Mists of Pandaria discussion

[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.

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

I forgot, you're one of those. We had no shaman tanks in MC. When I made a shaman in BC I wanted her to be a tank. But Blizzard had other thoughts.

On the other hand I well remember the low DPS of protection in MC! No problems holding aggro though. Sigh. I miss raiding in general, and in particular the forty person raids.

[Frag]

I raided as fury mainspec for months for keepers without telling them, they never noticed a difference from full prot, but with Sirshake taunting on cooldown, well...

I don't remember a lack of tanks, Treesh, any idea why my memory doesn't jive with yours?

[Concillian]

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.

Arms. Actually I think what you remember most was me tanking with TUF in UBRS.and holding aggro with sweeping strikes. Note that content was tuned relatively low when a 2H "tank" who is holding aggro strictly by out-DPSing everyone else can easily be healed through.

This was part of Jester's point. The "golden years" are seen through rose colored glasses. The skill level of the playerbase has raised to the point that content like this would be absolutely laughed at. People created challenge by having shaman tank and 2H warriors tank. The talents were not significantly better designed than now, and people frequently ridiculed talents.

Let's go over some of the 31 point talents I remember:
Discipline -- A raid spirit buff. The only one in the game. One raiding priest per raid would be required to take this exciting talent. They werre guaranteed a spot in every raid no matter their skill level, because they had the spirit buff.

Holy (priest) -- holy nova on an 8 second cooldown. umm... how many priests regularly use holy nova in raids now that it's baseline and spammable? About as many who took this 31 point talent in vanilla.

Prot (warrior) -- Shield discipline was a cooldown that increased block by a percentage. Keep in mind bosses hit for 1-2000 and block amounts were double digits and not bassed on %. It also buffed the damage of shield bash the lowest damage ability a warrior had... that was primarily used as an interrupt.

I don't want to pretend that the Poke-Panda-Pack is not some kind of significant departure from the game as it is now, but all expansions have been significant departures. As talents became more focused and more of the irrlevent talents like wand specialization and throwing weapon specialization were eliminated to make room for refined and useful talents like the discipline tree rebuilt around bubbles and rogue trees around specific abilities, then of course there became less "choice". Shockwave, for example, was a great talent that has defined prot warriors since it's introduction. In vanilla talents peoplee would plow through all kinds of useless talents to get to a talent like that. The 'choices' were often which nearly meaningless talent do you take to get the awesome one.

Well, the panda pack gives the good ones and most of the choices are not really that meaningful. I see that as a LOT like vanilla. Most of the choices are not particularly meaningful. Mitigation between a 15 / 5 / 31 warrior and a 20 / 31 / 0 warrior and a 31 / 20 / 0 warrior was not hugely different. Why? Because many of the talent choices had little meaning... just like many of the Panda-Pack talent choices.

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Pokemon inside WoW? Not my thing, but who really cares? If someone else wants to, that's their thing. Why would it bother me if they want to do that and I don't?
Dailies for valor? Who cares? There's a weekly cap. It gives options on how to get that cap. Options are good. Nobody is forced to do them. Raiders can get their cap almost by accident (raiding), so why would any raider really care one way or another?

Let's look to the past from Blizzard's perspective listening to hardcore raiders:
- vanilla and TBC hardcore raiders complained about having to schedule and run farm content to gear up recruits and such. (MC bindings too). You may recall back handed comments like "MC snoozefest" and comments on having to dedicate 1 raid night a week just to attune a few people for T6 content.

What was Blizzard's response? No more attunements & easier recruit gearing via badges... The hardcore community reaction? "That sucks, casuals don't deserve raid gear!" Uhh... they changed it because you didn't like MC snoozefests and now you complain?

- Hardcore 25 man raiders in Wrath complained about having to run 10s and run daily dungeons and the PvP bosses just to "keep up" on badges.

Blizzard's response? shared lockout plus 7 weekly dungeons instead of 1 daily... Community reaction? All I log in for is raiding and then I'm done, I'm bored, this sucks.

