The nerfbat has hit Firelands hard. Every Heroic encounter other than Ragnaros is a joke compared to what it used to be; some of them (Alysrazor, I’m looking at you) are easier than their normal counterparts were.
I mean, not that I object to their being nerfed - I agree 100% with the strategic objective - but I think they overdid it. Staged nerfs would have been nice; they could have, say, (in the example of Alys) done everything other than change the tornado movement speed, or (in the example of Beth) reduced Beth’s health but not the Drone health.
Meh. At least H-Rag is still ass-kicking hard. :)
Speaking of WoW, I bought a 60-day timer card for it and realize now that I’ll never use it, so it seems a waste to let it sit here and gather dust. If anyone would like to buy the code, send me a PM.
This weekend should finally reveal details on the next expansion. I hope it’s not this “Mists of Pandaria” stuff that’s been rumoured lately - I don’t object to an eastern-themed expansion but surely they can do better than expanding on past April Fool’s jokes.
A decent single-player content rich expansion is the only reason I could consider going back.
Let’s see what Blizzard has in store.
It depends on what you mean by single player content rich. Cataclysm fit that bill if you enjoy leveling alts, because they redid the 1 to 60 experience. Maxed out characters did not get as much content. I’d expect them to either stick with a five level expansion increase while increasing the experience required to get there (unlikely, people will complain), or go back to ten levels per expansion with at least the same amount of content as we got in Northrend.
Probably both. Five levels spread over more zones.
Athryn
6287
No, it really didn’t, due to the linear nature of the quests in the redone zones.
RickH
6288
Agreed, the over-emphasis on quest chains (just one damn exclamation point? wtf!) can leave you wondering whether leveling in BGs or dungeons would be more efficient/fun.
walTer
6289
Cataclysm made me quit after playing for 5 years prior due to disappointment. Once you ran the new zones, you never had a reason to go back.
Both BC and Wrath were wonderful expansions. Huge new continents, massive amounts of content and a reason to stay in the new area. Cataclysm fell totally flat for me- it came down to level to 85 in a week then dailies…an no new area after that.
I know that the “plan” is to make the level cap easy to obtain but that is not how I want to play. I remember when you had to hit frigging level 40 to get a damn horse!! GET OFF MY LAWN! But at least there was a sense of achievement - you had to work hard for that horse-now it takes a couple of days to hit 20 and bingo you have a horse.
If they do come back with a large new continent, one that you stay in after you cap, with at least some semblance of difficulty…maybe. But if it is 5 levels and a couple of new areas it is just not worth it for me. Mind you I am the kind of player that once I see a raid 2 or 3 times, I am kinda over it…Raiding every Tuesday and Thursday is just not my style.
That said, I really do miss our 25 person raids with the Drop Bears- all that yelling, laughing and general fun-good times.
I mean leveling to max level.
In Cata the first time through was really fun with all the cutscenes but the 2nd time to get one of the alts through it was already boring as fuck and I wished I could skip the cutscenes.
Also they either need to fix instances so noobs can do normals from the get go or give us enough dailies to work on exalted with every faction (you couldn’t get exalted in a reasonable amount of time with the Egyptian Tiger race for example without dungeon rep as you had 2 dailies only in that zone and one was broken most of the time (the shooting with the catapult).
Needing 18000+ rep while getting 150 or 200 rep a day is not fun at all.
The revamped 1-60 was a nice touch for sure though in retrospect a lot of zones were not that different (they simply did pace the progress better and lead you from one quest hub to another + grouped quests that you could do at the same time together (in older times you had to figure that out yourself to save time).
If you knew the zones well you found a ton of quests that were slightly altered and that’s it.
A few standouts of course like Hillsbrad on Horde which was fantastic.
My chief complaint with Cata was how spread out it was. I liked being able to settle in to the new continent and make it my home. Cata just felt taked on.
Blizzard must know they’ve run through everyone in the world that might play a swords & sorcery MMO, because Pandaria looks like pure Blizzard fan wank material. Adding in Pokemon was unexpected, though.
It looked more to me like they just gave up, realized that they can’t please the casual and the hardcore, and decided they might as well start the process of changing it to be much easier to understand systemwise so that they can move to the inevitable F2P model. From the bit I’ve seen on MMO Champion, it looks like they’ve stripped out most of the RPG-ish complexity and are looking to make it closer to… I dunno… some bizarre Action-RPG MMO hybrid. When you have nothing left for character building, you auto-scale people to the dungeon difficulty, and you give them pretty clothes as a motivator to twitch harder and faster it feels like a huge re-orientation of what the game is supposed to be. Maybe I’m misinterpreting or something.
The pokemon thing is utterly bizarre as an addition and again feels like one of those “And also you can do this…” things added into FreeRealms or the like. It should make my guildmate happy though since he’s tried to literally collect every pet he can for the past 6 years.
And WoW slowly slips in to irrelevance …
Also not impressed with the min 12 month subscription to get a free copy of Diablo III. Cheap way to keep your subscription figures artificially inflated. They really are desperate to keep people in the game.
My main complaint as well. I wasn’t a huge fan of Outland but at least it has its own “space” in my mind. Northrend was wonderful.
Seems like a nice option to me for people who anticipate playing WoW for a year. If they commit to that, they get Diablo 3 for free.
I’m don’t currently have an active WoW account beyond a free level 20 I play WSG with from time to time. This offer has me tempted, though. For $156 I get a year of WoW and Diablo 3. Or another way of looking at it is I get WoW for $96, or $8/month along with Diablo 3 which I was going to buy anyway. I still enjoy WoW, but I burn out and like to take a break, but $8/month is cheap enough it won’t bother me to not play for a few weeks at a time now and then.
Lorini
6297
Same thing I was thinking, Mark. And this way I get to avoid the sales tax on Diablo 3 :) so I save even more.
Frankly I couldn’t give a shit about ‘artificially inflating subscriber numbers’. I can’t believe anyone would ever base their decision on that. Instead I’m celebrating the fact that finally Blizzard has had to make the subscription cheaper. Assuming you plan to play D3 and play all year anyway, what’s not to like?
Oh I have no doubt it is a good deal for people that still play WoW. No one I know still plays it though and I suspect SWTOR will cause player numbers to drop even further. Be interesting to know just how far Western player numbers have fallen. At a guess a million active players?
Are you basing that guess on anything? And even if they’re down to 9-10 million worldwide subs, that’s pretty far from irrelevant, so I think they’ll be okay for a while.
Lorini
6300
Not everyone wants to play in a Star Wars universe. I have zero interest in SWOTOR. Not to say that there won’t be some other MMO that I’ll want to play, but it won’t be SWOTOR.
