Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Quark]

I think the quality is about as high as it has ever been.

The fact that someone can think this scares the hell out of me. Many aspects of this game have been improved. They've done so at a cost of cohesive thought, sadly.

The low-level content redesign is a perfect example. Zones themselves are much improved, each tending to have a fairly good story and quests streamlined. What, you actually wanted to experience it, though? Too bad, halfway through the zone you leveled up yet again and all the quests are now gray.

From what I hear the raiding fights have been nifty - until they got nerfed way too early. I see guilds falling apart because they can't keep good players. There's not enough good players because why should you learn a fight when it'll get nerfed in 2 weeks?

Why bother raiding before the inevitable nerf at all? Just get half your gear through dungeon finder, wait for the complete nerf of content, and then get easy epics to finish off your set. And certainly don't bother spending time in the previous tier raid. It's been made totally irrelevant by badges. (Remember when they said ToC too early and making Ulduar irrelevant was their biggest mistake in WotLK? Oops!)

Talents right now are probably in the best shape they'll ever be, I admit. Too bad they're ruining that in 5.0.

Nothing is thought all the way through, and that is the biggest difference between WoW now and every other Blizzard game.

On the bright side, it appears they found a way to release expansions quicker. They cut 1.5 tiers of raiding from Cataclysm.

[Jester]

The fact that someone can think this scares the hell out of me.

Okay. Why? You say much has been improved. Talents are in good, maybe the best, shape. Raid encounters are well-designed and fun. New areas are better than ever. Apparently ruining all this, to the point where it "scares the hell out of you" that I could think the game is in good shape, you point out two problems.

1) Levelling is too quick for the zone design.

Okay, yes, this is irritating. However, the overall benefits of fast levelling make it worth it for me. Besides, if you want (and I sometimes do), you can finish zones. It means you don't level optimally, but I'm fine with that. Is this a dealbreaker? More like a minor annoyance.

2) They're nerfing content too fast.

Also irritating. But there's always heroic content, for elite guilds. And only the very, very top of the raiding curve finishes, and gets sick of, content quickly. Even if I was still in the raiding game this tier, I can see where Terenas Lurkers are - we're not wafflestomping the content, certainly not on Heroic modes. Also, remember the history of the game, how quickly Illidan bit the dust after Kael'thas finally died? Blizzard has swung several times between bitchin' hard and laughably easy, at least from the high-end raider's perspective. Nihil novum sub sole.

Gear obsoletes quickly, and is available to n00bs. This, apparently, leads you to the "why bother" question, which doesn't concern me at all. I play because I enjoy playing. The shinies are there to help me see newer and awesomer things, not as an end in themselves. Content is the relevance, gear is the enabler. I downright love the idea of the challenge dungeon, where gear is normalized. I've been saying they should do this for years. Thought experiment: If I could press a button, get all the best gear, and block my characters from the content, would I press it? Of course not. But you seem to be suggesting doing exactly that, except the button is labelled "random heroics."

So, am I worried about these problems? No, not particularly. I hope they learn from their mistakes and do better, as always, but are they dealbreakers? Not even close.

-Jester

[Quark]

I said the game lacks cohesion, something Blizzard used to excel at, and gave two specific examples of that.

The leveling experience is hurt because if you want to finish a zone, you take the already too easy experience and make a complete joke out of it. How much of a game is it to two-shot mobs?

As for the "always heroic", did you perhaps miss where they nerfed Heroic modes before even most hardcore guilds had a shot at it? They're not just nerfing normal. Hamlet and a friend made a much better post than I could on this, here.

Melee vs Ranged is another example of lacking cohesive thought anymore. In this expansion, Ranged were given many tools to help them while they were on the move - a seemingly noble goal by itself. However, this ruined the fickle balance between melee and ranged - melee had the downside of having to be in the fray, with long distance moves causing issues, while having the upside of being able to damage during shorter distance moves. They had no upside after this, and melee has suffered for the entire expansion - see the AP buff as Blizzard's "fix". The above was further exasperated by giving casters a legendary.

Rogue's combat tree can be taken as another example. Bandit's Guile is thrown in as some neat sounding ability. However, in implementing it Blizzard failed to take into account how Rogues already work. You have DPS buildup due to combo points. You have DPS buildup due to poisons. And now you also have DPS buildup due to Bandit's Guile. Don't forget to time your cooldowns (already an interesting exercise before) to take advantage of the Bandit's Guile. Wait, you wanted to be valuable when there's tons of target switching going on? Hah! Uh, we'll give you a nuts Blade Flurry to compensate? So you'll be annoyed on one target, suck on 10 targets, but be completely overpowered on exactly two targets.

