World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[Rahdulan]

That's a problem they created for themselves by making all content trivially easy. They never had (real) content problems back in vanilla and TBC, because almost no one could complete the hardest content before new stuff came out.

Blizzard is the king of self-inflicted wounds.

Technically speaking, I can see what they wanted to do by opening the end game to a wider range of players because hey, it's really pointless making end game the focus of your entire product and than having a single-digit percentage of your player base actually go and experience it. Problem was that they went overboard with the nerf hammer.

 

[Zeriel]

I think it's only pointless if you believe that people will only buy an MMO if they are guaranteed to experience 100% of its content no matter what. I don't think anyone has ever conclusively proven that--anecdotally I'd suggest that the majority of people who never saw things like Sunwell when they were current enjoyed the idea of there always being things to strive towards.

Less anecdotally, I think it's self-evident that LFR kills long-term investment in the game.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

I agree, Vanilla content lasted so long not only because the encounters were harder but because the grind requiered took longer. BC and Kara finally made it possible for more people to access raiding while uppers raids still posing a challenge. Rep grinds were retarded as fuck and another way of making the content last longer without having actual content.

For me Woltk had the best balance regarding raiding. Especially since acquiring tier armour wasn't as random (if it doesn't drop then save points for it).

I think it's only pointless if you believe that people will only buy an MMO if they are guaranteed to experience 100% of its content no matter what.

Of course but then you have a situation where main end-game content is developed for a small percentage of playerbase. Different difficulties are the perfect solution, as long they're done right. Normal doable for 75% , Heroic doable for 20% players and Mythic doable for 5% of raiders. That way everyone can do the raids but only small percentage will obtain the best loot and stuff for their garrison (I'd presume).

Either way raiding isn't the problem. Blizzard need to develop more sandboxy-ish content. Stuff that isn't meant to be compleated - new gameplay systems instead.
Altough I am not a fan of pet battles it's what WoW needs more of - side activities that offer new gameplay mechanics and isn't made obsolete by "killing the final boss" etc.



Anyway, did a few pandaria quests with my main, stopped 1% before level 76. Not a fan of pandas but the locations are ok. Levelled my lvl 68 DK, I don't remember being able to two shot almost every normal mob that is 2 levels higher than me. Dungeons while levelling are a total joke. While I don't care since I've done them all tens of times, new players will just get rushed and won't learn jack shit - leading to complains that people cannot do first dungeon in the new expansion > bliz making everything even more easier.

 

[abija]

That's a problem they created for themselves by making all content trivially easy. They never had (real) content problems back in vanilla and TBC, because almost no one could complete the hardest content before new stuff came out.

Vanilla it was usually buggy content, and there were plenty of luls periods.
TBC on the other hand featured probably the worst content break in wow, 10 months or something between BT and Sunwell, with BT being the 2nd easiest raid tier (after wotlk t1).

 

[Metro]

It had the worst content break but it didn't have to -- shitty planning on their part. Tier 6 was released far too early. Most guilds only killed Kael and Vashj a handful of times and didn't even bother farming Tier 5 sets. Had they allowed for a four to six month period where Tier 5 was the highest relevant content and not wasted time implementing in-game voice chat (this delayed the time between Tier 6 and Sunwell by several months) then the pacing of the expansion would have been ideal. Wrath had better five-man dungeon design (TBC's dungeons were largely uninteresting strips of land) and better zones. I would combine the raid design (and plentiful content) of TBC and combine it with the dungeons, zones, and reputations of Wrath (ratcheting up heroic difficulty). Only new developments I would keep are the Looking-For-Raid option (so anyone can see the content) and the challenge modes that give more longevity to five mans.

Levelled my lvl 68 DK, I don't remember being able to two shot almost every normal mob that is 2 levels higher than me. Dungeons while levelling are a total joke. While I don't care since I've done them all tens of times, new players will just get rushed and won't learn jack shit - leading to complains that people cannot do first dungeon in the new expansion > bliz making everything even more easier.

