Page 18 of 29 FirstFirst ...
8
16
17
18
19
20
28
... LastLast
  1. #341
    Deleted
    I've been playing WoW as a hunter since EU release (with a few 6-8 month breaks). I was in a top raiding guild back in TBC and we got a few server firsts (never any world firsts though).

    I know some of it is nostalgia but I've never quite retained the same level of satisfaction or enjoyed the class quite as much as in TBC. I miss dungeons where you had to CC (and as a hunter, the special challenge that brought). I miss needing to weave my shots between the auto-shots so as not to delay it thus losing DPS.

    The skill cap for a hunter used to be insanely high, far above any other class I've played which is most.

    I also miss the way some members of a raiding team would take a spec that meant they did slightly lower dps but boosted everyone else. I was our guild's SV hunter in TBC which meant that I debuffed the boss and boosted everyone else's physical dps. It meant that I'd pass on gear upgrades because for me, it was all about the agi (to boost my debuff further).

    Why has it been dumbed down? Honestly, it seems that every change that has been made has been for player convenience, some of them have been very welcome changes such as dual-spec. Others I'm not so keen on like insta-porting to the dungeon. I remember having to run past Undercity to get to Scarlet Monastery or getting into big PvP fights in the underwater cavern in underbog 'cause your healer healed someone who was PvP flagged. It was a distraction from the dungeon but it was fun... isn't that why we play games?

    These conveniences are always welcomed when they're implemented. Hunters not needing a quiver and to carry arrows or buff reagents or soul stones for warlocks, poisons for rogues, these felt like a burden at the time but honestly, they were also flavourful and helped immerse you in the world.

    The game is still fun but every time something is gained, it feels like something got lost too.

  2. #342
    The Lightbringer Seriss's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2010
    Location
    EU-Garrosh
    Posts
    3,000
    Quote Originally Posted by aere1985 View Post
    I remember having to run past Undercity to get to Scarlet Monastery or getting into big PvP fights in the underwater cavern in underbog 'cause your healer healed someone who was PvP flagged. It was a distraction from the dungeon but it was fun... isn't that why we play games?

    You ran there? I did that only for as long as it took me to figure out that I could just grab the Chillwind Camp flight point and then AFK on the gryphon. Waltzing through Western Plaguelands was a bit on the dangerous side (wah, skull-level bears!!!), but it was just way more convenient than to watch where you're running, weasel past some murlocs, run past UC to finally arrive where you actually wanted to be 30 minutes ago already.

    Can't say much about pvp stuff in front of dungeons, only that it didn't happen on my PvE server and that I found it extremely annoying during my stint on a PvP server because it kept me from having fun.

  3. #343
    Deleted
    I hate when someone makes a thread like this and all people can say is ''Lol have you even killed [last boss of the last raid released] in hc yet? Show us your armory or everything you just said is invalid'', that's completly missing the point, yes raids were made harder with much more elaborated strategies but everything else was made a hell of alot easier to the point that it's insulting, and you can even see all raid content with LFR, OP has valid points.

  4. #344
    What a lot of posters seem to forget is that the game has more to offer than just end-game. The difficulty level (and the time needed to complete things) between endgame raiding and anything else in the game is increasing with every expansion. And no, LFR is no endgame raiding. You can call it "convenience" but at lower levels the game offers no challenge at all anymore. In the end this will cause the gap between (heroic) raiding and casual play to grow even bigger than it already is, and what influence that will have on the game...

  5. #345
    Quote Originally Posted by swagster View Post
    Strangely enough every new expansion WoW is simpler, dumbed down, etc.
    Only the easy content is easy in WoW. And it actually always has been easy.

    What they did was remove a lot of "artificial difficulty". Talent trees are one such example: all you had to do in the past was to google for a random guide and copy whatever they write - no matter how many talents you had a choice from. It all came down to 1 or 2 best options. It even went so far that players knew exactly what you had specced for when you just wrote that you had "51/0/12" or something like that. There was no depth, and no difficulty. It's called illusion of choice, because you barely had any choice. If you think you had massive amounts of choice back then, you simply didn't know better and gimped yourself respectively your class by taking bad talents.

