Where do you draw the line? At what point do you say “alright, I’ve had enough of this” and walk away? Or at least try to?
Those of you who have been playing WoW for many years have probably noticed. Every time some sort of major change goes into the game, whether it be revamping the honor system, removing attunements, or that whole Conquest badge thing, there are always hundreds, nay, thousands who claim that this is it.
Hopefully some of you still remember Lhivera, who first brought us the Theorycraft O Matic. He drew the line at talents being immutable, a part of a character’s identity, and dual specialization crossed that line for him. So he quit.
I have heard of those who quit when the honor system was revamped, I’ve known those who quit the game in disgust when attunements to SSC/TK were removed, and I’m sure everyone knows at least a few people who at least left for a few days when heroics started dropping Conquest badges.
All these people drew a line. On one side of the line is the WoW they want to play, and the other side is still WoW, just an iteration of it they no longer wish to have anything to do with.
So where do you draw the line? Do you know? Or will you be caught by surprise, utterly disappointed and despondent when those around you cheer?
The gearing itemization changes proudly announced at Blizzcon was met with cheering, especially the death of Armor Penetration. The removal of spellpower, mp5, defence rating… all gone.
There was cheering, there was praising, there was celebration in the streets and on the internet.
All I felt was a crushing sadness.
Now sure, this is all still very early on and there could be many changes. They still have time to remove hit, crit, resilience and haste from the game too.
It’s not like I don’t understand. It’s easy to see where the developers are trying to go, what they want the game to become.
Talents are being similarly adjusted, with things like “Firepower” and “Critical Mass” getting removed, while things like Dragon’s Breath and Blazing Speed staying.
Their goal of making the game “less mathy” and more about personal taste and style, making the game about your personal skill rather than the quality of spreadsheets, is something I can understand.
To use the old saying, “I can see where they’re coming from.”
I just don’t agree with it.
Having gear be complicated, not always knowing if something was an upgrade, having to keep a small pile of epics in the bank to juggle hit caps/defense caps… I liked that. I liked having to consult theory engines and spending quality time with Dr. Boom.
It’s too early to tell for sure, though. Maybe this whole gear complexity thing will remain. Maybe something will drop, and you won’t know if it’s an upgrade.
It all depends on how the gear is handled. If every piece of caster cloth has hit, crit and haste on it, that won’t require any thought at all.
If that’s the path gear takes… well… that’s about the end for me.
i know how you feel…
i’ve spent hours reaserching weather haste or spell damage will improve my DPS… weather to drop a little spell damage for MP5 for the Extra-long fights… and now it’s all to waste.
although there is 1 backup if you still want to keep playing, but blizz dosen’t like it =3
I left ages ago. My lines was when they just wouldnt stop changing the classes I played ever few minutes. The classes moved away from what I liked about them and anything I got into changed again. I lost interest completely.
I’m glad I’m gone, night elves mages, troll druids and blowing up the darkshore/horde taking ashenvale is jumping the shark for me.
The thing I object to is that for the casual player there is a relatively simple solution:
Epic > Blue > Green > White > Grey > Cannot be equipped
Higher Ilevel > Lower ILevel
It works pretty well for most situations, your gear goes up, you get the armour, and stamina increases and some stats go up. Of course there are time when X green > Y blue but as a general rule if its higher level it tends to be better (or has more stats to not be so bad with).
For those at the raiding level you start to look at stats, and again typically you can say “more is better”, trading 40 parry for 44 dodge is reasonable, trading 40 dodge for 44 parry again isn’t that bad. The rule of more typically works pretty well in WoW.
When you get to the top end, those trying to maximise everything, then we had it… we had 9 gazillion stats with 40 gazillion ways to interact… it was nice, X piece is > Y piece until you get Z haste then Q > P and M > N and many other relationships.
As for talents, +1% crit may be boring but its also nice. Holy Paladins could choose utility, or mana regen (+crit), Ret Paladins took it as a matter of course (+damage), and prot paladins could choose +crit (threat) or a demi cd in holy. The options were nice and more than simply +1% crit because of the interactions they held beyond +1% crit increases your crit by 1%.
