Analysis From WOTLK to WOD

[Deleted]

I made this post on the WoW official EU forums. I put a fair bit of time into it so felt I would post it here too.

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First of all this is going to be a very long post. I make no apologies for it and there won't be a TLDR. If you don't want or are incapable of reading it all, then it's best you don't comment.

I have seen this game had it's soul ripped apart ever since it's prime of WOTLK and I've realised it's now actually that bad that I am only logging in to socialise and not actually play the game. There are a lot of reasons for this which have all added up, and I'm going to address them all individually below.

Patch 3.3.5 was in my opinion, the best this game has ever been and also the statistics back that up, as there were 12 million players playing it and that was at the very end of the expansion. So, why is it that even at the very end of the expansion, the sub numbers were still increasing and people couldn't get enough of it?
This is primarily based around a PvP/arena perspective but not entirely.

FAST PACED GAMEPLAY - Faster paced gameplay is a lot more fun to not just play but also watch. My idea of fast paced gameplay means sustained damage is high, and burst is a little bit higher. It also means there shouldn't be loads of CD's and damage multipliers in the game. Same for healing. It means mistakes can be punished efficiently, positioning is vitally important and it means and feels every GCD is crucial which is how it should be.

Here's what Vanguards said the other day on his facebook regarding the pace of gameplay:

"The problem with slower pacing imo is that it makes it even harder to balance. Especially with how high healing has been in WoD. Comps in WoD victory is predetermined in the starting room more than ever, mistakes are hardly punished. Slower game pacing + high healing allows teams to recover easily, tunneling strong comps only to a few classes. - Also the final thing is, it's boring . 10-15 minutes matches vs RMD / RLD was the general occurrence. Not saying jungle insta kill on RShams is fun in any way, but that can be looked at individually. Slow pacing comps had no end, even if you nerfed RDruids to oblivion Turbo was also dampening, and the list keeps going. tl;dr (sorry for wall of text) Stronger comp wins, game is too slow to punish mistakes especially with high healing."

LITTLE HOMOGENISATION - Everyone now has a stun, a freedom, several abilities have different names but are essentially the same or very similar abilities. Every melee has a kick, every healer can dispel magic, there's a limited number of buffs in the game that are just spread out between 34 specs, nothing unique anymore - no one can deny how homogenised all the classes and specs have become. I loved having unique abilities for each class/spec, and unique buffs etc. It makes the game feel very fresh and in my opinion also helps with balance. If one spec is the same as another spec, but one has a little bit more damage, then the other class is completely redundant as it doesn't bring anything unique to the table.

LONGER TO LEVEL - I know you might be thinking, what has leveling got to do with PvP? Well it is actually highly relevant and I'll tell you why. The fact that you can level way more easily now than what you used to be able to, means that it's way more common for people to have loads of characters at max level. Why is this bad?

Well first of all, it means people will suffer from burnout way quicker. There are already people with every class at level 100, and all of them well geared. The expansion has been out for 4 months! Blizzard are basically cannibalising themselves by allowing people to go through their content 10x quicker than it takes to create it. There is little mystery left in the game once you've got and played every single class at top level and tried every ability the game has to offer.

It also means that it's harder than ever to get anywhere in PvP. Some of the top players who's main is a certain class, can end up with 10 different chars of the same class. If Hydra say, hypothetically has x10 level 100 priests, he will take up 10 rank 1 spots on the ladder alone. They do this so they then play different comps with different players, perhaps also have different races and be on different servers. This also exascerbates the problem of boosting. The more alts available the easier it is to offer boosting services.

If it's longer to level it also severely limits FOTM re rolling. Have you noticed as soon as certain classes/specs are OP from patch to patch, it's all you ever seem to fight?

When people put more time into their character, they take more pride in it and are less likely to discard it for the newest FOTM.

BOTS - I honestly don't remember the bots issue being anywhere near as bad as it is now. The bots issue ties in to the LONGER TO LEVEL problem, as people can just be in bed sleeping whilst the bot does all the leveling. It also pisses off people to no end, when you have bots in greens running round bg's adding very little to their factions cause. The other side of the bot issue, is when people use their capabilities whilst playing you have people insta interrupting etc. Blizzard really needs to address this issue ASAP.

LONGER TO GEAR - Similar thought process with LONGER TO LEVEL. This is an MMO is it not? Why are blizzard shoving gear down people's throats with almost very little work needed?

Simply put, lets say I don't have a mage. I can boost it to 90, bot for 24 hours, I'll be level 100.
Bot for another day, I'll have full honor gear. Spam arenas the next day with the catch up cap, and I'll be 3/4 full conquest geared. Thats literally 3 days, and I have a level 100 mage almost fully geared with the best gear available, created from nothing. This screams of burnout.

