WoW not feeling like WoW?

[Deleted]

What about the 12 second bubble that still allowed you to deal 100 % of your damage, with only priest able to remove it? =)

Or being able to give Blessing of Protection, Bubble and Lay on Hands because of no debuff?

[Ferocity]

You completely dodged the question. I'm talking about how imbalanced leveling was in vanilla in response to your claim that leveling balance got worse in late TBC and now you're talking about how leveling was an adventure.

I can't get what kind of imbalance you mean. You level'd as resto? A lot of abilities were cross-specs, including damage ones. Granted mobs weren't dying as fast as if other spec was nuking them, but not much changed since then (including MoP, telling you as leveling as Holy paladin in TBC and being prot later in TBC, leveling as prot in MoP and having to do dailies at 90 was the horribly more imbalanced, if you are about it).

I give you an example of a poorly designed vanilla class with bad mechanics and you tell me it was my problem for not playing a different class in vanilla. Ok, then...
...
The game wasn't broken, but entire specs were broken. And when you have a class with one completely broken spec and another spec that is pretty messed up like Druids, then the class itself is partly broken.

You think having a partly broken class is acceptable as long as classes have uniqueness. I strongly disagree.

It is sad that only spell you had on your action bars was Healing Touch. My memories are fine, and I remember how resto druids were liked for their Innervate (true Innervate, not that lol-ability which is in game atm). Not to say about other spells and abilities, but it would be going off-topic. Specs weren't broken, they were just more niche. You could make farm spec (demo warlocks) or PvP spec, specific 5-men tanking spec (enhance shammies, prot paladins preTBC) or raid spec. Now it's all about raiding specs. Current developers wanted to make all specs "raid-viable", which is another weird change which led to homogenization.

Oh and by "raid-viable" I mean "raid-viable" for their SWP-like raid model. As preSWP the only boss who had less or more tight enrage timer was Patchwerk (60), but that check was mostly to check if your raid dps is afking or not. Everything else preSWP were tanks/healers/HP/resist etc. gearchecks. You could basically bring any specs for as long as there would be some kind of core (tanks, healers) and people were meeting gearchecks. Of course you could bring everyone strictly in raid spec thus making raids even more so fluid. Mistake of GC and Co was starting to design raids explicitly around raid specs (by putting tight enrage timers here and there, demanding heavy and highly inconsistent class-stacking - lol Nefarian 10 hc, Spine 10hc pre-nerfs), and then trying to make each spec raid viable.

Yet again I am speaking mostly about TBC, as it is where game was being continued built upon. Only imbalance or broken aspect was connected with melee dps, as they were very problematic in any kind of dungeon environment, and not much changed since then.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Lol are we playing the same game here?? Pokemon, Farmville, Kung-fu pandas, LFR... It's exactly how Demithio described it. It doesn't take a genious to see what customer group they are catering the game to now.

Pet battles and Tillers are something people been asking for a long time: something to do when not raiding or doing arenas. People always bitch and complain when they say they have nothing to do. Fyi, Pandaren came before Kung-Fu Panda, but it doesn't take a genius to know that.

[Pancaspe]

I wasn't expecting Rainbows and flowers but damn. I'd rather level through a Zone looking like Blasted Lands, Icecrown or even Searing Gorge/Burning Steppes.

And then you would be the first to post "Lazy Blizzard, this looks just like Blasted Lands".

[Elegiac]

Fact of the Day: Most of the people that want Vanilla back never played in it.

It's fashionable to want Vanilla/BC back, but the fact of the matter is that the reason the game is so successful is because it moved -away- from that model and started catering to broader swathes of the player base. Challenge still exists if you desire it, but people seem to be complaining because there are too many options.

I call it Gladys Kravitz Syndrome; people care too much about what others do with their $15 a month.

[Pancaspe]

Lol are we playing the same game here?? Pokemon, Farmville, Kung-fu pandas, LFR... It's exactly how Demithio described it. It doesn't take a genious to see what customer group they are catering the game to now.

It doesn't take a genious? What pray tell is a genious? Misspelling that word is so Ironic.

[Deleted]

Personally MoP feels a lot more magical and mystical than Cataclysm did...

[Melkon]

A very nice post from pella88, but there are a couple of things I disagree with.

WoW doesn't have as much players as it had then

Compared to then, I believe the player population has doubled, and if not it's close. It is just that there are a lot more servers, so players are a bit scattered. I play in a realm (EU-Bronze Dragonflight) where every afternoon there are about 400 players online (Horde side, data from Census+ addon that I use), out of which less than half are lvl 90. This means that in the case of a 40man raid, there are enough people for 5 raids at best. And of course, not all of these players are PvEers. Many of them just PvP. I think that 10/25 man modes gave more players the chance to raid.

