I’ve recently noticed an increase in zerging in groups, be it dungeons, or outside. People trying to pull as many mobs as possible and rush to the end of the dungeon/quest ASAP. I get that some people have limited time, but where has this come from?
Yesterday, a Mage I was grouped with was trying to pull 4-5 mobs at a time, just me and him questing. And because my (warrior) AOE did more more damage than his, I got all the threat and would die in 10 seconds flat.
Ive been doing dungeons which have had people pulling as many as 10 mobs at a time trying to AOE, and just clearing as fast as possible. Tanks pulling left right and centre despite not even having a shield equipped. And then, surprise surprise, we wipe over and over.
It was not like this in the first few dungeons, but since late 20s, this is very frequent.
I played several vanilla private servers.
and never seen this strange behaviour… it was not like this back in the day either and while I appreciate we have improved and changed alot since “back in the day”, every private server I played on, had current players, who knew what to do, and they took group quests seriously with trying to use strategy and planning.
rather than bombing through at 100mph at the expense of your teammates.
Why is everyone in such a rush? Why are they pulling stupid high amount of mobs and wiping and stressing the group and thinking this is the normal way to play the game?
Have people seen it done by streamers and are copying?
Are these retail players who are treating it like retail dungeons and groups/questing?
Both I guess. I really hate it too, that’s why I rolled a tank so I might have a little bit of control over it. I don’t mind tanks rushing etc. when the group can handle it, what pisses me off the most is that a lot of these rush mentality players don’t often consider the rest of the group. Whether people have mana or health, where they are in relation to the mobs you are pulling, unable to bash down low health mobs quickly (mob targeting etc) and lack of CC. I definitely feel sorry for the healers in these circumstances.
Private server dungeons were stupidly hard so these zerg methods weren’t viable. Classic dungeons are so easy the most optimal way to clear them is with 4 Mages and a healer who zerg the place down.
It all goes down to good people vs bad people as in retail.
A good group can pull 10 mobs and keep the pace.
A bad group can wipe on 3 mobs.
In a pug where you get 2 good and 3 bad players this is what’s going to happen. It’s the same in retail as it is in classic.
The zerg rush has always been there. Plus the content is so easy that you can do way bigger pulls than you did back then. Overall the majority of the playerbase is more experienced => bigger pulls.
So start stance dancing. Know when to tank, when to dps and when to kite. You don’t have to stay there with a shield and 10 mobs on you. Most of the mobs don’t have mechanics so you can just do bigger pulls and aoe burst or cc lock them.
Agreed. If a groups capable of it then fair enough, but just a pug with potentially lowskilled randomers, probably not. Fair enough speed things up if you are doing well. But these people I’ve grouped with just do this AOE zerg straight away, sometimes before even saying a single word! They just assume that’s how everyone plays!
So this is something inspired by streamers?
I don’t know much about WoW streamers, or streaming in general tbh as never watched a stream, but are people really trying to imitate their favourite streamer in playstyle? Tat’s kind of sad.
Is this really true? I don’t think privateservers were much harder than Classic, certainly not from my experience I don’t think so. They feel pretty much identical?
Have you got any source of private server stats being more difficult than classic?
Also, what does 4 mages + healer have to do with anything? I’m not talking about those “cleave groups”, I’m talking about regular quests, and standard PUG dungeons with like some melee, a tank, ranged, healer.
Pretty much, yeah. Whatever tactics streamers adopt to get things done, their audience just copies them and accepts it as the only way to get things done.
They do it because done efficiently, it is incredibly fast. Fact is though most people are garbage so it doesnt work quite as well. A mage doing less aoe dmg on 4 mobs than a war is laughable. Mage while leveling should easily be able to pull 8 or more mobs and kill them solo ( especialy lvl 40+). Its also pathetic that he was able to let the warrior die. 1 coc and the war should have been able to kite it np
This is why I exclusively play with my guildies and other like-minded friends I’ve made. Only time I group up with randoms is open world questing on an alt.
You’re a warrior so you can tank yourself, but if not then don’t complain about warriors 2h tanking because that’s the most efficient way to tank at your level by far.
I used to play vanilla BC wolkt with this toon. I left at the end of wolkt because the gameplay looked at what you complain about in classic.
My sub is over in one week, i m gonna quit for good.
The playstyle, bugs, bugs abuses, lags, terrible release killed my love for classic.
That’s a shame but pservers like Nostalrious or northdale, kronos were better handled ,more fun and tougher… No zerg gameplay were possible.
MC and ony cleared in 5 days should have warned me…
In this case pservers rewarded much less exp which then made it not viable to just farm mobs in instances. It could still have been done for gold and resources (especially when quite often mobs were missing some of their special abilities) but not for leveling process.
So instance zerg is not because Classic did something wrong (unless using wrong exp data) but because players always take the path that benefits them more. If for someone quick leveling is the goal they will take whatever advantage they can. And with social media including things like streaming things that top 1% figures out is instantly passed to remaining 99%.
So far the players doing this are noticeably more annoying as well, think COD kid level of folks with zero patience and based their entire gameplay around “something cool they saw on youtube”.
It probably okay you pull multiple groups and synchronize well. Instead, you end up with a group with two mages, so we have to pull each group just as normal and while it works the mages spend alot of the time getting hurt and almost killed (too reliant on priest bubbles) and the time “saved” is immediately lost because they need to drink from zero for each and every pull.
Think it might indeed be a large part of the mage playstyle appeal. I haven’t played MOBAs myself, but it appears to be the class that most closely resembles it.
Very reaction based. Only dIrect damage. Teleporting movement. Crowd control. Multiple short cooldowns to manage.
Don’t know about streamers having any effect here, but this started getting a real foothold in WotLK. The dungeon finder combined with noticeably easier dungeons just made zerging the default, and it just stayed from then on.
You’d get a good group with overgeared or high level players that made it a viable strategy every now and then in Vanilla and TBC, but during the leveling phases it generally wasn’t a thing.