- Panda pack is designed to offer alternatives for people to do. Now the game sucks because some of the options are ridiculous? What about challenge modes? It's like the baron run in Tier 0.5 That was a pretty fun challenge. Everyone already tries to complete instances quickly, now you have a leaderboard and can have contests within your guild or server? That sounds better. As I said before, Poke-WoW may be something you're not interested in, but who really cares if someone who is not you is interested?

You have to laugh at some of the reaction the more 'hardcore' have to the Panda-Pack. Blizzard has really done a lot of things due to feedback from raiders. They tried pleasing them, and every time Blizzard did something for them, the raiders would complain about it. Were they supposed to continue being abused for trying to cater to them?

I didn't like the early nerfing of T12 content, but whatever. I think Blizzard is tired of being bashed by the hardcore raiding community over every decision and now they're trying to make the game less about that. How many "hardcore raiders" now are the hardcore raiders of Vanilla? Who really is hardcore anymore?

I may or may not get the Panda Pack, but if I don't it won't be because I don't like stuff I won't do anyway, it'll be because I've been subscribed seven years now, with no significant break or lapse and a game can only be interesting for so long.

To some extent, I see the Panda-Pack as turning the game more Diablo-like than WoW has ever been. Low barrier to entry and lots of options for people who want to do whatever they want. I'd think people on the lounge would be a bit more open minded about that kind of thing, since Diablo games were kinda about creating things that you liked to do with an easy game. Blizzard is kinda doing that in the Panda-Pack, aren't they?

[Treesh]

I forgot, you're one of those. We had no shaman tanks in MC. When I made a shaman in BC I wanted her to be a tank. But Blizzard had other thoughts.

On the other hand I well remember the low DPS of protection in MC! No problems holding aggro though. Sigh. I miss raiding in general, and in particular the forty person raids.

"One of those" what? Horde? You bet. Someone who didn't do things the normal way? Absolutely right. =) One of those people who tend to remember odd and pointless things and then interject them somewhat randomly into conversations? You're right on that score as well. I just don't pretend that what I experienced in the game was the same as what everyone experienced. I do know that I had a ton of fun with the people I was playing with and that more than made up for the problems I had with the game design and "normal" game play. I'm still curious as to what you meant by "one of those".

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Arms. Actually I think what you remember most was me tanking with TUF in UBRS.and holding aggro with sweeping strikes. Note that content was tuned relatively low when a 2H "tank" who is holding aggro strictly by out-DPSing everyone else can easily be healed through.

I do remember you being arms for the more important runs, but there was a night when we needed you to tank some run (could have been UBRS) and you didn't respec out of fury for whatever reason. I remember you not being sure if you'd be able to wing it, but it was fine, both on threat and on healing.

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I raided as fury mainspec for months for keepers without telling them, they never noticed a difference from full prot, but with Sirshake taunting on cooldown, well...

I don't remember a lack of tanks, Treesh, any idea why my memory doesn't jive with yours?

SirShake was also the reason why we had a shaman tank for a little bit of MC as well. =)

[LavCat]

I forgot, you're one of those. We had no shaman tanks in MC. When I made a shaman in BC I wanted her to be a tank. But Blizzard had other thoughts.

On the other hand I well remember the low DPS of protection in MC! No problems holding aggro though. Sigh. I miss raiding in general, and in particular the forty person raids.

"One of those" what? Horde? You bet. Someone who didn't do things the normal way? Absolutely right. =) One of those people who tend to remember odd and pointless things and then interject them somewhat randomly into conversations? You're right on that score as well. I just don't pretend that what I experienced in the game was the same as what everyone experienced. I do know that I had a ton of fun with the people I was playing with and that more than made up for the problems I had with the game design and "normal" game play. I'm still curious as to what you meant by "one of those".

One of those of the faction who had water walking in vanilla.

[Kevin]

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)

While Gnolack was typically deeper prot I would occasionally respec and not tell anyone. The Stormrage first kills of Shazz and Geddon (which I tanked) was done with Gnolack as 31/5/15. So was the first Vael kill which Gnolack also tanked on. So yeah your memory was off. There was a night were Anadrol and I both went 31/5/15 for the MC run and no one noticed.

