Originally Posted by
Szarala
Well, I think I'm done.
After giving it my most serious series of attempts in gear I don't think will be substantially upgraded this cycle, I just don't see myself doing this. I cannot properly express the severe disappointment this entire questline has been for me. I felt there was way too much hand-holding (the hot-cold) in finding the artifacts, huge chunks of the story felt nakedly missing (I know the reason for that), the "moral choice" (or lack thereof) in the Black Temple felt like an insult to my character (again, I know what happened there, development-wise too) and the final encounter feels very lazily designed in terms of trying to simulate "challenge". The only bright spots to me were that the lore itself.. at least what we got of it, was well written, and I did think the mechanics of progressing through the Black Temple itself were clever and well done... which just adds to my frustration at how the final fight turned out. Also adding to it.. perhaps even more so than the encounter itself is how many people are cheering the design (maybe I just have a wildly different concept of "fun" than so many others, I dunno).
To me, challenges that you can't quite overcome are supposed to give you a "ah well, we'll get 'em next time" attitude; I feel that way about most encounters in progression raiding and that's great. With this one, first blush impression (at 490ish) was "wow.. this isn't fun AT ALL. Well, maybe it'll go smoother with better gear" (an aside, all the people that post along the lines of "I did this in a mix of 470s and pvp gear.. if you can't you must be the suckiest suck who ever sucked" are very, very unhelpful). Trying another round of attempts at 510ish was basically "ok, yeah.. my impression of this fight hasn't changed at all.. I guess I'll just try to outgear it so I can get it overwith", and now at 525 it's "nope.. this ain't happenin".
I've often referred to the encounter as "juggling chainsaws" because that's exactly what it feels like, and what I certainly do not enjoy. Far too much going on at once and too quickly and any lapse whatsoever and your hand gets cut off. I'm sorry, that is just simply in no way fun for me.
I've mained a warlock since launch and have been Aff and nothing else ever since they removed the cast time from Siphon Life (when dual specs were introduced, that allowed me to have an Aff pve spec, and an Aff pvp spec; only in MoP did I change my offspec to demo, explicitly for tanking). This fight doesn't "make me a better warlock" (as so many are fond of saying in regards to this), it makes me want to -quit- my warlock (and by extension, WoW itself), since apparently something else entirely is expected of how I'm supposed to play the class I love.
This post is probably coming across as whiny.. honestly, I don't care. These are my feelings, and I'm certain there has to be others out there, regardless of how few they may be, that feel the same, and if thinking that those few are silently nodding in agreement, then that makes me feel just a tiny bit better to get this off my chest.
I'm not even mad (well, enraged) this time like I was after my previous rounds of attempts; just.. profoundly disappointed and resigned. I posted a poll weeks ago (before the ridiculous initial 5.4 notes drew mine and everyone else's attention) that asked how many people use addons (both in general and the encounter specifically) in an attempt to correlate their use to those that found the encounter "fun". The reason being that I have a strong suspicion that encounter was designed not only with addons and macros in mind, but likely expected. My suspicion could be wrong, but that's what it certainly feels like. If it IS true however, that is deeply flawed design. My feelings about addons in general is a whole other rant that doesn't belong here, but I brought it up to perhaps better explain my frustration.