I never really understood the complaints about early Cata heroics being too hard. Sure, if you compared them to late-Wrath heroics (when everyone was AoE face-rolling them in their T10 gear), they were clearly harder, but was that really a bad thing? I remember early Cata heroics being a reasonable challenge that required some strategy, coordination, and use of CC abilities, but none of them were so punishing that they should have caused 3m subscribers to quit the game.
I quit playing WoW for a reason that wasn't the game's fault at all. If I'm playing an MMO instead of a single-player game, with all the sacrifices made for that--no real sense that I'm changing the world personally, lots of strangers running through things, always-online requirements--then I damn well want to play with my friends. Or at least my acquaintances. I don't have to be grouped with them all the time, but I want to be able to hang out with them while I'm doing stuff, in guild chat or the like. All my friends who play WoW would play it much, much more than I do. So they'd outlevel me within days, be in zones I couldn't access within a week, and right around the time when I was crawling up to 60, get a server transfer to somewhere else where they could do Awesome Raids. While I just wanted to...do a few instances with friends now and again. Then they'd make alts to play with me, but outlevel me on those too, and never be on that server because they had raids to do on other servers. It's a pity, really. I like a lot of things about the game. But ultimately I couldn't find a stable social circle to chatter with while mining my copper or what not, and that's what killed it for me.
I think it was the combination of Dungeon Finder giving the expectation that heroics would be easy, the shift in raid focus to 10 mans causing larger guilds to splinter (causing some guilds to drop the lesser skilled players), and the fractured and fairly boring nature of the Cata zones and story that led to the drop in subscriptions. I think that, fairly successfully, all of those have been addressed with Pandaria.
Also, Cataclysm's raiding tiers were hands-down the worst out of all of the expansions, except for maybe BoT/BWD and the Conclave fight (BUT NOT AL'AKIR, FUCK HIM). Firelands and Dragonsoul were both massive pits of suck compared to even Wrath's oft-panned raids.
Wrath had "oft-panned" raids? Isn't Ulduar widely considered either the best (or possibly second-best after Karazhan) raid Blizzard ever made?
People bitched about Naxx, people frothed about TotC, and Icecrown had some legitimate complaints, though it was better received than the other two. Ulduar was awesome, though, that's certainly true.
Why were people bitching about Naxx? Because it was recycled content from vanilla? If so, that's really a valid complaint for only a tiny fraction of the playerbase as very few guilds ever completed Naxx40. IIRC, no raiding guild on my server at the time even beat the Four Horsemen, let along Sapphiron or Kel'Thuzad. What were the "legitimate complaints" about ICC? I really enjoyed that raid, too. TotC was weak, though, I'll grant you that.
If I remember correctly, there were two problems with Naxx: 1) Most people didn't enjoy the fights that much. The boss fight gimmicks just weren't appealing to a lot of people, myself included. There were a couple fights in there that I (and others) enjoyed, but overall the place felt more like a slog than something you might do for fun. 2) Naxx was the only raid for *way* too long, which meant that it got super-stale. In addition, because it was the only raid for too long, it also got too easy as people's gear continually improved. Granted, the "raids get easier" thing is true for all raids. But it was more noticeable for Naxx.
A bunch of the Naxx fights were gimmicky to the point of being un-fun, especially since they were astonishingly easy once you mastered the gimmick. You could clear Naxx in trash greens and blues without a wipe, if you knew the fights, so by the time people were in full max-ilevel blues (note: still not in epics) you had stuff like healers getting bored and going to smite, and raid members going afk with autoattack on because why not, it's not like the raid is gonna wipe because of it. Also, it was around as the only tier forever, and it had numerous very-low-drop-chance BiS-for-a-third-of-the-raid items. The only decent cloth chestpiece, everyone's weapons, etc. Having every single encounter in one dungeon meant that you couldn't really work on the earlier HM fights without risking not clearing the instance that week. Some of the fights (particularly HM Lich King) were super technical and demanding, but in too many ways at the same time; Archimonde is the good example of how to make a fight unforgiving and awareness-demanding while still approachable, while M'uru is the perfect example of being unforgiving on a technical, playing-your-class way that doesn't require quite the level of positioning awareness and target swapping as a fight like Vashj, where you don't really have the potential to wipe the entire raid by reacting a half-second too late. There are a few other things, but mostly what I heard - and experienced - was that first one. Fuck you (not really) ToTC was amazing. Every fight in there was solidly sexy swooning times. Well, okay, fights 1 and 2 were way too easy on Normal, but all five of them were a fucking dream to progress on in HM (though Twins could be pretty frustrating, especially if your graphics card wasn't great). Anub'Arak on hardmode was one of my favorite fights in the game to progress on, easily on par with Archimonde and Illidan, though not as great as Kael'thas or Vashj.