[Quark]

Are we really debating how tanks specced in the easiest raid instance that existed, while we were a tier behind everyone else and had the Dire Maul gear advantage? MC taught people what a raid was, BWL taught threat and self-survival, AQ taught movement, and Naxx was the first that required it all.

And no, Vael doesn't count, since I always tanked him at the end!

[Jester]

Are we really debating how tanks specced in the easiest raid instance that existed, while we were a tier behind everyone else and had the Dire Maul gear advantage? MC taught people what a raid was, BWL taught threat and self-survival, AQ taught movement, and Naxx was the first that required it all.

Well, a little. But that's just a minor point that we're bickering over.

The big point is, back for the first tiers of raiding, the game was an incoherent mess, relative to what it is now. Top tier talents were useless. Entire talent trees were worthless. Gear was comically itemized. Instances were badly built and awkward to play. Bosses were gimmicky, finicky, and whole classes were trivialized for some encounters. (Firemaw positioning? Melee DPS on Spazzrah?) Entire quest chains were bugged, or went nowhere. Zones of the map were left unfinished, filled with placeholders, or boring desolation. PvP was a life-wrecking grind, and top titles were monopolized by elite farmers who passed the title around among themselves.

Did they really think all this through? Did that have good design reasons for all this? Surely not. It's a learning process, for players and for Blizzard. I thought it was a good game then, and it's a better game now - though our expectations have gone up, and we're getting bored. But I think any concept that this was a well-thought out game back then, and not now? It's what GG and Conc have said, just rose-coloured glasses.

-Jester

[Lissa]

Are we really debating how tanks specced in the easiest raid instance that existed, while we were a tier behind everyone else and had the Dire Maul gear advantage? MC taught people what a raid was, BWL taught threat and self-survival, AQ taught movement, and Naxx was the first that required it all.

Well, a little. But that's just a minor point that we're bickering over.

The big point is, back for the first tiers of raiding, the game was an incoherent mess, relative to what it is now. Top tier talents were useless. Entire talent trees were worthless. Gear was comically itemized. Instances were badly built and awkward to play. Bosses were gimmicky, finicky, and whole classes were trivialized for some encounters. (Firemaw positioning? Melee DPS on Spazzrah?) Entire quest chains were bugged, or went nowhere. Zones of the map were left unfinished, filled with placeholders, or boring desolation. PvP was a life-wrecking grind, and top titles were monopolized by elite farmers who passed the title around among themselves.

Did they really think all this through? Did that have good design reasons for all this? Surely not. It's a learning process, for players and for Blizzard. I thought it was a good game then, and it's a better game now - though our expectations have gone up, and we're getting bored. But I think any concept that this was a well-thought out game back then, and not now? It's what GG and Conc have said, just rose-coloured glasses.

-Jester

Yes, it's a learning curve, but the A team didn't have anyone's shoulders to look over and make sure things were right. The B team had that opportunity and still screwed up. There's a difference when you've got no one else's mistakes to go on where as you have someone else's mistakes and the ability to ask them and still make the same kinds of mistakes. That is where the problem lies. A team had no understanding of exactly where they wanted to go with WoW when they started, the B team knew where WoW was going and had the advantage of seeing what the A team did and probably still had the ability to communicate with A team members to get advice and they screwed up and they're driving away subs across all sectors of the game, hard core and casual.

[Jester]

Yes, it's a learning curve, but the A team didn't have anyone's shoulders to look over and make sure things were right.

Everquest.

The B team had that opportunity and still screwed up. There's a difference when you've got no one else's mistakes to go on where as you have someone else's mistakes and the ability to ask them and still make the same kinds of mistakes. That is where the problem lies. A team had no understanding of exactly where they wanted to go with WoW when they started, the B team knew where WoW was going and had the advantage of seeing what the A team did and probably still had the ability to communicate with A team members to get advice and they screwed up and they're driving away subs across all sectors of the game, hard core and casual.