Some people are just interested in arena only and don't care about anything else around it. That's fine, but this is an MMO first and foremost which should be respected and it should be a long time investment to have a character max level and fully geared.

ABILITIES MADE SENSE IN COST AND RISK/REWARD - Can someone tell me why the likes of frostbolt, lightning bolt, shadowbolt etc do abysmal damage considering they all have relatively high cast times and opens you up to lockout on your main spell school? This makes no sense in a PvP environment. However, its not just limited to casted spells. How come festering strike costs 2 runes and does 12k damage on 350k healthpools?

Soulfire does 10k crits and is supposed to be an enhanced nuke as you require procs to cast it efficiently! Corruption does 2k - 4k depending on crits/multistrikes, which means if someone had 350k HP, it would take 2 minutes to kill him without any healing, defensives, damage reductions whatsoever. Where as in the meantime, swifty dark soul demon bolts can hit people for 180k, and dark soul chaos waves can hit for 100k+.

Multistrike is just another version of crit, and I don't think adds anything to the game whatsoever.

MORE CUSTOMISATION WITH GEAR - In season 8 with ICC, not everybody had the same gear and there were lots of different options for gear. You could mix in a few PvE pieces, you could alternatively just have all PvP gear, you could legitimately stack stamina as a viable PvP stat, you could take tank trinkets, the list was endless. You might want to be more mana conservative and gem intellect, or maybe you want more damage? You could get full spell penetration for certain classes, or just enough against most classes (because buffs were unique). If you weren't quite good enough to get shoulders or helm you could alternatively get a PvE piece or even the relentless gear.

There were different relics/tomes/librams etc which each had different bonuses. It also meant as a PvP'er you had loads of things to do. Daily heroic dungeon for frost emblems for PvE gear. Daily BG for increased honor and arena points. Weekly raid for 5 frost emblems. VoA. Wintergrasp every 2 hours. Arena. 10 man ICC, 25 man ICC. World PvP if that's what you're into. BG's were fun because you could take your hard earned gear and have fun with how powerful you've made your character over time.

The one concern I have is the effect that the best PvE heroic trinkets and legendaries (Shadowmourne) had in an arena setting. There's a part of me that thinks this is an MMO and if someone has got lucky and worked to get such an item, let them enjoy it. But also another part of me that thinks some of them were so ridiculous (heroic cunning of the cruel in RBG's in Cataclysm) they were game breaking. My solution is just don't create such ridiculous trinkets and legendaries in the first place!


RATING REQUIREMENTS ON ITEMS - Similar to what Cobrak said, in all the time rating requirements were on the top pieces of gear, I was never good enough at that time to ever get the rating required for full gear. But I loved it being in the game! It made me really want to strive to get better, and the excitement I had when I'd get the next piece was amazing.

You could be at 1600 and just got your chest, after 2 weeks of trying and learning, you're finally 5 points off 1700. You know you can get your wrathful relic with your next arena win. It's a really close game, but somehow your team pulls through and you know your item is waiting for you at the vendor. How good would you feel? After a long while of trying (months and months) , I remember when I finally got my wrathful weapon in season 8. I got the arena points, I farmed the 42k honor, and now I finally had the rating. I went to get my enchant, and when I finally bought it from the vendor, you couldn't find a single happier person than me in the game at that particular moment. Let other people have that experience too!

By the way in season 9 cataclysm, I remember I dinged my warlock to 85, capped arena that night then went to bed. Logged in the next day (the previous night was reset day) and capped arena again, and bought vicious weapon straight away. Literally within about 2 hours playtime of being 85 I had vicious weapon. That was before the days of needing a certain amount of conquest points before being able to buy weapon. I compared that to how I felt the previous season and as sad as it may sound, I felt nothing but sorrow.

Wheres the challenge?

Why do PvE'ers get rewarded with better gear for surmounting their challenges but we PvP'ers all have the same? When you go in arena, you fight at similar MMR so if you're 1500 you aren't going to be coming across people with full gear.

MORE CUSTOMISATION WITH TALENTS - 71 juicy talent points. Now I do understand what the developers said when they changed it that in a way it is an illusion of choice. There are certain talents that you'd never skip, but no matter how you look at it, we had way more choice than we do now. Have you ever seen a PvP Warlock without archimonde's darkness (x2 charges of dark soul)?

