I’m a long time Wow player who has played both as a casual player and a hardcore player and I have to say that I believe Wow has become too easy for casual players. This post certainly contains some QQ but I hope also shows what I believe are ways to fix these problems and make the game more fun. Before I begin this long post (consider yourself warned in advance) I would like to define 2 things:
Casual – A casual PvE player is generally a player who does not play as much as a hardcore player (often due to RL commitments). Often they cannot be part of a hardcore guild because they either can’t commit to being on at the same time every day or commit to being on for long length of time. In general they have less gear/experience than hardcore players.
PvE Fun – I believe that there are 2 requirements for an encounter to be fun. The first requirement is that the encounter be challenging. The second requirement is that the encounter has a chance to give a reward. Encounters that don’t meet these two requirements feel like a boring grind (if they are too easy) or a pointless fight (if they provide no reward).
With these things in mind I think it is clear that WotLK is too easy and thus not as much fun for casual players:
1) Heroics are too easy:
Heroics are one of the best encounters for casual players since they often require a shorter time commitment than raids and can be completed at any time of the day. Unfortunately, heroics in WotLK are so extremely easy that they can be run faster than the random heroic timer and without any player’s life dropping below 80%. I would even argue that heroics in WotLK were too easy in 80 blues. This makes these instances feel more like a grind and less like a fun game.
The Solution (for Cataclysm):
The solution to this problem is not simple because heroics fulfill a number of rolls including providing instances for new 80s and badges. My solution is to
a. Greatly increase the difficulty of heroics. People who don’t know the encounters or are unorganized should wipe multiple times on every boss. A well organized and experience group should wipe about once per run.
b. Mob difficulty should increase with player gear level. Since heroics need to last and be fun for the entire expansion they need to stay difficult even as player’s gear level changes dramatically. Heroic should be more about organization/skill/experience than gear.
c. Normal instances should drop badges. Heroics are currently so easy that obtaining badges is simply a matter of time not difficulty. Currently the “hard” heroics keep getting nerfed because people complain they take longer to get badges. Might as well make the normals drop badges so the heroics can be made hard.
d. Heroics need to drop good gear. In order to fulfill the fun requirement the new (actually hard) heroics need to provide rewards to compensate players for running them. They need to be above the value currently obtainable by badges (or everyone would just run for badges) but below the highest tier of raiding. One option would be to have enhancements like BOP gems, enchants, recipes, crafting mats drop from these new heroics.
2) Instances are repetitive due to lack of CC or threat/mana issues:
One of the things that makes heroics (and to a lesser extent some raids) feel boring is the repetitiveness of trash. When heroics came out in BC trash pulls were often extremely difficult due to the Tank having trouble holding aggro (esp off the healer) and CC being required by dps classes. Now that threat is no longer an issue most instances’ trash can be cleared by grouping, AoEing and repeating. When a dps has to cast only one spell (Blizzard, ftw) and the healer doesn’t have to worry about threat or mana, it makes trash extremely boring.
The Solution:
a. Bring back CC and give it to everyone. It was often frustrating in BC when classes without CC made encounters much more difficult so I think that all classes should be given some sort of instance CC. This allows for some pulls to be single target, some to be AoE, some to be controlled CC. Simply put, it gives more variety. And if you have CC you can also have…
b. Bring back threat as a problem for trash. In BC this was unbalanced because certain classes had huge threat advantaged. But as long as all tanks are equal, threat is actually a very interesting mechanic. Skilled tanks can help a group by being able to control more mobs. Skilled dps can help a group with consistent CC and good kiting. And the encounters become more difficult for healers because they have more targets to heal (not just the tank) and a skilled healer can do better by using spells that generate less threat. Quite frankly, my favorite heroics were the ones were threat issues caused the trash pulls to feel hectic.
3) Too many raid encounters are enrage timer based
It seems to me that a large number of the encounters are enrage timer based and consequently are very gear based. Often, fights have an enrage timer like effect (where you must beat a timer or you will be overwhelmed by adds) instead of an actual timer but the effect is the same. The problem with enrage timers is that the difficulty caused by an enrage timer can be easily overcome simply by obtaining a better gear. For example in a 25 man (17 dps) the death of 1 dps can be overcome by the other dps increasing their damage by 6% per person. 6% might seem like a lot until you realize that most people were doing 2k dps when they hit 80 and 5k (or more) dps now. That is a 150% increase over 3 raids (Naxx, ulduar, ToC). This probably means that from your first Ulduar run till ToC came out your dps increased by about 40% and you could therefore overcome the death of 6 dps (that’s almost 1/4 of your raid). The reason this is a problem (for Casuals) is that often Casuals run raids long after they come out. Since by this time many people significantly outgear the instances, the instances often are too easy.
Don’t believe that many encounters are balanced this way? Let’s look at the Keepers in Ulduar (on normal):Hodir has an enrage timer, the difficult part of Freaya is killing the adds fast enough (before the next set spawns), and Thorim is about getting down the corridor fast enough while still keeping up with the adds spawning in the center.
The Solution:
Design more encounters that don’t have timers. Encounters with CC are one way to do this. Also, encounters should have events where a mistake by any player can wipe the raid (regardless of gear). An example of this is the Northrend Beasts. A player getting hit by the yeti’s charge, for example, can wipe the raid as can a person with the fire debuff not dispelling poison off the tank. I’m not saying the Beasts encounter wasn’t relatively easy. It just didn’t get that much easier as gear improved.
The whole reason I bring this up is I recently stopped raiding hardcore and quickly became bored. I think it is ironic that I found the game to be too easy for casuals but decently balanced when I was hardercore (since I cared about the balance of heroic-raids not heroics). I’ve found myself waiting anxiously for Cataclysm because heroics will be much more difficult at the beginning of an expansion than they are now. I remember the time I spent as a casual in BC were much more interesting because heroics were more difficult for casuals. I still love Wow and think that, in general, WotLK was a fun expansion. I just hope some changes can be made to make it more interesting.