Ghostcrawler repeatedly said Blizzard didn’t want dropping “the same gear, but with 5 Int/Sta more” when players were asking about “sub-par itemization” of the gear in Tier 7, so there is some hope gear won’t be entirely homogenized
Why would it take no effort? Once again, it’s not becoming HP, MP, Power. You will still have your gear with hit, haste, int and crit in different amounts and configurations, I will still have my leather with agi, crit, haste and hit in different amounts.
There’s absolutely no reason at all to think that every drop will have them all. Why would they? Because Blizzard decided to drop some of the redundant or confusing stats?
What makes it even more without sense or reason is that you have absolutely no clue whatsoever what that gear will look like, and yet you’re panicking. ;P Drawing the line is fine and I understand that, but there’s nothing telling you that line will be crossed.
Not that I have any clue about it as well, but I lose the annoying Armor Penetration and Defense Rating (we will have Block instead to juggle, which nobody cares about now), so I’m happy.
It will still take the same effort as it does now to look at the stats on the item and understand what they do to your character. For me it will be just easier to do it without external tools.
Surely, you should play as long as you enjoy it. Don’t let nostalgia for an idealised view of the game get in the way of that. Of course, if the changes they make actually do affect your enjoyment of the game, then it’s time to rethink.
I draw the line at losing my WoW-friends. If they eventually stop playing, I will too. As for the gear changes – yes please. I hate theorycrafting, I hate having my bank filled with epics (hello dual spec!), I dislike having to read up a dozen pages of EJ people disagreeing until I find an answer. ArPen be gone, I say!
The gear complexity will still be there, it’s just that white stats are being emphasised more.
With the addition of reforgeing equipment can be altered to suit whatever statistics you want on your gear but createing a balance of useful stats will still be as complicated as it is now.
I’m personally going to enjoy more freedom when chooseing my talents and the new path of the titan customiseation should help make charecters more individualistic.
Now if they would only do something about everyone looking the same then i’d be very pleases about the next expansion.
I posted a similar reaction on my blog. What I love about the game is the complexity. I love looking at a piece of gear and wondering if its an upgrade… and then calculating whether it actually is or not.
My favorite thing in the game is when my characters get to the level cap and then I have to go through the process of gearing them properly. Getting my tanks to the defense cap while maintaining enough effective health. Getting my dps specs to their hit cap and then getting the other stats that I need. I research the characters I play and I love it.
This truely is the first time I’ve seen blizz say… you are too dumb to figure this out so we are dumbing down the game.
I still think it can come out ok… but Blizz needs to be very very careful
I do statistics and accounting 8 hours a day at work and I get to go home and do two hours of calculus homework just to play a video game or face being exiled by the raiding community for not being good enough.
I think my “line” is when it’s not about throwing fireballs at monsters anymore.
Regardless of the item stats, I am more dissapointed with the gearing-sharing mentality.
Bring back the days of +Shadow Damage, +Healing and +Spell Power.
Anyone else who’s spend the last 8 (9?) months running OS+0 for Illustration of the Dragon Soul will understand.
It’s ok if every item has a very short list of Stats, but I don’t like to think that every Boomkin, Shadow Priest, Mage, Warlock, Ele Shaman etc want the exact same stats in the exact same amount/percentages. Then you end up with a raid instance that has 10 bosses, 150 items, and about 30 of those items are best in slot. When they drop everyone fights for them and the rest is junk.
Well everyone fights except for the Holy Paladin who currently has the honor of being the only class/spec to equip caster Plate. Of course, once you combine spellpower/attackpower into +damage, I guess they’ll be rolling against every other plate wearer.
I don’t know… it used to be part of mastering your class “Oh, is that item actually good for Ele Shamans? I thought Mages would want it…”
I have once quit wow only to return. I left over conflicts with the guild at the time, but came back to my friends. I like how gear is now, having to check to see if its an actual upgrade, by how much, the pros and cons of taking said piece, etc. I understand they are trying to appease the masses by making things easier to promote new subscriptions and all.