The game seems to be in good shape. Is that because the A team learned all the good lessons, and the B team just picked them up off the shelf? Or did the B team actually do a pretty decent job, and everyone's just getting bored (and therefore nostalgic)? The internal dynamics of Blizzard are opaque to me. I don't know who did what. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the same is true of you, and all of us.

I do know, having seen people in this industry from the inside, that the things that become the receptacles for blame from players and forums, do not necessarily bear any resemblance whatsoever to the actual problems.

-Jester

[Lissa]

Yes, it's a learning curve, but the A team didn't have anyone's shoulders to look over and make sure things were right.

Everquest.

The B team had that opportunity and still screwed up. There's a difference when you've got no one else's mistakes to go on where as you have someone else's mistakes and the ability to ask them and still make the same kinds of mistakes. That is where the problem lies. A team had no understanding of exactly where they wanted to go with WoW when they started, the B team knew where WoW was going and had the advantage of seeing what the A team did and probably still had the ability to communicate with A team members to get advice and they screwed up and they're driving away subs across all sectors of the game, hard core and casual.

The game seems to be in good shape. Is that because the A team learned all the good lessons, and the B team just picked them up off the shelf? Or did the B team actually do a pretty decent job, and everyone's just getting bored (and therefore nostalgic)? The internal dynamics of Blizzard are opaque to me. I don't know who did what. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the same is true of you, and all of us.

I do know, having seen people in this industry from the inside, that the things that become the receptacles for blame from players and forums, do not necessarily bear any resemblance whatsoever to the actual problems.

-Jester

No, B team has screwed up. It's not nostalgia, it's actually B team screwing up. Look back at my earlier posts about things that have been done wrong, like overtuning things or nerfing too soon. I gave specific examples and everyone seems to be overlooking them.

[Jester]

No, B team has screwed up. It's not nostalgia, it's actually B team screwing up. Look back at my earlier posts about things that have been done wrong, like overtuning things or nerfing too soon. I gave specific examples and everyone seems to be overlooking them.

That's because you're missing *our* point. It's not that the B team has made no mistakes. Of course they have. It's that ALL teams have made mistakes, at every point. Over-tuning and over-nerfing have been constantly see-sawing back and forth. Sometimes they nerf too soon and too hard, other times, they don't nerf quickly enough or deep enough. The game wasn't perfect to begin with, it hasn't been perfect at any point, and it isn't perfect now. So it's no use arguing that there are flaws. The question is whether these flaws are abnormally large, relative to the past experience. I say definitely not.

-Jester

[Lissa]

No, B team has screwed up. It's not nostalgia, it's actually B team screwing up. Look back at my earlier posts about things that have been done wrong, like overtuning things or nerfing too soon. I gave specific examples and everyone seems to be overlooking them.

That's because you're missing *our* point. It's not that the B team has made no mistakes. Of course they have. It's that ALL teams have made mistakes, at every point. Over-tuning and over-nerfing have been constantly see-sawing back and forth. Sometimes they nerf too soon and too hard, other times, they don't nerf quickly enough or deep enough. The game wasn't perfect to begin with, it hasn't been perfect at any point, and it isn't perfect now. So it's no use arguing that there are flaws. The question is whether these flaws are abnormally large, relative to the past experience. I say definitely not.

-Jester

You're totally missing it. I understand mistakes are going to be made, but drastic mistakes, which is what the B team has made, shouldn't. A team wasn't coming from prior MMO experience, they were building things up from the ground up and did a fairly decent job over time with Ulduar being their pinnacle. B team had the ability to use what they learned from what A team was doing and go forward, with some mistakes granted, but they shouldn't have been drastic mistakes. Cataclysm shows that they didn't learn from what A team did right and what A team did wrong, and now they're reaping the lost subscribers because of it (almost 1 Million lost subs from all area with many more potentially on the way). You can say that Cataclysm was good all you want, but 8% of the subscriber base leaving in the first 6 months of the expansion says otherwise.

[Bolty]

You're totally missing it. I understand mistakes are going to be made, but drastic mistakes, which is what the B team has made, shouldn't. A team wasn't coming from prior MMO experience, they were building things up from the ground up and did a fairly decent job over time with Ulduar being their pinnacle.