10x lvl85 DKs soloing full DS raid, that's plain stupid... Raids are made for combination of class to do it, not for a single class to do it...

Long before TBC was released (AQ40 or Naxx period, can't remember) a group of 40 priests killed Onyxia. If a clothie (well, with Shadowform its like a mail armor, but still) with 3000 hp could tank onyxia, I find no reason why 10 DKs cannot clear DS.

Other than that, pretty much you wrote what I was thinking about each expansion.

My rating
Vanilla: 9.5/10
TBC: 8/10
WotLK: 9/10
Cata: 8/10
MoP (So far): 8.5/10

[Zylph]

But i think each class should have a counter at least. Like Melee counter healers, healers counter ranged, range counter melee or something.

Do you have any idea about how unbalanced that sounds?

[Seref]

I played Vanilla, and I liked it. But people are overly biased towards Vanilla imo.

Yeah 12 hour AV's were fun. Yeah grinding rep for a single faction non-stop for a month just to get Exalted was fun, maybe? Non-stop PvP'ing until your brain started oozing out of your ears just to become Grand Marshall... Raiding back then WAS challenging, but it was such a tedious thing. Hours of progression attempts, multiple days a week, never an item drop in sight...

And nothing to show for it. (That's why I love Achievements so much. E-Peen/BraggingRights)

My most memorable moment in Vanilla, was finally downing Twin Emps after weeks of attempts. We were the 2nd Guild on my Realm to down it, first one on Alliance side. Amazing sense of accomplishment.

But that aside, I'm not biased towards Vanilla. If I had to rank the xpacs like the previous poster:
Vanilla: 6.5/10
TBC: 3/10
WotLK: 8/10
Cata: 9/10
MoP: 8.5/10

[Bitehattori]

Do you have any idea about how unbalanced that sounds?

Probably but my thought was more or less some classes should counter other classes, Rogues taking mages and priests, Warriors can take out rogues and paladins, Hunters take out warlocks and death knights, or something like that.

[Rarespawn2012]

DBGT was not same as DBZ, akira toriyama didn't work on it. People disliked dbgt because of some of the awful filler episodes. Personally I like GT but not nearly as much as DBZ and it is namely the artwork. goku shouldn't have square eye sockets.

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 01:02 PM ----------

I started this game late vanil;la, right after the South Park episode featuring WoW came out. I didn't like it, way too much micromanaging. I enjoyed vanilla plus tbc and even was okay with the nerfing come WOTLK but it does seem to be getting a bit watered down at this point. I play namely because I love the universe, story and characters in it.

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 01:16 PM ----------

Also, I have a life and find the lack of need to spend six months farming a raid to finish it a bit more tolerable. I do miss some of the difficulty, especially in the TBC dungeons but I am tired of said content and do appreciate Blizz's approach of getting me to the end AFAP.

[Deleted]

BWahahaah that has got to be the most ignorant post I've seen yet. Did you even pay attention while leveling or did you not even play?

This coming from someone who rated MoP the best expansion ever even before its release. I think your opinion therefore dosent count for much.

[SamR]

I can't get what kind of imbalance you mean. You level'd as resto? A lot of abilities were cross-specs, including damage ones. Granted mobs weren't dying as fast as if other spec was nuking them, but not much changed since then (including MoP, telling you as leveling as Holy paladin in TBC and being prot later in TBC, leveling as prot in MoP and having to do dailies at 90 was the horribly more imbalanced, if you are about it).

You're the one who brought up that leveling imbalance worsened after GC came aboard started changing classes. I'm not sure what you mean by leveling balance if you weren't referring to the vast gaps between the speed and effectiveness of leveling a Resto Druid vs. a Rogue or Hunter.

You said that WoW classes are balanced around high end raids and leveling and PvP balance got worse. I'm just asking for some examples of how leveling imbalance got worse. I've already provided several examples of how leveling balance was horrible in vanilla and is much better today. Which is the exact opposite of what you were arguing.

BTW, leveling as Resto in Feral gear was better than leveling as Feral in Feral gear because the dmg difference was pretty small and Innervate decreased downtime significantly.

It is sad that only spell you had on your action bars was Healing Touch. My memories are fine, and I remember how resto druids were liked for their Innervate (true Innervate, not that lol-ability which is in game atm). Not to say about other spells and abilities, but it would be going off-topic.

How is talking about the difference between vanilla Resto Druids and Resto Druids today going off topic in a thread which specifically compares WoW today to WoW past?

Yes, Druids were brought to raids to innervate the good healers(Priests). I already mentioned that earlier. We were also brought to buff mark. And to spam click decursive on certain fights.

