God, I used to love this game.

May 6th will be my 4 year anniversary of playing WoW, and unfortunately I don’t see myself renewing my account long enough to see it. This is not intended as a blasting post, but I felt it necessary to post up what made this game great, and why I feel it has been destroyed.


1) Class Homogenization. This may sound weird coming from someone who plays a shaman and had the most to benefit. But one of the things that made this game great was that every class had something that made that class truly unique, cool, and fun. But at this point, why don’t you just have everyone choose one of the following: Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Tank, or Healer. Because there is very little between any of those anymore. Can you honestly tell me that in an instance, a mage and a hunter have any real functional differences anymore? No. What about a fury warrior and an enhancement shaman? Not really.

Back before all this nonsense started, nobody tanked like a warrior, nobody buffed like a shaman or paladin, and nobody DPSed like a mage. –And really, what was wrong with that?


2) Content is Just Too Easy. For god sakes, we were AoE tanking level 80 heroics the moment we dinged 80, in blues and greens… -And I haven’t seen a single time in any level 80 content where crowd control was ever needed. Why? The game content is just too easy. Anyone remember doing 10-man UBRS runs back when it was hard? –And later doing it, getting people keyed for Onyxia? Anyone remember the guild-breaker Razorgore and Vaelastrasz were, the moment you walked into Blackwing Lair? Anyone remember the first time they did heroic Shadow Labs at level 70, shortly after TBC came out, trying to get keyed for Kara? Remember having to do tons of crowd control, because otherwise the tank died in about 4 seconds? Anyone remember when heroic Magister’s Terrace first came out, and people were freaking out because of how hard the runs could be?

All that is gone, friends. The hardest thing we saw when WotLK first came out was heroic Loken… LOL.


3) No more Prestige to Hardcore Raiding. At the risk of sounding like an elitist jerk, unless someone has Immortal, Undying, Nightfall, or Twilight Vanquisher, chances are they are a completely casual player… -Wearing full 5/5 of the best raid gear the game has to offer. Anyone remember seeing someone in full T2 gear at 60, or full tier 5 gear at 70, and being like “WOW! That guy is freakin PIMP!” -Yet nowadays, anyone who isn’t half brain-dead and can mash a couple buttons can get 5/5 Valorous gear, and the best weapons in the game. Seriously! And what do the more hardcore players get? –A chance at a mediocre mount that isn’t even a proto-drake, and a title? Please.

And it’s not like this is changing folks. Ghostcrawler has already said that Ulduar is not going to be a huge step up from Naxxramas. More easy mode top-tier epic gear, available to the most casual players.


4) PvP is a total Gibfest. I consider myself a fairly casual PvPer over the years, but I have always been active in every aspect of PvP this game has had to offer. Never in four years of PvP play have I seen PvP turned into such a complete gibfest, like what is the metagame today. People die slower in Quake 4, for god sakes. Who’s idea was it to triple and quadruple DPS output from 70 to 80, while barely doubling the health pools?

And what’s with the no-skill faceroll PvP classes? Used too, people basically complained about one class not really requiring skill to be awesome in PvP: Warlocks. Now there’s at least 4 classes in the game that can basically faceroll 4 buttons each, and completely own in PvP. Funny how most are all over the top of the arena brackets. Yeah. That’s skill…

–And God help you if you’re like me, and you want to PvP as a healer… Under-geared people die faster than you can ever hope to get a heal off. –And I hope you have 1000 resilience and 2200+ spell power… -Because that’s what it will take to not die in the duration of a stunlock or a chains of ice when the healer aggro comes.


Well that's it. Account is canceled, and game is uninstalled. Gonna play some first person shooters and hope that when Diablo comes out, it'll be better I guess. Peace.

Well good luck man in your travels. People need to understand that this is a game. Games are ment to be fun. If a game are causeing you stress or anger, then it's time to go.


I recommend halo 3, take the skills from this put it in that and you'll do....... fair >.>

Though I hardly believe WOW is "quit worty" yet.......

My 2c

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Q u o t e:
God, I used to love this game.

May 6th will be my 4 year anniversary of playing WoW, and unfortunately I don’t see myself renewing my account long enough to see it. This is not intended as a blasting post, but I felt it necessary to post up what made this game great, and why I feel it has been destroyed.


1) Class Homogenization. This may sound weird coming from someone who plays a shaman and had the most to benefit. But one of the things that made this game great was that every class had something that made that class truly unique, cool, and fun. But at this point, why don’t you just have everyone choose one of the following: Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Tank, or Healer. Because there is very little between any of those anymore. Can you honestly tell me that in an instance, a mage and a hunter have any real functional differences anymore? No. What about a fury warrior and an enhancement shaman? Not really.

Back before all this nonsense started, nobody tanked like a warrior, nobody buffed like a shaman or paladin, and nobody DPSed like a mage. –And really, what was wrong with that?