I heard the figure that only about 5% of the players actually raid end game content and the majority of players do not have a lvl 80. Not sure if it is true or not. But if it is, it makes much more sense that Blizz would do what they could to protect that customer base.
I am a fan of the conquest badge drops form heroics. Gives people are purpose to run dungeons again. Makes it easier for them to get some decent gear without having to commit to a raid schedule. And it gives my alt some good gear without having to pug as much. The trophies out of ToC allow for no wasted token drops like in Naxx, Uld, etc.
I am a little scared with the gear changes. I was told that a piece of gear would drop, say a plate item, at the person who got the piece would then select which spec that plate would be. (ie. Ap and str for melee, int and sp for healer, etc)
[...] bye bye such wonderful sites as Elitist Jerks. Will this be a sticking point of not to play like Critical QQ, no I think not, but it will effect my gold management of future purchases on gems and the like. [...]
Whenever Blizzard changing something in WoW, trying to make something that they see as needlessly annoying, time-consuming, and hampering fun for their playerbase less of a problem, inevitably this particular form of criticism shows up.
Essentially, it boils down to this:
“I did that when it was hard. Really hard. Stupefyingly hard. I felt really good about getting that done. Now, my achievement feels cheapened and worthless because someone else can get it done for much less effort.”
I understand this feeling, and I’ve felt it, since they’ve changed a whole lot of things since 2006. But I think it is important to look at the overall game.
As much as we wouldn’t like to admit it, part of the reward of getting gear, mounts, titles, and whatnot, is sitting around in Dalaran, wearing our cool stuff, and /lol-ing at scrubs who just hit 80 and are in blues. It may be subconscious, but its there. But consider a new player’s point of view.
There are some challenges in this game that need to stay challenges, and there are some challenges in this game that are just annoying and should be removed. The development team is constantly looking at challenges in the game and deciding which of these two categories they fit in. Since this is an MMO, that formula is constantly changing.
Take conquest badges. At the start of wrath, the tiered badge system worked well, because you could gear up for Naxx by doing content that was accessible, namely heroics. Challenge: Heroics+Badge farming = good.
Now with the introduction of higher tier content, players on the cutting edge have no reason to run 5-mans, an integral part of the game. If you are in a 25 man guild, running top content then “graduating from heroics” isn’t a problem. However, if you’re a new 80, with no guild or a small guild, you can’t gear up because you can’t find a group for Naxxramas (no one runs it because they’re all running Ulduar) or even heroics. That player is left with no options, and might as well quit playing. The challenge of badge farming doesn’t work when you have no one to farm badges with. Blizzard see this, and decides to fix this.
They recognize that top players deserve top rewards: hard mode loot, achievement mounts and titles, BIS gear. None of that is going away. What changed with the badges is that even a new 80 (or a new 80 alt) has a fighting chance to gear up without /praying against hope that they can find a group for raids and dungeons no one runs. I ran into this on my alts: I was basically never going to get any gear at all beyond the heroic gear because I was not going to get invites to guild raids on my alt. eventually that toon’s gear wouldn’t even be good enough to enter top content with. Why play that toon?
Everyone needs a path to advance. It shouldn’t and won’t be easy, but it is reliable and doable. The devs made a judgement call as to how hard they wanted that to be.
This is the same deal with the stat consolidation. I LOVE figuring out how all the abilities work and what gear is going to be an upgrade. However, if they make that such a hard decision that you need a spreadsheet – you won’t see anymore of the fun guides on EJ, you’ll just see – spreadsheets. Blizzard looked at the way things were going, and decided that it was just too much. However, they aren’t completely gutting it, and never will. They recognize that people really like figuring out their character, and being rewarded for that understanding by getting better performance from the character. They have to balance it. And the pendulum is swinging the other way in Cataclysm.
to put it another way – if stats and complexity were a Rosebush:
They’re just pruning away the sick/dead parts, they aren’t cutting down the whole bush. Same with talent trees. There will still be a lot of BEST answers in there for specific situations. People will not be able to be unique snowflakes and perform well. You just won’t pick up boring spreadsheet talents anymore.
