mists of pandaria

cactus jack

just heard about this new expansion & while a new expansion is always interesting i'm not liking the idea of an 11th class with 10 slots. hopefully there'll be an 11th slot added during this expansion

nix

They will add more slots, anything to keep subscribers..

The mists of kung fu panda, they should have just called this expansion "Please dont go to SWTOR"

The expansion news just stinks of desperation in an attempt to keep subscribers. Not enough to get me going back, im done with wow. And they are changing the game again, new talent system, **** sake, they are all over the place...

Diluting the game even further by removing the need to respecc/buy new spells.

World of warcraft.. taking the MM out of MMORPG :rolleyes:

fiinch

i glanced over the expansion notes and just felt sorry for WoW. i was so sure it was an april fools till i remembered it's October.

super_furry

I dunno, I mean I don't really have a problem with pandas per se - we've had giant talking cows and space goats already. It just feels like there's no focus now though, they're throwing every idea they have into the game and it's going to get messy. It's not hard to listen to the claims that the Blizzard 'A' team have all moved onto their next MMO and the work experience crew are running things now.

nix

The trailer is so funny, its hyping up through all the challenges thus far from expansion to expansion and then ends with a new challenge awaits and shows nothing but bears rolling around and doing karate.

A new talent system? which looks like its just made to cater to idiots, pets can battle? whoopdi doo!

What i would have liked to hear is we have made our servers stable for MMO style pvp battles and improved pvp, not, heres more fluff for you to look at :rolleyes:

I'm actually gobsmacked at how lousy this attempt at an expansion is, its like its taking the piss, like some big wig on the inside is trying to win a bet with this haha..

Oh_Noes

It does seem like an attempt to appease the hardcore novelty lore-geek type people who will subscribe no matter what. They almost look like they're trying to lure people from Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

I still play a twinkish level 20 freeplay trial account for wsg and ab sometimes but that's about it, I won't be resubbing on the back of this. World of Warcraft II or some kind of brand new, modern MMO is the only thing that can save this franchise now imo.

super_furry

I do like the idea of a free Diablo III if you're willing to commit to the game for a year. It's not even an upfront payment - just have to sign a year long mobile-phone type contract.

Lone Stone

I know panda's are in warcraft but WTF :eek: this kind of reminds me of when ever quest added fairy's and i left that game and never went back because see twinkly ass fairies flying around just wasnt my cup of tea. And playing with kung fu panda's aint my cup of tea either. But then i did quit like a year and a half ago so my opinion means f all. But this is the worst expansion ive ever seen ever !

It just seems to have no point no direction, and it sounds like they are just removing the talent tree system from what i read not a new one, just removing it all together. Which was always the thing i looked forward to when i levelled up spending that point. I guess i really wont be going back to wow now

Also those pve scenarios with scaling gear completely voids the entire point of a big part of the game gearing up to do bigger and better things!

Dr Bob

jesus , theres a vanity pet/pokemon mode now as well
..that crunch noise you hear in the background is the bottom of the barrel being well and truly scraped....

jabberwock

haters gonna hate.
/end of line

nix

trollers gonna troll :rolleyes:

jabberwock

no troll. serious dislike for all the negativity for this game. between ingame and forums. if you want to go to SW when it comes out, very well. WoW has been going for 6 yrs now. how many other mmos can say that? Is SWs going to be really that much different from WoW you think?

nix

Different? Most definitely! Better? Hopefully! and looking highly likely considering the state of wow at the moment...

There was a time when wow was a good game, it used to be a really good MMO, over time they made drastic changes to "improve/increase" the amount of subscribers. These changes in my opinion ruined the game and made it boring/unfun.

Arena, easy/heroic modes, flying mounts, loading into instances... i could go on, all reducing the need to actually participate in the open world that makes an MMO..

But yeah, im a hater, so im gonna hate :rolleyes:

All these new MMO's coming out with fresh ideas and wow with its millions upon millions of dollas and the best they can come up with is carebears, pokemon pet battles and a new diluted talent system (again)

I want nothing more than wow to succeed, all my characters going to waste instead, alota love gone into them. And all because they havent got the balls to make the necessary changes (cuts) to make the game what it once was.. Fun..

Putting more/bigger sails on a sinking ship aint gonna make me buy it

</ramble>

jabberwock

SW will just come and go. people will complain about wow as always. people will still buy it and play it. anyone who says they will not, is lying to themselves.

uncle_sam_ie

jabberwock wrote: »

no troll. serious dislike for all the negativity for this game. between ingame and forums. if you want to go to SW when it comes out, very well. WoW has been going for 6 yrs now. how many other mmos can say that? Is SWs going to be really that much different from WoW you think?