Late to the party, but for what it's worth, I got bored by level 37 on my first char in the original game. Haven't gone back since. It was just so fucking dull. I mean, the game is nothing but 1,4,3,1,4,5,1,6,4,7,8,OMG I GET TO PRESS 2 NOW!
Quit not terribly long after BC. Got burned out, honestly. Raiding didn't do much for me -- wasn't much fun, was half standing around and half following button-mashing patterns, and guild raids took on a schedule I eventually just didn't want to commit to anymore -- and when I gave up on the ghost on raiding, it forced me to have to rehash the same content over and over until I was bored with it. You can only roll and level so many alts. Plus they'd just started making fundamental changes to the mechanics that made it not as much fun for me, especially with certain classes. My ex was bigger on raiding, I went to bed many a night alone to the sounds of warlock bolt spam. She didn't last a heck of a lot longer than I did, though. We've sworn off MMOs since and often have to talk each other out of even looking at them when new titles pop up. The closest to questing we do now is Borderlands 2.
I appreciate LFR for opening up the game to casual players like I am now, but I do remember the satisfaction of finally beating Kael'thas when I was still raiding. That kind of fight could never be defeated by a pug raid. Or Archimonde, which our guild never entirely mastered. We were totally dependent on how many shamans we had on that night - no shamans meant no luck.
Cataclysm dungeons/heroics were not difficult once you knew them, but if you were running with pubbies it was even odds -- even well into the life of the expansion -- that you would get clueless group members who would make them hard, usually through poor mechanics execution. Pulling the adds in whatever the stone one was, before the big golem boss, became a chore as they pulled way too many adds, or Feared an add into another group because they didn't glyph Fear. Whatever one it was that had the drake bombing run became a chore because no one but you would bomb properly and you would have to fight all the (far too many) trash packs normally. Whatever the first one was became a hassle because group members couldn't handle standing in/getting out of the stacking beam on the priestess fight. The fight with the adds that you had to kill before they reached and hatched the eggs became a chore with comically low DPS. Many of the people saying they were too easy didn't run them regularly without a full group of their friends. Doing it with competent people became easy, yes.
I'm quoting you only because I know exactly what type of player you are and because I think the majority of the people complaining about the difficulty of Cata heroics weren't in the category of gamer you belong to. I don't think it led to the loss of 3m subscribers, but what you and I consider a "reasonable challenge" is actually pretty damn hard for most of the playerbase. I loved the difficulty of the heroics at the start of Cata, but that was only in guild groups and the rare PuG where people played well. In most random PuGs, which is how most people experienced the content, it was often pretty fucking painful and I can understand the cries of "TOO HARD". Plus, people had been trained in mid-to-late Wrath that running heroics was just something you did mindlessly in order to purchase epics.
I didn't mean to sound like an elitist when I described Cata heroics as a "reasonable challenge", so apologies if my post appeared that way. Obviously there is such as thing as too hard where the players were justified to complain about the difficulty (see pre-nerf TBC heroics), but I don't think the Cata heroics fall into that category. As you noted, mid-to-late Wrath heroics were stupid easy, and Cata heroics undoubtedly were a rude awakening to people who expected them to be something you could mindlessly sleepwalk through. My contention is that this is how it should be; I thought Cata heroics found the happy middle ground for difficulty (with TBC heroics being too hard and Wrath heroics being too easy). Do you remember our first few Ulduar raids? At the time, we had grown accustomed from Naxx to simply AoEing the trash packs while ignoring CC and all other mechanics. Obviously that didn't work in Ulduar (at least not until we were over-geared for it), so after a few wipes we were forced to adapt and play smarter. I think most of us consider that to have been an improvement in Blizzard's design. In the same vein, I saw the shift from the mindless Wrath heroics to the heroics in Cata where players had to pay attention and learn the fights to be beneficial to the game even if it meant some short-term pain for fresh level 85 players. Incidentally, how are the heroics in Mists in terms of difficulty? Have they returned to the facerolling Wrath style, or are they somewhere in between Wrath and Cata?