2) Content is Just Too Easy. For god sakes, we were AoE tanking level 80 heroics the moment we dinged 80, in blues and greens… -And I haven’t seen a single time in any level 80 content where crowd control was ever needed. Why? The game content is just too easy. Anyone remember doing 10-man UBRS runs back when it was hard? –And later doing it, getting people keyed for Onyxia? Anyone remember the guild-breaker Razorgore and Vaelastrasz were, the moment you walked into Blackwing Lair? Anyone remember the first time they did heroic Shadow Labs at level 70, shortly after TBC came out, trying to get keyed for Kara? Remember having to do tons of crowd control, because otherwise the tank died in about 4 seconds? Anyone remember when heroic Magister’s Terrace first came out, and people were freaking out because of how hard the runs could be?

All that is gone, friends. The hardest thing we saw when WotLK first came out was heroic Loken… LOL.


3) No more Prestige to Hardcore Raiding. At the risk of sounding like an elitist jerk, unless someone has Immortal, Undying, Nightfall, or Twilight Vanquisher, chances are they are a completely casual player… -Wearing full 5/5 of the best raid gear the game has to offer. Anyone remember seeing someone in full T2 gear at 60, or full tier 5 gear at 70, and being like “WOW! That guy is freakin PIMP!” -Yet nowadays, anyone who isn’t half brain-dead and can mash a couple buttons can get 5/5 Valorous gear, and the best weapons in the game. Seriously! And what do the more hardcore players get? –A chance at a mediocre mount that isn’t even a proto-drake, and a title? Please.

And it’s not like this is changing folks. Ghostcrawler has already said that Ulduar is not going to be a huge step up from Naxxramas. More easy mode top-tier epic gear, available to the most casual players.

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Dead on. Though I don't know what the solution is. There is merit to the new direction as GC has pointed out. On the other hand this game became success in pre-BC and during BC. Messing with a successful formula is dangerous.

Class Homogenization comes from the devs inability to make classes work that don't fit into an archetype. It's easier to give all classes AoE and overlapping Buffs.

My biggest worry is what are people expected to do if they want to play on days they aren't Raiding. Ulduar will be great I'm sure but most of my friends and I (on different servers) pretty much log in at Raid time then log out. Great for Blizzard's balance sheet but not great for any longevity it seems.

/agree @ OP. This expansion is disappointing at best.

The problem is that for every hardcore player that is lost because LK so far is a joke, there are 5 un-enchanted, poorly gemmed, welfare DK's out there pugging full T7.5, and face rolling to 2k with out having to put in any effort what so ever. 5 casuals > 1 Hardcore because that's who is being catered to.

/farewell

I think it's time for a lot of us.

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Q u o t e:
Yeah raid stacking 5-6 Resto Shamans for SW:P was the way to go.

Remember the Sunwell.

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A) This has nothing to do with the conversation.

B) Stacking Resto shamans only really occured in late BT and Sunwell. Less than 10% of the raiders (and only a couple percent at most of the whole player base) even got to see that content, and experienced that. Of those, about 30% of raiders are healers, and experienced being sat for endgame Sunwell. When you do all the math, that ends up being near 1% of the player base that got sat for Resto shamans in Sunwell. Are you one of those few that this happened too? Probably not.

Did you READ about it on Bluetrackers and worldofraids.com, and are quick to throw out the fact at every opportunity when someone says that BC raiding > WotLK raiding? Most likely.

C) This has nothing to do with the conversation.

D) Resto shamans were stacked because AoE healing was king in Sunwell. -And chain heal was the absolute king of AoE healing. There are plenty of ways fights can be made hard without following this model, and some of that has been implemented in WotLK. As well, there are plenty of other alternatives to giving every healing class in the game intelligent AoE healing, further reducing skill level of the game, and further homogenizing healing classes.

E) This has nothing to do with the conversation.

1) Partial agreement
2) 5p's and 10p's are too easy
3) Good, the sooner it utterly dies the better
4) Completely agreed

I understand some of what you are saying.

However I do like how Blizzard approached the content for LK.

I have also been playing this game since early Beta and was becoming very frustrated with tge game.

My reasons were different however. I was in and am in a guild with many like myself. We play for a few hours a night and sometimes get a Saturday to play as well.

So with the Old model we never got to see any of the end game content at all. Imagin playing for 2 years and not being able to see the very best that WOW has to offer. That was me and many like me. I had actually though about quiting this game until they released Kara. But even at that time I still never got to see the beauty that was Hyjal and Black Temple.

I do accept you point of view though. For hard core raiders the content is very very easy and many of you have been done with it for months now. The guild I am in has just started clearing 25 man Nax.

I hope Blizzard does add some content that challenges even the top raiding guilds. I justhope they do it in a way that allows the rest of us to see the contnent as well.

