at a lower level. Let's face it: right now, there is no place for a causal guild to learn how to raid.

Before anyone says it, I'm not complaining that Cata raids are too hard. Even though I haven't completed most of the raiding content, I still don't have a problem with the difficulty of the expansion. I'm a casual player and I don't expect to have easy access to all parts of the game without hard work.

As it stands, casual guilds can basically hit a brick wall trying to get a start into raiding. Rather than asking for loot pinatas, I would rather they make the old raid content easier. Not only will it allow more people access to the gear they will need to try to survive in Firelands, but it will give less experienced or less dedicated raiders a place to hone their skills. Casuals can hit a brick wall in raiding with Firelands, but now struggling guilds fall back to BWD and BoT.

Hardcore raiders should be thrilled that Blizzard isn't going to implement another set of 5-man heroics to help casuals gear up. Instead of worrying about a heroic instance putting out better loot than they are wearing, they can focus on Firelands. It also makes the current raid tier a place for us noobs to practice.

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