Tonight was my first time clearing part 2 for the LFR version of Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring. Since my job had wound down, I finally decided to get back into putting effort into my Paladin and make some progress into the game. Matter of fact, I did 4 of the LFRs tonight. But that whole experience made me think, which is why I’m writing up this blog.
Currently, the new LFRs are very mechanic oriented compared to what many felt was a very disappointing end to Cataclysm in patch 4.3. Right now, it’s almost impossible to faceroll LFR, especially once you get into the later parts. There’s a lot more movement and things to be aware of compared to when it first started. That doesn’t mean it’s not easy but I think it’s more refined than before.
However, quite honestly, I could not help to think what a pixelated clusterfuck LFR is. Outside of the horrible wait times (at least on a Sunday night), the encounters are just brutal in terms of all the crap going on. I find all the effects incredibly distracting to the point where it’s just visually confusing. Now, I do realize that Blizzard probably intended for this but I find it nearly impossible to see what’s going at all. There’s just a lot of flash and too many mobs to really distinguish certain abilities.
For instance, in the first half of LFR Heart of Fear, when you attack the swarms, it’s just a mass of buzzing insects. All of a sudden, you’ll find yourself losing health and dying for now good reason. Certainly, it’s some ability from these creatures. However, between the 25 people attacking and healing the party with all the glowing circles, noises and whatnot, they decided to add abilities in this type of encounter, which essentially nukes players really quickly. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to do a simple AoE encounter with some mass damage out of nowhere, but it’s shit like this that pisses me off with raid mechanics.
Or take Elegan. Visually, it looks nice. But when you start getting into the fight, all the sparkles and whatnot are horribly distracting and even hard on the eyes. This is worse than a Michael Bay movie. You really can’t see anything at times and just have to guess if you’re outputting any damage at all. For a melee DPS this fight is just awful in that regard.
Another horrible encounter is the fight just before Gara’jal where you assault the trolls. Most of the fight is simple. But once the bombs start going off, we get back into the whole clusterfuck situation again. I get what Blizzard is attempting to do in these encounters by making people run this way and that. But I find the mechanics to be more annoying rather than anything fun nor interesting.
Here’s the thing. Maybe it’s my general lack of raid exposure but it just feels as though since Cataclysm Blizzard wants people just to be jumping up and down and running around rather than focusing on their class abilities. Whoever made this paradigm shift in the company should be fired immediately. People say “bring the player not the class” but just jumping up and down and running around trying to avoid fire is not really “bringing the player.” It’s just running around and jumping around.
A good player knows what the class does and knows how to react to a situation based on what the class can do. The problem with the game is that classes with their specs has devolved into a monotonous series of limited button pushing (aka the rotation). With Blizzard’s single minded goal of trying to balance all classes, you really don’t have a lot going on. At this stage, you might as well just have 3-4 types of classes (tanks, ranged, melee and heals) since individual classes don’t really matter that much, except for the few exceptions where a smart player figures out a mechanic with their class.
I understand that the game designers want to avoid forcing certain classes to be a prerequisite for raiding. However, at the same time, classes lose their meaning in the long run without a sense of specialization. The only meaningful thing is the category of a class being used. But at that point, it’s pretty much too late in the design.
The other thing is the whole vehicle mechanic in LFR. Seriously? As if reducing what a class can do is bad enough, they put a fucking vehicle mechanic in LFR to boot. Has Blizzard ever seen the horrible reaction to the Occulus? There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why everyone hates the Malygos encounter. People want to play their classes, not being in a stupid vehicle.
Putting a vehicle mechanic in a clusterfuck instance just convinces me ever more that the developers for Blizzard have extra chromosomes. Let’s go over this. First, imagine a new player entering the instance. Suddenly, they automatically get placed into this “vehicle” without having any time to really read about what the buttons does. Suddenly, things start beeping all around, they panic and die. You can’t assume what players will and won’t do. Why not just make the situation an elective rather than random? Or maybe give the ability to someone who has done LFR say 10 times?
It seems that Blizzard attempted to be more ballsy in developing these encounters. They aren’t impossible but they demonstrate that Blizzard has a long way to go in finding a good mixture between raiding difficulties.