Cráb People

There was a nice essay from Wowhead guy and one from EJ.

Read yourself
http://flavortextlore.wordpress.com/201 ... ne-of-wow/

Whats your opinion on that?

In my opinion the current "bad" state isnt just the cause of cata. IMO it startet all with the aoe roflstomp 3.0 patch and the well known wrath baby expansion.

Maybe i am oldschool and masochistic but i liked some of the harder things in the game back then, even though they were grindy. (attunments, group quests, real rep grinds)

If you remember spike, he recognized that paradigm shift back then when he quitted early in WotLK. Though he was thinking of raiding, which isnt that easy mode, right?

Think Spike quit because of achievements back then, but last I heard he was playing on another server.

I enjoyed the game back in vanilla and tbc over wotlk and cata but looking back on it I don't really know why.

Well maybe ashjre'thul and thori'dal had something to do with it...

Edit: Got around to reading some of it and so far it's complaining about valor points and the new 1-60 content. Was a virtually meaningless essay until just before the end where he starts to bring up a good point... before descending back to casual gamers are killing games.

Something like the 0.5 rare tier set for each expansion would have changed everything. Even more so if there where quick "tests" to upgrade pieces to epic versions. While I'm unsure about the contents of tests for other classes but for hunters they already had 4 suitable encounters from the rhok'delar quest line. Fight a moderately powerful elite that despawns if anyone else attempts to engage it or buff you combined with a mix of damage buffs for certain abilities different on each. New 5man instances could drop a token that would allow you to upgrade your previously upgraded 0.5 set piece. Interesting class progression, mark of honor(*) and for cunning raid leaders the ability to see the weaknesses of players in their raids.

Of course, we all know why this didn't happen and it's because it's cheaper and faster to increase the damage and heal of mobs by 50% and increases stats by 8% on items while adding a "heroic" tag.

* Competing with Shinkudo to get Rhok'delar was one of the high points of vanilla now thinking back to it.

There has been nothing like it since then.

While I'm in edit mode I'm unable to check what Skullhi wrote but apart from grinding gold I don't remember hardly any grinding for rep. The few fractions of relevance where raiding fractions.

Read it all, and i agree on pretty much all of it.

Wow needs dying and cockblocks back: the tier 0.5 boss summoned in UBRS, grinding nr gear for huhuran, grinding fr gear for rag, onyxia scale cloaks for nef and/or flamegor/ebonroc/firemaw, shadow res for mother shahraz, hydross, magtheridon cube clicking (before it was nerfed), bosses with aggro resets, crowd control fights (Gothik) and many more...

Even tho most of the text is about how they have trivialized everything in general, it does make a solid point at saying that players are no longer exposed to danger at all almost. You can't even die to trash anymore, unless for some retarded reason you pull multiple packs and get overzerged, what's the point of putting in trash if it can't kill you anyway. Remember those gargoyles in naxx40, C'thun trash, giants in SSC when they had almost as much HP as a boss and a ~10-15 min respawn, the whirlwinding kael trash that would instakill all melee and so on.

Ever since Blizzard merged with Activision all that we got was content that is ~hard for about a month after comming of the PTR, and afterwards it becomes a buffet available for everyone.

There were some grinds in Vanilla for rep like Argent Dawn (Cauldrons farming) or Timbermaw. Also these Insane in the membrane Reputations but those were for me too hardcore as well.

I find the points about the general game interesting as well, since that is also important, not just raids and dungeons. They removed many things that were normal for us.
Like the quests for getting warlock pets, buying ammo as hunter and many more things.

Shalelog thought raiding is pretty decent and hard now (t11 and t12 pre nerf). That things get nerfed after while is IMO okay but that shouldnt happen too fast.

The game itself is getting old and frankly I think ICC had a lot to do with the current issues.
I loved this game until the end of ulduar never once thought about quitting because I always had stuff I wanted to do. Then they throw out CoC and we farmed that useless piece of crap for several months and then release ICC for 1 year before Cata.