Hi Knight,
I agree with all you said about so many players talking about epic items, achievements & showing them off in Dalaran.
This game has become wholly based on loot/achievement hoarding.
I will tell you why.
Because the 5-mans instances and raids do not offer any challenge anymore! So what is left is outfitting your toon.
Nevermind having fun in an old instance with fellow guildies, because it could be fun!?
That is exactly why I disagree with you about the whole Conquest emblem items.
Conquest emblems are a bad thing, because the items in that shop are so powerfull that they make any 5-man or raid instance a cakewalk.
Trust me, i’ve been doing heroics to gather the Conquest emblems ( and since I can’t do raids nowadays, I consider myself a casual ).
What is left to do when you have all your Conquest emblem gear? …. right nothing (for a casual) !
Since you can already blow through all heroics / Naxx / EoE etc..
The only thing left is the 25-mans raid-groups, which I can’t join because of my irregular working hours.
Thanks blizzard for not adding any challenging 5-mans or 10-mans dungeons which you could do with a PuG in an evening or afternoon…
World of Warcraft should be renamed World of 25-man guildies who grind.
Yes, I love fighting with every other cloth-wearing caster class for gear. And the odd resto/balance druid every so often.
Now it looks like ALL my gear will be as appealing to healers as it is to DPS. Awesome.
Knighterrant81 hit it right on the head with a very well worded post. Nothing I can add to that since it was all said in the post, but I will say I agree fully with the path Blizz is going down. Sure, it’ll piss off all those elitists who want their game to be super hard because they’re ‘so good’, but it’s letting the majority of players, the casuals who just want to enjoy the game, have more fun.
I can respect people who have fun in the “Preparation” part of the game, running around collecting the right pieces of gear with the right gems and the right enchants and the right talent spec to absolutely maximize their effectiveness for whatever fight, but the “Execution” stage, where you’re actually killing stuff, should always get the emphasis. Seems like Blizz is trying to move towards that with the new talents. If gear complexity is a casualty of this movement, well, copypasting from EJ or plugging numbers into a spreadsheet was never much fun anyway.
There’s nothing interesting about gearing. The numbers are all known. You follow the formula until you run into some gimmick fight, and then you have to regear and regem and all the other grindy crap that makes the game no fun.
I draw the line when the gear receives greater attention than personal skill, when people are so focused on their numbers that Blizz adds personal-DPS perks to raid-booster talents like Improved Scorch, when I lose all freedom to experiment or personalize because all that matters is minimaxing—in short, when the community and the game are no longer any fun to be around. I’ve come very close to cancelling my subscription several times. I did it, once, for a couple months. Hell, it’s been difficult for me to find the motivation to play any of my max level characters because of the environment they’re in. I welcome these changes. Even if it’s completely ridiculous lorewise, Cataclysm can’t come fast enough.
“i know how you feel…
i’ve spent hours reaserching weather haste or spell damage will improve my DPS… weather to drop a little spell damage for MP5 for the Extra-long fights… and now it’s all to waste.
although there is 1 backup if you still want to keep playing, but blizz dosen’t like it =3″
And you’d rather do that than actually play your character?
“Yes, I love fighting with every other cloth-wearing caster class for gear. And the odd resto/balance druid every so often.
Now it looks like ALL my gear will be as appealing to healers as it is to DPS. Awesome.”
Equally, healer gear will be more appealing to you. You’re not going to lose out.
I know several people who have drawn this line. They’ve said they will play WoW now, but with the expansion, they can’t see themselves picking it up.
I’m torn. I would be interested in trying the expansion, while at the same time, I’m not impressed, really. I feel like all I would miss are my friendships.