I can tell you on my Warlock, ever since that talent was changed in 5.2 or 5.3 (I can't remember) we're now on 6.1 and I haven't changed that talent row once. To me, it doesn't even feel like options, more like common sense. "Oh I'm against casters now, I'll go unbound will" - "This melee cleave I think will go on me, I'll go blood horror". Burning rush is NEVER used in PvP apart from you can use it against spam poly mages, but even then, it's not being used for it's intended use and I really doubt the developers wasn't thinking of it being used to get out of polymorphs when designing it. Here's some of the top Affliction Warlocks and their talents and glyphs (in fact the top 3 affliction locks EU):

Namqtirltwô
Dark Regeneration, Shadowfury, Soul Link, Unbound Will, Grimoire of Supremacy, Archimonde's Darkness, Soulburn: Haunt
Glyphs - Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Eternal Resolve

Suchdots
Dark Regeneration, Howl of Terror, Soul Link, Unbound Will, Grimoire of Sacrifice, Archimonde's Darkness, Soulburn: Haunt
Glyphs - Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Eternal Resolve

Blukstack
Dark Regeneration, Shadowfury, Soul Link, Unbound WIll, Grimoire of Supremacy, Archimonde's Darkness, Soulburn: Haunt
Glyphs - Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Eternal Resolve

I could go on and link more, but they're all speccing EXACTLY the same. Only difference is 'Suchdots' has gone Grimoire of Sacrifice, probably because at that time he was queuing into teams which are killing his pet with ease without even really focusing it (Moonkins, Dk's other warlocks), and he's gone howl of terror which is maybe better for the comp he's playing at the time. Apart from that, EVERYTHING ELSE IS THE SAME. I'm not saying the talent system in WOTLK was absolutely perfect but it was a million times better than what we have now.

I know I'm pretty much pissing in the wind if I expect all of the above to be changed in the next expansion, but up until WOTLK this game had given me so much I felt it deserved one big post as to why I think the game has gone down the toilet.
A logical solution would be for Blizzard to create their own expansion servers but they'd never do that, because how stupid would they look if more people were playing WOTLK and maybe other expansions/Vanilla than live?

The growing trend of Blizzard making their game easier and easier, and catering towards the casual is killing the game. I don't think I'm the only one feeling this way either.

[TheTaurenOrc]

Great analysis. Now if you could just reformat it to 140 characters and tweet it to Holinka that would be great, thanks.

[Illiterate]

I pretty much agree with 95% of your post. I just disagree with the rating requirement on gear.

[solarfallz]

Patch 3.3.5 was in my opinion, the best this game has ever been and also the statistics back that up, as there were 12 million players playing it and that was at the very end of the expansion.

That's a pretty funny way of looking at statistics. The game's growth virtually stopped in Wotlk. It ended with roughly as many players as it began. Classic and BC saw constant growth through 100% of each time period. It plateaued during Wrath, signifying the first time in the game's history that there were as many people quitting as there were joining. Furthermore, the 12 million figure it from the 4.0 pre-Cataclysm period, when a decent chunk of people who had quit during Wrath reactivated to give Cata a shot.

Virtually all of the problems you discuss in this post either began, or were greatly exacerbated by Wotlk, so I honestly can't even imagine why you would say you enjoyed Wrath the most. The expansion added major offensive and defensive CDs to almost every class, and most of them were terribly designed and generally unstoppable/unavoidable, or at least much more so than abilities had been in the past. Instant casts and CDs became infinitely more prevalent in Wrath. Risk vs Reward for many spells was completely wonky (although admittedly not nearly as bad as it is now), and haste was the god-stat for all casters while armor pen was the god-stat for melee. Wotlk started the trend of "die instantly or don't die at all" mostly due to the powerful unstoppable healing toolkit, combined with powerful unstoppable cooldowns (both offensive and defensive), largely introduced in Wotlk and expanded upon in every expansion since. Botting is the only point that may not necessarily have gotten WORSE in Wrath, as it was already a big problem in BC.

[Frogguh]

Completely disagree on the gear. If anything it should be removed completely from PVP as a factor. Completing the gear grind is not akin to waiting eagerly for Christmas to open presents. It's more like suffering through a bad dental operation. I don't feel excitement at getting a full set of gear, I simply feel relief that I can finally start having fun by being competitive. That is hideous gamed design.

[solarfallz]

Completely disagree on the gear. If anything it should be removed completely from PVP as a factor. Completing the gear grind is not akin to waiting eagerly for Christmas to open presents. It's more like suffering through a bad dental operation. I don't feel excitement at getting a full set of gear, I simply feel relief that I can finally start having fun by being competitive. That is hideous gamed design.

That's because you apparently didn't play in a time when not everyone else had full gear like they do now. With every single expansion so far, gearing has gotten to be more and more of a "grind toward equality" and less of a "reward of superiority". Full arena gear in BC was actually quite rare, and in Wrath only slightly less so, but still much more uncommon than it is now. Getting a weapon and shoulders in Wrath/BC was great, and it was a feeling that you simply cannot get any more. Getting gear and killing things with it is a cornerstone of the game's design, taking gear out of WoW PVP would kill it forever.