We chew up and spit out the content faster than ever before and I don't think Blizzards development can keep up.
I think raid finder will help a lot. I'm really looking forward to pugging raids on offdays and during the day before raids. It doesn't matter that I can only get loot from each boss once, I just enjoy raiding.

They should have dropped war of the ancients 5 man and developed it as a small raid along side dragon soul. Or hell even released it on it's own as 4.3 to tide us over for a while.

The changes that blizzard has made to the game for the "casual" gamer, while I agree they have removed some of the challenge and reward aspects, are usually for the better. Making old clunky mechanics better and more streamline.

tl;dr For me as long as there is raiding content to be done I'll keep playing wow. The things outside of raids are just a means to raid and if they aren't necessary then I won't do them unless they are exceedingly fun and worth my leisure time.

Since the next expansion is supposed to be coming in the 2nd quarter of 2012, I doubt it will be that long.

It has it good and bad sides.

I did not enjoy trash farm BT for shadow res gear
I did not enjoy farming 2 hours outside of 1900 - 2400 raids for consumables (resistance pots / firewater / etc.)
I did not enjoy running Molten Core for the gazillionth time to gear up shamans because their T2 sucked
I did not enjoy getting up at 4 AM and battle with Curse to get Nature Res gear for Huhuran
I did not enjoy UBRS / ZG / doing towers in EPL for world buffs, and then cancelling raid because we wiped.
I did not enjoy TBC "entry level" raids, even though we killed Maghteridon world 13 (or something). The author states that the system was good with the attunements, but he failed to mention the rediculous difficulty on the trash in for example SSC, on a 45 minute respawn timer. Frankly it made me want to stick a rusty fork in my eye, if i could come at all, we would only take like 3 melee every raid. Gruul FTL.
I did not enjoy doing Trial of the Crusader 4 times per lockout: both 10 and 25 man on normal and heroic. WTF?

The only thing i enjoyed was the "leetness" of my gear and kills. Accomplishing stuff others wouldn't, but the price was high, and i like that they lowered the threshold. the only thing i feel is regrettable is that the gear you have "outdates" way too fast. Just one patch later, your alt can be packing better stuff then your main had without ever stepping a foot in raid instance, and so people can kill stuff you killed without having to make a real effort. This complicates recruitment too.

The "optimal" raid experience for me was Sunwell Plateau i think. Apart from the gated content maybe, but the bosses were challenging, and we had cauldrons for resistance pots But then, rotating blood lust and drums in the melee group was maybe a bit unfair for the others

So yeah, pros and cons everywhere!!

I enjoyed stacking stamina, I do not enjoy stacking avoidance to reach CTC cap. Have to use a bloody macro to see if I'm capped. It's JUST TOO HARD!

In all seriousness though, the game is not what it used to be. If they were too find a way to keep casuals interested (through the upcoming raid finder hopefully?) and still put out challenging content for raiders (bai 6 easy bosses and 1 ridiculously tuned boss) I think things would turn around for the better.

Tuned you can still farm content 4+ times a week if you want!

There is no casual content currently, and hasn't been since wotlk. Only gear-farming content.

Vanilla & TBC was great for casual players, I played casual at times, and had chars in casual guilds.

There was a much stronger sense of progression and enjoyment compared to now. Instead of farming the same boring shit over and over you had an actual path to follow.

And getting a succesful instance group together took about 3 minutes, by the way.

Many casual guilds were successful in maintaining a fun and lasting experience, without requiring a hardcore guildleader.

Additionally, simple mechanics but smaller marginals for error(off-set by gear over a LONGER period of time, and over-time nerfs) are much more fun than rotations and complex (but easier) mechanics. Every raid between AQ and Ulduar should demonstrate this well.

Why do rotations(more spells) not make for more fun?
Hammer of justice was an incredibly fun spell at level 60 & 70. Now? Not really because I need to maintain my rotation!