...what? "A team" came from Everquest with lots of prior MMO experience. Not ALL the developers, of course, but a solid core. Vanilla WoW was f'ing awful compared to WoW of today - nostalgia may make us pine for it, but if they switched back to it now, we'd be quitting in droves.

Oh by the way, "A team" brought us Ulduar, which I'll happily agree was the best raid instance ever made, but they also brought us the raid before it - a rehashed years-old raid - Naxxramas. Some serious innovation there, yeah! Don't even compare this to Ragnaros. Naxx was the exact same fights as before with minor tweaks for 25-player raiding.

It's too easy to point to lower subscriber numbers and say "B team screwed up." There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base. I personally believe it was the drastic difficulty increase that was the single largest reason. Since WoW's release, the game's gotten consistently easier to play in terms of grind investment requirements, time investment requirements, skill level requirements, and so on, and the subscriber base grew accordingly as the game became more accessible. Cataclysm's release was the first moment where this trend reversed, and the subscriber base reflects that.

I still don't understand the ragging on "B team" juxtaposed with the excellent raid encounters Cataclysm has brought us. Conclave of Wind, Al'Akir, OmniTron Council, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Valiona and Theralion, Cho'gall, Sinestra, Rhyolith, Baleroc, and Ragnaros have all struck me as fun new challenges. The problems that people gripe about regarding balance and bugs are miniscule compared to the ridiculously broken mechanics of WoW's past, where whole specs and even classes were just awful.

There is some serious rose-tinting going on in this thread, and I find it disturbing. The fact is that WoW is old, it's old old old, been beaten to death, and we (most of us) are still playing it because nothing out there has found a way to trump it.

[LavCat]

It's too easy to point to lower subscriber numbers and say "B team screwed up." There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base.

My theory is the one million are us nine year olds who left when they killed off Old Blanchy.

[Mavfin]

There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base. I personally believe it was the drastic difficulty increase that was the single largest reason. Since WoW's release, the game's gotten consistently easier to play in terms of grind investment requirements, time investment requirements, skill level requirements, and so on, and the subscriber base grew accordingly as the game became more accessible. Cataclysm's release was the first moment where this trend reversed, and the subscriber base reflects that.

I *completely* agree here. In Wrath, the masses could jump on for an hour, do a heroic or two *with a probable 90% expectation of finishing the instance, despite bad players*, and then could log off for the night. Of course, Blizzard listened to the 'too easy' crowd, and, while many of us personally enjoy doing hard instances with our guilds, the current pugging of heroics in Cata is a nightmare unless you're in gear sufficient to 'carry the derp' as I call it. My personal experience in pugs is that I'm lucky to complete more than 60% w/o having either too much stupid, or just people who can't/won't do what's needed. MoP is returning to the WotLK level of heroics, while giving guilds/groups of friends the Challenge dungeons that are supposed to offer basically heroics that can't be overgeared.

Now, there's some of you in this thread whose whole WoW experience is built around raiding, and you look at everything through that lens. Some of you can look outside that, but, some of you can't, and I'll remind you that there's a LOT more to WoW than just raiding, to the masses that really pay the bills. These are the people that the announced changes are for. These are the people who will enjoy PokeWoW and Pandas. You're not the target anymore. Conc pretty much hit the nail on the head. Why should Blizzard continue to cater to people that most of the time bash them for every decision they make, anyway, (and some of you are here in this thread) and aren't a huge portion of the playerbase, and also, imo, are the type of competitive people who will run to the newest thing anyway, such as SWTOR, which a couple of you that I'm thinking of the most, have already mentioned.

And yeah, some of you need to take off your rose-colored glasses. Vanilla was only awesome because we didn't know any better. Boss mechanics? Pfft. Tank/spank/dispel, 15 people carrying 25. I was there, too, you know. Vanilla was tedious as hell, though we didn't know any better at the time. Some of you call having to farm resist sets, and tons and tons of herbs for flasks every week 'difficulty'. Attunements, too. Not 'difficulty'. Tedium.

