Improvements for casual raiding

My plan for 2008 is to retire to an island in the South Sea and have my readers continue writing my blog. Just kidding, but Trevor sent me a long summary of casual raiding ideas already discussed here with his suggestions and asked me to publish them. Sure, no problem. Although if you can write like that, you might want to consider starting your own blog. :)

Dear Tobold,

Recently your blog has several posts that really is relevant and interesting to me. A bit of background. My guild is a casual raiding guild (http://www.happyhourguild.org ). We schedule 3-4 raids a week, but our average raider can only attend about 2 raids a week, meaning we have lots of rotations/substitutions. We have had slow but not always steady progression.

I believe this is true - most WoW players will like to experience PvE raids if they can. To me and many others, raids are the best part of the game. To be able to research and execute a complex strategy as a team to take down a boss is an exhilarating experience. I see many comments posted at your blog by others that is basically anti-raid, saying how raiders are only interested in loot, how raiding is a boring (!) activity. But I think these are posted by people that either have not raided much, or raided with the wrong guild. I think the biggest improvement that can be made in WoW is to make raiding more casual-friendly.

So, I will put up a summary of proposals here, if you deem suitable, hopefully you can put them up at your blog for discussion (and hopefully wider attention). Majority of the ideas are from your blog (from you directly or your readers).


1) Easymode Raid Dungeons
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(http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/12/making-raiding-more-like-pvp.html)

Have an easymode version of raid dungeons. Set them at the difficulty level of say half a tier below its normal counterpart, with loot corresponding to that difficulty level. For casual guilds this serve as a bridge towards higher level content, and furthermore at any one point in the guild's progression more content is open to it. Which is a terrific thing. For hardcore guilds (for whom raid progression is a competition), these easymode dungeons are quickly skipped after using them to get a feel of the encounters, hence it should not be an objection to them. I do not see any drawbacks to having these easymode raids.


2) Better Handling of Raid IDs
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One of the biggest hindrance to casuals now are Raid IDs. Even if there are 18 people online and ready to raid, sometimes the raids are no go because 9 are locked to one ID, and the other 9 another ID. Raid IDs serve 2 functions:
i) Identify the state of the dungeon (how many bosses down), hence allowing raids to be spreaded over multiple sessions.
ii) To prevent bleeding edge guilds from farming the easier bosses over and over again, hence gearing up too quickly, hence clearing the highest level raids too quickly. Although arguable (and I am sure will be argued :p), I will assume this is necessary for Blizzard due to their limited resources, hence limited pace of new content created, hence they need to regulate the consumption of these content. Basically, a guild's loot is limited to the number of unique teams it can field (say if Kara has 30 pieces of loot available, a guild able to field 2 unique teams is constrained to 60 pieces for each week).

So, any new proposals will have to satisfy these 2 constrains. There is a relatively easy way - allow intra-guild exchange of IDs. For example, an interface is available to officers that shows the Raid IDs in the guild, and the members belonging to these IDs, and the officer can just exchange one member already having an ID with another.


3) Better separation of PvE and PvP
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(http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/12/separating-pvp-from-pve.html)

What do I mean by separation? What I mean is that you should not need to do PvP (BGs and Arena), in order to do well in PvE (raids), and vice-versa. A person who does not like PvP, should not be compelled to do PvP so as to get gear that will allow him to do better in the activity he likes, ie. PvE raids. Same the other way around. At one point pre-BC, the situation is that to do well in PvP you will have to raid, because PvE raid gear are so much better than PvP gear for PvP purposes. That is bad. Now the situation is in a sense reversed, and equally bad. PvE gear of the same item level is better than PvP gear for raids, but PvP gear of much higher item level are available for grinding as soon as you turn 70. For example, many casual raiders in my guild who does not at all like PvP, felt compelled to grind BGs and Arena, simply because PvP is a faster way to gear better to help our guild progress further in PvE raids. It especially hurts casuals because we already have limited time to play.

The suggested remedy in Tobold's blog post to limit PvP gear to BGs and Arena, although drastic sounding, I think will work. The alternative, which I think is better, is to make PvP gear even more specialized for PvP (and same goes for PvE gear), but without an artificial block. Right now already stamina and resilience is emphasized in PvP. The problem is that even after a big chunk of the item budget goes into stam and resilience, the PvE potential of the gear (say +dmg or +heal or +AP) is still too high. One way is to emphasize burst potential, much valued in PvP but of limited use in PvE. Rather than +100 dmg, let the item have a "Use" that gives +300 for 15 seconds every 5 minutes.


Thanks for your time.

Cheers,
Trevor

Just some small comments. On point 2 I believe that if you have "easy mode" raids which just give out points and badges, and are accessible via a queue similar to battleground queues, you will have to get rid of Raid IDs altogether. Which shouldn't be a problem, because there aren't any epics to farm, only points and badges. There aren't any PvP battleground lockouts either.

On point 3 I'd like to point out that the separation of PvP and PvE wasn't my idea, but another reader's post. I know it is difficult, but my preferred solution is to balance PvP and PvE in a way that the same hours spent in either gives comparable rewards. If rewards were balanced enough, people would automatically chose the method that was more fun to them. If one method gives better rewards people tend to play stuff they don't like just for the rewards. Both methods have to be tuned in a way that just showing up and doing nothing doesn't earn you rewards, which isn't yet the case in PvP.