So,there has been a lot of in game negativity. It would be fun to see what the in game chat has been saying about the kung fu panda expansion.Yea I want different, bring on GW2.

jabberwock

GW2 pvp sounds amazing. finally level playing field allowing skill to be the decider. hopefully it ends up being what was said it would be.

Calhoun

I Loved the expansion update for one reason that has been pointed out the desperation or fear from blizzard. Don't get me wrong I play it and like it for what it is to me but it's clear it has got complacent and nobody can argue different.

Let's face it though with what ? 6-7 years? Of dominate and wiping out many other mmo's you would be to . I think though they are finally seeing the writing in the wall, games like swtor which will bring with it such a fan base or gw with it's polish.

This is a good thning if they build on it.

VampiricPadraig

I personally feel (As a non WoW player) that Blizzard are just trying anything that they can to keep people playing the game.

I have heard from some of my friends who play WoW said that since 4.2, the game is just boring and nothing is intresting, and in some cases, a couple of them has stopped playing WoW all together.

While I see MoP as a big expansion update, I can personally see alot of people leaving the game and moving onto different MMO's such as SWTOR (Which I believe alot of people are doing).

Final Words, WoW is pretty much done and dusted, time for Blizzard to move on and work on something new.

(And No, I am not bashing WoW players what-so-ever)

Dr Bob

jabberwock wrote: »

SW will just come and go. people will complain about wow as always. people will still buy it and play it. anyone who says they will not, is lying to themselves.

If they come up with sh!te like this expansion in future , no , they wont.
Pokemon, Kung fu pandas, ala carte talent trees.Screw that.I'm done
And this is someone who played from launch week up till august of this year.
(and no you cant have my stuff..;)

uncle_sam_ie

New trailer out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBHJLCZo_o

bad2dabone

This looks like a complete farce to be honest.
WoW was a great game for years, looks like its lost the plot.

witless1

Two things captivated me most when I first played WoW at the tail end of Vanilla. Firstly it was the scale of the world and the amount of people playing. This was my first MMO so seeing that many people around really amazed me. Taking time to move from point to point wasn't frustrating it was a marvel to me, it just showed that they had created an actual world and going through contested territory on a PVP server was genuinely exciting.

The second thing that drew me in was the notion of team work and boss mechanics, working as a small cog in a bigger wheel. 3 expansions later and I have seen the majority of boss mechanics and hats off to Blizzard, 4.2 had interesting mechanics and I am sure 5.0 will have the same. The trade off for interesting mechanics is easier content making progression way too attainable. Changes to make the game more accessible and save time playing have really reduced it as a Massive Multiplayer game. Raids are self sustaining (no farming so you literally have no need to leave the capital city because of summons and dungeon transportation. That's where most of the QQ and general boredom comes into it, sitting in general chat waiting for a queue to pop or worse still not needing any valor gear and having nothing to do for the week once raids are over.

My game playing time is reduced but I could still raid two evenings a week if needed. The odd raid I do we clear everything on normal (or a good few on heroic if I wanted to) in 3 hours. That's a drastic time reduction and it's something over the years I thought I would be happy to see but when it arrived I'm genuinely not happy with it. There is no happy medium between modern raiding and TBC raiding from a time and preparation commitment and to me that's after leaving a mental disconnect between me and my characters progression. I really hope the new expansion tries to open up the world again and make raiding somewhat of a commitment. An MMO is meant to be time consuming by it's nature but now WoW feels more like a console game that you can pick up, effectively clear and put away for another week. The initial feature set from the announcement does smell of desperation but they will get people buying it and playing the game purely because they are fans of the game. I know I will buy it, I probably won't raid full time ever again but I would like to see how the game develops and see the new encounters and zone that they will build. I definitely will be critical of the game but my criticism comes as a long standing fan and player.

Blowfish

It's kind of odd that people are surprised by the announcement since it's been known for months, Blizzard applied for the trademark back in July.

IMO though, if Blizzard wanted to take the focus off SWTOR, they would have been better off announcing their next MMO instead.

jabberwock wrote: »

no troll. serious dislike for all the negativity for this game. between ingame and forums. if you want to go to SW when it comes out, very well. WoW has been going for 6 yrs now. how many other mmos can say that?

Most of them, actually. Hell SWG was a complete mess, yet lasted 8 years.

Overall though, there are some interesting concepts, but the trailer especially is very much 'meh'. It'll probably still be pretty good quality content as usual, but there's no enough different in the setting/style to make me want to resub.

Yetsemegi Tsetsu

Hey, you can play as a cow or a space goat, right? Why not a panda? Check out the Usagi Yojimbo comics by Stan Sakai for anthropomorphic Asian greatness.

Dustaz

I said before THIS expansion even came out that blizzard had fucked it up and imo i was correct. cata was just wotlk+1. No massive pve changes, no massive pvp changes, no new classes, no new professions (archeologylol) just "revamped 1-60" content. Yeah, thats not what people want and its been proven by the dramatically lower populations.