I also think the main 'B team screwup' was listening to the 'too easy' people when they tuned the early Cata stuff. They went the wrong direction, and that's why they're bleeding some subs. Sure, I enjoy the difficulty myself, with people I can trust, but, in a business sense, it simply didn't work. Same thing with Firelands. They overtuned it for the masses, and had to nerf it when too many brick-walled. (Why they nerfed heroic modes, I'm not sure. They can let the "I want it harder" people wipe for a couple more months. They love that.) Of course, some of the hardcores had a fit on Blizzard again for that, convincing Blizzard even more it really isn't worth it to try to cater to them at all. MoP is a step back in the direction of WotLK, where WoW was most successful. Of course, I don't expect agreement on this from all of you. Rose-colored glasses are hard to see well through, after all.

Also, as Bolty pointed out, the game is OLD. I've personally been playing since 1/28/2005, and I know some of you were in beta, so, yeah, it's a long time. When something trumps this, people will leave, and some people will just quit because 7 years is a long time, as Conc said that he may or may not buy MoP because it's just been forever, not because he thinks it's bad. Of course, what trumps this will be different things for different people. Some of you are all excited about Star Wars. Personally, meh, but, more power to you if that's your thing. Personally, I await D3, but, the geniuses that Blizzard are, they offered it to me for free if I kept playing WoW, and took a decision out of my hands for me. I don't have to pick one. I can have both. Easy for me, but, YMMV.

[Concillian]

No, B team has screwed up. It's not nostalgia, it's actually B team screwing up. Look back at my earlier posts about things that have been done wrong, like overtuning things or nerfing too soon. I gave specific examples and everyone seems to be overlooking them.

This as opposed to being on Brutallus and one of your 10 Warlocks leaves and you need to recruit another. You can't just pick up any ranged. Shadow priests did crap DPS but brought mana, mages did significantly worse DPS than stacking Warlocks, the DPS was so tight you needed a warlock... The new guy doesn't have enough gear and you need to farm T6 for a few weeks to get him gear while he levels leatherworking.

Yeah, the A-team was peachy.

Not saying whoever is doing things now doesn't make mistakes, as I said, I thought the nerfs came too soon and raid pretty casually (once a week raider and we had about 5 hours of work on normal Ragnaros when the nerfs hit).

There were plenty of rather grevious mistakes made by your so-called "A-team"

If, as you mention, overtuning is a significant fault, almost the entirety of TBC can be faulted. Pretty much All of Kara, T4 and T5 content was overtuned at release. I never got to see most of that pre-nerf because the heroic attunements were tuned so brutally that most of the raiding community was still cycling enough non-CC classes through pre-nerf Shattered Halls with the few people they had who could carry a non-CC class through the instance in time to meet the attunement.

Nobody i saying that whatever team is developing now is faultless, just saying that there was just as much, if not more fault in the past as there is now.

What's clear is that they've given up on absolutely catering to the hardcore players. They still have heroic raids for them, and no matter when they nerf them, someone will think it's too soon, but the new stuff is for the more casual players.

[Quark]

I still don't understand the ragging on "B team" juxtaposed with the excellent raid encounters Cataclysm has brought us. Conclave of Wind, Al'Akir, OmniTron Council, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Valiona and Theralion, Cho'gall, Sinestra, Rhyolith, Baleroc, and Ragnaros have all struck me as fun new challenges. The problems that people gripe about regarding balance and bugs are miniscule compared to the ridiculously broken mechanics of WoW's past, where whole specs and even classes were just awful.

Can I qualify my statements? The raid fights themselves are pretty much at their top shape for the game. At least as I saw in the first Cata tier before I quit again. I find that all the supporting elements have fallen by the wayside, all stuff that is driven by the philosophy and high-level design of the developers.

[Lissa]

You're totally missing it. I understand mistakes are going to be made, but drastic mistakes, which is what the B team has made, shouldn't. A team wasn't coming from prior MMO experience, they were building things up from the ground up and did a fairly decent job over time with Ulduar being their pinnacle.

