This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Take off your rose colored glasses and go back and look at the old boss encounters. They're really not any harder than any encounters in Wrath. In fact, most Wrath encounters are more complex than Vanilla encounters. I'd put Mimiron hard up against anything in Vanilla and it will stomp 7 kinds of hell out of them and leave them crying for their mother.What people, especially the vanilla raiders forget, is that they've had FIVE YEARS OF RAIDING EXPERIENCE. Five years. Of course stuff isn't as hard. You've had five years of practice! If you ran into the Ragnaros fight for the first time next week, you'd blow through it in a night of attempts and call it easy. Nefarian is only add control and mastering class calls. With five years of this game under your belt, it would take you less than a week of attempts, and you'd be crying about the final boss of BWL being a crappy pushover. Not only that, but far, far, far more players min/max and they do it far more effectively. Getting optimal gear and rotations and specs is as simple as plugging your options into a spreadsheet and seeing if the DPS numbers goes up or down. Everybody hitcaps, everybody flasks, everybody uses food buffs, and it doesn't take a week of farming consumables so you can have 10 elixirs active on every attempt.Not only THAT, but Blizzard has a lot more practice, and encounters are better tuned right from the start. There's no Cthuns getting bugged for weeks. Also, with the removable of the artificial length-increasing gear !@#$blocks, there's no "You need to get 2 tanks defcapped while wearing full sets of resist gear" fights. There's no "You need to farm Hearts of Darkness for a month to get enough shadow resist gear for your raid to get through Mother" fights. No Onyxia Scale Cloaks required to avoid Shadow Flame. The raid fights are more involved and more complex than they ever were in Vanilla. They just seem easier because gearing up 25 people doesn't take as long as gearing up 40 people, especially with tier gear not being "Oh, damn, we dropped double druid again and all our druids are full, who wants Nexus crystals?" And they also seem easier because Blizzard removed a ton of the grindy aspects of raiding preparation that required no skill at all and only served as a timesink to artificially inflate the lifespan of the raid content.If they added in all the extra grindy content back and cut the gearing speed by 75%, you'd have your "old raid experience" back and you'd hate it.
There needs to be content for both "hardcore" players and "casual" players. I am a bit of column A and a bit of column B; I like a challenge but sometimes I just don't feel like chugging through hours upon hours of bull^&*! to get to a raids final boss, sometimes I just like to slice through my enemies like a hot knife through butter.Whilst I know it would take quite a bit of work I would love Blizzard to implement 10, 25 and 40-man raids. 40-man raids would only be for those players who can take the time out to do them, who can find the people and, most importantly, who want that extra bit of a challenge.I have no argument with the way game is now however, I will not argue if they never change it. I have absolutely no quarrels with trudging through content like *!@#. Why? Because I play video games as a stress relief, I do not play they them to stress myself out more. And wiping heaps of times on one encounter is NOT fun. At all.Besides, if I want a challenge I'll go do some PVP. I never found any sort of PVE encounter overly difficult on any RPG because the only sense of randomness was how much damage they did when they struck you. The moves and the strategies are generally discussed over during the PTR testing, by the time the PTR is down and the patch applied to the live realms the latest raids boss fights already have basic strategies to them. The guilds just need to read them, research them and discuss them with their guild and make sure everyone understands what needs to be done.You want a challenge? There's nothing harder than facing another highly-rated Arena team, or fighting your way out of 10-20 people in a battleground. What makes it harder? The players aren't usually programmed, it's far harder to guess what a player will do in the battleground than it is for artificial intelligence.EDIT: Might I add that there were A LOT of things in the original version of WoW that players HATED. With a passion. 5 minute Paladin buffs anyone? Raids that you finished just barely before the lockout reset because you wiped so damn much? Are you honestly telling me you wanna go back to the Days of Frustration, simply because it was "harder"?
To be honest, the only part of Vanilla WoW I miss is the day to week long AVs. Which was impractical, but loads of fun. Most people who miss the 40 mans never had to organize them - so I tend to be biased and not consider anyone's opinions on those unless they did. And as a mage, I will never personally forget having to go do a special quest in Dire Maul just to get your max rank of Conjure water - and then having to conjure enough for 40 people, even with the assistance of other mages.As for recently, Coliseum should have been released before Ulduar. What a magnificent raid Ulduar is, and by making it second of four tier levels in Northrend (instead of just below Icecrown) Blizzard has shot themselves in the foot.
I dont see why some gamers should be excluded from content just because they dont have as many hours as you to dedicate to the game. There is something very wrong with that mindset.
I started playing WoW halfway through Vanilla. I didn't even hit 60 until TBC, and I didn't hit 70 until the night Wrath was released. My boyfriend was raiding while I was leveling, and I always was so jealous that I was never good enough (or high enough level) to become a part of it.Well, now I am 80. I was the leader of a raiding guild right before Ulduar was released, along with one of my best friends and my boyfriend. My first taste of raiding was amazing. So what if most of the guilds on my server had already cleared Nax. I still did it. Getting tier gear when it was actually good was an amazing achievement for me. I just got my first piece of t10 from Frost Badges the other day. And it felt damn good.The fact is, I'm a casual player. I don't have the time to spend 4 days a week raiding. And I don't care if 3/4 of the server has already done something before I get the chance to.. when I do it, it still has that 'YES' factor to go with it, because I was still able to.I love what Blizz has done to this game. Everyone plays for their own reasons. I socialize, do heroics with friends, and maybe the occasional pug raid when I have the time. I just got my Red Dragonhawk, which I've been trying to get forever. It feels great to not have so much elitism in the game compared to Vanilla. The hardcore players have their hard modes, and the casuals have heroics, normal modes, and everything in between.This game has a gigantic player base. To turn it back to a grind fest elitist party like it used to be (even though I didn't experience it, I had to listen to my boyfriend as he wiped on raids repeatedly) would be stupid. It's got a little bit of everything in it now, and I'm very excited to see where it's headed from here.
This game is suffering the same fate all fundamentally artistic endeavours suffer when they succumb to the throes of corporate greed, it's rotting from the inside out. There isn't any one thing I can point to and say that it specifically indicates that this is happening. I can just feel it.The passion and the inspiration are just gone. I've been an artist my whole life and I've seen this pattern repeat itself more times than I care to recount in the music, graphic art and gaming industries. This game might be bigger than ever but it's a hollow shell of its former self.