The Daily Grind: What content keeps holding you back?

Lololol you got held back in Naxxramas?

Anyway, the only time I can remember being held back in WoW was SSC back before the late-BC content nerf, doing Fathom Lord Karathress. Took us a bit to learn to handle his adds who were basically mini-bosses themselves, especially that damned shaman and his freakin' windfury that could just crush a tank outright.

But I honestly can't imagine being stuck on content in wotlk, since it's all so easy and the gearing up process and progression flow has been whittled down to a 3-day badge/heroic farm to be ready for raids.

I assume they were talking about the original Naxx which was very difficult. Fathom Lord was a cool fight, but the Lady Vashj and Kael Thas [TK] were epic fights too. If the way you felt about a fight was an indicator of its challenge, I would have to say doing Lady, Kael, and even Illidan were much more epic in nature than the LK fight, it really felt like an accomplishment when you got the vials and went into Black Temple for the first time. Getting those vials was tough if your guild wasn't putting the time in to better themselves and step up.

The biggest holdback I see in raiding (at least from WoW perspective) is that people are getting "carried through" raids more than ever. That holds back progression getting someone new to learn the fight all over again. Back in TBC days, you couldn't get away with having those players as much as today.

It was in old Naxxarasmus in plaguelands that I lost my taste for raiding. And A-N00b-Wrekkar was the mobs name that did it. (Anubrekhan). Get 40 people together and it seemed someone was always going afk and not moving from the circle of death, or standing in clumps for the spikes, or had no health stone for when they did get thrown in space.

The concept of death = bugs = more death = wipe was lost on these N00bs and after an endless nights in which I used up a good 500 gold worth of potions and resources (a lot at the time and for me half my total bank) and I basically lost my taste for hardcore raiding. Anything that requires 39 other people to not screw up is asking for a miracle in most cases.

Smaller raids are better although I hate the homogenization of classes Blizzard has undertaken with Wow in the last couple years. PS down with Deathknights!

Good God that comic book's artwork is butt ugly. Ugh.

On top of being terrible in general, but the article picture is the only part that's viewable by any one here, so....

she has a very weird hitbox, stirs up problems with tanks and facing issues, her aoe sometimes does not actually do dmg, and her aoe grab sometimes does not actually work (which is actually funny for a melee-seeing that one guildy start running randomly)

Raiding generally in WoW held me back - I'd been a raider in original EverQuest and got so burned out on it I never wanted to raid again, so WoW's endgame being mostly raiding just held me back from experiencing all the denouements that Blizzard had written for their characters from Warcraft lore (which I had followed closely from playing their RTS games). Admittedly the PvP held me back too, because all the PvPers I met doing World PvP were major a-holes, so I just never bothered dipping my toe too far into PvP there.

Nothing holds me back in City of Heroes, which is why I like it. They don't gate story content behind challenges that require a playstyle you may not like - Paragon Studios don't try to condition players into the way the devs want you to play, like Blizzard does. Sure, there's a cathedral of pain trial now in CoH which requires a big guild to do (and I have a 2-man guild with my friend that we're very happy with), but it doesn't unlock access to other content so I can handle not doing it - I have accessed 99.99% of the rest of the game.

I don't mind unlockable content, what I don't like is gated content - one is an optional thing you can unlock to do, but if you don't do it then you're only missing that specific piece of content and not other things beyond it - the other is a breadcrumb trail onto a hamster-wheel with the devs controlling what content you do and in which order, and it's all too linear for me.