[RH92]

I personally would welcome faster combat, but with less extreme burst. I miss times where playing Affliction Warlock I didn't feel like I was only outlasting my enemy or even score a kill on a healer if he wasn't careful.

In WoD burst is just too extreme, you have classes that have strong sustained damage and classes that blow half of your health in a second once in a while. Which I think simpy isn't fun. When playing an Affliction I feel most of the time uneffective despite the fact I am doing a tremendous pressure or when playing any class with burst you feel like constantly waiting for the right procs, cooldowns or whatever to be effective. With the CC it is the same, it does anything at all or if timed well it is a game over.

When you are watching any High Rated players you see them following a rather simple strategy and then to align their CC chain and blow off damage cooldown to land a kill. It isn't very intuitive I think, it feels very animated and therefore not fun.

Just take a look at a real sport teams, don't we all prefer teams who can move it up and score a lot of goals or points? Yes, slow and defensive effort often win the games, but are they the most attractive ones? On any of the big competitions, final game isn't the most entertaining one most of the time because teams are trying to play safe.

Now I am talking more from an average Joe's point of view. WotLK was often accused as being less about skill of players, but it was more fun to participate in PvP back then as it was faster and even average players could get a high amount of kills in a BG which gave them an illusion of being good and actually great players were seen like gods.

[PrairieChicken]

Flat out no about gear part. Having any gear in pvp was bad enough and the "customization" was just getting heroic raid stuff/legendaries and smashing people.

Do agree on that the homogenization is bit excessive right now. Honestly most problems will be gone when they start to balance stuff separately from PVE

[DarkspearNeverDie]

I made this post on the WoW official EU forums. I put a fair bit of time into it so felt I would post it here too.

Thanks for sharing. I agree with a lot of what you said, especially about how damaging homogenization and speed-leveling have been to WoW's health.

What I think this all boils down to, is the mentality shift that the average WoW consumer now exhibits (and how Blizzard caters to that).

It's all about entitlements and instant-gratification; Being busy all the time (and thus having very little time to commit to a hobby) is seen as favorable and the norm. They don't want to grind, customize, commit, or strive. They want to get in, get out, and move on.

There's a reason so many veterans have moved on. The game is not about exceptionalism anymore. Couple this with the complete and utter destruction of realm-community, and you can see why the soul of this game is dead.

[Deus_77]

FAST PACED GAMEPLAY -

I agree slow gameplay is bad. But too fast also not good either.
a 20 sec games are not fun ( Bursting all your CD ).
I don't agree at the high damage of sustained, or lower burst.
Mindlessly just hitting button ( when it's up ) are not challenging at all.

IMO, Burst need reworked, it should be like WW monk.
You stack up something ( Tiger eye brew ), you buff your self ( Tiger Palm ), you debuff your opponent ( Rising Kick ).

LITTLE HOMOGENISATION

I really never understand this.
I am sorry but Homogenization equal to balance.
They take Feral defensive put it on more healing.
They take WW healing but keep a lot escape tools.
Seem unique to me

Yet, how many people think they're not balance ?
You want unique/Heterogen ? Don't expect balance !
You want balance ? Expect Homogenization !

But I like to hear anyone how you can have Unique and Balance at the same time

LONGER TO LEVEL -

Look at the bright side.
The very easiest/obvious way to think a class OP is ... the swarming of the class.
Ret and Disc are all over high rating first month arena, then Blizz nerf them.

BOTS -

I find it's hard at BG, wether they're Botting or just Idiots.
Instant Interupt can also mean very fast reflex.

LONGER TO GEAR

I don't understand this.
You wanna remove conquest catch up ?
You wanna face other with huge different ilevel of gear in arena ?
And you also want balance ?

MORE CUSTOMISATION WITH GEAR

Nothing restrict you using PVE gear in Arena,
PVP gear should be better, that's what everyone agree atm.
Our customization lies on Talent and Glyph now.
I don't wanna ( forced ) raid to get Tier gear cause they're better for PVP.

RATING REQUIREMENTS ON ITEMS -

No
No
No

Getting rating equipment won't prevent unskilled player have it.
There are tons of Rating carried.
And it will be hard to class balance with that.
Gear should be less factor for PVP, but progression should still exist cause it's RPG.

MORE CUSTOMISATION WITH TALENTS .

I half agree with this.
The choice are balance in PVE eye
Tier 1 : Passive Mobility - active Mobility - mobility
Tier 2 : Passive Heal - Burst Heal - lower CD Heal
Tier 3 : Passive Damage - Burst Damage - etc

It's kinda boring for PVP,
There should be Talent choice that gives Damage or Defensive or Heal or Mobility or CC in a tier