A stream of abilities and talents that weren't designed fully considering the consequences - no cohesion.

[TheDragoon]

1) Levelling is too quick for the zone design.

Okay, yes, this is irritating. However, the overall benefits of fast levelling make it worth it for me. Besides, if you want (and I sometimes do), you can finish zones. It means you don't level optimally, but I'm fine with that. Is this a dealbreaker? More like a minor annoyance.

I would say it's more than a minor annoyance. Going through the quests and then having out-leveled the zone mid-way through the quests breaks the continuity of the questing. While you note that you CAN finish the zones, I wonder how many people actually do. Personally, I'm more of your mindset so I frequently would finish the zones even if I could skip past them to progress faster, but I think the majority of people just skip on to the next zone, often missing the conclusion of each area.

No matter whether you like to finish it off or just move on, the fact that the quest design doesn't mesh with the XP required to move on from the zone is one of those little details that indicates that Blizzard didn't think through what makes sense (which is to finish the zone with sufficient XP to move on to the next). I think that's the thing that Quark finds concerning.

2) They're nerfing content too fast.

I think that Blizzard has set the bar too high for the normal raiding content in Cataclysm. Prior to the nerfs, a lot of the fights have been too hard for the casual raid group to make good progress on. Heck, even some harder-core groups haven't been able to finish things before they get nerfed. Then, because the content is so much harder than what most people can handle, the fights get super-nerfed, resulting in the trends that Quark noted. Throughout Cataclysm, Blizzard has consistently over-tuned the normal versions of the raids which is pretty frustrating and leads to a lot of burnout on the casual end. Then, when the nerfs are handed down, the hardcore raiders get burned out because they've been spending so much time banging their heads into the wall only to see everything they've accomplished be handed to everyone else on a silver platter.

I wish that the raids were tuned to allow most raids to progress through the raid at a reasonable rate with the Heroic-mode encounters catering to the top-end. Unfortunately, that balance is tough to reach since the difference between fully casual, uncoordinated raiding groups and the hardestcore, top-end raiding guild groups is absolutely enormous. I thought that the increasing zone buff in ICC seemed like a great way to do this as it allowed everyone to make progress as time went on. Of course, if they did this again they should make the buff ramp up a bit faster since I don't think people would be particularly interested in another 6 month raiding tier that starts off so slowly, but the idea seemed to work very well.

I downright love the idea of the challenge dungeon, where gear is normalized. I've been saying they should do this for years.

I completely agree, I think this sounds like a great addition. This is the one thing from the announced content from MoP that thought would be really interesting.

Thought experiment: If I could press a button, get all the best gear, and block my characters from the content, would I press it? Of course not. But you seem to be suggesting doing exactly that, except the button is labelled "random heroics."

You wouldn't push the button and I wouldn't push the button (at least until I got sick of farming the same content over and over looking for the last 2 things I need) but I gather from Quark's complaints that he's been seeing a lot of people who would love to push that button. Also, it's not so much that it blocks them from the content as they can always just wait for the nerfs and then experience the content in a reasonable time-frame (i.e. no banging the head against the wall for 2 months trying to learn the same boss).

[Kevin]

A stream of abilities and talents that weren't designed fully considering the consequences - no cohesion.

Sorry and this is different from how WoW has always been?

I have NEVER seen a time during the life of this game where there wasn't a large portion of people bitching vehemently about talents, content, lore, leveling speed, gear itemization, length of dungeons, gear availability (it's too easy to get, it's too hard to get).

Hunters for example have had MASSIVE play style changes with every expansion sometimes with just mid expansion patches. Same with paladins. Same very likely with most classes. I stopped paying close attentions because well things changed so much all the time with all the classes.

Lissa pointed out "oh and the new racials are overpowered again" which just says that hey everything is the same as it was before the last time there was a new race it was OP. The last time there was a new class it was OP.

You can argue they have had 7 years to learn, but the numbers argue they have. They kept gaining subscribers for 6 years! Show me another game that KEPT GROWING for 6 years? Not staying stable, but GROWING.