But the everyday mechanics of the spec itself were horrible. Healing consisted of throwing around a few Rejuvs(hoping they didn't overwrite or get overwritten by others) and spamming rank 4 HT. That was how Resto Druids healed.

Some people would cry that healers got homogenized when Resto Druids got an AoE spell(just like people cried when Warrior tanks got good AoE tanking tools and made Pallies less unique), but I would much rather play a fun interesting class with good tools than a class with a gimpy toolset which is kept gimpy so that classes can be unique.

Specs weren't broken, they were just more niche.

Can you tell me what niche Survival Hunters were for? What about Balance Druids?

[Deleted]

Pet battles and Tillers are something people been asking for a long time: something to do when not raiding or doing arenas. People always bitch and complain when they say they have nothing to do. Fyi, Pandaren came before Kung-Fu Panda, but it doesn't take a genius to know that.

Good then you can post me some old links about players wanting pet battles etc. because I haven´t seen anyone in my 7 years of WoW play saying that!

Ty!

[Wildtree]

A very nice post from pella88, but there are a couple of things I disagree with.


Compared to then, I believe the player population has doubled, and if not it's close. It is just that there are a lot more servers,

Roughly....
Vanilla 7 mio subs
TBC 12 Mio subs
WotLK 11 Mio subs
Cata 10 mio subs.
MoP atm last number was 10 mio.

One can now say all kinds of things why there's a 2 mio drainage since TBC....
Facts are. 2 mio are lost, and whoever claims they know why is simply talking out of their ass, because only Blizzard can know, and I doubt that even they know.

my rating..

Vanilla 7/10 no, I did not forget the bug-fest and the server downtimes from back then. From technical viewpoint the worst period of the game. Everything else I loved. hell even the walking til lvl 40... Prevented the game from getting too many spoiled douchebags, like we got now..
TBC 9/10 I wish they never had listened to whomever complained. Best 3 way system they had so far. Non-Raiders, Raiders, PVP. one could go either path and have fulfilling fun from start to end.
WotLK 8.5/10 I did like the change of pace.. Did not like the nerfs to Rep etc.. found that the first step in dumbing down everything. And as we see today, people bitching for how they have to put a bit of work into getting Rep..
Cata 6/10 that was just all over the place, too hard, too easy, too cluttered and in the end a way too long time for the last major patch.
Mop 8/10 I cannot rate it any higher (or lower) just yet, given how fresh it is. But it is definitely aiming into the right direction so far.

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 04:13 PM ----------

Good then you can post me some old links about players wanting pet battles etc. because I haven´t seen anyone in my 7 years of WoW play saying that!

Ty!

You are right. People did not ask about pet battles. People did tho ask here and there about some love for their companion pets. Like giving them personal names and such. Blizz went way further and brought pet battles.

[Kelimbror]

disregarding 11 pages of whatever is happening here:

This feels more like WoW than Cata did, possibly more like WoW than it ever has. Most of the elitist measure no longer exist, which I fundamentally understand and am ok with due to my life status compared to TBC.

From a design standpoint, it feels more fully realized than pretty much everything since vanilla. It's not my favorite, but I can respect the vibe.

[Frazzle.d]

Remember when greater paladin buffs required a reagent and only affected one class group at a time? Damn that was good. I sure miss that. That was a good feature.

Haha.

Yup, changes to the game to make it more fun and get rid of pointless or things that just weren't fun are all steps in the right direction, however there are still flaws in every expansion. Some of them seem fairly deliberate at times or just half arsed design. If you had told me when I was 18 / 19 and first dabbled around with MMOs and then WoW, that I would be doing Pokecraft battles and there would be four continents to explore but only after Illidan, Lich King and Deathwing had been killed and that the main race would be the Pandaren I would have just blinked at you and wondered how fucking high you were while I was busy trying to spam /2 and /1 to get an invite to fucking Scholo or Strat or SOMETHING other than joining battlegrounds while bored in the city at the battlemasters.

Now I'm not 18/19, I live on my own, I was logged on earlier, looking for shit to do but apparently I need to go find dailies and shit to actually do anything meaningful or fun in the game but getting any currency other than gold is so damningly slow and painful that I logged out after a couple of hours and had to do other things and play other games. Every time I log in I feel spaced out, like the game is leaving anyone who doesn't play it for at least several hours a day behind.

This is my problem with it, personally. It is not a case of pve or pvp, or lore or it's a case of the game deciding HAHA FUCK YOU, you need to play me every day like vanilla to be anything resembling useful in a raid or do stuff with friends!

That is not progress, my friends.

TLR - the game has went full circle. To actually do things that you would normally otherwise expect to do at end game or after all the quests have been done, you need to do grindfests. For practically everything. Like vanilla. Grind mats for resistance gear. Grind mats for mounts. Or grind dailies. Same difference. You feel me?

