Mark (newsgroups)
2/10/2011 11:37:00 AM
On 10/02/2011 08:58, Steve Kaye wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:10:27 -0800 (PST), JC<jc1k@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 9, 12:09 pm, "Mark (newsgroups)"<marknewsgro...@yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>> I'm hearing reports about a 'buff' to groups entering heroics through
>>> the dungeon finder. Something about a 15% group wide buff if you queue
>>> solo and get put in with other solo players. I don't know what this 15%
>>> buff means, if it's the health or what, but I must say I did find my
>>> daily heroic quite easy today. Got HoO and thought it was just because
>>> we had a good group (actually had good CCers), but trash was very simple
>>> and so were boss fights.
>>>
>>> I think it's a pity, there are still many people who haven't started
>>> heroics who now won't experience them as they originally were. That and
>>> add on the fact that JP are easy to come by from normals means that you
>>> can overgear heroics before you even enter them. Combined with the buff
>>> (and some nerfs in the dungeons themselves) and I don't think people
>>> will struggle any more.
>>>
>>> I understand these sort of things happen in every expansion but it seems
>>> to soon to me. They should only do it when they add a new tier of more
>>> difficult dungeons.
>>
>> Guild and premade heroic runs were fine, but by in large, LFD for
>> heroics has been a complete and utter toilet - a cesspool. Even above
>> and beyond the content difficulty, with all the other problems with
>> LFD (tanks selling queues and bailing, tanks/healers bailing when they
>> see Stonecore or GB, generally poor attitudes, etc.), this change is
>> well deserved. Pugs get a slight handicap, to account for the
>> randomness of group comp, and generally not knowing the rest of their
>> party, while guild runs can still experience the original difficulty.
>> Win/Win.
>
> PuGs do get a slight disadvantage over pre-mades because of the fact
> that they don't know each other so don't coordinate as well. That's a
> *slight* disadvantage and should have easily been compensated for by
> the old 5% buff.
>
> A 5% buff isn't a slight buff - it's a good buff. It's a buff that
> people would snap up for 3 talent points and they're getting three
> times that amount just for joining the LFD tool solo. I think that
> it's too much.
>
> I think that the major part of the difficulty is more to do with
> player quality.
>
> In a PuG, you get anybody and everybody and don't get to pick and
> choose who you go with. In a pre-made or a guild run, you do get to
> choose who you run with and you're not going to choose to group with a
> bad player more than once or twice unless it's a guildie. If it's a
> guildie, you'll probably not join a group with them if there is
> someone else in the group who you know to be a bad player.
>
> This results in the quality of player in a pre-made being higher than
> that of a PuG.
Our guild is a smallish social guild. We have a core raiding team (of
which I am not part) who have played together forever. They generally
run their heroics together. The other players in the guild are all down
to earth people (for the most part) as that is meant to be the ethos of
the guild. However, and this probably isn't something I should say, I
actually prefer running PUGs to running guild runs with some of our
members. Some of them think that because it's a guild run and the guild
is casual they don't have to make an effort to gear up, learn the
fights, CC, etc. Our tanks are all taken, as in they generally run with
the raiding members, and so I have no real incentive to queue up as a
healer with a couple of random DPS from our guild. My queues are no
shorter, in fact they may be longer.
These days, it's very rare for me to go into a heroic PUG and see
players with less than say 8k DPS. However, on a recent guild run, two
of our DPS had 6k DPS. One went afk in the middle of the run with a
"brb" for 10 minutes. The run took far longer than most of my PUGs. As I
mentioned in another post, I very seldom fail in PUGs. I'm not sure if
this is because I am the healer and so have some more ability to
influence the result than just playing a DPS or what.
The horror stories of heroic PUGs were true, and sometimes I still get
terrible groups, but largely these days things are fine (before the patch).
I ask players who are having issues in PUGs, what classes do you play?
Are you DPS? Do you have dispels, interrupts etc? Do you know which mobs
(yes even, or especially trash) you should be interrupting and dispelling?
>> Pug failure should be the exception, not the rule.
>
> Success/failure should be based upon the skill and gear level of the
> group. It shouldn't be based upon how the group entered the instance.
> I think that the 5% buff should have been enough to compensate for not
> knowing your teammates. 15% seems too much to me - it seems like it
> is actually compensating for bad players.
If the buff is only 5% then I am actually more ok with it I guess. Still
don't see that it was totally needed based on my PUG experiences.