I don't think he was criticizing you for being elitist. I think he was just pointing out that you're atypical & lack perspective. Hmm... even this is coming off more critical than I mean it to. In a sense, most of us lack perspective; we tend to assume that other players have roughly our preferences & motivations.
In my experience, there are two distinct and discrete groups of people who play MMOs. The first group is you, and people like you. You read up on theory, you know your rotation, you gear well, you observe mechanics, you use abilities in creative ways. Most importantly, you want to be good. The other group doesn't know that Elitist Jerks exists and if they did they wouldn't care. They want to throw some fireballs and see monsters die. They don't know what Recount is, they don't understand the concept of a rotation, they don't know that there is such a thing as an optimal talent build or that they ought to have one. You sometimes see them standing around for a bit between casts because they don't really have a concept of maximizing DPS output. There can be considerable tension when those two groups get thrown together, which MMOs do with some frequency. I've been a member of both groups, starting as the latter and ending as the former. It's not that people in the second group don't want to be good, exactly -- it's that they don't understand that there is a concept of being good at MMOs. I leveled a Rogue from 1-80 as Subtlety during Wrath. I made it through and killed things so I figured it was fine. I didn't know I was terrible because I didn't know that being terrible was a thing you could do. In my head things died or they didn't, and they died so I was fine. It took someone taking me aside and explaining the facts of life to me before I got it, and now the idea of not caring about your performance is totally alien to me. A lot of people in the group that you and I play MMOs in do not realize that the other group exists. If you only run with your guild full of competent people, you are insulated from the terribleness that can infest pubbie groups. They aren't bad on purpose, they don't know that being bad is a possibility. But Cataclysm heroics required decent execution and DPS, and sometimes players in the second group just don't have that. EDIT: I spent some time in the Secret World yesterday running people through an Elite dungeon. We finally reached a fight that was a DPS check and were laughably unable to complete it. We then discovered that people were using soloing builds with survivability and shields to DPS in. We helped them come up with viable builds and then we cleared it no problem. Before we could give them builds, we had to get it through their heads that they needed to optimize their ability choices to maximize their damage, and that took some time. One of the dudes in that group is 46 and has never played an MMO before. He's not dumb, he just didn't have the MMO mindset that the rest of us are accustomed to.
Heh, I distinctly remember our first pull of those two giant golems in front of Ignis' room as being a "this shit is real" moment. Granted, it was because we went in blind and didn't know what the mechanics were so we were making it a lot harder than it should've been, but still. And so I'm not misunderstood, I agree with you completely that the difference between Wrath and Cata heroics was positive. It's just that, like Mark M said, it's hard for us to always see the overall difficulty level from the non-raider's viewpoint, so that balance is probably pretty hard to maintain for Blizzard. I think the main problem is that the original intent of heroics and hard modes was to satisfy the players who seek out bigger challenges, but somewhere along the way they turned all of it into content that everyone felt they were supposed to do easily. It's not all Blizzard's fault, of course. A lot of people view difficult content as just something standing in the way of the gear they feel they deserve for whatever reason. They're all pretty easy. They're designed pretty well and a lot of the encounters have some pretty interesting mechanics, but so far only the absolute worst PuGs I've been in have had any trouble at all, even early on when everyone was still mostly in quest gear. They're not quite as simple to blast through as in Wrath, but they're not that far away unfortunately.
They are face-rollingly silly easy. The idea behind them is similar to /LFR: give the casual player content that they can enjoy at their own leisure. Don't take that to mean there's no challenging content, however. They've added a challenge mode to all the level 90 dungeons. There's no LFD tool to teleport you there, you gotta walk. The mobs in the dungeons are all a lot meaner and tougher and hit harder than the regular heroic version, so CC, focus fire, good situational awareness, and the ability to play your class are all mandatory for these runs. Oh by the way, you're on a time limit too. And the fastest times are posted to Battle.net. Challenge modes reward mounts and special transmog gear (some of which looks awesome, others not so much.).
