Cráb People

Well the problem now is that they're making 1 set of raid that is supposedly ballanced for both pvers and casuals and it's imo what's causing the problem. They need to make it more of a challenge for pvers (As in not nerf content nearly as quick as they do and also ballance out the bosses a lot better then what they're doing atm), while still making sure that casuals can see some of the content too. Which I think the raid finder will to some extent do.

"seeing content" isn't fun. If people want to see content, they should try http://www.youtube.com.

Progressing is fun. Beating content is fun. 5man-->10man/hard 5man-->Molten core --> ZG&BWL --> AQ20&AQ40-->Naxxramas

This was a fun progression path as a casual. It was never about gear, it was always about team efforts and putting your soul into killing the next evil badguy.

None of which require spending a lot of time.

Additionally, you learned the new neccesary skills to deal with the next tier by simply playing the previous tiers. It started simple and got more complex over time.

Also, simple and hard aren't mutually exclusive. If something is simple it only means that the learning curve is shorter, not that your marginals or initial requirements are very low.

None of the Molten Core fights were "easy" when first ran into with dungeon gear, they were however simple. And fun. And class mechanics were fun. BWL stepped up the complexity of encounters by adding more mechanics (but not more complex mechanics or class mechanics).

Because of MC experience, this made sense and added challenge. However the mechanics themselves were still simple. And class mechanics were still simple.

At the very peak of raiding, sunwell and naxxramas the mechanics were more and more complex but most of all you had smaller marginals. Class mechanics were still simple.

The only negative about vanilla& tbc class- and encounterdesign was lots of bugs and balance issues.



Combining class and encounter mechanics today you have so many small things to keep track of simultaneously. This isn't particularly hard since you're not even required to keep up with most of them, but it makes the actual important things much less satisfying, because they're just one thing out of a gazillion.

Edit: an example of current day really cool shit and what makes it less fun:

Heroic Al'akir.

Ret paladin. Saving people with instant word of glorys when being combo'd by storms and lightning. This is awesome in itself as it's situational and awesome utility.

However, I'll be interrupting my rotation to do this, the rotation that I do 95% of the encounter.

Additionally I have too many survival/save the day cooldowns. Lay on hands for every try, divine protection for every or every other wind burst, bubble, hand of freedom etc.

The cooldowns and "situational" spells themselves turn into a rotation. I'm now doing a dps rotation, a survival rotation, and a dps cooldown rotation.

The only truly situational judgement calls I make is when to delay my dps cooldowns/trinkets for maximum effect.

Not many spells are used reactively or by planning and coordinating. Ulduar(25H) was the godraid of reaction, planning, timing and coordination, with a perfect balance of required effort and time spent.

You need to understand that the game can _never_ ever be like vanilla and tbc ever again.
The progression paths that you talk off, they don't work in the modern game and they won't ever again because these days bosses are either killable or not. There is no middle ground.

You make a DPS check boss to check the gear of the raid. The raid drops two healers and goes like that, ala baleroc and ragnaros 10man.

Unless you make the gear stats scale stupidly quickly, which they already do frankly, you can't put in place gear checks anymore without resistance fights. Without gear checks you can't gate an instance.

Yogg0 mathematically impossible, np we'll just bring 17 affliction warlocks. etc

I like challanges and i like being given 0 tolerance for fucking up aka getting killed instantly, perfecting my play inbetween. Hell i'd put an onyxia in rags P2 to do deep breaths while he casts seeds, throw in the Yogg deathstare 'look away' mechanic too while at it. But that's just me.

I liked the attunement maze in tbc. Although if they bring em back the stuff that grants attunements need to give some on-use item that attunes a new recruit.

Don't think I have enjoyed any other encounters as much as Kael and Vashj.

Attunements were ok, but if they would implement it now it should be a guild perk. Not level based, but something you earn with your guild through raiding and doing quests, or account wide at the very least.

Some of the other stuff from Vanilla was just annoying, like farming 20000 linen for the AQ gates, zzzzz.

Think the diffuctly changes to WoW are a one time road, once you have been there, there is no way back.
The shitstorm will be too big. We saw a slightly bit of it with Cata at release.

Many complain about the TBC raid model that people had hard time to catch up when they were starting late
and good guilds would catch the geared people from the lower tier guilds all the time, so that
they never catch up.

Also apart from raiding, LFD was a bad idea for the community. Dont think LFR will be any better.
Faction changes etc. are also not the best ways to support community.

And about TBC/Vanilla style:

I liked the attunments like the ones TBC, Onyxia was also cool. Running Warlords Commands, UBRS and all that shit (5x blood of drakisath at the start also).
Today the game is too much focused on reaching the level cap fast and start farming VP.

I mean whats the progression or sense if people farm ZA/ZG heroics in every tier to get raiding gear.

Vanilla and all of the expansions have been good in their own ways and the game has evolved to keep it fresh. I loved vanilla with all the hardcoreness, but cant say I enjoyed the countless hours spent into farming mats and such. Linear progression was exciting and motivating and kept you interested. TBC and Wotlk were more fun boss encounter-wise, but the game started reminding alot like a PVE e-sport.

Honestly what "destroyed" the essence of this game was when Blizzard implemented faction and realm changes. I think that broke the whole unity feeling. Horde doesnt feel horde and alliance doesnt feel like alliance. Not that I havent found it useful but this is how i see it.

My 2 cents:

As far as difficulty goes the game is old and people know it inside out by now. Comparing the old 4hm to Rag HC is just a world of difference. Because people are much better players now. At the same time there still are some people who are just starting out and know nothing of the game. Back in vanilla the best were much worse compared to the worst people playing the game, and so the range of content didn't quite need to be as extensive. The more breadth you add to the game the less interesting each part of it will feel, to some extent.

Another part of the game beeing old is that people have already seen it all. I mean, it was pretty epic in vanilla the sheer amount of time it took to get from orgrimmar to get to AQ for your raid. The amount of things you passed by flying there made the world feel large and interesting. Nowadays u port everywhere np. And that IS a good thing in the long run, but it also sort of goes both ways.

As far as encounter design and high end raiding I think the game has constantly improved, with only a few setbacks (i.e. new naxx, mh and maybe toc). As far as maintaining the epic feeling of beeing an individual exploring a massive and interesting new world, the game has utterly failed. But I think that is more me than the game.

All in all, a game shouldn't be interesting for what is it now? 7 years? WoW is by far the best game ever made and I doubt there are many things I could've ever done nearly as well as the people working on it.

There has been too much caving in to players complaining by a developer that is afraid of losing its customers. Caving in to people who can't properly express what they want, most of the time don't even know what they want and certainly never consider the (long term) consequences of what they are asking for.

Most of the old school hardcore players have left the game, their place taken by more and more new players who expect everything to be handed to them free from effort. And who can blame them, it's how the game works nowadays.

Every expansion promised to be better than the previous one, but turned out to be far worse. The experience of WoW is not about memories anymore. Memories of taking on Hogger for the first time, riding out on your very first mount, finally completing the Rhok'delar quest or having an epic battle in Warsong Gulch with that fearsome team of the other faction. The experience today is your itemlevel and something called 'archivment' which they keep asking for and which I haven't really figured out yet what it means. PvP was about how fast and smart you were, the abomination they call PvP these days is about stacking some artificial super-stat and hugging pillars above anything else.

The game has evolved a lot since the start, but priceless stuff like communities and the possibility of developing lasting memories will probably never return.