5741

Good story, and apparently Blizzard’s Jack Pearce agrees with you about D3. :)

5742

Never got all the Nagrand love - those weird trees were too obviously made of shaded planes for me. Loved Zangarmarsh, probably my favourite zone in the game.

I came back from a long hiatus for Cata - levelled a fresh hunter up from scratch, solo (inspired by ‘You Awaken in Razor Hill’, he’s an orc with a cat). He’s 78 now, plugging along.

The highest character I ever got before was 72 - so that’s got to count for something.

5743

I still log in to raid, but that’s about it. DA2 and my huge backlog aren’t helping.

When you’re logging in to collect 70 valor points or make little bars get slightly bigger… that can’t compete with never-seen-before single-player content in another game.

5744

WoW has become my “during the week” game. I only have a couple of hours every night to do anything at all with video games during the work week, so getting into something like Dragon Age, or even finishing one of the little downloadable episodes that I’ve told myself I have to do before I’m allowed to install and play the sequel, is a little out of my reach. WoW fills an hour or two every night wherein I can fly around and snag some herbs and DPS a single heroic. On the weekend, I almost never touch it.

My brief experience raiding (last Wednesday we some-large-number of shotted Magmaw and three-shotted Omnitron, the second of those being kind of impressive) has been entirely meh. I don’t mind it, but one of the things I hate most about WoW is navigating the environment, and so much of fights so far seem to be about navigating the environment and changing targets and all sorts of other crap. At this point I’m basically just backfilling in case somebody can’t make it on regular nights. Maybe some of the patched content (I’ve never done Cthun, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to be getting that at some point, since he’s apparently the Old God responsible for the Twilight nonsense) might be a bigger draw for me.

5745

I canceled my account today. I chose the answers that gave me the box to tell them the 255 character version of my reason: “The quest hub structure; compass and map pointers; streamlined quests; cross-server grouping; teleporting to dungeons; the grind of dailies, points, honor, and reputation: You have removed the “world” from World of Warcraft.” I’m sure a lot of people have no problem with any of this, but for me, the game lost its soul. I’m not quitting for another MMO; the WoW killer for me was Cataclysm.

5746

My account is still active, but I haven’t really logged in for a while. I guess I have left for Rift, but I haven’t been playing anything for the last couple of weeks. The weather is starting to get nice.

5747

100% agreed. I’ve been trying to put my finger on what’s missing in Cat, and for me, it’s the loss of discovery and the loss of fun group acitvities.

Questing on rails, often coming down to ONE quest that must be done before advancement is allowed. That just offends me. I wasted an hour in Deepholm because I wanted to pick up the mandatory quest chain for Therazane dailies, but I couldn’t find the single, phased quest giver I needed. It took an add-on and a great deal of time.

I went from successful PUG raiding with any of four max-level characters to being unable to complete a heroic. If I can’t do heroics, I can’t grind rep, and I can’t get geared for heroics… My kids stopped playing, and except for working the AH, I pretty much have too.

Yeah, I’m sure you can post all about how I’m doing it wrong and you are succeeding where I’m failing, but playing WoW has just plain stopped being fun for me, and that’s a shame. I’ll still keep banking gold, but I’m waiting for things to change in the actual game play.

5748

I was in Sunken Temple and just can’t get over how much less fun it is now that it has been “trimmed”. Sure, the old dungeons were a bit rambly but they felt like real places and felt like something more than just a linear sequence of loot pinatas…

5749

You have removed the “world” from World of Warcraft."

I agree – it’s basically cities and instances in the endgame – although I think it’s a nontrivial design problem to come up with reasons for people to go back to zones they’ve already leveled through, when you set up your world in this tiered way. You can stick gathering nodes out there, of course, which they do, but it’s more of a bandaid.

