I stumbled upon this touching story today. Everyone needs to go read it. Sometimes we all need a reminder to slow down just a little bit even in WoW.
Fate wrote a nice piece the other day about the hassles of trash mobs. One of his Guildies complained about them and Fate took it upon his hands to write about why trash is good and not bad. His main argument? Trash helps to build up the suspense and the pleasure when the boss in charge of them gets taken down. Otherwise, you’d be blowing through Karazhan, SSC, and TK within time frames of an hour.
Personally, I’d love to see more instances akin to Mag and Gruul (Ony style). We’re on a limited raiding schedule. Every wipe, every trash kill, every rebuff eats into the precious time we have. Our 25 mans are capped at exactly 11 hours of raiding per week. Let me first say that I’m proud of the Guild that I’m in and the discipline that they show during crunch time. We may fool around and crack jokes, but when we get down to business we do whatever it takes to get the job done. The clutch Al’ar kill is a testament to that (5 hours of sunday wiping, one more respawn kill, followed by an Al’ar first down). Sometimes, I just wish we had more time to do it.
Trash is nice to have sometimes. I do agree with Fate that it’s something to do in between bosses. Players need to have a little bit of a downtime. It’s not possible to ask 25 players to maintain a 110% focus and concentration. They would burn out too quickly. I know I can’t remain that tense for such a period of time.
But on the other hand, I don’t want to spend time to reclear trash repeatedly. Nothing kills momentum faster then getting a boss down to 10% and knowing you’re able to kill him only to get stopped by the Wall of Trash (0/*, Creature – Wall, Tap: Piss off target raid).
Ah M:TG. Sometimes I miss playing. But it’s either that or WoW.
Anyways, the trash respawns, you look at the time and you realize that your raid is over as people have to work or go to school on the east coast. Trash respawns just kills that level of energy and anticipation. With all the trash removed in SSC, we’d be able to one shot all the bosses and have time left over to do other things (Like Cartman says, now we can all enjoy the game)!
Fate’s point is excellent though. We DO need that trash. Where else are we going to get our Primal Nethers from? Or random BoE/BoP recipes?
Here’s a thought.
We’ve all sniggered at one point when our raid leader forgot to downgrade a raid instance from Heroic to Normal difficulty.
What if Blizzard implemented it and made Heroic raids? Give Raiders a choice in how they want to go through SSC. They can do it normally, or they can do it the Heroic way. Reduce trash by 80% but increase boss difficulty by 20%. Keep loot tables roughly the same and throw in some badges. Maybe the health of Hydross will increase a little bit so the raid needs to ice and poison dance for an extra minute. Think of it as an express raid. I’m not going to try and develop that concept any further. It would probably get defeated in a manner of minutes. But at least it’s something to think about. I sure as hell am not a game developer.
Sadly, I don’t get to go into Zul’Aman today. Our 25 schedules stay the same throughout. With the reset timer nearly twice as fast as Karazhan, it means we can do it any time we want. I’ll probably run through it tomorrow.
Meanwhile, snoozing through trash is the order of the day.