I think the cloth split between healer and DPS will be about the same. Currently, hit = dps and mp5 = healer (maybe?). In Cataclysm, it will be hit = dps and spirit = healer. Of course, some gear will overlap, but it shouldn’t be any worse than it is now. And while it is nice to have gear that is “your gear” and you have no competition for, it also sucks when gear drops that nobody wants. My raid has no regular Holy paladins, so we get tons of useless spell plate. How is that good?
Anyways, I don’t think gear will be that much less complicated. They are just getting rid of a lot of the warts of the system. Getting rid of attack power means that plate DPS won’t want DPS leather any more, which was pretty stupid. Defense capping for tanks is rough at the low level of the gear curve, but it becomes a joke fairly rapidly. I hear druid tanks complaining about gearing being difficult, and they don’t have to worry about defense, so we’ll have to see.
Bottom line: it is too early to panic!
I would just wait and see. Blizzard is probably the best equipped to appraise the people who play their game. If stat-simplification is your line, then that’s a personal choice, but I doubt they will alienate the more math oriented “hardcore” players with such reckless abandon. I agree with Merlot; it’s a five year old game, it has to change to keep it feeling new. If the new changes affect your actual enjoyment however, then that’s something you’ll have to reckon with.
I draw the line when I have 12 people doing an intervention to stop my habit.
There’s a very good quote from Blizzard blues on this btw:
” What we were finding is that in many cases things had just become so complicated that players were not making intelligent decisions based on their knowledge of how various stats benefited them. That sounds like what you wanted to have happened, but it really wasn’t. Instead players would pull up a BiS list, or plug the item into a spreadsheet. If the answer was “upgrade” they equipped the item. We could pretty much just give the items a name and art and make all the stats not displayed.”
And that is true. Because in the extreme cases like half of my leather drops in Ulduar you have to use the spreadsheet or you won’t really know if that piece of leather with arpen instead of haste (and lower AP than your current piece, both at the same time) is better. Is it? Or maybe you’d be better off using what you’ve been using for a few months now?
Right now, without a spreadsheet or Rawr you can’t tell. Remove arpen from that piece above and it’s a lot easier – it’s either better or not. And it’s still not oversimplified – it might have no haste but crit, do I have enough haste now?
“If you were one of those players who picked up a piece and understood how armor pen vs. attack power benefited you or whether defense was still worth collecting after you had hit crit immunity, then you were in the minority.”
And that’s exactly what I wrote above.
“Hopefully we can get back to a system where eyeballing an item’s stats has some chance of being right.”
And thats how it should be like. It doesn’t make it too simple.
Also, there’s a comment somewhere up there by Cassandri, that says:
“Well everyone fights except for the Holy Paladin who currently has the honor of being the only class/spec to equip caster Plate. Of course, once you combine spellpower/attackpower into +damage, I guess they’ll be rolling against every other plate wearer”
Well, first thing is they’re NOT making anything into +damage. That’s you panicking, stop it now.
Second thing is that the devs were specifically asked at that panel what’s going to happen to spellpower plate now, and the response was “nothing, it will just have Int and no spellpower, we have no plans to make Holy Paladins work with strength cause it sounds really stupid”.
@Rhii and Argon
With the removal (once again) of spirit from DPS gear and talent specs, actually there will be a greater discrepancy, and less infighting, over healing/mana DPS gear.
I’m looking forward to the changes.
Gear should be easier to design and balance, meaning more useful gear will drop. Yes, more people will be rolling on it, but there will be more gear dropping that’s attractive.
Reforging will make my crafting profession feel useful and allow me to really tweak what gear I have.
I hopefully won’t feel forced into a cookie cutter build to maximize DPS at the expense of a talent that I think might be fun or cool to use once in a while.
I don’t mind researching or doing some math (You can poke around on my blog and find a post or two like that). But I don’t have a degree in math and I would rather spend more time IN the game actually wearing the cool purplez and blowing shit up instead of poring over spreadsheets that other people have created and hoping that I’m doing it “right.”