For me the first year of Vanilla was still the best, not because the design was so great (I’m sure I’d find aspects of it pretty tedious now), but because everything was fresh and shiny and it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that you were already at max level and there were people running around the world and all that. I think it’s hard to recapture that early feeling. Not having played EQ, I didn’t even understand the concept of an “endgame” back then – I figured I’d be pretty much done once I dinged 60, so I was enjoying the ride as much as possible. Looking back it seems like I spent ages and ages in my 30s and 40s on my tauren warrior and undead mage, grinding Scarlet Monastery cemetery for mount money, trying to find Roogug in Razorfen Kraul for my warrior quest, watching party members get into arguments over who can loot the staff from Arcanist Doan in SM library, trying to find someone help me get the Whirlwind Axe, doing multiple runs in Stromgarde Keep to finish a few measly quests. I don’t mean to get all rose-colored-glassesy looking back on it; much of what I described would be considered sheer tedium now, and some of my interest probably derived from ignorance about what efforts actually would yield worthwhile rewards. But it felt like there was a lot of “there” there, that you were spending time in the middle levels and that, because you would be in those levels for a while, dungeon drops and class quests actually mattered; whereas now you blaze up to 85 before you give a damn about anything. Some essence is gone. Not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different. I enjoyed it more back then, but maybe just because it was new, not because it was better designed. Hard to disentangle it all.

I also want to give a nod of appreciation to the sequence of zones that begins with Dun Morogh and goes up through Loch Modan, Wetlands, and Arathi. It’s beautifully paced in the way the world unfolds for you – that first entry into Ironforge; first taking the tram to Stormwind and then seeing the scary high level zones (Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes) as you fly back to IF; going through the dwarf tunnels under the mountain into Wetlands; massive architecture like the Thandol Span or the dam in Loch Modan. Even though the quests lacked the story focus of the Cataclysm stuff – and I remember noticing this at the time, comparing it rather unfavorably to the single player RPGs I’d come from – I do think a better job was done stitching zones together and making them feel a part of a single world. Nagrand was mentioned above, and it’s a pretty and tranquil zone, but also feels completely disconnected from anything else around it. I think, however, that the sense of disjointedness was strongest in Outland and was less so in Northrend; it was also, I suppose, thematically appropriate. I don’t want to bash BC too much: Zangarmarsh was beautiful and the first arrival out of the Dark Portal is one of the most awe-inspiring moments in the whole game.

5750

Okay - one thing I will note about long dungeons. When people get shoved into an instance for random, they need to be locked to that dungeon (so that no matter how many times you leave and come back you’re going to end up in an instance of…say…Deadmines). I sit in the queue for half a damn hour waiting to get a spot as DPS for a heroic and it’s Deadmines. Oh, well - that sucks, but whatever. And then the tank says, “Sorry - this takes too long, so get effed jerks” and leaves and then the new and improved no cheesing system boots ALL of us out of the queue. Either Deadmines needs to get a lot shorter or some kind of penalty needs to exist that will motivate people to actually do it. And the best part is that I’m pretty sure that if one person knows what he’s doing, you can still finish it about as fast as you can finish Grim Batol, though I will admit that I have never gotten past the wolfman fight because I’ve only been that far once and it was with a guild group and we were short on DPS.

5751

You already have a penalty for people doing that, which is the 30 minute debuff. If you’re getting tossed it means you’ve grouped with that tank before entering the queue, and your only recourse there is to pick a more reliable tank to group with.

That being said, the DF system is all sorts of fucked up right now with 2 hour votekick times and the likes. So easy to grief people now in there.

5752

Deadmines is the new Halls of Reflection or original Oculus. Except I think I preferred HoR (and I grew to hate pugging it). Its too long and too frustrating for little pay off. Its one of the things killing wow for me. I only like to heal on my druid now as tanking is just frustrating due to aoe problems. So a 10min queue got me into DM(or VC if you prefer) with a warrior tank. With buffs he was at 160k HP yet was getting hit hard often. He barely coordinated crowd control with dps who were competent with CC and despite having a mod that gave a brief text description in chat for each boss fight, often didnt follow it. Foereaver caused wipe #3 and on the second attempt, the tank couldn’t hold aggro and died 20s in. I left the instance before dying again and quit for the day. Heroics aren’t fun anymore, even in guild groups.