    Now, with the new talent system, you have slightly more choice. There's still often a best pick, but not always, and whenever you switch to a different talent then your gameplay feels a lot different. Which is great.

    Overall the new talent system made talent choices matter more, while also offering a little bit more choice.
    Also, with the new system you often see good players switching talents for different bosses. In the past, that was almost never necessary.

    On the topic of hard content:
    The hardcore content is still there and harder than ever. I see guilds who - in the past - easily did NHC clear and a couple of HC kills struggling hard with ToT, at best they have 1 or 2 hardmode bosses down. Out of 13! And many haven't even reached Lei Shen on NHC yet. The previous T14 content is no different - very few have downed Sha of Fear HC.

    Endgame WoW has never been harder. Unless all you do is LFR. But if LFR is all you want to do, then you are in no position to complain about difficulty, because you're not playing the difficult stuff. End of story.

    Also there's this bit:
    http://www.restokin.com/2013/04/the-...tion-overload/

    I'm sorry, but just because the easy content of WoW is easy doesn't mean that there exists no hard content. What you do out of all that content, is your choice, and there is no right answer on what you should do because it's a game and you should have fun. But if you don't do hard content and claim the game is easy, then you are simply making a fool out of yourself.
    Last edited by TaurenNinja; 2013-06-25 at 11:44 AM.

  6. #346
    Quote Originally Posted by paralleluniverse View Post
    No. WoW is not dumbed down.

    Proof: http://www.wowprogress.com/
    Fewer people making attempts to begin with isn't proof of difficulty, nor is raiding the entire scope of the game.

    Quote Originally Posted by owbu View Post
    Wow is being made more accessible. Which is good for every game, because you limit the amount of new players otherwise.
    Yet this game had more new players coming in when it was far less 'accommodating' than it is now. Good content is what attracts new players, not 'hey, we're farmville with a subscription'

    ---------- Post added 2013-06-25 at 07:51 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by TaurenNinja View Post
    I'm sorry, but just because the easy content of WoW is easy doesn't mean that there exists no hard content.
    I don't think anyone is asserting that. The issue is that the vast majority of content in this game IS, in fact, pants on head easy.

  7. #347
    Each quality of life improvement is usually a welcome change but they are all part of a bigger puzzle.

    If you remove more and more "annyoing" things, you wont recognize the whole thing anymore.
    Thats what some player mean when they miss sings like weapon skills or a trainers all over the world.

    Sure you can answer most of these things with "what is hard about training skill", "what is hard about googling talent specs", "what is hard traveling to an instance" ...
    Each step is not "hard" but those "artificial difficulty" is sometimes required to make a good game experience and also to favour a feeling of satisfaction when reaching your goal.
    With instant gratification most of these things are meaningless or useless.

    And i agree with the OP that most of the things (except high end raiding) has been dumbed down a lot. Be it leveling, leveling dungeons, dungeons in general, professions etc.
    "A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!"

    WoW leveling/heroic/LFR difficulty in one line of code:
    do {press (AnyKey)} until MobHealth=0;

  8. #348
    WoW is more complex than ever. The game has more abilities, more content, more competition and a greater range of difficulty than ever before.

    The people who often complain the most about WoW being 'dumbed down' are the people who were able to access ressources like thottbot, elitist jerks forum etc. The knowledge of and ability to use those third-party ressources were often what separated the player with knowledge of the game from the ones without that knowledge. The latter were called 'Newbies".

    So, you would go to the EJ forums to read up on your class and to thottbot for help with quests, items etc. Now most of this knowledge is either in the game client or easily deductible from reading tooltips on abilities and talents.

    At the same time, the number of abilities available for each spec has grown a lot - and we have more classes and races than ever before. There are 34 specs, all of which are able to access all the talents for their class. On top of that, we have 11 races with different racial abilities. Back in Vanilla, you could have maybe 5-6 different ways to spec your druid - now, you have 4 different specwith 6 talents, which are independent of the choice of spec.

