Originally Posted by
Relnor
There is no such thing as being a unique snowflake in an MMO, at least not in WoW. And it NEVER was this way.
You did NOT have the opportunity to significantly differentiate your characters from others of your class. Going as far as saying you'd be "unique on your realm" is downright hilarious, really. You had cookie cutter builds and everyone would spec into those, depending on what you played you had a few points you could've put in some damage reduction or in a PvP talent if you wanted, and THAT WAS IT. Anything else was sub-optimal, there wasn't anything "creative" to do with the talent tree, you could either spec correctly, or you could spec wrong and be shit. There was no such thing as "out of the box".
If anything, you have more choice with the talents now, a lot of classes have more than 1 viable choice per tier, sometimes it depends on what you're fighting. Guess what, this means you put MORE thought into your talent choices than you did with the old, antiquated system.
Epics are simple a colour code. It literally doesn't mean anything whatsoever, get over the colours, please.
The game is harder than it was in Vanilla. End. Of. Story. If you think it's not, you just don't remember or you were really young and everything seems harder then. SO many specs in Vanilla would have 1-2 button rotations. Warlocks would Shadow Bolt spam, Retri Paladins (if anyone even took them to raids...) would just wait on Seal of Command to proc while AAing. Hunters could bind their entire rotation to the mouse wheel and just scroll to win. The only thing harder about raiding back then were the logistics involved in getting 40 people together, if you were not a GM or an officer, the game back then was the easiest it's ever been.
Artifact weapons are great. You have post max level progression for your character in a way other than pure gear, there are plenty of skins for you to choose from, and at the end of the day, when you're actually playing the game you're not staring at your character anyway.
Finally, people need to stop conflating "This takes really long and is tedious" with "This is really difficult". Something that takes very long is not necessarily difficult. You know what is difficult ? BRH+6 is difficult. NL+6 or more has Pelters 3 shotting DPS, etc. There you have it folks, difficult, progression oriented 5 man content, where you have to play at your best, use all of your stuns and interrupts and abilities, and not fuck around making mistakes else you miss the timer.
On the other hand, you had Vanilla where BRD was "hard" because it took 2 fucking hours to do and you'd have to replace leavers, meanwhile you were spamming your 2-3 abilities on like no more than 4 mobs at a time who mostly just auto attacked your tank and cast a spell like once in ages, zzzz.
/rant