I don't recall if it was you or Lissa that talked about how well put together all their other games were. Yeah, that's why D1 had 8 patches while it was a "current game" that made several major balance changes. Tile changes anyone? These boards have stories of "I'm quitting D2 because this last patch RUINED THE GAME! What were they thinking! This breaks everything" How many patches did Starcraft get that completely changed strategies that people used and introduced something else that was completely out of whack?

Blizzard's history clearly demonstrates that they are more than willing to try something new, aren't afraid to break something and re-invent the wheel and usually their changes result in them getting more money and gaining more fans.

The fact that some people have paid ~ $1200 (84 mo * $13 / per month average + ~$200 for the purchase of WoW, TBC, WotK, Cata) is actually pretty astounding. I've quit the game 4 or 5 times and come back and still had fun every time I came back even if I didn't stay. The fact people valued WoW enough to not buy 4 or 5 other games a year or not go to a movie that month, etc speaks a fair bit about how "awful" the game must have been.

From the beginning Blizzard has demonstrated and outright said that they were making the game more and more and more casual and accessible as time went on. They haven't really blinked at any other MMO that came out, despite several of those games being a fair bit better. They managed their inertia. The fact that Diablo 3 actually has them worried enough to bundle it with WoW speaks volumes.



tl;dr summary. I could probably search this very forum and find similar posts to what you just made about this game that are 2,3,4,5,6 years old.

[Quark]

You can argue they have had 7 years to learn, but the numbers argue they have. They kept gaining subscribers for 6 years! Show me another game that KEPT GROWING for 6 years? Not staying stable, but GROWING.

Check your numbers. Only saved by the Cataclysm release, which was quickly reversed. When did they start going down? Oh, around the time B Team took over.

...

I only brought up balance in that Blizzard managed to make rogues too weak and too strong at the same time. Balance is its own discussion, one that both has good results (the gap is smaller than ever) and bad (the obvious weak classes were not fixed between 4.0 and 4.3).

Blizzard's history clearly demonstrates that they are more than willing to try something new, aren't afraid to break something and re-invent the wheel and usually their changes result in them getting more money and gaining more fans.

Again, check your numbers. B Team takes over, subscriptions go down.

[Lissa]

I have NEVER seen a time during the life of this game where there wasn't a large portion of people bitching vehemently about talents, content, lore, leveling speed, gear itemization, length of dungeons, gear availability (it's too easy to get, it's too hard to get).

Yes, but those aspects have accelerated. During Vanilla and tBC, lore was consistent, there was some retconning going on, but nothing that truly detracted from the Warcraft Universe, now...it's like what happened in Warcraft, WC2, and WC3 don't matter anymore. In essence, Metzen has thrown the Warcraft Universe out the window. During tBC, "badges" existed there as well, but they were meant to get you gear equal to the prior tier to get you up to speed quicker (this was necessary after the way Vanilla went were you had to keep running old tiers to get people geared up).

Hunters for example have had MASSIVE play style changes with every expansion sometimes with just mid expansion patches. Same with paladins. Same very likely with most classes. I stopped paying close attentions because well things changed so much all the time with all the classes.

This goes to show how bad it's gotten, the people at Blizzard don't know what they're doing now with these massive swings. Likewise, they continue to ignore facts in other ares and have been hurt by it (WoW losing it's e-sport tag because of how imbalanced PvP is where Mages continue to be good no matter what because of their control abilities.

Lissa pointed out "oh and the new racials are overpowered again" which just says that hey everything is the same as it was before the last time there was a new race it was OP. The last time there was a new class it was OP.

That was Quark that pointed that out... =p

You can argue they have had 7 years to learn, but the numbers argue they have. They kept gaining subscribers for 6 years! Show me another game that KEPT GROWING for 6 years? Not staying stable, but GROWING.

It was growing up through Wrath, now it's declining rapidly. They lost 900k subscribers in the first 6 months of launch of Cataclysm. Next week, they will release their third quarter results (9 months out from Cataclysm launch) and folks think that they will lose another 300k to 500k subs, that means that they will have lost around 10% of their subscribers in just 9 months after a new expansion came out. That's very telling about the direction of the game with you can have 10% of your subscribers leave like that. It should tell management that whoever is in charge of WoW has fucked up royally to cause that drastic a slide in that short of time.

Blizzard's history clearly demonstrates that they are more than willing to try something new, aren't afraid to break something and re-invent the wheel and usually their changes result in them getting more money and gaining more fans.

Trying something new is fine, completely doing things that are just bad when your playerbase tells you as such and you ignore them and they were right will just cost you in the long run (as it's doing now).

