5721

There is a 5 instance per hour lockout that is at least Server Wide, not sure about Account Wide for the account in question. This was implemented back in Vanilla WoW due to gold farmers exploiting chests in instances. Why this lockout is still around is beyond me, as it’s total bullshit at this point.

The DF system bypasses this lockout, which is what makes the original lockout still being in place even more idiotic.

Basically the real impact you see from this is people being unable to zone in to a raid zone during raid time.

5722

I didn’t follow this. Are you suggesting “can’t do quests while in a raid” is a bug that Blizz has been lax in fixing?

5723

Agreed 100%. That post was a good bit of Raid Design 101 that too many people don’t understand.

5724

Here’s a cool story, bro.

After a false start with WoW Classic (Mage to 34 and quit – I missed EQ: Planes of Power) I got into it again right about the time AQ was about to be released. By far, this era of the game had the greatest sense of high adventure to it. Grinding for Felcloth in Azshara, enjoying the empty purposelessness of the zone. No quests, no handheld storyline. It was quiet, serene even, and you had to figure it all out by yourself. I ended up quitting because of raid guild drama.

Burning Crusade. I make a Blood Elf like everyone else. I get 60 and wait for my brother to hit 58 so we can go through the Dark Portal together. And… wow! Hellfire is incredible! Holy shit, that worm just erupted from the ground! Amazing! It truly felt otherworldly.

Then Zangarmarsh and Terrocar. Zzzz.

Then Nagrand and Netherstorm. Neat!

Did a few heroics then skipped right to raids. Karazhan – absolutely amazing. Gruul, Kazzak – well we killed them at least. Magtheridon – server first, but I swear to god I lost a year off my life trying to kill that guy. And then the rest of the raid content was bugged so I quit. I saw the first boss of SCC and never stepped foot in Tempest Keep, Black Temple, or Sunwell.

Wrath! They added death knights, gotta be one of those. A much more realistic theme this time, which had its benefits in certain zones. Grizzly Hills and Dragonblight felt right. Icecrown was scary. Borean, Stranglethorn Vale 3.0, and Storm Peaks? Yuck.

Heroics are pretty fun! Did those for a couple weeks and then started Naxx. I think we cleared Naxx 10 in two or three lockouts, with a dramatic final encounter with KT where I, the Off-Tank, ended up tanking KT AND the adds when our MT died.

And then… well, what was there to do? Naxx again? Arenas? Wintergrasp? Hodir faction or gear? I quit.

Then came probably the best time I’d ever had in WoW. About two months before Cataclysm, I started playing again as a Mage. Heroics were facerolling fun – like Diablo almost. I earned badges and bought real, cool-looking, good gear. In short time I was doing the Icecrown 5 mans, which were excellent. Then I was doing the Crusader raid, which was fun, and then finally ICC. The kicker? I wasn’t in a raid guild. Did these pugs do well? Not really. I never killed LK. But it was fun.

I got my girlfriend to play. She loved it. We leveled together, ran dungeons, etc. She hit 80 right before Cataclysm and went on a couple raids with us. She was thrilled by the whole thing.

And then Cataclysm. In more ways than just one.

They re-did the game. Ballsy. Too bad 80% of the expansion’s content was a the 1-60 overhaul.

Then the zones. Phasing, neat! Except why can’t I see you; I’m standing right next to you? Oh, I’m one quest ahead of you in a chain.

Suddenly it’s a single player game. I got a few steps out of sync with my girlfriend and we couldn’t level together. She quickly lost interest, and that saddened me.

The dungeons are alright I guess. Some annoying mechanics. But then the Heroics came, and for the first time, WoW became a headache-inducing drag. I didn’t walk away from the game tired from staying up all night or relaxed from a few hours of wasting time, I walked away with a headache and a deep loathing of humanity. It was probably a good thing my girlfriend quit – she wouldn’t have been able to cut it in heroics.

That’s probably when the switch flipped.

I’d have to find a way to explain to my girlfriend that she couldn’t come on heroics with us. And when that question came to mind, I was forced to stop and think: What had this all become?

