I don't like ICC

| Thursday, November 11, 2010
There, I said it. Hang me up high til my neck stretches too far. I don't like Icecrown Citadel.

I'm not going to waste time trying to define fun or interesting since you'd say it's wrong anyway. But the first wing is not fun, except gunship, which is easy but at least different. Festerface and Rotgut aren't much fun either. Putricide is almost fun, definitely fun as the abomination, though also quite simple and easy.

Heal dragon fight is not fun either. Run here and kill this then runthere and kill that and nothing lasts more than a few seconds. It just feels frantic without being truly difficult. Sindragosa is a bit of fun, but frost breath irritates me as a tank.

Blood council is boring as a tank or melee. But as a nuclei catcher I've had fun. Blood queen is boring. Biting is a fun idea, but in practice is just a source of stress, or in 25 a call for addons and I'm no fan of fights that demand addons or even do more than slightly encourage their use. This is part of why I hate healing.

But at least there's Arthas. Except I don't enjoy that fight either. Phase one is boring. Phase 1.5 is boring. Phase 2 is some combination of irritating RNG and excessively precise positioning. Phase 3 is boring. It's fucking irritating staring at a release button for half the fight duration while Arthas and Tirion have a shouting match. A free last 10% doesn't feel fun, it just feels like I'm doing PvP with a rogue around.

I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment, pride, joy, or even relief when I got my first kill. I just thought "oh, I ran out of health". That's no way to feel after killing the last boss of the expansion. And I'll stick with the Insane, thanks.

I cannot blame all of this on ICC. More than a little bit, I believe, comes from having spent months longer wiping in ICC than I should have. I associate it too much with needless wipes, not from mistakes, which happen, but from players just plain not trying, not listening, not grasping basic concepts of fights or even roles. So when bosses died, it did not feel like my accomplishment or our accomplishment, but simply the eventual outcome of for once someone by accident not uttterly and completely failing.

And tanking in general has been pretty much straight downhill this expansion, with only a brief period of fun and challenge back before we overheated everything. Ret DPS wasn't much better, with T10 being a lovely source of lag-based DPS loss.

While I'm at it...
Naxxramas was a giant pile of crap.
Malygos was too soon and three dimensional vehicle fights do not fit in WoW, not the audience, not the game engine.
Ulduar was fairly fun but felt like it got cut off too much from the Storm Peaks setup due to having a raid and too much tome in between, not that I'm blaming blizzard for the delay, it just didn't work well for the immersion factor.
ToC was too hyped for being basically ICC-lite. Not much fun and somehow too short to be substantial but long enough to feel like I wasted a night.
I forgot Sartharion. 3D is brilliant for nothing else than showing exactly how ridiculous gear inflation has become.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

wtb more original trolling

Rorran said...

Klep- try as one may to define "fun and interesting," it's still subjective. There's nothing wrong with your dislike of the Wrath raids for whatever your reasons.

I'm curious though...what WoW raids DO you like?

Nils said...

Maybe it is not the raid itself that even can be fun, but rather the circumstances. Maybe the circumstances have not been as 'good' in WotLK as they have been in TBC or classic?

A related question: How could Molten Core as a frost mage possibly have been fun? I have been pressing exactly one button for several hours and, ignoring the 20th+ run, it was a hell of a lot of fun ?!?!

Anonymous said...

i dont like wotlk... snow sucks...

Klepsacovic said...

@Rorran: I like Ulduar. And the mystery raid to be announced tomorrow.

@Nils: I think you might be on to something there.

Dariela said...

It seems fairly obvious the problem is you don't like raiding. You may want to like raiding, but you simply don't.

Maybe you are simply burnt out on raiding, or the social atmosphere of you raiding party has changed, but your emotions aren't caused by the raids themselves. They are caused by you doing something you don't have the desire to be doing deep down inside.

Anonymous said...

Raiding with PUGs is really PvP in disguise.

Klepsacovic said...

Dariela, I used to think that. I wrote a few draft posts with titles like "afraid to be casual", suggesting that maybe I hate raiding but can't not raid. But I had fun in vanilla raids and BC raids and even LK raids (though obviously that quickly wore off). And in the new mystery raid I'm having fun. So there must have been something else, something which looked like a dislike of raiding, but wasn't.

Shintar said...

I actually wrote a post about how I liked ICC and its difficulty about a month after it came out - except for Festergut and Blood Queen, which originally felt like they were purely designed to drive healers insane. I do think our view of ICC is largely tainted by how long it's been out by now. I mean, after nearly a year and a thirty percent buff there's this constant feeling that you've already done this a hundred times and that you should be able to do better than you are. It's like a tv series that starts out well but then gets dragged out way beyond its natural ending...

Oh, and I wasn't impressed with Arthas either. The fight has some interesting and challenging mechanics, but Tirion stealing the limelight at the end sucked in my opinion.

Coreus said...

A good thing to remember is that games tend not to be fun unless you actually play them.

It can be easy to forget this in WoW -- you can get lost in the periphery of guild obligations and farming and mix-maxing and achievements and gearscores and social drama.

I see a lot of people posting in forums and blogs who seem determined to make the game as un-fun as possible, and it doesn't surprise me that they end up disliking it and burning themselves out by doing it anyway.

Key word is "play". It's a game.

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