The fact that some people have paid ~ $1200 (84 mo * $13 / per month average + ~$200 for the purchase of WoW, TBC, WotK, Cata) is actually pretty astounding. I've quit the game 4 or 5 times and come back and still had fun every time I came back even if I didn't stay. The fact people valued WoW enough to not buy 4 or 5 other games a year or not go to a movie that month, etc speaks a fair bit about how "awful" the game must have been.

Up until Cataclysm, I had minor complaints, but nothing to make me want to stop playing. When Cataclysm came out, the overall tone of the game completely changed. Many things became way too frustrating and when a game hits that, it's time to move on. Prior to Cataclysm, I looked forward to logging on and doing something, leveling alts, raiding, what have you, after Cataclysm, I felt a palatable dread logging in and I logged in less and less until I finally threw in the towel.

From the beginning Blizzard has demonstrated and outright said that they were making the game more and more and more casual and accessible as time went on. They haven't really blinked at any other MMO that came out, despite several of those games being a fair bit better. They managed their inertia. The fact that Diablo 3 actually has them worried enough to bundle it with WoW speaks volumes.

That's fine, except that Cataclysm, at least raidingwise, was the exact opposite and made it less casually accessible. 10 mans were way overtuned (there were bosses hitting tanks in 10 man for the same damage they were doing in 25 mans, there was damage being thrown out at the raid that just as damaging in 10 man as it was in 25 man), some dungeon bosses were stupidly overtuned initially (I'm looking at your Setesh), and some quests were horribly broken and took forever to fix (I'm looking at you Taking Down the Mountain). And it got worse with the troll dungeons Z'G having horribly tuned fights and Z'A being an absolute joke (the fights were hardly changed from the raid version, just fewer adds in some cases or little modifications here and there). The quality went way down in Cataclysm and that's a problem.

[TheDragoon]

Here's my initial thoughts on what I've heard about Mists of Pandaria recently:

New Race: Pandarens
I have been expecting this would happen in the next expansion for a long time so I've had a while to get used to the idea. I think the models look pretty good, though it would be weird to see a bunch of pandas running around. I like that one of their racials helps them level up faster (more rested XP) and it's interesting to see the food/cooking buffs since those will certainly help out all classes. Overall, I was expecting this to happen so I'm relatively neutral to this addition; I don't see this as a particularly great or bad thing.

New Class: Monk
This sounds like a potentially interesting class. It's wise of Blizzard to make them be able to fill any role (tank/heal/dps) since, during the leveling experience, the random dungeons will be 5 monks, more often than not.

The healing role for the monk intrigues me. I'm interested to see how this will be implemented to give the monks a good reason to be hanging out at melee range while still being able to heal people at a range. I think this will be particularly interesting if Blizzard does allow the monks to do some melee attacking in addition to healing. That type of hybrid approach has been completely abandoned in WoW for years, so it would be interesting to see it added back in.

I haven't seen a lot of info on how the tanking or dps works. No auto-attack is interesting though I'm not sure it will really make that big of a difference. I guess the biggest difference is that it will be harder to multi-task while playing a monk since every time you don't hit a button you're losing out on all of your attacks rather than just most of them.

Overall, this new class isn't a major draw to me, though I think it could be interesting to see how it turns out.

New Zones
I think the new zones look interesting. I don't think that they look too horribly different than a lot of the areas that are already in the game. The architecture reminds me a lot of the Night Elf architecture, so even that doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking. Insects as bad guys have already been done (hi Silithid!) though we'll see how some of the other villain races turn out. Either way, this seems like a nice extention of the existing game but it is nothing that is going to completely reinvent the game.

Talents Changes
I agree with Quark that I feel like they've got a decent talent system in place for Cataclysm. I think that a slight overhaul of the existing system would make more sense than completely scrapping it and starting over. In particular, I think that this change is going to make the leveling process a whole lot more boring. Now instead of having something new basically every level, there are going to be more boring level-ups where you don't get any new spells, you don't get any new glyph slots and you don't get any new talent points. Considering how many levels you now have to go through to level up (90!), adding more boring level-ups seems like it will detract from the game rather than add to it.