Where had WoW gone? Everything was plotted out and phased and on rails. You could barely explore, there were no quests out there unless you’d done the ones before them. The lore made no sense and was boring as hell. Dungeons were inaccessibly hard. Wasn’t that kind of frustration supposed to be reserved for heroic raiding? How was I supposed to tell my girlfriend who’d just spent a month or two doing heroics and raids in Wrath that she was not good enough to do heroics and raids in Cataclysm?

Cataclysm had made WoW do a total 180, like a happy, fun grandfather who suddenly had a stroke and now was bitter and angry and barely remembered you. It was, in many ways, like Everquest’s Luclin expansion, which is what many EQ players consider to be the falling point in the history of the game.

Maybe, a year down the road from now, Cataclysm will be at a point where Wrath was eight months ago. Everything except Deathwing’s Citadel Heroic will be tuned for fun, not “challenge.”

Or maybe it won’t. Maybe this is WoW’s Luclin. If Actilizzard starts cranking out expansions like their leaked plan suggests, they’ll be lining up to make the exact same mistakes Sony did to EQ1 after Luclin.

Oh well.

tl;dr: There’s Diablo 3, right? If there were ever a WoW killer, Diablo 3 is it.

5725

Ah, that’s probably what bit him. I don’t know how he got to five but I suppose it is possible. Thanks!

Why not allow quests to be done in a raid? Or at least dailies… Just seems odd that they’ll let me take the quest and start it but not award credit. It’d definitely be low on the priority list, I suppose, but it just seems an arbitrary restriction.

5726

Because they don’t want to utterly trivialise the already easy content.

5727

Here’s how I see your story. You enjoy coming in at the end of an expansion when the gear makes dungeons easy, and you hate it at the beginning when you have to coordinate with other skilled players. Also, phasing was in wrath quests too.

5728

I love when people keep repeating the “WoW lost its exploration” bit, which is just completely not true. The quests are streamlined now, that’s it. And with the total revamp of the world, there’s more to explore than there ever has been. You can still explore the hell out of the game if you like. The only difference is that you’re no longer required to travel all over the world and back just to get to the next quest. You can do that, but I certainly don’t miss having to alt-tab out while I waited for my 10 minute (literally, in some cases) flight to get me to the next quest.

5729

That’s not quite true. In some zones it’s as you describe, sure. But in others, there’s nothing of interest in the rest of the zone unless you do the quests in order so that you can enter the right phase & see the next round of quest givers, flight masters, etc.

Sure, you can explore, but all too often all you’ll find is topography & mobs. That can be cool, but it does give the world an empty, barren feel to it. Meanwhile, if you do things “correctly” and follow the quest chains, the world is more interesting but you really feel like you’re on rails. Don’t feel like doing a “Collect 10 bear butts” quest? Too bad. You gotta, if you want to be sure the phasing works out.

5730

Okay, but how is that different than before? The phasing issue can cause some hiccups, but there has never been anything more in terms of exploration.

5731

I played BC and Wrath heroics all at the start of the expansion. They were fun.

Wrath also spoiled us by giving us an LFD tool midway through the expansion that could put together groups who were capable of finishing Heroics. I honestly think they should have just disabled LFD for Cata Heroics. They’re simply too hard for a totally random pug.

Also, “coordinating with other skilled players” sounds like something just short of something you’d put on a resume, which pretty much sums up how I feel about Cataclysm’s Heroics: a frustrating slog of a job.

Right before we quit for RIFT, my friends and I put together a pug BWD because we were all so sick of the raid guild popularity contest. We only killed the first two bosses before a key member DC’d and it all fell apart, but it was much easier than the lion’s share of Cata Heroics. To me that said something was terribly wrong with the progression curve Blizzard had set up.

And yes, while Wrath had phasing, not every zone was completely phased like Cata is. Seriously, I think the only Cata zone that isn’t totally phased is Deepholme.

Sure there has. I remember finding the weird lone quest giver in the middle of nowhere plenty of times.

5732

Absolutes like that don’t help much. They’re not too hard for a totally random pug. Some pugs can’t do them.

