It's been a year since he passed away, and I wanted to go back and re-watch his last WoW video. Turns out he was pretty right on what direction they were heading at this time.
On Dungeons:
• Blizzard started nerfing things at the end of Wrath to make the game more accessible. Most dungeons were just AOE fests between the nerfs and gear inflation from all of the difficulty tiers.
• They started Cataclysm out great for most players who were used to the "harder" stuff. And let's be clear, it wasn't hard. It was just making sure you weren't brain dead and going to AOE spamming dungeon packs. You had to use your CCs tactically and communicate with the group. Wrath with LFD and accessibility changed the whole dynamic of what a dungeon was.
• It's possible some on the WoW team saw making the game faceroll was a mistake, and the lead WoW designer at the time Ghostcrawler came out with a blog post about the Cata dungeons like "yeah they are hard" you can't just walk in and spam stuff and ignore game mechanics.
• But the playerbase was essentially trained during Wrath to want easy dungeon gameplay, hence hte origin of "Wrath baby". And WoW started losing subscribers.
• Blizzard makes a 180, nerfs the fuck out of everything, and makes dungeon gameplay shallow.
On Raiding:
• I think most players would say TBC was the golden age of raiding. What was the main difference between then and now? There was one version of a raid. You either did it or you didn't.
• No massive gear item level inflation because there wasn't 4 versions of every raid.
• The addition of upgraded badge vendors allowed even the most casual players just doing weekly Karazhan runs to fill a few slots with high end gear. But you couldn't fill every slot.
• Black Temple was Black Temple. Karazhan was Karazhan. Progression was more interesting becuase it wasn't Karazhan difficulty 1 > Karazhan difficulty 2 > Karazhan difficulty 3. It was Karazhan > maybe TK void reaver > SSC / TK / ZA > BT > Sunwell.
So what are all of your thoughts on this video or on TB's views of WoW in general?