Pet System (i.e. WoW meets Pokemon)
I think this seems kind of gimmicky. I have actually enjoyed the base Pokemon games because they are nice portable games that I can take with me on planes or other trips. Adding this into WoW means you lose that convenience aspect but I imagine some people will enjoy it. I wonder how this will be integrated into the overall game. Do you have to flip a switch to enable those random battles? Will it be like Final Fantasy or Pokemon where you're running through the world, suddenly your screen flashes and you get teleported into a random pet battle? This just doesn’t really seem like it is going to integrate with the rest of the game particularly well but I guess we'll see. I think the one good thing about this is that if the game actually gives some hints about where to go to find the pets you're missing, that could be handy. It would be nice to have that integrated into the game rather than forcing me to go to Wowhead or some other website to figure out where to go to find new pets.

Challenge Dungeons
I think this is potentially the best thing that this expansion is adding! These will allow dungeons to stay challenging and interesting over time. If this can recapture some of the fun I had running heroics early on in TBC (remember running Shadow Labyrinth and having to actually pull and CC things carefully or you'd get destroyed?!) this could be awesome!

PvE Scenarios
These sound kind of fun, particularly for DPS classes that have such horrible queues for random heroics. Hopefully there's a bunch of them available so they don't get stale/boring too quickly.

Valor Points for pretty much anything
I think this is probably a good thing. It is nice to have a reason to do some things such as daily quests beyond just reputation gains. I wonder big of a difference in points gain there will be between raids, ranodm heroics, daily quests, PvE scenarios, Challenge Dungeons, etc. The actual details of this will determine whether this is a big deal or not.

The Diablo III promotion
At first, I was very tempted to sign up for the year of WoW to get Diablo III for free. I definitely plan on playing Diablo III, so getting that tossed in sounded good. Also, while I don't really think that it is worth paying $12-15 to play WoW, at this point (given my lack of time and burn-out level) the effectively lower amount (due to getting Diablo III for free) per month for the year was tempting. As an added bonus, I thought the Tyrael-like mount looked pretty cool, so the completionist/cool-things-seeker in me was tempted.

However, after I've thought about it a bit more, I continue to have a lack of time to play and I'm not sure I'd be interested in getting into raiding again (unless it were at the very end of the expansion when I could reasonably expect to get to see the content quickly and less painfully than it would be to learn it when it's cutting-edge), so the main two issues that caused me to stop playing are still in effect. If I were to come back, I think the main things I would be interested in doing are:

- Level up my alts
- Go back and do the quests in all of the newly re-made zones that I haven't done, yet
- Do daily quests to get the fire hippogriff (which I think looks cool)
- Do random dungeons with people I know when I occasionally feel like it

All of those could be potentially fun to do occasionally (particularly on weekend mornings when there isn't much else to do) but it's tough to justify signing up for a year if those are the main things I'd be doing.


Conclusion
From the initial information out there, this expansion seems like kind of a mixed bag. There's some stuff that is getting changed that I think works well as it is, right now, and there's some new stuff getting added that I probably don't care about.

[Bolty]

Again, check your numbers. B Team takes over, subscriptions go down.

Sup Quark, missed you 'round these parts. Too much EJ, too little LL!

I would say the declining numbers are due to a couple of things, some of which may be linked to this "B team" taking over.

• Sense of community / world lost. Server transfers changed WoW, obviously. Server communities used to be tighter; people knew each other, every server had its own feel, and players had to get along with others better or else risk ostracization. LFD (and upcoming LFR) groups are notoriously filled with a-holes because there's no need to be civil. Nobody leaves capital cities anymore because there just isn't a reason to sans Archaeology. If we want to go back to the old way, it means taking an hour to form a group and head to a dungeon, so what's the solution?
  
• Badges. The concept was sound: let newer players or alts have a means to gear up enough to tackle the latest raid content, in order to avoid the guild tier stratification, player sniping, and other pains brought about by vanilla/TBC's raid progression system. The downside is obvious: you annihilate the raid progression system, making only the very latest raid the relevant one. This greatly lowers the sense of achievement or progression, when every six months the whole system is reset and you're moving on to the next raid. WotLK's initial model of letting you use badges to gear up to the previous tier's item level was replaced by Cataclysm's model of letting you use badges to gear up to the current tier's item level. This greatly reduces the gear incentive to even bother raiding at all. I don't want to see the system go back to vanilla/TBC levels, but Cataclysm's model is pretty out of whack.
  