Leveling has been made piss-easy. I was messing around on the PTR leveling an arms warrior. Had an heirloom chest, shoulders, and the two-handed axe. I two shot everything. Mortal strike and slam is usually all it took to kill something. Once I got AoE skills like whirlwind I could round up 3-4 mobs at a time with ease. Once I got Bladestorm... forget it. I could pile up a dozen mobs, hit the button, and kill them in a couple seconds. On the one hand I understand the changes. On the other, as you note, a new player only has to use maybe two or three abilities to level so they learn nothing about their class. Not that it really matters since things like crowd control have long since been rendered useless/unnecessary.

 

[Zed]

I did the furbolg grind in vanilla and I think the grind now is worse. Fucking daily quests and shit forcing it to take longer than it should.

Luckily they have said that Draenor will have little to no daily quests.

 

[felipepepe]

Grind is defintly worse now, I did the Netherwing Drake grind in TBC and it was way more intresting and short than grinding in Cataclysm or Pandaria. Fuck those farms in Pandaria.

 

[Zed]

I never did the netherwing grind. I thought the mount looked like shit.

there is one nice grind in pandaria and that's the black prince rep grind. you can do that in 3 hours of constantly killing shit.
sadly, it's part of a long-ass quest-chain with stupid arbitrary limits so that the quest must be completed over like 2 months anyway.

 

[J1M]

I never did the netherwing grind. I thought the mount looked like shit.

there is one nice grind in pandaria and that's the black prince rep grind. you can do that in 3 hours of constantly killing shit.
sadly, it's part of a long-ass quest-chain with stupid arbitrary limits so that the quest must be completed over like 2 months anyway.

As I understand it, there is a catch-up quest that will jump you to the last part that requires collecting stuff from raids.

 

[Kane]

I never did the netherwing grind. I thought the mount looked like shit.

there is one nice grind in pandaria and that's the black prince rep grind. you can do that in 3 hours of constantly killing shit.
sadly, it's part of a long-ass quest-chain with stupid arbitrary limits so that the quest must be completed over like 2 months anyway.

As I understand it, there is a catch-up quest that will jump you to the last part that requires collecting stuff from raids.

And when you're done collecting your stuff from your raids you can use it to raid even more!

 

[Gurkog]

I played WoW off and on for first 5-6 years and I must say that Ulduar was the best raid instance I ever engaged in... but I loved the vanilla world the most.

 

[Zed]

I liked Freya, Mimiron and the last boss. Other than that Ulduar kinda sucked IMO. Especially the first boss (vehicles -_-).
I'd say Ulduar is on par with Firelands, and that the better instances were AQ40 and Naxx40 (at least playing as a tank).

 

[yeye]

AQ40? C'Thun trash? Running back after a wipe? It was hell. And the healing mace never dropped. Fun fights, sure, but damn was it a showcase of what not to do with everything else.

Naxx40 was probably my favorite though.

 

[Xor]

As much as I miss the hardcore sentiments of vanilla and TBC, I think WotLK had better raids (not counting revamped naxx, which was terrible) and the idea of selectable difficulty in the Sarth and some Ulduar bosses was a great idea that I really wish they had stuck with. I don't think they ever gave a reason for switching to the normal/heroic difficulty for fights thing other than "we're too lazy to design more complex encounters. Here's a raid with 5 bosses and no trash we threw together over a weekend. It's piss easy and the 10 man gear is higher ilvl than ulduar25 hard mode stuff." If the game had gone in a different direction after Ulduar I'd probably still be playing.

 

[Metro]

Ulduar was good. Icecrown looked good (had stopped playing by then). Trial of the Crusader was a joke (yay one room raids) as was revamped Naxx. Wrath is when they started to get lazy and produce less overall content.

 

[made]

WotLK had plenty of complex, fun encounters. In particular the endbosses like Yogg and LK. The main problem was that by the time you killed them on the highest difficulty setting, you had already killed them a bunch of times on normal and on 10 man, so the epic feel of downing a truly hard boss for the first time was gone.

