Originally Posted by
Whitepaw
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.