There comes a point where Blizzard has to step back and take measure of all the effort that is required OUTSIDE of their game to make it playable at the higher levels.
Maybe in this new world, we won’t have a best in slot list, but a selection and we won’t all look like clones of each other. That would be awesome.
ZOMG, individuality in an RPG?
It’s like what Lucy said. The “Preparation” stage of the game is huge to me.
Yes, the “Execution” stage is very kickass and definitely fun, but I view it as a pay off of the Preparation stage.
Carefully selecting gear and optimizing it the best I can before tearing up an instance is far more fun than just grabbing whatever from the AH and tearing up the same instance.
Seriously, it’s not THAT hard to gear a caster dps these days and figure out what’s what. Just reading up on wowwiki, or EJ if you prefer, and installing the addon Ratingbuster will get you pretty far. And while numbers are good, reliable and all that, different stats will work in different ways in different fights (for example, haste may be more beneficial in a fight that requires more movement, as you will be able to get a few more casts off etc). It’s not rocket science, and you don’t have to crunch the numbers that much, since other people have already done it for you.
I have always loved to play ranged, but I have to say that it’s quite boring to have my ele shaman and my mage wanting the same upgrades more often than not. -.- (apart from the whole woop woop spirit is beneficial to mages now).
As Cassandri wrote above, it’s just not much fun having certain items (Illustration of the Dragon Soul) being so coveted by all casters that your chance of actually getting it is infinitesimal.
I welcome the Cataclysm stat changes. I always wondered why melee dps could stack strength or agility or whatever and get attack power, but as a mage I couldn’t stack intellect to do the same thing and get spellpower. Currently, the base stats are practically worthless beyond the spirit = crit from molten armor.
It’s more a streamlining of the stats and not a great change. Crit and haste and hit are still there, so different talent specs of different classes will still need different gear. And with the removal of spirit from caster dps gear, we won’t need to fight with healers over some items.
My upcoming female goblin warlock will be sad if you quit.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
While many people will welcome the change and see the old stats as redundant or hampering their success I can only feel sad.
Part of what defines your skill as a World of Warcraft player is having to make choices, hard choices on gear. Calculating what you need in order to become stronger.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math and in all honesty, if your not willing to do that bit of effort than you should be lagging behind the people who are.
Cataclysm is my wow killer.
Peace Fire
For me, having to think about the stats, and having to do a few rounds on the dummies, and delving into EJ is the fun part of the game. If i wanted to just kill things, i would have left WOW a long time ago. That being said, if they homoginize to that extent, i’m out.
Wow is a chore. The farming, the dailies, the achievements, the constant character and talent changes. My only solution is to not keep up with the game. I am playing a hunter in Eastern plaguelands, I’ve stopped playing my main who is in hateful pvp gear and almost 6000 something in achievement points. I drew the line so that I won’t lose complete interest in the game.
There is no doubt the game is getting less and less fun for me. My partner and I both play WoW much less than the good old days…pre WoTLK and pre BC…everything was simpler and more fun then.
This is one of THE blogs I come to when I want info on playing a mage, or thoughts on the game in general. But with all respect, I think you need to step back and look at what brought you into the game in the first place.
When you approached a MMORPG, did you do it with the intent of playing a character, solving quests, and conquering epic bosses? Or did you approach it as an exercise in mathematics and spreadsheet use?
It’s one thing to enjoy playing what if with your abilities. I’d equate that to the wizard sitting in his tower, poring over dusty tomes, looking for ways to increase his power. I would imagine most wizards would have to enjoy it, or they wouldn’t be very good wizards.
But it seems, from what you’re saying, that for you, the game is no longer about what you can do with your abilities, or even about how much actual power your character has. It’s become about how much of a challenge it is to maximize your characters power.
I totally agree with you Euripedes.
When I heared that spellpower, defense, MP5 and will disappear from the items in Cataclysm it was the last straw for me.
I’ve been playing WoW continuosly since its release, and have enjoyed it it a great deal. However since the latest patch it has become clear to me that Blizzard is shifting this game towards a direction I don’t like at all.
