World of Warcraft®

01/23/2013 03:49 PMPosted by Slashlove

But when you throw five people together who all have different objectives and available time? It stops working and badly.

Blame LFD.

I can't. LFD was simply a symptom of a larger problem. The average WoW player that you run into has neither the time nor the patience to do a dungeon the size of BRD in one single uninterrupted sitting. BRD, at level, was a 2 or 3 hour ordeal. (well...back in the day) You're being entirely insane if you think that was in any way, shape, or form, appropriate to *expect* from 4 other people, random or not.

Which is basically what I was saying. You take "the other people out of it" and embrace the idea of 2 or 3 hour long *solo* experiences for a player to get wrapped up in and suddenly it works perfectly, and damned if player-specific phasing wouldn't enable exactly that now.

The average WoW player that you run into has neither the time nor the patience to do a dungeon the size of BRD in one single uninterrupted sitting. BRD, at level, was a 2 or 3 hour ordeal. (well...back in the day) You're being entirely insane if you think that was in any way, shape, or form, appropriate to *expect* from 4 other people, random or not.

You're being entirely ignorant if you think that the only way to run BRD back in the day was to kill everything in one sitting, or even that they expected "the average WoW player" to be wanting to do that.

Part of what makes BRD now less special is that a lot of the sub-quests or sub-events that people were interested in back then don't exist now. Back then, guilds going to the Black Anvil/Forge, or doing the Ony chain, or MC attunement, all these things were goals people could have and were relevant. They're not now, so all that "appears" to be left is a big instance full of HP bars.

I love BRD.

Unfortunately, the only good runs I have are when I'm tanking it, because no one knows how to do it anymore. And no one wants to take 10 min to study the map and the quests, or to listen to me explain it.

And I am done leveling tanks. (I've said that after leveling my last 6 tanks.)

So, what we have left are: 2 min runs at 48-51 directly to Interrogator, and 30 min runs at 52-55 directly to Angerforge-Emperor. And sometimes, the tank doesn't know which is which.

The problem isn't the dungeons; it's the players.

long non-linear dungeons that take hours with secrets and stuff should be reserved for single player games like zelda

10-20m linear dungeons are fine for wow

01/23/2013 06:28 PMPosted by Faliz

10-20m linear dungeons are fine for wow

/puke

BRD was excellent.

UBRS was okay.
LBRS was a nightmare that I only suffered through ONCE because I really liked my group and we were going strong on our fourth requeue together.

But I had good times in BRD. I would grab the Monk buff, queue up for that one specifically, and just chain pull everything in sight. I was unstoppable. Sure, everyone wants to do different things, but I enjoyed just going wherever people needed. At first I would just do the beginning; at higher levels I would use the Mole Machine to skip it altogether. It really is a nice dungeon because you can leave whenever you want -- and as tanks we have a bit more of a say in what content we cover. :)

I had a group with someone who wanted MC attunement... everyone complained about it, even though we were ALREADY heading to the Emperor, and I took the guy through the lava shortcut so we could skip The Seven. Everyone complained so hard that I just left after the guy was attuned. Didn't matter - good exp and I got to help someone out.

Definitely a great dungeon. I'm having serious motivational issues now -- I tanked that !@#$ till the mobs turned grey, and then kept going ("Uh oh guys... I just realized I leveled up last run and these guys have been grey to me, gotta move onto BRS"). BRS was good enough for a while, except for some serious idiocy problems in the Whelp room and the room after that with the delicate mob groupings.

But now? I'm stuck with HELLFIRE RAMPARTS. They should set up a special queue for that dungeon, and instead of having Tank/Healer/DPS, they should just set up "Dummy/Dunce/arsehat".

Maybe a good idea would be a BRD Challenge mode (you know, since those require a premade group). Except the challenge should be something other than a speedrun.

You're being entirely ignorant if you think that the only way to run BRD back in the day was to kill everything in one sitting, or even that they expected "the average WoW player" to be wanting to do that.

Part of what makes BRD now less special is that a lot of the sub-quests or sub-events that people were interested in back then don't exist now. Back then, guilds going to the Black Anvil/Forge, or doing the Ony chain, or MC attunement, all these things were goals people could have and were relevant. They're not now, so all that "appears" to be left is a big instance full of HP bars.

That's part of the problem. *IF* you didn't basically do it all in one sitting, no two people are going to be after the same part of BRD. So you either agree to do all of it, or you do none of it because good luck finding four more people all looking to do whatever part of BRD you wanted. I started out on a high-pop server, and it took *longer* to find just ONE person to do any given part of BRD than it took to do *all* of BRD.

And then somebody runs out of time anyways, the group falls apart and you're screwed. Not to mention that dying/wiping/taking too long basically meant you started over from the beginning *anyways*.

BRD is amazing, dont get me wrong, but i started late in vanilla (after multiple rerolls for 1year), and my experiences with it were pretty weak, people just went to their route, and the dungeon usually finished when poeple left, respawns everywhere, and nobody ever wanted to do the full dungeons or any of the quests.

I'd love for bliz to make a dungeon like that again, but make it more practical.

i'm pretty chuffed for OP :)

the awe of exploration, the satisfaction of being so thrilled with their accomplishment and the rewards for doing it...

pretty much everything that's right with the game.

01/23/2013 05:30 PMPosted by Slashlove

Part of what makes BRD now less special is that a lot of the sub-quests or sub-events that people were interested in back then don't exist now. Back then, guilds going to the Black Anvil/Forge, or doing the Ony chain, or MC attunement, all these things were goals people could have and were relevant. They're not now, so all that "appears" to be left is a big instance full of HP bars.

