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| Man, it's too bad everyone gets to miss the awesome Molten Core grind by Rafiki 04/25/2008, 12:10pm PDT | ||||
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| How to keep the playerbase from getting bored with the content? Endless grinds that require them to replay content 600,000 times or spend 500 hours picking flowers or mining or other things just so they can see more of the game.
For those of you that missed it or have never played World of Warcraft, here are the steps you need to complete before you can kill all the bosses in Molten Core, the VERY FIRST raid instance. 1) Reach level 55. This is the minimum level requirement for getting the quest to be attuned to Molten Core. Attunement means you can't even ENTER the instance unless you've completed the quest. 2) Get the attunement quest and go to the Blackrock Depths instance. --Note. Blackrock Depths is a MASSIVE instance that's so big it has monsters that span 12 levels (48 - 60), and has quests divided up into different sections of the instance so the player doesn't have to complete the whole thing at once. If they did, they could easily spend 6 hours in appropriate level gear. 3) Die. Seriously, kill your character. In order to get to the second half of the instance to even complete the Molten Core attunement quest, you're required to get a key to close a gate. The quest to get the key is given by a ghost OUTSIDE the instance that can only be seen when you're dead. There is no indication this ghost exists, unless you spot it on the run back from the graveyard or you already knew about it. Before quest givers showed up on the minimap with a giant exclamation point (3 months ago), it was entirely possible to never know this ghost existed because you could skip his location on the run back to save time. 4) Complete the key quest inside Blackrock Depths. Depending on your group, this could take 1-3 hours. 5) Use they key to close the gate, then fight through the second half of the instance to complete the MC attunement quest. This could take another 1-3 hours. 6) Turn in the attunement quest. Hooray! YOU'RE NOT FUCKING DONE YET 7) Reach level 60. Don't even fucking bother trying to do anything in Molten Core without being level 60. All the monsters are level 61-63, so they'll kill you super fast or you'll miss constantly. Leveling to 60 from 55 could take days, weeks, or months depending on your available play time. 8) Grind instances for the best gear you can get. What, you didn't think you could just waltz into Molten Core wearing any old thing, did you? If you're not properly geared, you're fucked. And since instance bosses drop 1-2 items per kill often with 5-10 possible items to drop, it could take days, weeks, or months to get properly geared depending on your available play time and your luck on the drops. You could also craft your own gear, but it still took a long time to gather materials and most of it sucked. Now you're attuned AND geared! YOU'RE STILL NOT FUCKING DONE YET. See, you can walk into Molten Core and kill some bosses, but you can't kill the final two bosses without an item called Aqual Quintessence (don't try to understand the name, it's just some gay fantasy shit). See, for each of the first EIGHT bosses there's a flaming rune on the ground that can only be extinguished by using that item on them. Once they're all extinguished, the second to last boss is summoned. Once you kill that boss, he can summon the final boss Ragnaros. Oh, did I mention the Aqual Quintessence item can only be used once every two HOURS? So multiple people in the raid need to have this, or raiding MC will be be a weeklong process. 9) Run out to the ass-end of Azshara in swim out into middle of the ocean to an island you never would have thought to check and no one told you to go to to talk to Duke Hydraxis. He starts you on the quest chain to get the Aqual Quintessence (I feel gayer and gayer every time I type that). The first quest has you killing elementals in Eastern Plaguelands. For those of you not hip to WoW geography, Eastern Plaguelands is on the opposite continent of Azshara and takes roughly 15 minutes to arrive there. But that's if and only if you were traveling there after a flight path was added, which I think was like over a year after the game was released. 10) Complete the quest, then run ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis. Get the next part of the quest chain that has you killing enemies in Silithus. Again, for those of you not hip to WoW geography, Silithus is on the same continent but on the opposite end. It's a 15 minute flight to get there, and that's if and only if you were flying there after a flight path was added, which was a year after the game was released. Otherwise you'd have to land in the next zone over and run the rest of the way. 11) Complete the quest, then run ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis. Get the next part of the quest chain which leads you into the Upper Blackrock Spire instance. 12) You can't enter Upper Blackrock Spire without a key. Enter Lower Blackrock Spire and fight your way to the NPC that provides the quest to get the UBRS key. 13) The key requires 4 components. One is a random drop off of generic enemies in Lower Blackrock Spire, the other 3 are drops off 3 bosses in Lower Blackrock Spire and have about a 10% chance to drop. Clearing these bosses can take 2 hours or more, depending on the group. And that's if and only if you only kill those bosses, otherwise you'll be in there way way long. Getting the key can take days, weeks, or months depending on your available play time and your lock on the drops. The drops are also only lootable by one person and you'll likely have 10 people in the group all competing for the same drop. 14) Turn in the key quest, and get the key! Enter UBRS. 15) Kill the first boss in UBRS and get the quest item from the Duke Hydraxis quest. If you're only after this, then it will only take 20 minutes or so. 16) RUN ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis and turn in the quest. Get the next part of the quest chain that has you killing 4 enemies in Molten Core. This is no big deal because you have to kill them anyways. 