The game is becoming way too simple.
The quality of the game has started going downward since the release of the 1st expansion TBC, and it has only accelerated being simplyfied with the release of WotlK and its subsequent patches.
Is it too much to ask for challenge in a game?
Where you actually have to think & perform teamplay when you group up with other players to do pvp or a 5-mans dungeon? I have the best memories of the old instances like BRD, UBRS/LBRS, Karazhan etc… where you actually had to do crowd-control & think when you progressed through the instance.
Nowadays crowd-control is dead, and everything has been reduces to a tank & spank race.
Maybe it’s because I like some challenge in a game and would like some semblance of continuity in lore.
I am old-fashioned like that maybe, but…. common’a Tauren Paladin!? or a Gnome Priest!? …..no thanks!
The current 5-man heroic dungeons of WotLK are a total joke. I’ve done them all in 1 afternoon (as healer) for the conquest emblems…. without anyone dying… !?
At the end you have better gear because of the Conquest Emblem shop…. but what for ??? Not heroics, since you can already sail through them… and the same goes for the raid-dungeons.
One thing is sure… this evening when I get home, I will cancel my subscription to Wow.
The hunt for a new MMO or Multiplayer game that offers some fun & challenge has begun.
World of Warcraft clearly doesn’t fit that description anymore.
Geez you guys are weird. Who cares what Race/Class combination you can have? If that guy wanted a Pally he would have just rolled a Belf or alliance toon anyway. Also Warcraft started in Vanilla with just the basic stats, no ArPen or Spellpower so all Blizz is doing is going BACK to the “good old days” when all us old timers first started. They are bringing in the old content for us to play again in a new setting, revamping some nostalgia dungeons to bring back the experience we first had. and they are going full circle back to the “old world” which had become quite redundant, and making the whole world new. Honestly it is going to be like it was when I first started the game, awe inspiring to look at and interesting to explore.
I wish Blizzard was bringing back the “good old days”, because that was the high-point of this game.
Unfortunately they are throwing out all the lore and removing any challenge from the game.
I don’t have any problems with them changing the old maps. Something world-changing has happend to the realms… ok fine.
But come on..
Landing space-craft on this wow-world… (Draenei in TBC)!?
And next in Cataclysm is removing Thrall as leader of the Horde, killing Cairn as leader of the Tauren.. adding …. Gnome priests, Tauren Paladins, Troll druids.
What is comming up next?
…Gnome druids with light-sabers !?!
That isn’t a consistent story-line & lore, it is a complete and total mess.
And about the itemization in Cataclysm… how nice that in the CaT expansion they will remove a dozen stats to simplify the game. Makes you really appreciate the developers, the same developers who added about a 999 gem-crafting recipes which you could only aquire by doing daily-quests! …In the expansion about 3/4 of them will useless because they will affect the same stat, since they will reduces the different nr of stats possible.
Vanilla WoW already had +defense, MP/5, +healing spellpower and +damage spellpower on its item-drops.
In the Vanilla WoW instances you HAD to do crowd-control & think as a team when progressing through a
5-mans instance with your party. Direct blue posts from a couple of months back, have already indicated that Crowd-control in instances is not ever comming back!
Do you remember the Vanilla instances like BRD, UBRS/LBRS and Stratholme? Start comparing those with the current instances. You will see 4 things:
1) The Vanilla instances had different paths and area’s, the new instance have 1 path…. A -> B that’s it, completly different from say BRD or LBRS.
2) The Vanilla instance were big, the new instances are small. Heck some of the new instances are only 1 room (Violet Hold, Trial of the Champion) !?
3) The Vanilla instances actually had mobs & patrols who could think and reacted differently when attacked. Look closely and you will see that the mobs & patrols in the newer instances have become more static & dumber.
4) … already mentioned before… in Vanilla WoW (and to some extent the TBC heroics) you had to do Crowd-control, nowaday its always simple & boring tank/spank.