This expansion is even worse by the looks of things. Pandas and Pokemon pet battles? They might as well include a wii controller with it.

Unsubbed at the moment and nothings going to change that.

A few things to clear up though.

PvE has been made borishly easy (Wasn't ICC cleared within a week of release? You never had that sort of thing with the likes of, say, Naxxramus in Vanilla or TBC content

ICC may have been the quickest clear (no idea what was) but end content was ALWAYS cleared ridiculously quick by high end guilds willing to invest the time in it. IIRC Ouro is the longest standing boss by a long shot, with HC Rag in the top 5 i think.


wow was groundbreaking 6 years ago. even 2 years ago it was still the best show in town. Right now, even though theres nothing actually better out there, its right there for the taking. If SWTOR doesnt do it, Titan defintely will.

Overheal

You mean this wasn't a giant pisstake?

Sonics2k

For me, I'll put the best example like this.

You're watching The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
An epic siege is taking place, the Uruk-Hai and Orcs are smashing in the walls of Helm's Deep, as the brave Warrior's of Rohan fight in a last stand battle for their very survival.
Friends lay dead, the walls are collapsing, you dread the thought of what will happen to wife and children should you die. You're desperate for a new hope, something that can save you from the terror just moments away.

And then THIS comes to save you!

Drakar

To be fair, the struggle popular games have is that they have to appeal to an audience with a wide range of skills. So they need to provide interesting challenges to people who are new to the game (new in experience\skills and equipment etc), and also be challenging for experienced players (skilled players with potentially good equipment etc), without being frustrating for these groups, or the myriad groups inbetween.

Heroics were a good way to deal with the two extremes, but they did quickly become the default. Hopefully the epic modes or whatever the new type is will provide some greater challenge to experienced players, but don't be surprised if they do get "nerfed". Players who should only be playing the lower level of difficulty, will always be striving to get into the harder modes just for the loot, and this frustrates them when they can't complete, and frustrates the groups they are with when the group fails.

I think this problem is always a bit more complicated than the black and white way it is portrayed. I'm not sure if there is an easy answer to addressing people's psychological desire to attain teh phat lewtz, and yet to marry this with "successful" players desire to remain challenged (even though week to week these experienced players will be better versed in tactics, be more skilled through repetition, and more effective through gearing up).

In the end, it's in everyone's interest that the playerbase remains large, this is what pays the bills, which supplies new content, features and challenges for casual\hardcore players alike. I'm pretty sure that's Blizzard's goal (since it just happens to make them wheelbarrows of cash).

Anyway, back to whining about pandas?

Lone Stone

What blizzard need to do in regards to wow, is grow with its player base. Its out how long now 5- 6 years. Granted i started playing in my twenties and a lot of people playing since then would have been teenagers who are now in their twenties and instead of trying to grow with the massive player base they are trying to pull in people which is a bad move considering they have around 7-8 mil subscriber's. Instead of maturing with the consumer they are going this route which if i was still playing would not have made me a happy stv camper.

Blowfish

RopeDrink wrote: »

My point on ICC was just a general example. What I really meant intended to be a bit deeper than that. For example, when Heroics were introduced in TBC, they were without a doubt "HEROIC" - I fondly remember being mauled many times with groups trying to complete, say, Shattered Halls HC on the quest timer - Even got vids of other Heroics that took as long a raids to clear (All pre-nerf of course) - Then they got nerfed... Then the heroics released in WotLK... Well, you may as well have done a Normal instance, it wasn't much different. A typical WotLK Heroic daily took 10mins and was a mere zerg to the end. Cataclysm added a few more interesting twists and mechanics but ultimately they're all pretty much just as easy (And thats me saying it as someone who DIDN'T take the time to become omg uber geared enough to zerg it like it was nothing) - Without doing so it was still quick'n'easy with no intention of changing that, it seems.

I actually don't think WotLK heroics were all that much easier than TBC ones at the same gear level. In greens/blues they were still tricky enough, in fact even Loken caused problems early on.

The main issue why it felt so easy was (as you mention) the ridiculously undertuned Naxx and OS, meaning people geared up far far quicker than they should have been able to.

nix

TBC heroics were hardcore, wotlk content was a walk over in comparison.

Loken was the only boss who provided a challenge at first and that just proved how dumbed down and idiotic most people were at the game. As the fight was easy once you knew what to do, but they still ended up nerfing him instead of waiting on people to use their head.

witless1

Blowfish wrote: »

I actually don't think WotLK heroics were all that much easier than TBC ones at the same gear level. In greens/blues they were still tricky enough, in fact even Loken caused problems early on.