    So lets say you meet a druid at lvl 15. He can be 1 of 4 different specs, and have chosen 1 of the 3 talents at the first talent tier. That's 12 different combinations already. At lvl 30, you have 36 different combinations (and I'm not even calculating the glyphs here!). In a BG at lvl 30, you will have 10 classes with 27 different combinations and 1 class with 36 combinations. That's over 300 different combinations - at lvl 30. Back in Vanilla, you would have had 8 classes, each with access to 3 different specs. Now, each of these classes would have chosen their specs by placing their 21 talent points somewhere in their talent trees - and hey! that seems like a lot of choice and complexity, right? Wrong, because the system was balanced, even back then. Also, you had to choose a lot of passive talent points to make your baseline abilities useful. So, for a druid at lvl 30, there were 3 different specs, with a few outliers. Lets say 10 different combinations at lvl 30. Today, we have at least 3 times as many combinations - and that's just at lvl 30.

    Today, when you queue a BG at lvl 90, you can choose between 13 different BGs. Your team mates can be any of the thousands of combinations available - and so can the opposing team. On top of that, you have added layers of complexity from glyphs and even one of the professions (engineering). The same pattern for PvE. The boss fights are a lot more complex than back in Vanilla - and the disabling of certain mod functions available back in Vanilla (fx Decursive) adds more compexity as well.

    Add to the above the fact that all classes have more abilities available than ever before. Blizzard even removed a lot of never-used abilities in MoP, so now you actually have abilities that you use - and so you need to place them on your bars and find keybindings for them! I am way past 40 keybindings to play my Feral druid. Blizzard has also made actual tanking, damaging and healing rotations - and these typically have single-target or AoE variations. In Vanilla, you had 1 ability to do AoE - if you had one (a lot of melee specs didn't). Now, you typically use 2 different abilities, or spread dots or do some other, rather complex rotation to maximise AoE. It's the same with single-target - there is a rotation, loads of factors that can change your rotation and cooldowns/trinkets that you can weave in as well.

    If anything, WoW has grown in complexity and variation. Back in Vanilla, you could do some small-scale PvE (5 man dungeon runs), large-scale PvE (raids), PvP or you could grind mats. Now, there are so many options that I hesitate to even start mentioning them - I will forget some of them, because I probably never really tried them.

    I do miss a few things:
    - Moving around in the world should be more dangerous (yes, that includes leveling). There should be danger when trying to kill mobs to complete quests. Now, its way too easy (until you reach lvl 85 - but even then its still fairly easy).
    - Heroic instances are way too easy. I know, there are challenge modes - but it still breaks immersion when the HEROIC instances are so easy as they are. I enjoyed Cataclysm/TBC Heroics as well as BRD (doing BRD with all quests and attunement for MC could take a whole Sunday in Vanilla).
    - I would like for attunements to return. They wouldn't have to be as difficult as TBC attunements for entering tier 5 and 6 instances, but forcing players to be social in an MMORPG should be ok and expected. I really enjoyed the Onyxia quest chain (Alliance) and the attunement for UBRS back in Vanilla. Those quests and fights were quite epic and memorable. There are a few of these today, but most of the more epic fights can be solo'd, with some kind of helping mechanic.

  9. #349
    I agree with everything OP said. Check my sig for my armory. (yes im stuck in normal modes)

  10. #350
    Yet this game had more new players coming in when it was far less 'accommodating' than it is now. Good content is what attracts new players, not 'hey, we're farmville with a subscription'
    You are comparing a new game without a lot of competitors with an old game, that has a giant free to play market to compete with.
    We also have more high quality content than any expansion before. There is just other content for other playertypes too. Which seems to make players, whove been here a while upset. But I never have seen a new player complain about its mere existence.