• PvP system. The PvP system is fairly sound - PvP should be based on skill, not gear, so getting gear is pretty trivial - but when you mix it into a PvE system, you have problems. We saw this in TBC, when new players / alts simply played PvP to gear up rather than start from the bottom of the PvE progression system. So PvE is forced to use a similar gearing model, or else it'll be ignored in favor of the far easier PvP gearing system. What's the solution here? It's not enough to make a stat (resilience) that's useless in PvE; the main stat / secondary stat gains on PvP gear will eventually be worth it enough to not bother with a PvE grind that takes 10x longer.
  

I don't think any of these are necessarily a "B team" issue. The Cataclysm raids have been pretty awesome, actually. The only real screw-up of the "B team" was Trial of the Crusader. ICC was great - hey, they finally put a boss in you have to "heal to death!" Heroic Ragnaros was the most difficult fight ever made in the game, and even after his 15% health and damage nerf, he's still one of the most difficult encounters out there. We're still fighting unique and interesting boss mechanics. "B team" may have designed these fights pretty well (well, except the overtuned wtfisBlizzardthinking heroic Ragnaros), but are getting orders from on high that not enough percentage of the playerbase is killing them, so nerf away.

My only beef is the total loss of progression feel. Every patch release is a gear reset, and it doesn't matter where you were in progression. BAM, you're on the next tier now. Get to it. Don't worry that you never got to a few bosses last tier. I don't have a solution to this one, because it also means that when the expansion wraps up, you're back to a large portion of the playerbase not getting to all the content, and eventually most players will just get PvP gear instead (like in TBC).

[shoju]

I'm not going to argue my point anymore. I will be moving on in 5.0.

Bolty mentioned something, and while this is slightly OT, I felt the need to post it. From a personal perspective, I have hated the tiers where the number of bosses <10, or the number of raid zones <2, and feel that the "amount" of content in T12 is a problem. Quality is good from what I have seen, but the quantity is a serious problem.

When I first joined Terenas Lurkers we were working in T5 content. We had Vashj and Kael to go, we were 3/5 or 4/5 in Hyjal, and 2/9 in BT. We had enough content to send a night somewhere and work on something, and not interfere with other raid nights. That worked great for the rest of TBC that I was here for.
IN T7, we had plenty of things to do. Naxx, Wings inside Naxx, OS, Maly.
In T8, we had plenty of things to do. Hard Modes, plenty of bosses.
In T9.... We struggled with finding content to fill our desires. We weren't able to get heroic 10m content completely down, so we were bouncing around wildly in that tier working on hard modes, in uld, and killing ToC, and using alts.
T10 worked pretty well for the most part.
T11 worked well.
T12. We are back to having scheduling problems.
T13. I can forsee scheduling problems again, but that is as much to do with its perceived linear nature as it is the lack of bosses.

This problem is probably limited to very few guilds, and I accept that. I accept that our scheduling, and rostering, and allowances towards limited play time present us with challenges that most guilds probably don't have to work through.

The problems with the smaller number of bosses seems to be the real detriment to Lurkers. 1 raid zone isn't too bad if there is a large enough number of bosses, but the 5, 6, 7, or 8 bosses just leaves our raiding style in a tough spot.

As far as MoP is concerned, the only thing that even remotely interests me at all is the challenge raidsDungeons. Not Pandas. Not Monks. Not Pokemon. Definitely not the return to the Horde V Alliance war. Not the lack of a "big bad guy". Not the new "talents". Not the new zones. Which is sad, because I'm in love with all things fuedal / ancient Asia themed.

The game feels more like it was aimed at enticing my 8 year old to play, and not me.

[LochnarITB]

Loch, they do care. They're bleeding subs left and right. Why do you think they're giving people 4 months of WoW if they buy the CE of D3 or that they're giving people D3 if they sign up for the year sub to WoW. Blizzard does care. And the whole reason they're bleeding subs is because the quality has gone way down with this new team.

Of course they care about subs. What I said is they don't care about your sub, as a hard core player. You have hard core players - players who want classes balanced, instances/raids to be challenging but not impossible, gear to be accomplishment not grind, who analyze how well tuned the game is. You have casual players - players who want to have fun playing and killing stuff, gear because they spent time in game, instances they can grab a group for and beat with limited thought or skill. For drawing new players, the pool of hard core has always been much smaller than the casuals. They have burned through much of the hard core pool and would naturally have lost much more as new viable contenders for time hit. They are adjusting the game to draw more from the far larger pool of the casuals. They probably did stumble with Cata, losing more than expected sooner than expecred, but I doubt they are worried. They made the D3 offer just as would any other business when trying to retain income flow from customers that would naturally otherwise be moving on, through no fault of the business.