The main issue why it felt so easy was (as you mention) the ridiculously undertuned Naxx and OS, meaning people geared up far far quicker than they should have been able to.

100% spot on, the difficulty was there the rapid gearing just outpaced it. It was nowhere near as difficult though as pre nerf TBC heroics but we never got to experience it. On my main I went and hit 80 and half an hour later walked into Naxx and downed 3 wings. Got a couple of upgrades and combined with some crafted gear I didn't experience any trouble in heroics outside of learning the limited mechanics. On my main alt I initially had some difficulty but running with geared people limited that. By the time I pushed another alt through it LFG was in full flow as well as TOC and you could be carried to purples within a few days.

Gummy Panda

I like Pandas but I don't think this will be enough for me.

I stop playing about 3 weeks ago. Was only logging on 2 nights a week to raid firelands. So bored of it now.

witless1

It's worth factoring in the relevance of badge / points gear when comparing TBC with WOTLK/Cata heroics. TBC heroics pre nerf were pretty much a gearing experience, mandatory before raiding pretty much. I ran the heroics like everyone else but as soon as I got through Kara and into SSC/TK and got upgrades to replace the heroic gear and badge gear I had no need for it. Similarly with later tiers and more badge gear released very little was BiS, maybe one or two pieces so running heroics from a gearing point of view was practically pointless if you were in a decent guild.

WOTLK made heroics mandatory for gear upgrades with each content patch. The gear offered included BiS pieces, tier pieces, trinkets, neck pieces...traditionally difficult pieces to obtain in a raid. That's possibly a reason for how undertuned the heroics were and why Cata is in the same model. If I had to give the same time commitment that pre-nerf TBC heroics (~2 hours min) for badges to obtain gear that was practically mandatory, I don't think I would have been able to keep pace with raiding. Don't get me wrong I loved TBC raiding and heroics and the challenge it brought like wiping constantly on the second boss in Shadow Labs because a raiding geared player blows up everyone else during the MC was enjoyable :P Even the dungeons you mentioned were great experiences. The current gear distribution model though is balanced with the difficulty and time commitments. Until they address how we obtain loot, dungeons are going to be faceroll to an extent.

TheDoc

Watched Blizzcon and while the initial " omfg pandas" was a bit overhyped ( please remember Pandas of this sort made an appearance over a decade before Jack Black went black and white) the other content looks decent.

There has been no secret that expansions are getting shorter, simply to avoid the burnout experienced which is fine.

I signed up ffor the 12 month sub contract the minute it went live. I'll be getting Diablo 3 anyway so basically a years sub cost me €80, and I'm happy with that.


There was enough discussed to keep me interested. also the lack of a new villian means we wont be grinding the one dungeon for weeks on end getting burnt, it will be more 4.0 where there is a number of raids you can mix up with, I didn't really suffer any burnout at 4.0 raiding which was nice, Firelands is a bit of a chore at this stage.

Most people are getting a bit lost with WoW and to a certain extent, since ATT disbanded I have too, but if anything I'll plod along to 90, level my alts, and even if my current guild ( which is a nightmare to raid with ) I'll be happy enough using looking for raid on a more casual schedule of raiding, more importantly, my schedule

I don't know what it is with me but when I start getting bored with wow, I find something new to keep me interested. Recently it has been levelling a rogue and making gold.

I've a plan outlined that my Warlock raids main raids with guild, Rogue and Paladin do LFR, if I leave my current guild, I'll just go exclusively LFR or something.

I dunno I just looked at all the panels in Blizzcon and while I guess there was some contraversial changes, I saw enough things interesting me to make me continue for a year.

I dont want to get into a long winded coutner arguement, I've made my points before, I think they are valid and they still stand.

Of course blizzard " are doing anything to bring people in" why the hell not? The game is nearly ten years old, to keep millions playing? They need something fresh

Pokemon battles? Same arguement as I put to things like this before. You have pets that do nothing, they decided to let it do something. Its not this MEGA ULTRA CONTENT FOR EXPANSION. The panel and overview on it was max 15 minutes.

Its a litle added bonus for something extra to do. Its not taking up ALL the dev time, its not there replacing other content, and new content wasnt sacrificed to make it.

I'm interested to know what would make people happy in terms of WoW? We have pretty much had everything. We also have 2 -3 more expansions after this, in this format of shorter bursted expansions with less gaps through content, which I for one am happy with, it means less boredom and downtime.

WoW won't last forever, Star Wars might be able to take some of the mantel going forward.

But as I always say, just look at the corpses of MMO's WoW has left in its wake. I've got all the hopes for Star Wars, but I'm not holding my breathe and wont be suprised in the slightest if it flops and we are all back on WoW.

Kiith

TheDoc wrote: »

I'm interested to know what would make people happy in terms of WoW? We have pretty much had everything. We also have 2 -3 more expansions after this, in this format of shorter bursted expansions with less gaps through content, which I for one am happy with, it means less boredom and downtime.

