Raids (Destiny)

by BOLL , Sweden, Tuesday, May 07, 2013, 11:23 (4008 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Ah, skimming the thread I realize most things have been said, but I have to use that year I lost to hard core WoW raiding in some way.

Endgame in vanilla WoW was like this. The raids were scaled as such that they were _reaaaaally_ hard, you could spend a month trying to down a single boss, and this even with having checked guides. It was mostly slow because you had to grind a raid until your group had good enough gear to get through it all, and in WoW there were lockout timers so you could not just restart a raid.

I read on Malstrom's blog that it's a tactic to make distance to the content wall, the point where there is no more content and players will lose interest. With WoW all the super hard raids were nerfed with the next expansion, so _anyone_ could finish them, not just the hard core guilds. Why was this content unlocked like this? Probably because then there was more content waiting after that raid. Luckily I had quit WoW before the first expansion so I saw the nerfs on a distance.

To check out boss fights on YouTube feels very MMO-ish. In vanilla WoW it would be up to 40 people in a raid, and if you fail, there is a reset time before you can try again and lots of preparation to get people resurrected and buffed, and it costs a lot of gold for everyone's repairs. And it takes a lot of time to just organize the group. With all these costs you as a raid leader will make sure you have done all you can to get a successful run, nobody likes to wipe, and few people had the patience to retry things that seemed impossible. It takes some time to change strategy when you are that many people.

And honestly, if you make a really hard encounter, the majority of the players will not care to figure it out, only the really hard core will grind until they can manage it. Then they will upload videos to YouTube for some street cred and normal players will have a better chance at actually taking part in that content (while it is hard).

This thing with raids sure does make me wonder how Destiny will actually play. I am not going to play a slow MMO like WoW again, the skill ceiling was fairly low, the real ceiling was knowledge about the encounters and the gear you had. The whole point becomes the grind towards better gear to make your character more capable, something that restarted every expansion. I really hope Destiny will work different somehow... o_o