I agree 100% about what you said about PVP though.

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Q u o t e:
Back before all this nonsense started, nobody tanked like a warrior, nobody buffed like a shaman or paladin, and nobody DPSed like a mage. –And really, what was wrong with that?

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Your raid brought exactly enough of each class to get the important buffs and then stacked the best DPS class. Many, many specs just didn't work in raids, and putting together a raid for late BC content required some real spec gymnastics that kept many players out of the raid game.

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Q u o t e:
2) Content is Just Too Easy.

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I largely agree. I used to like raiding more. I was really turned off by the fact that Naxx is puggable with people that don't even know the fights.

I want heroics that you have to gear up for. I remember constantly getting turned down to heroics at the end of BC. It hurt, but I had to run regs, gear up, learn the fights, and learn my class.

Now some failtard who quested from 70-80 can join queue for any given heroic 30 seconds after dinging. They can still put out enough DPS to justify their spot, but constantly die because they don't know what the hell they're doing.

Make heroics HARD.

Wow has been geting old for a while, this time around they realy screwed things up. the funnest aspect of the game for me was pvp, although i do enjoy pve. This time around they made pvp on a priest torture, and pve content got old reall fast, its an easymode snozzefest now...

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Q u o t e:
Make heroics HARD.

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I would love, love, love some hard 5 man content. I have a group of RL friends that I play with, and we almost never have 10 folks on. We can usually get 5 together, though. If there was something that could challenge my group of players who all know their class and play well together, it would be heaps and heaps of fun.

I wish heroics had hard modes with cosmetic rewards. Think timed CoT but harder.

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Q u o t e:
I understand the class homogenization concerns. It is sometimes difficult to make sure that all classes are viable for what they want to do without pushing their stats and abilities too close together. We are going to continue to try to strike a balance here. However I will offer that for every player that asks what was wrong with the good old days, there is a Prot paladin, Feral druid, Ret paladin, Arcane mage or Survival hunter who is happy that their spec isn't a joke any longer.

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Aside from Arcane Mage, my guild cleared SW in early September with every single one of those specs playing a vital role in our progression. Prot Paladins weren't a joke, and neither were Feral Druids, Ret Paladins, or SV hunters. Hell, we didn't even have a Prot Warrior until we got to Muru. We also "stacked" resto shaman all the way to 2. It was out of control!

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Q u o t e:
We designed Naxx to be easy. It was the first raiding tier. It was content many raiding guilds had already seen. We allowed players to practice extensively during beta. Ulduar is not Naxx. I suspect you'll see Ulduar pugs eventually, but not right away. I suspect you will see a ton of "Ulduar is just way too hard" posts, especially for guilds trying the hard modes. But we'll see.

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It's not just about Naxx. We understand the need for some training wheels for some people at the beginning of an expansion pack to some extent. Naxx being easy doesn't have anything to do with being able to AoE down every single pull in every single heroic, in leveling gear, the first week of WotLK. It would have been nice to have to use my brand new level 80 spell at some point (I don't PvP), but I completely forgot I had Hex and didn't even test it out until a couple months after I hit 80.

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Q u o t e:


I would love, love, love some hard 5 man content. I have a group of RL friends that I play with, and we almost never have 10 folks on. We can usually get 5 together, though. If there was something that could challenge my group of players who all know their class and play well together, it would be heaps and heaps of fun.

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The massive amount of AOE now makes this impossible. Every single heroic was made completely trivial as soon as you have the most minor amount of level 80 gear. All of the new dungeons are pretty damn impressive, but the only time i'd see them again will be levelling alts. Heroics were a good chance to increase the longevity, however new design philosophy has made it a complete failure and waste of content.

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Q u o t e:


Aside from Arcane Mage, my guild cleared SW in early September with every single one of those specs playing a vital role in our progression. Prot Paladins weren't a joke, and neither were Feral Druids, Ret Paladins, or SV hunters. Hell, we didn't even have a Prot Warrior until we got to Muru.

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He means real old school, like pre-tbc.

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Q u o t e:
However I will offer that for every player that asks what was wrong with the good old days, there is a Prot paladin, Feral druid, Ret paladin, Arcane mage or Survival hunter who is happy that their spec isn't a joke any longer.

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not that you care GC.. not that you need it. even through all the crap i post on the boards... you have made me as a ret paladin... a lot happier. Ty

Yeah, after you get all those achievements for 10/25m naxx, 6 min maly etc game does seem easy,

I tried to pug 2 drake OS, it fails,

I love LK expansion, it gave you 2 choices: 1. ez mode for pugs 2. hard more for guilds/raiders

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Q u o t e:


He means real old school, like pre-tbc.

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Then his point with regards to WotLK homogenization is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, as these issues were already solved before the design philosophy change that has made this game so unfun.