WoW won't last forever, Star Wars might be able to take some of the mantel going forward.

But as I always say, just look at the corpses of MMO's WoW has left in its wake. I've got all the hopes for Star Wars, but I'm not holding my breathe and wont be suprised in the slightest if it flops and we are all back on WoW.

I don't know if there's anything it can do to keep people interested. As you say, it's almost 8 years old now, and it's been the top dog for almost that entire time. And it's done pretty much everything really well (bar, imo, PvP). But every game has it's time limit. People will still play as long as the servers are up, the the player base will steadily drop off over the next few years, regardless of the content.

Now i'm not the best person to argue either way, as i lost most of my interest in the game a good while ago, but nothing i've see at Blizzcon makes me even remotely interesting in coming back.

As for Star Wars, it won't flop, but it won't beat Warcraft. Nothing will ever reach the dizzying high's that Warcraft did.

Lord TSC

I'm not going to get into the whole "Raids/Heroics difficulty" aspect of things; I've never been in a raid and appreciate the fact they are for the hardcore gamers, and tbh, I feel not everyone should have access to the highest armours. There should be rewards for those who pump ten times the amount of time into the game.

But what worries me is this overhaul of the talent system when it strikes me that they've nailed it with Cata. I love getting that message that I have a talent point to spend and, even if its a fake sense, it gives me a sense of individuality when it comes to choosing how to spend it. But this new scheme of just giving you a few...I don't like it. It's oversimplfying something thats already pretty damn simple.

On the otherhand, I've been wanting a pokemon MMO for years and years now and this sounds pretty damn close to what I've always wanted so yeay

nix

Teamshadowclan wrote: »

It's oversimplfying something thats already pretty damn simple.

That should be blizz's motto for the last 2 expansions, and now soon to be 3.

TheDoc made a point of asking what could blizz do instead of introducing pokemon battles and what not.. They could bloody fix some things in the game, like World PvP!!! Its something that should be a big part on a PvP server, but its non existent and they acknowledge this and make no efforts to improve it, heck they wont even help balance servers as it would reduce the traffic in their payed player transfer service (****).

So the things that need fixing would require blizz to either spend more money (improving server stability) and balance horde/alli ratio on servers (payed player transfer) But they dont? Just what exactly is my subscription paying for?? Watered down content?? Why not fix the above and increase the subs??

World bosses?? Any chance in geting some of them in with worthy loot? Oh no? why? too many people crowding around the boss area causing a server crash?? You prefer people to hang out in Stormwind or Ogrimmar and just load into dungeons/raids?? as opposed to traveling the massive world you have created??

Srsly wtf has happened to WoW! I cant be the only one seeing this, its turned into nothing more than a glorified virtual online game of Barbie and Ken where you dress up your alts (dolls) and prance around your local AH/Bank flexing infront of hundreds of other people with the same gear!!! Its fucking lame!

blodvyn

arena-tournament.com

where any decent wow player resides now a days, pew pew

TheDoc

Want a big change and a real fix?

Remove arena PvP...

It has been acknowledged even by Blizzard themselves as the worst decision they made and if they could go back in time, their one regret was introcuding PvP in that style.

Since doing so it instantly pulled away the dangers and excitement of world pvp, and how a battle can just erupt randomly.

It also has lent to a disastrous nightmare when trying to balance classes.

I must find that interview that was done during Wotlk where there was like 5 Blizzards guys who all agreed their biggest regret was creating arenas and making PvP the way they did, where now they balance a spell or mechanic for PvE and it becomes imba in PvP, and vice versa.

And I agree with it, I dont appreciate PvP, but I do appreciate how since its introduction into Arenas and battlegrounds where it was balanced specifically with PvP in mind, the games balance has fallen out of whack and all classes are starting to just become the same, all having CC's dispells and the like.

But of course there would be immaculate QQ from PvP players... all I'll say is that it still looks the most glaring ****up they ever did and balance has been impossible since.

Alternative?

Remove PvP from the game, and have it as a seperate client, where it can be balanced specifically not interfering with pve. You have a clone of your character on a pvp client where you can only play arena and battlegrounds. And you earn your gear through playing more and mroe.

Not this bollox of walsing into BH doing slack DPS and getting gear ezmode, in a PvE environment.

TheDoc

RopeDrink wrote: »

*Maintain an iota of difficulty. Yes, I respect that there are always now more casual players than there are die-hard fanatical raiders or PvP'ers but damn, do we have to play such a dumbed down game? We're not mentally incapable of a playing a game with a grain of challenge...

I appreciate your other points, but I still don't buy this arguement....

Hands up here who has 7/7 Heroic Firelands completed?