Warm and fuzzy toons, the Pandas, will draw a new segment of the casuals. The ease leveling will cater to those that don't want to think too much about it. Having been there done that, we see content being skipped leveling (my 20th slot went to a goblin and I'm skipping easily 1-2 bread crumb zones for each zone I level through). New casuals they draw in won't even realize how much is being skipped over. In fact, it might even be seen as a positive. When they do pick up another race/class, now they have at least one or two other "paths" they can level through.

Blizzard is a gaming business. They are good at it. I would bet that they have charted their course well but even they didn't expect the run that WoW has had, and will still continue to have. I am also sure that most of us here would never have expected to have been so wrapped up in this game for so long and all the complaints over the progression are a lament for the love lost. It had to happen. The divorce has come. We can choose to remain friends (continued sub playing casually) or sever all ties and let them keep the kids.

[Jester]

The leveling experience is hurt because if you want to finish a zone, you take the already too easy experience and make a complete joke out of it. How much of a game is it to two-shot mobs?

The levelling game already approached trivial. Nothing out in the world was difficult unless you pushed it to be, and that's still true. Yes, it's gotten faster. But the game has also gotten longer, and Blizzard does want new players to actually hit max level at some point.

As for the "always heroic", did you perhaps miss where they nerfed Heroic modes before even most hardcore guilds had a shot at it? They're not just nerfing normal. Hamlet and a friend made a much better post than I could on this, here.

The question is whether guilds, excepting only the ultra-elite, have sufficient challenges to keep them at the edge of their abilities. Where precisely in the tiering this happens - heroics vs. normals, lower vs. higher tiers, pre-nerf vs. post-nerf, the only big problem is if people run out of challenges. I know you raid in more exalted circles than I ever have, but I've never once run out of challenges in WoW. So, why should it be a huge problem to me that there are nerfs? If me and mine step up our game, we can still take on bigger and better challenges. They're out there to be done. Anyone attending wipe night still has "constructive and useful failures."

A stream of abilities and talents that weren't designed fully considering the consequences - no cohesion.

Right, because WoW has been so famous for how consistently cohesive its classes and talent trees have been. So great, back when tank Warriors specced arms. When Druids were a joke in all specs but Resto, and Paladins were a joke in all specs including Resto.* When Fire couldn't raid, because everything was immune to fire. When warrior gear had spirit on it. Yeah, Blizzard sure thought all that through pretty carefully.

-Jester

*yeah, yeah, holy.

[Lissa]

Loch, they do care. They're bleeding subs left and right. Why do you think they're giving people 4 months of WoW if they buy the CE of D3 or that they're giving people D3 if they sign up for the year sub to WoW. Blizzard does care. And the whole reason they're bleeding subs is because the quality has gone way down with this new team.

Of course they care about subs. What I said is they don't care about your sub, as a hard core player. You have hard core players - players who want classes balanced, instances/raids to be challenging but not impossible, gear to be accomplishment not grind, who analyze how well tuned the game is. You have casual players - players who want to have fun playing and killing stuff, gear because they spent time in game, instances they can grab a group for and beat with limited thought or skill. For drawing new players, the pool of hard core has always been much smaller than the casuals. They have burned through much of the hard core pool and would naturally have lost much more as new viable contenders for time hit. They are adjusting the game to draw more from the far larger pool of the casuals. They probably did stumble with Cata, losing more than expected sooner than expecred, but I doubt they are worried. They made the D3 offer just as would any other business when trying to retain income flow from customers that would naturally otherwise be moving on, through no fault of the business.

Warm and fuzzy toons, the Pandas, will draw a new segment of the casuals. The ease leveling will cater to those that don't want to think too much about it. Having been there done that, we see content being skipped leveling (my 20th slot went to a goblin and I'm skipping easily 1-2 bread crumb zones for each zone I level through). New casuals they draw in won't even realize how much is being skipped over. In fact, it might even be seen as a positive. When they do pick up another race/class, now they have at least one or two other "paths" they can level through.

Blizzard is a gaming business. They are good at it. I would bet that they have charted their course well but even they didn't expect the run that WoW has had, and will still continue to have. I am also sure that most of us here would never have expected to have been so wrapped up in this game for so long and all the complaints over the progression are a lament for the love lost. It had to happen. The divorce has come. We can choose to remain friends (continued sub playing casually) or sever all ties and let them keep the kids.