[Deleted]

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 04:13 PM ----------

You are right. People did not ask about pet battles. People did tho ask here and there about some love for their companion pets. Like giving them personal names and such. Blizz went way further and brought pet battles.

Good then it wasn´t just me then =)

[Deleted]

As for Resto druid discussion:

The problem with multirole classes like Druid, is that they shouldn't be able to be best at all roles... For example... Locks/hunters/rogues/mages should be best dps, as that's their main role... Warriors should be best tank, and second best melee... Shamans should share second best melee spot with warriors, and share second best heal and range dps... Priests should share second best range dps with shamans, and be best healers (mainly cause two of their specs is healing role)... Paladins and druids shouldn't be best in any of their roles, as they can do any role (dps, tank or heal)... They should share third best melee dps, heal and tank, while druid should be third best range dps...

Overall, druid can do any thing, but if choosing between druid, and lets say warrior for tanking position on a hard fight, you should always choose warrior... That's how it's suppose to be... But now, we can see druids healing better then priests, paladins dpsing better then rogues and similar... I don't say that's always the case, but the point is that should never be the case... They should make fights where Paladin tank is better than warrior, but not make paladin tank be better then warrior overall...

Every class should have their role...

As for DK/Priest soloing content:

That's the point of my post... No single class should be able to solo content (I dont mean 1xDK going raid, i mean raid composed of only one class)... As I said above, every class has it's role, and should be dealt with accordingly... I really didn't know about priest solo Ony, and I'm sorry about that... Then I admit vanilla had some flaws too...

As for bugs/technical problems and similar in Vanilla:

You can't expect same technical solutions 7 years ago and now... That is, back then, WoW was just introduced, servers were flooded, and we could see free migrations every week... That's because they didn't have technical possibilities like they have today... Back then, even cross realm raids/backgrounds and similar were just a dream, cause they didn't have server computers to back up such process.. Ok, it had bugs, but don't say that expansions don't have bugs also... Thing is, their beta testing process is more developed now, as they have to satisfy players that already play it... Back then, it just started, and they were just looking for a feedback... Now, they have feedback (WE WANT TO PLAY), and they HAVE TO provide best service...

As for Pokemon/Kung Fu panda/Farmville:

I already said what I think about Farmville... Nice idea, that is, mostly for cooking process (scallions and similar), but don't say it's a filler... You go there, plant 4-16 plants, which takes like 10mins, and go back in 12 or 24h hours (not sure if that has changed), and ripe what you planted, which takes 10 more mins and then plant again... So that fills only 20mins of your time...

Pokemons... For me one of the most interesting parts that came in game, but maybe a bit poor execution... I loved Pokemon games, and I've won generations that were on GBA (don't like DS that much)... This is a great filler, but don't think everyone is excited as I am about it... Problem with Pokemon, is that having it in WoW is a bit odd, cause those are two different games, and combining them is a bit...hmm...well, odd... I've leveled only one pet to level 10 on Beta, so I can't give any much feedback, but overall, it's somewhere in the middle...

Kung Fu panda... First: PANDAREN WERE IN THE GAME FROM BEFORE... So you can't say Kung Fu Panda is the main reason they implemented it... Also, you can't say that, cause Kung Fu Panda isn't that popular, so they gave whole expansion in WoW about it... What about Star Wars?? I'm positive that's even more popular than Kung Fu Panda?? Or why didn't they put Spiderman class, or I don't know... They did, however, use Asian culture to provide background for Pandas, which is marketing trick to get more subscriptions (mostly from Asia), which I dislike (not because it's a marketing trick, cause I finished economy, and I know what they are doing, but mostly cause Pandaren don't have anything to do with Asia)... Don't think that Chen was that much Asian they made him to be...

They could have made Naga, Murloc, Furbolg, Ethereal, or something else... For example, I would much like to play with Murloc or Ethereal... They could have used Ethereal to bring players to Outland lore again, and similar... But that's their decision (even if they say that they listen to players)...


Everything now has been simplified to get to younger players... You don't have to run to dungeons, you have LFD... You don't have to run to raids, you have LFR (i don't count normal and hc versions)... You don't have to go to battlemasters, you can just use BG tab... You don't have 31-51 talents per tree, you have only 21 talents total... You don't have to use your brain to figure rotations for best performance, there is tab in your spellbook which will tell you what to do... You dont' have mana per 5 sec reg or similar secondary attributes, they are merged with primary attributes... And similar... For me, this kills the point of the game... And is contradictory to what they are saying: we are putting Pokemon/Farmville as a filler... Well, you had your fillers: running, exploring, flying and similar, but you removed it...