    I think the biggest problem WoW has right now, is that its really hard to get into the "good" content of the game. You can instantly get acess to lfd/lfr.
    And then there are a few guilds per server doing normals and heroics, with very little chances to get into, because all you know about real raiding is, that its the place where the shouty people who destroy you in the damage meters come from.
    So with virtual servers (more players you can reach) and flexraid, I really hope that the pugscene will be revived. I think WoW needs one to stay (get) a healthy game with somewhat stable playernumbers.
    Last edited by owbu; 2013-06-25 at 01:07 PM.
    "And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five?
    A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."

  11. #351
    Quote Originally Posted by mickybrighteyes View Post
    I find it hilarious that whenever a topic like this pops up someone or multiple people will bring up <insert boss kill>.
    why would you find it funny?
    the challenge in wow in in high end pve (or I guess high end pvp if that's your thing)

    wanting to see if the people whining about there being no challenge have actually beaten the most challenging content that is freely available to them at no additional cost is a completely valid request

  12. #352
    OP:
    - God I hate this game, it's not challenging me at all!
    - Well, what difficulty are you playing on?
    - ...Beginner.
    Last edited by Chaosturn; 2013-06-25 at 03:08 PM.

  13. #353
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by mvallas View Post
    Let me ask you one question:

    Did you, or did you not, get all gold medals in the challenge modes and have beaten every heroic raid?

    I'm suspecting that you did not. If you did not - then you do not want challenge or have to think - as it's in the game, but you're not doing it for some reason. Why is that?
    People have answered this question many times before but for some reason you refuse to listen.

    It's impossible to do something when no one else wants to do it.

  14. #354
    The Unstoppable Force Resentful's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Dota 2 24/7 / Dark Souls II
    Posts
    21,566
    Quote Originally Posted by Garian View Post
    People have answered this question many times before but for some reason you refuse to listen.

    It's impossible to do something when no one else wants to do it.
    Then you revert to an alternative and do something else challenging aka H mode heroic wtfever.

  15. #355
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Apathy - View Post
    Then you revert to an alternative and do something else challenging aka H mode heroic wtfever.
    No we quit the game and find something better to do.

  16. #356
    The Unstoppable Force Resentful's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Dota 2 24/7 / Dark Souls II
    Posts
    21,566
    Quote Originally Posted by Garian View Post
    No we quit the game and find something better to do.
    Then why complain shit is easy in the first place when you can't do the hard shit n.n aka OP

  17. #357
    Deleted
    The difficulty at the top of the game (heroic modes etc.) has been high for some time and is reasonably consistent now.

    LFR is meant to be "dumbed down" and is there so everyone gets to experience the lore & content equally (which is great 'cause we all pay for it equally).

    The dumbing down has happened in 5-mans mostly. There's no more requirement to CC mobs or be careful of patrols. There's no complex dungeon layouts like with BRD. Of course there's also almost no reason to do 5-mans at all anymore which is a shame considering how much design time will have gone into them. I always felt that it was in 5-mans that player skill was most evident. It's a place where you can't hide behind 16 other DPS players or be dragged along by 5 other healers.

    I realise that challenge modes were meant to become this but with no material reward they were never going to take off.

    In the next expansion I'd like to see 5-mans that rival/surpass raids for difficulty. They could have their own progression like with the Icecrown dungeons back in WotLK.

  18. #358
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Apathy - View Post
    Then why complain shit is easy in the first place when you can't do the hard shit n.n
    I'm not complaining that things are easy. I am complaining that welfare robs people of an incentive to actually raid and they miss out on what made this game great in the first place.

  19. #359
    The Unstoppable Force Resentful's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Dota 2 24/7 / Dark Souls II
    Posts
    21,566
    Quote Originally Posted by Garian View Post
    I'm not complaining that things are easy. I am complaining that welfare robs people of an incentive to actually raid and they miss out on what made this game great in the first place.
    I meant the OP silly haha the welfare shit started in BC is the ironic part which was well known to be the Golden age of raiding or some shit.

  20. #360
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Apathy - View Post
    I meant the OP silly haha the welfare shit started in BC is the ironic part which was well known to be the Golden age of raiding or some shit.
    It wasn't as bad as this. At least in TBC players had to group up and make friends to get their welfare gear.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •