Hardly Easy

I hate when instances are made harder after being easy.

I just finished wiping for four hours in the Watcher with my Kinship. I hate that fight. I hate going. But they need me if they are going to go. As it is, we had to PUG a captain because one of our members was a no-show to the raid after signing up. I can’t say these people aren’t practiced. They’ve been wiping an average of three hours a week against the watcher with the same people every week for the last few months. There is a sign-up for next week, and I don’t want to go.

The PUG captain we picked up already had the shoulders and helm from the Watcher. Dear god, he must have killed the thing many times. We asked him what our group might be doing wrong after the first couple wipes and he had no feedback to give, either positive or negative on our technique.

The natural assumption we want to make is that he rocks and we suck. But we can’t necessarily make that assumption. He may have obtained the shoulders and helm before the update when the Watcher was easier. He may have got those items when the Watcher was even harder. We don’t know, so we don’t know whether to envy is luck at farming the Watcher early, or be envious of his Kinship’s awesome abilities.

We spent a few hours wiping at Dark Delving earlier in the week. We see a lot of people who are wearing the helm that drops from Dark Delving, including people in our Kin, but even the people in our Kin can’t reliably beat Dark Delving anymore. It used to be easy because of a bug, but they fixed the bug and simultaneously made the fight harder. Late-comers like me, are out of luck on that one.

Then there’s the new Book 8 instances. I ran these a ton. On my Runekeeper, I easily obtained all three pieces of +15 radiance armor and I got most of the pieces on my Loremaster. Many people in my Kin however, did not realize they were going to punish you by removing the tokens for the armor if you fail hard mode. People who jumped on the 3-mans early like me lucked out…. people who took their time with the content.

I helped my husband’s brother through the Halls of Mirrors instance after the path. What was once a somewhat easy boss fight is now incredibly difficult. If it had always been this difficult, then people who had obtained the HoM armor could wear it and impress people. But no, they can’t. No one will know if they got it during the “easy days” or the “hard days”. The armor looks the same, it functions the same, and no one can see on what date it was obtained or the level of difficulty necessary to obtain it.

I hate when they make it harder. I can’t give props to people who have the gear, because I don’t know when they got it, or how. I know it sucks when there’s a bug. Nobody likes to exploit things to get their gear. But stop changing the instances unless you are going to change the name of the item. I can accept if you let people keep their gear they may, or may not have exploited to get. But please, if you’re going to change the instance, change the name of the gear slightly so I know exactly what kind of challenge someone had to face to get that gear.