This game is making it harder to feel like a fantasy world after every patch….
You can zap to each location in the game whenever you want, no need to travel anywhere.
( short hearthstone cooldowns, mounts, summoning stones, flying mounts etc..etc.. all killing the sense of a real big wide world )
The trend I see here is an extreme path downward to dumbing down the game & killing any sense of game immersion or challenge.
So Blizzard is NOT going back to the “good old days”, quite the contrary!
If it was, I would be the 1st person to welcome the Cataclysm expansion.
As much as I think this will homogenize the game (again), I look forward to seeing loot drop and not having to consult a spread sheet to determine if it’s really worth using DKP or if the change is so small that I can pass on it to someone else.
Having played the game off and on (overwhelmingly on) since August 2005, I’ve reached the 4 year mark. I’m making the decision to quit with the next expansion, not due to changes, but due to breaking from the MMO scene. I think Blizzard has a solid track record with their game titles. I’ve played several of their top sellers and enjoyed them immensely. A game with no game over screen requires closure. The Cataclysm expansion will be mine.
Great post. Just discovered your blog, loving it.
It seems to me that with each iteration, whatever challenge was present in the game is being surgically removed. Having played since 2005 I find there’s not much left to aspire to in this game.
The most recent hint of wow championing the mundane was when I started a new character recently and “achieved” [Journeyman in First Aid]. I mean really, it’s something a player *has* to do to level. What’s next, I get an achievement that reads [Logged in again]?
Once upon a time you could look at another player and see that they’d not only invested time in their character, but gone out of their way to do something a little rare or special. Case in point, tame Humar the Pridelord. But waiting and competing for a rarespawn is too much effort, so Blizzard made the same pet model tameable for everyone via a common mob found elsewhere.
As Syndrome says in The Incredibles: And when everyone’s super, no one will be…
So true “Nowadays crowd-control is dead, and everything has been reduces to a tank & spank race.”
And don’t forget the epics. Epics are now as common as greens but next step up is legendary which is extremely rare.
Everyone can be in epics using the same functions. The only difference is there are more character and race combos.
Why is everyone still comparing incredibly easy, accessible content to everything in the past? Making heartbreaking content where you can’t win unless you raid stack and the like does not make for good business.
With every expansion the playerbase age changes. I play with many more fourteen and fifteen year olds now than when I started. Modern kids, especially at that age, don’t want something they can’t win. Even some older players want to be able to at least see it all, and they couldn’t do that in BC and certainly not in Vanilla.
As far I know, through the Mastery system, haste and the like aren’t getting pushed away, and they may still remain on stats. I’m all for the gear change if it means I can weed out bad players quicker, especially those who don’t wish to work on being better.
At this point, I could hardly care about the argument “everyone gets purples?! WTF?!”. No amount of purples, as you’ve said before, will make a 1200 dps go to 4000 dps. Bad players are still bad, assholes are still assholes, and elitists are still self-serving dicks. No amount of purples or accessibility for better income will change that. While I’m not surprised people still are peeved about everyone running around with free epics (though I have to ask, did you miss BC?), it still comes down to actual player skill. Case in point: I ran H Toc the other day on my shaman in t7 healing. I never broke half mana. I ran on my mage later on and ran into an old druid healer friend of mine. She was constantly overhealing and usually below half mana easily, if not quarter, at the end of each encounter. And she’s in mostly tier 8/tier 8 equivalent gear. I don’t druid heal since I don’t have access to an 80 druid anymore, but I know if I’m down on someone by a full tier and they’re doing worse than me, something is amiss.
Basically, this wall of text I’ve placed is, at the core, stuck in the middle. Will I miss eyeballing gear to figure out what’s an upgrade and what’s not? Yeah. I’m gonna miss chuckling at people who have better gear and still do worse than I. But I know when the changes come, half of the people I already beat that are futher in progression than I am are going to get free and easier to collect gear, and still do worse. Maybe I’m a jerk, but that just makes me giggle.