We both still enjoy our first kills a lot. We enjoy the feeling of having done a great job at healing 10 people.

Maybe not after Magmaw, but there wasn’t much yelling after we killed Attumen or Anub’arak as well. The later fights are much better though – for example Chimaeron (though my raid is now scared of him and doesn’t want to try again) or Maloriak.

***

About death penalties – I’m happy with WoW’s take on it. It makes me not play defensively, it makes me take risks and try out fights where I’m not 102% sure to win – both in PvE and in PvP. I wouldn’t try to gank people mining or herbing “my nodes” if I knew that when I fail at it I’m faced with, say, 10 minutes of running naked and potentially losing my gear if I don’t make it or dying some more on the way. Tol Barad, or even the old Tarren Mill vs Southshore battles wouldn’t have a reason to exist at all.

I also don’t think death penalty itself makes the game more or less hard. Compare that to Eve Online, where when you die in PvP, you not only spawn in your home system – you also lose your “gear” as your ship has been destroyed; the opponent can loot some of your stuff from the wreck, so you have no way at all to ever get it back; and if you forgot to update your clone you can potentially lose skills that will take you weeks or even months of real time to learn again. Oh, and you also lose your implants and these can cost even more than the ship you were flying in.

However, this is not what makes Eve hard. It merely makes you play it longer – from just taking a few minutes to reship; to having to wait 20 days because you suddenly can’t fly something anymore.

But I could probably write another wall of text about it, so I’ll stop here for now.

I disagree with Dee’s assertion that EQ was not hard. Sure, it was grindy and slow, but the single factor that she ignores is the death XP penalty. That single effect made you plan, or think, or carefully consider your actions. In WoW I can run into a group of mobs and hope for the best. At worst I have a short corpse run. In Everquest, people didn’t generally do that. That’s a game-changer. Yes, it mostly served to slow things down. However, I would categorize that as an area of increased difficulty.

On the other hand, as you point out, Tobold did pick and choose which parts of her post he addressed.

I do agree with him that raiding in WoW is not what it was compared to even earlier iterations of WoW. You can cite game mechanics, class balancing or whatever. I cite only one thing: compare the reaction of your raid team after your first Magmaw kill to the reaction of your raid after your first Moroes kill. When we killed Moroes, we whooped and yelled so much that we nearly forgot to loot the boss before he despawned. When we killed Magmaw, on the other hand, it was met with a “Nice job. Should we get a screenshot?” That’s all the evidence I need that the game is changed, and not for the better.

Is it still fun? Sure. But probably not as much fun as it once was. Fun is not a black and white issue. There are varying degrees. Tobold still likes WoW. He just has issues with its direction, as do many other players.

We 2 healed this (Paladin and Druid) and I always keep my BoL on the DS tank. The MT only needs to be above 10k, so they just get a HL every other cast or so.

With glyphed Regrowth, your group should be up fairly easily – as it will only fall off if you can get them over 50% during a massacre. I don’t know if the tick is enough to bring them over 10k or not though.

Good luck with it.

I already usually run them as a dps with a friend tanking.

I just didn’t expected to be kicked when no deaths have been my fault. Oh well, guess I couldn’t have been the only one who gets the good puggers. ;)