That might explain why it feels so empty now; granted I came up in BC, but BRD always felt like it had lots of stuff going on whenever I was there, and in Cata it sort of...well, got emptied out pretty hard. Heck, I still remember doing stealth Shanker runs for !@#$s and giggles back then at 60 because I could. >_>;

I mean, granted, splitting it up was probably a good idea for the LFD crowd, but honestly I've had more people ask if I wanted to stay "for the whole thing" than not, even now. It's more just now that I've worked it out to a science of how few pulls I can make, how few events I can do (and you can skip a good 50% of the content in the instance if you reaaaaally want to), combined with how much of the original content got gutted or just made irrelevant, it just feels like a shell of its former self.

To this date, it's still one of my favorite dungeons in levelling content, but it's just sort of fallen from grace; it's not the same instance I remember...though in the long run who knows? Maybe that's for the best.

01/23/2013 06:49 PMPosted by Gruklaar

10-20m linear dungeons are fine for wow

/puke

If you want to group with 5 random people and do a non linear dungeon for 3 hours in todays WoW...well...

Granted I started in Wrath but in a way that gives me perspective outside nostalgia; dungeons like BRD do not belong in WoW

01/23/2013 03:49 PMPosted by Slashlove

Blame LFD.

01/23/2013 04:25 PMPosted by Sliphe

Now I'm getting all nostalgic.

Before LFD all you had to do on a reasonably populated server was post in /trade "Tank looking for dps and healer for so and so dungeon" and you'd have a group almost as fast as the LFD queue.

And the server community was a bit better imo.

01/25/2013 12:47 PMPosted by Fangthane

Blame LFD.

Now I'm getting all nostalgic.

Before LFD all you had to do on a reasonably populated server was post in /trade "Tank looking for dps and healer for so and so dungeon" and you'd have a group almost as fast as the LFD queue.

And the server community was a bit better imo.

And if you were a Ret paladin, well haha, sucks to be you.

That's part of the problem. *IF* you didn't basically do it all in one sitting, no two people are going to be after the same part of BRD. So you either agree to do all of it, or you do none of it because good luck finding four more people all looking to do whatever part of BRD you wanted. I started out on a high-pop server, and it took *longer* to find just ONE person to do any given part of BRD than it took to do *all* of BRD.

And then somebody runs out of time anyways, the group falls apart and you're screwed. Not to mention that dying/wiping/taking too long basically meant you started over from the beginning *anyways*.

Before LFD, you went in with people who were all after the same thing, as long as you had a shred of common sense.

There's a reason guilds work better for getting people on the same page than pure pugging. One of them is that people are willing to do things they no longer need to help someone else. It didn't take long to not need something specific from BRD if you weren't in a guild, because most of the things you did need were tied in some way or other to Onyxia/Molten Core. But that didn't eliminate the concept.

dungeons like BRD do not belong in WoW anymore

Fixed.

The difference between the available sense of community when BRD was introduced (vanilla) and now is large. The current WoW community would rather hit a button to queue, enter a dungeon without traveling and finish in a timely manner without even talking to eachother.

So yes, because the dungeon is not a one-way cave, or tunnel, people tend to avoid it. You have to think. Which is unacceptable.

I can't compare it to vanilla or pre-LFD, since I didn't start playing until fairly late into Wrath. On all 4 toons, I had runs in there from 45 min to about 2 hours, doing class quests for people, optional bosses, heart of the mountain, and so forth. I've also had ones where we just did the first boss and requeued. Usually, when we did class quests, people stayed to finish the run, even after their own was complete.

Achi, BRD tends to be one of the more sociable/talkative dungeons, if for no other reason than that people do need to communicate their goals, and since it is a long one (if you get 2nd half). In general, a lot of people keep it to the minimal "hi" at the beginning and "thank you" at the end, but I've had some really fun conversations in a lot of dungeons, and added people via Battletag or RealID while I was leveling, who I still play with.

01/23/2013 05:55 AMPosted by Inushi

This was one spectacular dungeon. It seemed endless. Tons of good drops too. Definately the best dungeon for me up to this point.

The best trolls are subtle enough that rubes can't tell that they're being trolled.
Well-played.

i hope is a honest post

BRD and BRS are the remaining old instances from vanilla, they provide a nice experience if you can properly finish them, since they can be confusing and overwhelming for the newcomer.

But i think that for our generation of players with fast queues from anywhere and super fast leveling with looms this kind of instances don't really fit, i like them a lot but i'm annoyed when i get to run them with my alts too often because they can be tedious when you're the only one who knows what's going on.

That's part of the problem. *IF* you didn't basically do it all in one sitting, no two people are going to be after the same part of BRD. So you either agree to do all of it, or you do none of it because good luck finding four more people all looking to do whatever part of BRD you wanted. I started out on a high-pop server, and it took *longer* to find just ONE person to do any given part of BRD than it took to do *all* of BRD.

And then somebody runs out of time anyways, the group falls apart and you're screwed. Not to mention that dying/wiping/taking too long basically meant you started over from the beginning *anyways*.

I never had any problems like that back in the day. When people were trying to put together groups for BRD they would just spam what sort of run they were looking for (stealth, bank, emperor, jailbreak, quest x, etc) and people joined and stayed at least for that part. Sometimes the groups would do more but if you weren't interested no one gave you grief about leaving once the part you signed on for was finished. Different servers were different I guess...

Personally I like the old style dungeons a lot more than the decorated bowling alley model but I understand why they moved in that direction. Your first few times through BRD, BRS (especially lower), and ST could become real nightmares if there wasn't someone who knew the place in the group.