5733

Before I could wander around in the wilderness & just stumble across a fully functional quest hub, or a single quest giver. Now, if I just head off into the unknown, there’s a good chance I’ll find absolutely nothing interesting thanks to phasing. This problem is made worse if I’m meeting up with a friend to do questing, or if I have already done the zone… in such cases I expect to be able to see my friend or the quest givers. They were here on my shaman. Fuck. Guess I gotta go back and complete every single bear ass quest before I can do these.

The story is much more coherent, but I’m often forced to do zones in a certain order, which can turn questing into a grind for me, rather than being lighthearted fun.

That’s right… I went there. Blizzard destroyed my fun.

(Seriously though, it’s not that bad, but it can get kinda annoying.)

No they’re not. I usually do Cata heroics with 4 random people, because it’s more interesting that way. And I get through them 9 times out of 10. It could be that I’m so awesome that I carry the group. But honestly, I think it’s that I’m willing to (and want to) communicate, coordinate, and strike up a conversation.

5734

The overwhelming majority of my LFD groups have had few, if any, difficulties with the heroics. I have felt the need to leave a group precisely twice, and it turned out one of those times was my own damn fault–I’d been under the impression you were supposed to kite the first boss in Tol’Vir around which, uh, no, bad idea.

5735

Fair enough. I just think you’re remembering back to before you knew where all the quest hubs were, though. Those quest givers out in the middle of nowhere were mostly pointed to by other quests, you just found them before that happened. And those guys are still around, even in the Cataclysm zones. It is true for the most part that you’re more on rails now, but I think the sense of exploration is gone for a lot of people simply because they’ve already explored everything in the previous 6+ years.

I do totally agree that they’ve gone much too crazy with their phasing crap, however. It’s well done in some cases, but I don’t think it’s cool enough to balance out how much of a pain in the ass it is when you’re trying to group with other people.

5736

Yeah, this.

5737

The “can’t do quests in a raid” distinction carried more weight back in vanilla WoW, where group quests to kill special elites were common and dungeons like Strat and UBRS let you bring 5/10/15 players. If you wanted to complete the dungeon quests – which was often important for stuff like UBRS key or Onyxia chain – you had to 5-man them. The non-raid requirement made them an actual challenge to complete, and was a perfectly acceptable restriction.

But even now, it still makes sense. The Tol Barad dailies would be comical if you could do them in a raid – you’d have 40 people steamrolling them as a group every time TB ended. If you want to do quests, just drop out of your raid, problem solved.

5738

How is Rift? Does it better meet your preferred style? Do you see that being just because of the newness and excitement, or do you see it holding up for awhile?

5739

Great post. ;)

Thinking back my favorite area of all time was Nagrand. The rolling hills coupled with the fantastic floating islands. BC had a lot of awesome areas though. Not so awesome were all the ridiculous key quests to enable access to content continued on to this day with the silly iLevel requirements of the current Cataclysm expansion.

As an aside I downloaded and logged into Rift for the first time last night. The whole gameplay concept of invasions from rifts gave me serious déjà vu for Tabula Rasa. It’s a very well put together game for a first release and the graphics and sound are gorgeous. Still lot’s of “collect 10” quests though especially in the early game.

5740

Thinking back my favorite area of all time was Nagrand. The rolling hills coupled with the fantastic floating islands. BC had a lot of awesome areas though. Not so awesome were all the ridiculous key quests to enable access to content continued on to this day with the silly iLevel requirements of the current Cataclysm expansion.

BC was by far my favorite expansion. Coming into Hellfire Peninsula from classic WoW was an experience in of itself. Every zone was so thematic and completely different than anything else. I do wish they’d go back to the Outlands and do something else with it (either more areas in the Outlands or another world being invaded by the burning legion).

And am I the only one who thought the starting zones for the Blood Elves kicked ass? Enough that I played through it twice (once when BC first came out and then again just before Cata). And I think I enjoyed it even more the second time. There was just something about the story, the music, and the unique look that captivated me. Conversely, I thought the Draenei starting zones were pretty mediocre.