No one?

OK Hands up who has 6/7 heroic Firelands completed?
Still only a few?

That is if we are talking specifically about PvE. I get the feeling that people jump on the bandwagon of " omg the games easy" and to be fair, I don't see people strutting around with alot of data to back that up.

I'm sure Dustaz and w1tless might be able to back me up here but I'm pretty sure through ICC and 4.0 our ATT guild was pretty much the only irish guild pushing hard in progression. I've no doubt there are other wow players out there who maybe were working down bosses faster then us, but I don't remember hearing about it.

I', not being smart of trying to boast or brag I'm just genuinelly interested in terms of what is so easy within WoW that it is dumbed down?
Raiding half the time compared to Vanilla isnt easier, its just more conviniant.

I guess I would just appreciate the arguement more if it was coming from a cutting edge raider ( maybe you are an apologies if so) but I'm not aware of it.

Anythine I read form the top world guilds is that the usual QQ about how a bug stopped them from being world first, but also how they were happy with the challenge presented but it could be harder. These are guys who literally live on wow and stay up all hours to push server first, typically raiding up to 8 hours a day for progression.

I've dont most content, we did 12/12 ICC Heroic ( lets not bring up the lich king heroic incident again) before any outragous nerfs if memory serves

We did 4.0 raids Heroic bar maybe 1 or 2 if memory serves.

And we did Firelands 6/7 Heroic.

And I wouldnt call it outragously easy, I'd strugle to call it "easy". I think its a touch of bangwagon jumping and exageration calling the content easy

nix

The problem with PvE content IMO is with the introduction of heroic modes. The game can still be a challenge, I'm not denying that, its in no way as hard as raids used to be though..

What the problem im seeing with raiding is, ill set an example.

I raided in TBC and the content was **** hard and the majority of my guild mates stayed dedicated and wanted to clear the raid bosses as they wanted to see all the content and finish the game. So nobody hardly went inactive and put the required work in.

In WOTLK the mentality changed in that we were constantly on recruiting drives as people got fed up alot easier as they breezed through the normal modes, seen all the content and in no way felt obliged to put in the effort to clear the heroic modes when they seen how much effort they would have to put in, they got all their cool looking epics and seen all the content. Why stress over a few extra stats on gear and a colour change to the gear they had, its not enough reward. And the game couldnt offer more in regards to content. So the amount of quitters increased ALOT.

And i kind of agreed with them even though i stayed on to clear 11/12 ICC heroic, but i had to jump severs to another guild to do that and i done sindra (heroic) for my first time and got a kill. Thats not really much to write home about in regards to difficulty, and i didnt even look at heroics tacs, just listened on vent to them chatting about the tacs..

If they didnt have heroic modes and just made the fights hard, you would have ALOT more players willing to stay on till the end.

Your pvp arguement is sound in regards to arena, but imo, heroic modes hurt PVE as arena hurt PvP.

In Cata, the trend didnt change one bit PvE wise so i didnt bother my arse doing PvE this time around. In Cata i played PvP for a few months and just saw that the game wasnt gonna change for the better, but keep slipping into this decline im seeing. And all for the sake of scrounging as many subs as possible. Its sick..

Kadongy

cool ewoks
I might resub

TheDoc

Well I did mention that I wasn't sure of your PvE experience recently, and that you mostly post in relation to PvP.

So if PvP has got drastically easier I'll take your word for it since I don't play it.

Of course dungeons, heroic dungeons are not going to be difficult. They are only ever difficult when you are below that contents gear, but now we all outgear dungeons so can walse through them.

The challenge now is really only when your thrown in with ****ters.

Firelands is challenging. It was challenging before the nerf and there is still a big challenge for most guilds out there now with it. There are still too few guilds with Heroic Rag down and still too few able to clear 6/7 in a night.

Not completing a raid 100% and calling it easy ( not aimed at anyone here just reading alot online through the wow official/mmo-champ forums) is a dopey comment to make and the typical bandwagon jumping done by so many average skilled wow players.

nix

TheDoc wrote: »

Of course dungeons, heroic dungeons are not going to be difficult. They are only ever difficult when you are below that contents gear, but now we all outgear dungeons so can walse through them.

They are never difficult, infact they are soooo easy, impatient assholes tend to leave the group or try and kick the people that made a stupid mistake after one wipe the content is that simple.

I cleared all Cata dungeon/heroic content with ease and i was never over geared with raid equipment as i never raided.

And all you're saying is the last few bosses in firelands heroic is hard.

Take a look at the raids in TBC,

One that became easy after awhile: Kara, Gruul.

SSC,
TK,
MH,
BT,
SWP,
Mag,

All of the above were pretty darn hard, even if you out geared them they still kicked your ass. Each raid may have had one or two easy bosses, the rest a challenge. As opposed to now where you get one or two challenging bosses, the rest easy.