 

[Zed]

current raid content is actually good btw. siege of orgrimmar.

 

[Wilian]

The problem of WotLK was that it made all the content besides raids irrelevant pretty fucking fast. Cata "fixed" this by removing all the content besides raiding almoust completely for the first half a year or so and the only thing they could release after that was a 20 minutes-of-dailies patch. The only saving grace it had was the T11 content which was probably their best over-all raid tier since Sunwell if we ignore once-in-a lifetime beaty such as Ulduar, this naturally before they went for the retarded nerfing spree in order "fix" the spiraling subs. Of course it didn't help because the difficulty of early Cata was never the issue for sub-loss (Hint, next time don't fucking treat end-game as second class citizen when revamping something else)

Compared to them Pandaria was stocked up content like no expansion ever, even though that content was fucked up with daily gating. Had it been more vanilla-TBC like free-form farming it'd have probably hit the spot pretty perfectly. One of the better things it brought was that you couldn't out-gear earliel content just as easily due to working away a bit with the gear-reset a patch bullshit. Of course they done fucked it up with Timeless Isle patch but eh.

Hopefully they can somehow combine Pandaria amount of content with this time sensible grind that has nothing to do with dailies. The test-zone for Battlefield Barren was pretty neat idea and it's something they definately should expand upon.

 

[Metro]

Having played through a lot of the Pandaria content on the PTR I can say most of it was boring-ass-fuck. Battlefield Barrens was entertaining for about two hours.

 

[Wilian]

The problem with BF: Barrens was that it lacked any proper direction, longevity and felt more like random activities slapped on with the general narrative built around it. However it also added some things that had been missing from the game quite long time, namely grinding at your own pace and more free-form style of content. If they can build it properly and add other systems around it (Like reputation/world progression) it could prove to be quite effective tool for end-game.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

 

[Excidium]

So I found out they merged all NA BG battlegroups and now you always get people from H4RDC0R3 pvp realms like Tichondrius which are all 90% horde.

That + Alliance loser mentality = a lot of fun if you're trying to farm pvp gear.

 

[Caim]

I played quite some time during Cataclysm, and I quickly noticed that a good chunk of the flight paths were unlocked early on. I spent and awful lot of time flying around and mapping the world (only parts I couldn't do yet were the high level Cataclysm maps) and it broke mah 'mershun that you could fly from tail to ass end on both continents without having explored to those places. It would at least make the world feel big and interesting instead of what it really was: zones with monsters with numbers and if your numbers were bigger often enough your numbers became bigger so you could go to other zones with monsters with bigger numbers.

Speaking of, during my travels through Azeroth I discovered four or so portals under bigass trees. I remember something about very high level dragons having been there, but they were scrapped. Why's that?

 

[Bahamut]

Speaking of, during my travels through Azeroth I discovered four or so portals under bigass trees. I remember something about very high level dragons having been there, but they were scrapped. Why's that?

Book stuff, they more or less delt with emerald nightmare

 

[J1M]

I played quite some time during Cataclysm, and I quickly noticed that a good chunk of the flight paths were unlocked early on. I spent and awful lot of time flying around and mapping the world (only parts I couldn't do yet were the high level Cataclysm maps) and it broke mah 'mershun that you could fly from tail to ass end on both continents without having explored to those places. It would at least make the world feel big and interesting instead of what it really was: zones with monsters with numbers and if your numbers were bigger often enough your numbers became bigger so you could go to other zones with monsters with bigger numbers.

Speaking of, during my travels through Azeroth I discovered four or so portals under bigass trees. I remember something about very high level dragons having been there, but they were scrapped. Why's that?

I suspect you were playing a deathknight and that is why all of the flight paths were unlocked for you. The lore reason being that you were a former hero of the third war who had already been to those places.

Those areas that are guarded by various dragonspawn are portals to the emerald dream. They were never implemented, but that's what they are.