Hey, I want that Shaman gear specifically because it looks so utterly ridiculous. But yeah, the Challenge Modes are pretty rough. I've only done one of them so far, but I think it's a great idea for people who enjoy a challenge more than getting a reward. Since gear is all normalized for them, the only way to get better is to practice and figure out what you can improve to get through faster. We spent an hour or two on Gate of the Setting Sun and ended up 2m 36s away from Gold, so it's not out of reach but will certainly take some effort to get Gold in all 9.
Holy shit, someone thought they could one-up the Tier 1 Hunter set shoulders, and they succeeded at it.
That shaman gear is *awesome*. Finally, the developers realized that shamen players all secretely want to wield bazookas. Dual bazookas, to be precise. Or are those supposed to be jet engines? Well, whatever they are, they're my new favoritest thing.
Trying to figure out which set you mean, but I don't see any druid tier armor with antennae. Plenty with antlers, though! Druid t3/7 was one of the less dramatic sets and I think was actually quite spiffy.
I quit WoW because of the person I was dating at the time. He was one of those people that was like AWW MAN I GOTTA DO MY RAID TONIGHT CAN'T TALK SORRY, so I decided to join in the game. From the very beginning, he made it an unpleasant experience by trying to control how I named my character. "A girl can't be named Robert! Rock is not a good name! Buttons what???" And then when I finally made it in-game, we had a little fun leveling up new characters together, but then he was like "LEMME SHOW YOU MY HIGHEST LEVEL WARFENDORF". He showed me and was displeased with my "oh, that's nice". Then he made me challenge him to a duel. By "made me", I mean he followed me around and killed all NPCs I tried to talk to while spamming me with duel challenges. So I accepted his goddamn duel and he, as expected, beat me in one second. And then he bragged and started challenging me again. Turned the game off, never turned it on again.
Man, the relationship was ended in a matter of days later, don't even worry 'bout that. And I guess he was a member of the opposing faction then? I remember being dumbfounded that he could kill NPCs. I'm used to them being invincible.
I actually met my ex on WoW. I realize this isn't a huge deal these days, but it's still a secret shame. The fact that we ended up living together for five years and are still in constant contact kinda attests to it not being such a horrible thing, but still ... it hasn't stopped feeling nerdy as hell. I kept playing WoW a lot longer than I really wanted because she was constantly dragging me grinding or raiding with her, but she burned out eventually.
Hence the unpopularity of heroic-mode raiding, challenge modes, and RBGs. Oh wait, those things are all things people enjoy. It's almost as if Blizzard has designed a game that can accommodate a multitude of playstyles.
I quit World of Warcraft because it is a jealous game, and I just don't have time for that these days. If a game is going to passive-aggressively punish me for failing to call up and talk about its dailies every night, and if it's then going to keep me on the phone for an hour and a half yammering about crap that I really don't enjoy discussing (wait for the boat, ride the griffon, etc.), I'm just fine letting it go off and find its joy on its own. At this point, I have such a tremendous volume of other games that are actually fun to do that wasting even a second of my life waiting for something I'm paying for every month to get to the fun part already just isn't something I can justify.
I still enjoy playing casually. I just finished all of the initial Pandaria quest content, and am slowly moving through some of the 5.1 stuff. I find it best to treat the dailies as casually as possible, and not sweat the reputation gain or the more annoying quests. I’m having more fun with WoW than with Guild Wars 2 but I do wish I could treat other players as other than annoyances. The dailies really bring that home.
It's actually a little mind-blowing when I think about just how much better WoW would be if Blizzard would copy a ton of things from GW2.
And the popularity of COD right? I didn't say it was a rule with no exceptions. I just meant in general.
I chose Too Boring. My deal with WoW is, get the expansion, level up, play all the new content, do all dungeons a bunch of times, enjoy the heck out of raiding with the Drop Bears, do every daily 10 times and then if there are no achievements that grab me (like fishing- yeah fishing) call it a day. This can take 6 months or a year easily but in the end, I always unsubscribe. I cannot do the "daily grind"...I just can't handle logging on every day and doing the same 20 quests 7 days a week anymore. Same with say raiding- 25 Drop Bears on vent yelling, screaming, singing and having a good old time, all acting as or trying to act as a finely tuned unit is really great fun. But running the same raid content every Wednesday and Saturday for a year is not my style. Oddly Panda was the first time I did not buy an expansion on day one. That said while I am currently enjoying GW2 and TSW (no sub fee really helps) I know that buy this summer I will be farming with my Panda for at least 6 months.