Aaron, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree again on Ghostcrawler’s raid progression post. :)

5753

I can’t really agree to disagree with you when you’ve provided not a shred of rationale for why he’s wrong. :)

Also, Deadmines? Really? I mean, yeah, it was a bitch and a half before the nerf, but now, it’s not that much harder than VP. It’s certainly no Grim Batol… I’m more likely than not to just drop group if I queue into GB, unless all of the others in the group have decent gear.

Deadmines, well, I can carry a group through Deadmines as a healer if there’s at least one DPSer who can ride the reaper.

Anyway, I agree with you that Heroics aren’t really fun anymore in Guild groups. They’re too easy. They were really fun the first couple of weeks, though!

5754

Aaron, you aren’t exactly an average player, so I can see how you have a slightly different perspective. :)

5755

I agree, actually; my perspective is somewhat skewed. I’m very happy that I got the chance to work through various Heroics back when they were a challenge even for the bleeding edge players, and I’m also happy that they were tuned down so that groups less dedicated and coordinated can get through them.

I still don’t see how GC’s comments on raiding can be taken poorly, so I’m asking Ranulf to share why he takes them that way, so that I may see it from another perspective.

5756

Enh, I’m not nearly as leet as Aaron and I’ve noticed the same thing for heroics and guild groups. They’re pretty easy now when we do all Bears runs.

5757

Very well said, Gordon.

I don’t know what it was exactly that flipped the switch for me and led me to cancel. Learning the Cata heroics, getting my Cata factions up, finishing off Loremaster of Cataclysm, all that stuff was great fun (minus some serious annoyances at the stupidities of the 80-85 zones’ rampant phasing). Had a wonderful time with the Drop Bears on Moonrunner.

Then we started raiding, and I completely lost interest in like a week and a half. Just didn’t want to log into the game any more. I think part of it was that I felt powerless in raids again (as opposed to carrying groups through pre-nerf 85 heroics as a tank when a 349 gearscore was bumpin’). Part of it was probably that I felt the treadmill bearing down on me and wasn’t interested in dealing with it again (though I’d certainly spent plenty of time turning that wheel at 85 up until then).

So Rift it is, for now. We’ll see if that keeps me much past level cap either.

5758

Bears runs were pretty easy a month and a half ago ;) I do think that the Bears have decidedly above-average tanks, which makes all the difference in 5-mans.

5759

I’ve been pugging a fair bit on my new shitty elemental shaman and I can say that heroics are a total joke to how they were back in December. I see groups with some of the dumbest tanks and healers push through things when you have someone who isn’t retarded and can CC even one single mob, or is in control of a defining aspect of an encounter (Foereaper).

With people having gear now, and the changes they have made to the DF system giving increased modifiers to DPS/Health/Healing etc based on the # of randoms in the group it’s pushed what was once a challenge to rather boring. Boring though is also based on the fact that there’s only 9 heroics in total to do and it seems more time and effort was spent on leveling content then end game content this xpac.

This is based on experience of me queuing solo as a DPS in a class I’ve never really played much so I’m still learning the ropes of out.

EDIT - Personally I think the biggest issue people are still having is the unfun factor of having to carry at least one person in the run and the insanity is it at the difficulty it is to remove the person at the time. I do also think the overall quality of pugs has improved over the past 2 months, which is what makes doing the heroics so much easier now than before on top of the other buffs and nerfs that have been implemented.

5760

I like Grim Batol. More afraid of the first boss in Shadowfang or the Foe Reaper and wolfieman in Deadmines by far.

Of course, I still haven’t tanked heroic stonecore, and I imagine I’m going to be wiping the group all over the place when I finally do.

Incidentally, is Anti-Magic Shell effective against shatter?