That's the point Rope is trying to make in regards to PvE, he isnt saying there isnt a challenge what so ever, he is saying there isnt enough challenge. And for an MMO, hes god damn right.

Its meant to be a role playing game, the very idea of introducing different difficulty modes breaks the illusion of that very role.

witless1

Nix,
I had a good chat with someone about TBC raiding a while ago, was in two guilds with him and we came to pretty much the same conclusion. One was an decent guild, server 2nd for a long time but got over populated with average players and eventually became very much average. The other guild we later joined was largely made up of decent players, very little carrying. This was my experience of the TBC raids you listed above:

- Mag: Click a cube or fail
- SSC: Simple enough with a challenging end boss beaten by good communication
- TK: Simple enough with a challenging end boss beaten by good communicatiion and excellent co-ordination
- MH: Free gear with progress halted by tear clicking
- BT: Difficult end boss gear wise & mechanic wise
- SWP: Mega step up mainly gear related for initial bosses. Latter bosses were not accessible at all.

I went through all bar SWP with the average guild and done BT/MH with the 2nd guild and 3 bosses in SWP. The average player base we carried meant that the mechanics of the end bosses in all 4 major raid instances caused wipes and blocks that lost us months of progress. Anything that had individual responsibility potentially caused a wipe and all end bosses had that. With 25 players of which you were carrying maybe 10 that should never really raid (but somehow they are there with decent gear and keep turning up) you are making the content seem so much harder. The amount of days we wiped on someone's inability to click the tears on Archimonde was insane. The entire truly accessible raids (i.e. no SWP) had maybe 3 bosses that would cause great difficulty. The other bosses on farm mode were a piece of piss, small things to get right which you could shout at someone on vent. On the more difficult bosses you couldn't micro manage to the level required which meant it came down to a persons ability to raid. Difficulty drastically increased by peoples lack of decent raiding. The guild I later joined one shot BT + MH for gear purposes, often gearing alts, mainly because the players were a lot better. Had we the gear in my old guild SWP would not have been possible in any way shape or form.

WOTLK raiding was easy enough initially, we 19 manned Naxx because of lack of numbers. Hard modes saved end game raiding but again it turned out that in a 25 man guild you carry way too much slack. That's why 10 man raiding became so popular, get a decent guild with very little slack and you make difficult content somewhat easy. ICC10 heroic was very difficult if you tackled it with ICC10 heroic gear. Even padding a character out with 25s gear wasn't a guaranteed success and our LK heroic progression and kill was possibly one of the best WoW moments I had. Cataclysm 4.0 has come on a lot by removing the chance to pad your gear by double dipping into raids. 4.0 heroic content, on our server ATT were top 10 by the time Firelands came out. On a full pop server with great progression that shows how many people actually experienced decent end game content. So if your guild gets an average 10 people all you get is cries for nerfs and Blizzard oblige for some reason. Firelands is the most blatant example of that, we walked through normal mode content which had complex boss mechanics which I would put on a par with some of the TBC end bosses. All of us had seen previous expansions and the boss mechanics so adapting took a wipe or two. Good communication and even better player skill makes new mechanics somewhat a redundant factor in killing the boss. The hard modes that I saw in Firelands were genuinely challenging, it's just a pity I didn't have the time to commit to pushing on and trying for the end bosses.

So yeah, think back on your TBC raids, remember the keyboard turners, remember the people that stood in fire, or failed to click an item....they made TBC raids a lot more difficult then they needed to be. Still agreeing though that the difficulty is not the same today though, largely due to mechanics being recycled and a more severe punishment for mess ups.

RopeDrink,

I don't think WoW is a game you enjoy any more (I don't either cause I can't play it!!) and your pretty much saying that in your last post. PVE normal mode is designed to be easy (accessible). PVP hard mode is designed to be a challenge and it is. PVE heroic dungeons are easy because of gear and familiarity. PVP is horribly broke and I have shied away from it for ages. The PVP easy mode is slacking in TB, slacking in BGs and playing lol arena for points. PVP "hard mode" is all about comp and rock/paper/scissors at high end, rated BGs are possibly the only source of saviour but I don't play that side of it.

Purely from a development point of view I honestly don't think Blizzard can offer anything else. As it is they are offering maybe 5 legitimate paths to play which is a lot more then a few years ago. Your side challenges are achievements, pets, exploration, attempts at WPVP -- I used to spend an hour or so a day in Firelands daily area to this effect. I think the game has evolved to suit the masses. It certainly is different from TBC but from a PVE point of view it hasn't changed that much. It's a matter of finding the right guild with the same like minded people and the game content wise is very much the same challenge. If anything opening up the normal mode content is probably something extra to do within the game that wouldn't have been accessible in TBC. Pugging TBC end bosses was never on the cards.

nix

Mag was alot more than just clicking a cube witless :P And the mobs leading up to him were lethal. The packs around him had to be killed in order, people had to position themselves and space out so not to get hit by **** falling off the roof or get thrown into mags cleave when he shuck the ground and people had to click the cube once, and everybody had to be on the ball to cover any clickers dying..And make sure they were doing enough dps.. The fight was mayhem

In retrospect over the last few days, after digesting witless post. You're right to an extent. But it has become very clear to me why the raids are easy to progress in these days.

