On this weeks episode; Kormus, Varazslat and Rusty sit down with nothing to talk about. We do however get to hear how Russell (With the help of his wife) almost burns down the house. Little to nothing going on the World of Warcraft. We have email from Chubbs, Voicemail from Fen from Ventchat and Prince Malkazar…. Please ignore the fill in the blank story, a horrid experiment to say the least. Dont forget we have the upcoming SuperFan #2 coming up and Rusty might be putting together a Raging Roundtable, so stay tuned for that. And the show name this week….. EPIC.
It looks like we will be having our 2nd /2 SuperFan day on June 18th. Unlike last time we will be using our Ventrilo server for the show (No disconnections yeah!) SuperFan day is where we put out an open invitation for any fans of the show to come on and be on that weeks episode. It ends up being a hilarious fun clusterfuck of talking over each other and bad microphones but in the end we walk away satisfied. This date is still tentative, I am trying to get it setup to be for a special episode 40 (Bring your 40) Stay tuned for more information as I have it available.
This week on /2 we sit down with captain awesome himself, Ninthbatter. The show never officially starts, and Ninth is barely introduced, but it was still a blast. We talk FOOD (yes we were all really hungry) Iron Man 2 (Spoiler Alert), We rant alittle on the offline AH crap. Then we get to the meet of the show, Handjobs by Quato and the dude from the Mask (Cher version) We also announce a new contest for fetish lovers! All that and more crap on this weeks Slash 2 Podcast.
This week, Kormus and Rustee fly solo while V abuses Mexican labor. We go into a little bit about the Cataclysm alpha and predict the downfall of blizzard/facebook. We check out your answers to the weekly inquisition, Bryter sends a voice mail and I make it up to Chubbs for missing his last email. All that and not much more.
This week on an super long /2 we sit down with Thespius from World of Matticus and the Raid Warning podcast. After the initial fastfood poopfest we dive into the most WoW new ever covered on Slash 2. The 15% raid damage buff in ICC, The new badge errr emblem errrr points system for PVE and PVP. Rusty shows some hate for the new Wintergrasp changes on the horizon…. even if the rest of the group was all tuckered out from this weeks main focus, the slow death of 25 man raiding for most of the Warcraft community.
We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!
The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.
We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.
Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards
10 and 25-player (Normal difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
10 and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.
We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you’re able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.
We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.
We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don’t plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.
In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.
We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you’re a big guild or a small guild the choice won’t be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.
We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We’re eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!
This is definitely a topic that will be warrant continual discussion as more news trickles down from blizzard. Its nice to see so many members of the community passionate about something after months of stagnation from a lackluster effort on blizzards part. All of this as well as the EPIC conclusion to the lilXT giveaway which pitted Bryterside and Ranedor in Mortal Voicemail Combat.