17) RUN ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis and turn in the quest. Get the next part of the quest chain that requires you to gain HONORED REPUTATION with Duke Hydraxis. How do you get reputation? You kill enemies and bosses in Molten Core. To get honored, you need to gain 9,000 reputation points. Bosses in Molten Core gave something like 120 reputation, and enemies something like 10. Do the math! 18) Grind for fucking ever to gain honored reputaton. Did I mention you need 40 people to raid Molten Core? You need 40 people to raid Molten Core. I hope you have 39 other people that are at level 60, well geared, and have completed the attunement quest. 19) RUN ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis and turn in the quest. Get the next part of the quest chain that has you killing 4 bosses in Molten Core. Assuming your raid isn't full of retards and you can kill the bosses in one try by now, this will take 2-3 hours or so. 20) RUN ALL THE WAY THE FUCK BACK to Duke Hydraxis and turn in the quest. Hooray! You have the Aqual Quintessence. YOU'RE STILL NOT FUCKING DONE YET. In order to kill Ragnaros, who does a shit ton of fire damage, and the second half of Molten Core with enemies that do a shit ton of fire damage, you need fire resistance gear. Yes, that's right, an entire second full set of gear with fire resistance stats. Recommended amount is 200-250, and this could easily have you getting 7-8 pieces of gear. Some of this gear can be obtained from instance bosses, which means you'd have to grind instances and pray. The patterns to learn how to create some of the gear can be bought from a vendor in........................Blackrock Depths! AND GUESS WHAT? The ability to buy these patterns are REPUTATION BASED! You get to grind reputation with the Thorium Brotherhood! Remember how I said gaining honored standing required 9,000 points? Well some patterns required REVERED to buy! That's 21,000 reputation points total! You gain reputation with TB by turning in items. Some of them are dropped in Blackrock Depths (!), but you can only turn those in until you hit a certain reputation level. Then you have to switch to other turn-ins! And when you get to the turn-ins to go from Honored to Revered, you need to turn them in inside...........BLACKROCK DEPTHS! And it takes like an hour or so to get to the NPC! Oh, and if you're a tank? Well, some of those patterns require Dark Iron Bars. Dark Iron Bars are created from EIGHT Dark Iron Ore. You mine Dark Iron Ore from mining nodes that can provide 2-4 ore total. And Dark Iron Ore is a rare spawn mining node! Dark Iron Armor requires 20 bars! 160 ore! From rarely spawning mining nodes! HAAHHA. AND IT GETS EVEN BETTER You have to know how to smelt the ore into bars. Most of the time you learn this from mining trainers, but not for dark iron ore because it's special! You learn to smelt it from an NPC that is normally a boss in......BLACKROCK DEPTHS! It can take you 1.5-2 hours to reach him! And you have no indication he can give you a quest to learn how to smelt the ore unless you're a miner AND you have the appropriate skill in mining AND you randomly decide to talk to him at the time! Otherwise you can talk to him and he says nothing of interest, and when you start the boss event you kill him! HAHAHAHA! And once you get the quest from him, you have to go collect the appropriate items and then fight all the way back to him. And now you have to smelt the dark iron. Most times you do this at a forge located in like every city in the game. But not Dark Iron, because it's SPECIAL! You do this at a SPECIAL forge located in.......................................................................................................BLACKROCK DEPTHS AND IT'S AT THE END OF THE FUCKING INSTANCE. IT WOULD TAKE YOU 2-3 HOURS TO GO FORGE THIS FUCKING ORE, AND IT TAKES 8 ORE PER BAR AND YOU'D NEED LIKE 100 BARS TOTAL TO CRAFT ALL THE GEAR YOU NEED. AND THAT'S JUST FOR ONE PERSON. YOU NEED MULTIPLE TANKS IN MOLTEN CORE, SO YOU'D HAVE TO REPEAT PROCESS OVER AND OVER! AND SINCE THIS IS IN AN INSTANCE, YOU NEED A GROUP OF PEOPLE TO GO SMELT THIS FUCKING ORE. And you know what the worst part is? The WORST fucking part of all of this? Not so much the grind. Some of it really sucked and was stupid and should never have been put into the game, but a lot of it had you actually playing the game which is what you're paying for anyways. The WORST part is that even after spending the retarded number of hours completing all of this and running instances and raid instances over and over a million billion times, there were (and are) still people who FUCKING SUCKED AT THE GAME. How that's possible is a question that wasn't even answered in the Bible because GOD HIMSELF DOESN'T KNOW. This shit was like the biggest time sink in the universe and had you clocking in dozens and dozens of hours, not even counting the time it took to level to 60, and people still couldn't play the game well. I'm sympathetic to complaints about some of the requirements for raiding and some of the difficulty, but there's a line where players are just flat out retarded and should cancel their accounts forever. *I said MC requires 40 people. That was pre-expansion or if you're only bringing level 60 characters. If you have a group that's level 70, you only need 5. But it's only worth going if you have some free time to kill and have never seen it or want to see if you can 5-man it, because all the drops are for level 60 players and are worthless at 70. |
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