Friday, October 2, 2009

Skipping Content

The guild that I'm in, Aculeus Upon Ordeum, is NOT a "hardcore" progression raiding guild but we do raid on occasion and last spring even managed to do Naxx 25 twice a week on a regular basis. Since then, those who enjoy raiding in the guild (which excludes me for the most part) have suffered from a lack of key members (tanks and healers) and lack of desire to formally organize raids on a weekly basis.

A few days ago, I was part of a heated debate with some members of our guild about raiding and someone mentioned that we can’t skip content and that we should start trying to clear Ulduar. Well, that got me thinking, why the hell not? We’ve already done it by downing Onyxia 10 and many of the better raiders have pugged Trial of the Crusader with no issues. So, why is it important to do all the raids in order? It’s not. I personally would like to skip every raid up to Icecrown Citadel. I’ve never been into WoW lore until Lich King and since the main focus of the expansion is the constant battle against the forces of Arthas, I really could care less about seeing anything except Icecrown. Well, I liked defeating Onyxia, but that’s more because it was a redone Classic WoW raid that drops awesome loot.

So, since the new Icecrown 5 man heroic will drop iLvL 232 loot and badge loot from other heroic 5 mans is ilvl 226, why would anyone even bother with doing Ulduar 10 after patch 3.3? Even now for a new 80, the gear you can get from normal Trial of the Champion, heroic badge gear and heroic Trial of the Champion is easily good enough to get started on 10 man Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia. If Gevlon and his old guild could do Ulduar 10 in BLUES, then it should be easily possible to do both of those raids in iLvL 219 and 226 gear. Isn’t that how the progression should be anyway if you were to only do 10 man raids? At this point, the only real reason anyone should have for doing Ulduar 10 is because they want to, not because they have to.

To me, Ulduar and to a certain extent Trial of the Crusader are just side stories to the main conflict in Lich King. Since Blizzard is making it possible to “skip to the good part” of the story, why bother with the side plot if you don’t care to see it?

4 comments:

  1. In a way I agree with you. But the game is about having fun, not getting loot (which is always replaced). I personally don't understand why anyone would not want to do Ulduar. If that's the case, then why bother playing at all? If I didn't want to clear Naxx/Ulduar/ToC then I'd just wait until 3.3 and start to gear up then for the Arthas encounter. Or I'd wait a couple of expansions, when you can clear Arthas and the other bosses with ease.

    Even better, why not join a private server where you can one shot bosses. :P

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  2. I was in Gnomer today. Wow, I remember when every trash mob was a potential wipe. When we finally got a boss down it was epic. Now its one easy mob, boss, one mob, boss. If no one wants to do the hard content, then what's the point of the game, I wonder?

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  3. Some percentage of lore junkies will skip content. EG: Every who really hates the Old Gods. I skipped C'thun and I'm skipping Yogg-Saron.
    I just get a kick out of fighting dragons and defeating massive undead emperors. Funny looking octopi don't do it for me.

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  4. I agree with rorik as far as saying skip uld and go for loot piñata CC. If you're a group of good quality casual players you'll gear up quickly. What I like about Ulduar is that some fights are excellent learning experiences for future raids. That's really the only reason I can see doing stuff in order, to be better prepared for harder content. The one thing that bums me out is seeing someone with a 245 wep in their hands because they rolled and won but don't have shoulder enchants or gemmed gear grrrrr.

    Rorik and Millie are my faves :)

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