With normal modes there isn't alot to the fights, so learning them is pretty easy, and when you do it on heroic mode, they just add in one or two extra problems for the players in the fight and increase bosses hp and damage output.

Its like they put stabilizers into the game and learning the fights was alot easier.

I never really had an issue learning the fights in any of the expansions, in TBC i never understood how some people had issues comprehending what they needed to do. So to me, the fights were never really difficult to begin with, but they were for the most of the other raid players. I enjoyed the difficulty they used to be, but now blizz catered the raids for the average players were referring too by splitting up the raids into normal/heroic modes.

The only reason blizz introduced heroic dungeons in TBC was to give players something to do outside raid times. As you know back then raids had to be organised and planned as opposed to now where most just pug it.

If blizz got rid of normal mode raids id have no doubt that raids would become as difficult as they were before as they would simply take longer to learn as they would be alot harder straight off the bat and with weaker gear.

witless1

Ah yeah Mag was very much chaotic, it took my guild the bones of a whole raid to clear trash the first time we got in there with little to no attempts on the boss. When it boiled down to the actual encounter the first 2 maybe 3 kills we had were very much panicky. Killing the initial adds in time, avoiding getting cleaved and timing the DPS to have the raid topped up for the roof collapse. After that was learned though, most if not all of our wipes came from people clicking the cubes too early (or forgetting), getting the debuff and not bothering calling out. Had we a 25 man raid with all 25 capable of calling out problems TBC would have been so much easier. People sitting there silent after they made a mess of something is frustrating beyond belief.

I hope my last post didn't come off as elitist, I'm far from that! In TBC I raided from the start but was completely new to this side of the game. I keyboard turned, I clicked things and played a class that was DPS capped after Kara for the entire expansion pretty much (shadowpriest), which meant my performance would never be under scrutiny. I think because of that I managed to become more raid aware and spotting people standing in things taking avoidable damage was frustrating. The "average" player killed progress at too many points in TBC for me personally and for most raiders who were not in top guilds. I eventually got to Sunwell in a progressive manner but it was probably 6 months after everyone else. We had cock blocks at Kael because of the individual responsibility required, same with Archimonde, Gorefiend caused problems because people couldn't figure out a 3 button tab system to kill ghosts and of course Illidan because tanks couldn't kite in a semi circle.

Keep the same mechanics and remove the slack and the fight becomes beatable. I think that was the mantra that Blizzard took into WOTLK and Cata with the more complex mechanics translating into hard modes and the simpler normal mode encounters designed for the masses. I don't think they can move from that system especially now that 10 player raids are firmly in place. If it was just one mode of raiding on TBC ("semi-hard mode") style difficulty you would see too much QQ and lost subscriptions. 25s back then, and even now, gave the option for people to hide. 10s is the preferred mode of raiding and one death is generally a wipe. A return to that could kill casual 10 player raids and go back to having a lot of organisation for 25s and a lot of player turnover crippling progression. Our 10 man guild this expansion had about 7 maybe 8 regular people with the last 2 spots rotated / recruited somewhat. I don't think we ever closed recruitment in TBC, the turnover was immense with decent players moving on over frustration. It's a tough place Blizzard find themselves in now. The move towards LFR is opening up three kinds of raids so possibly the normal modes might get tuned up and heroic mode going seriously heroic. That to me would be the perfect solution for casual, committed and hardcore raiding.

Shougeki

TheDoc wrote: »

Firelands is challenging. It was challenging before the nerf and there is still a big challenge for most guilds out there now with it. There are still too few guilds with Heroic Rag down and still too few able to clear 6/7 in a night.

Well Ragnaros HC is still two tiers above current gear levels in my opinion. It is too hard i think. We have been stuck on it for a while, and everyone is fed up of him. We can manage 6/7 in one night, unless we have a stupid night with Baelroc with people not having their head in the game, and spreading aids constantly (like last week).

I would have hoped that Ragnaros is not as hard as he is now before 4.3 The level of difficulty is TOO high in this case. I would have preferred if the heroic FL bosses were a bit harder, with Raggy being a little (but not too much) easier.....

boarder294

they've added a new one. and i think it's better.

Akarinn

Hah. Seems to me that we have an obvious troll.. ^^