It's not the hard core players that they're losing Loch, they're losing casuals as well because of improper tuning. Simply, whoever is the one actually in control of the direction of the game screwedup. They've pissed off the casuals by improper tuning and they've pissed off the hard core, cause they nerf the content too quick. This is what you're missing, those in control have screwed up royally and they're losing subs across all groups of players, not just hard core.

[LavCat]

When warrior gear had spirit on it. Yeah, Blizzard sure thought all that through pretty carefully.

Fafner, my warrior, was collecting a set of spirit gear. Then they changed it all to int. She almost quit right there.

[Tal]

So great, back when tank Warriors specced arms.

I don't remember there ever being a time where tank warriors were specc'd arms. I was on Shal and was only used in raiding as a add tank - and usually one of the first adds to die. (I'm thinking so that TD and I could begin our competition for who could be top dps warrior in tank gear THAT night - hint: TD usually won)

When warrior gear had spirit on it.

-Jester

To be fair - almost all the set gear had spirit on it.

[LochnarITB]

They've pissed off the casuals by improper tuning and they've pissed off the hard core, cause they nerf the content too quick. This is what you're missing, those in control have screwed up royally and they're losing subs across all groups of players, not just hard core.

We're never going to agree (surprise!) because our definitions of casual and hard core don't even agree. I believe Blizzard is following the direction they intended and have had coming down the pipe for some time and, even if the losses now are bigger than expected, WoW will draw in enough of the next class of player to remain profitable while they prepare the next e-crack they plan to drop on us.

[Jester]

I don't remember there ever being a time where tank warriors were specc'd arms. I was on Shal and was only used in raiding as a add tank - and usually one of the first adds to die. (I'm thinking so that TD and I could begin our competition for who could be top dps warrior in tank gear THAT night - hint: TD usually won)

I'm thinking about 31/5/15, back when you could get almost everything of relevance in Prot from the bottom of the tree. Back when shield slam was just a funny joke.

-Jester

[LavCat]

I don't remember there ever being a time where tank warriors were specc'd arms. I was on Shal and was only used in raiding as a add tank - and usually one of the first adds to die. (I'm thinking so that TD and I could begin our competition for who could be top dps warrior in tank gear THAT night - hint: TD usually won)

I'm thinking about 31/5/15, back when you could get almost everything of relevance in Prot from the bottom of the tree. Back when shield slam was just a funny joke.

-Jester

I don't remember that either. Never speced arms till Cataclysm.

[TheDragoon]

I'm thinking about 31/5/15, back when you could get almost everything of relevance in Prot from the bottom of the tree. Back when shield slam was just a funny joke.

My emphasis above, that while you could get almost everything there were some things you couldn't get. And perhaps more importantly is that the warriors who spec'd the full protection build were terrible for DPS so for our raids on Stormrage those guys would generally end up being the main tanks and those of us using the 31/5/15 were usually off-tanks, when necessary.

I think my favorite warrior spec was the 0/31/20 fury spec that could do a lot of tanking (I remember tanking a Twin Emperor with that build) but could also toss on a second weapon and go to town as a DPS. Plus it was just plain fun to dual-wield tank ZG with that build.

[Treesh]

I don't remember there ever being a time where tank warriors were specc'd arms. I was on Shal and was only used in raiding as a add tank - and usually one of the first adds to die. (I'm thinking so that TD and I could begin our competition for who could be top dps warrior in tank gear THAT night - hint: TD usually won)

I'm thinking about 31/5/15, back when you could get almost everything of relevance in Prot from the bottom of the tree. Back when shield slam was just a funny joke.

-Jester

I don't remember that either. Never speced arms till Cataclysm.

I remember it. But I also remember Conc tanking as fury. I remember shaman tanks both in MC and even some in Burning Crusade. I remember pet tanks, priest tanks, everybody EXCEPT the tank tanks. I remember a two rogue, two priest group running through Magister's Terrace until we got a shaman in there to tank for us. I remember more non-traditional tanks than traditional tanks though since it always seemed like we were short on traditional tanks. =)

Edit:I almost forgot one of my fondest memories of tanks - the searing totem tank! A resto druid and a resto shaman playing around in Burning Crusade and doing some group quest. The most mana efficient way for us to do it was just let the big voidy looking thing (whatever his name was) throw nasty bolts at the searing totem tank instead of one of us. =) But that really is such a specialized case it really doesn't count, but I still like mentioning it anyway. =D