...what? "A team" came from Everquest with lots of prior MMO experience. Not ALL the developers, of course, but a solid core. Vanilla WoW was f'ing awful compared to WoW of today - nostalgia may make us pine for it, but if they switched back to it now, we'd be quitting in droves.

Oh by the way, "A team" brought us Ulduar, which I'll happily agree was the best raid instance ever made, but they also brought us the raid before it - a rehashed years-old raid - Naxxramas. Some serious innovation there, yeah! Don't even compare this to Ragnaros. Naxx was the exact same fights as before with minor tweaks for 25-player raiding.

It's too easy to point to lower subscriber numbers and say "B team screwed up." There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base. I personally believe it was the drastic difficulty increase that was the single largest reason. Since WoW's release, the game's gotten consistently easier to play in terms of grind investment requirements, time investment requirements, skill level requirements, and so on, and the subscriber base grew accordingly as the game became more accessible. Cataclysm's release was the first moment where this trend reversed, and the subscriber base reflects that.

I still don't understand the ragging on "B team" juxtaposed with the excellent raid encounters Cataclysm has brought us. Conclave of Wind, Al'Akir, OmniTron Council, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Valiona and Theralion, Cho'gall, Sinestra, Rhyolith, Baleroc, and Ragnaros have all struck me as fun new challenges. The problems that people gripe about regarding balance and bugs are miniscule compared to the ridiculously broken mechanics of WoW's past, where whole specs and even classes were just awful.

There is some serious rose-tinting going on in this thread, and I find it disturbing. The fact is that WoW is old, it's old old old, been beaten to death, and we (most of us) are still playing it because nothing out there has found a way to trump it.

Did you try any of those fights in 10 man Bolty or are you looking at it strictly from 25 man? If you tried those in 10 man, you'd have a very different look at those fights. Most of the bosses in Tier 11 were hitting for the same level of damage as was happening in 25 man. If they properly scaled everythings between the two tiers, they would have either; a) set the damage going out to be similar between the two sizes accounting for the loss of healers between 10 and 25 (ie, damage in 10 would be lower than 25 man) or b) required more healers on a similar level for 25 as seen in 10 - 8 to 9 healers per encounter instead of the 5 to 6 seen typically (because bosses in 25 man would have been hitting even harder than they were). You, yourself, mentioned numerous times how easy the 25 man fights were, but did you ever really sit down and see what was going on in 10s?

This is the kind of thing I'm pointing at when I say that B team screwed up. They didn't properly tune 10 man vs 25 man and made it so 25 man was way easier than 10 because of the amount of damage that was being thrown around.

Likewise, I'm in no way nostalgic for smelling pile that Vanilla was when a Warlock was just spamming Shadow Bolt over and over when the optimal build was sacrificing your Sucubus and with Ruin for double critical damage. The other aspect is that Vanilla they, the Devs, were mostly clueless and learning the system. Likewise, a lot of the people that you say came over from EQ weren't EQ devs, but various players that had an inkling of what was going on. And, they did figure things out after about a year of live (when they did re-itemize a lot of the Tier 1 sets, some will recall that I specifically by passed Felheart for Nemsis because I mentioned how badly itemized Felheart was originally).

And simply, how do you account for nearly a million subs going in active in just 6 months of a new expansion when the game was gaining subscribtions up until that expansion came out. Age might have something to do with it, but definitely not everything.

And let's hit Naxx really quick. It made a re-run because not many people got a chance to go through it. Look at how far we got back in Vanilla (and that's because we put too much emphasis on trying to get C'Thun). We might have gotten Patchwerk, Grobbulus, maybe Gluth, Heigen, and maybe Gothik, but we still wouldn't have seen the end of it. Consider that only two guilds, maybe three, actually killed Kel-Thuzad on SR back during Vanilla (DJ and CM). Hell, there were only 6 guilds that got C'Thun on SR. There were a lot of guilds that never saw C'Thun down on SR and there were even fewer for KT, so I can see Blizzard wanting to relook at Naxx, especially when it tied so well into the Wrath storyline. And, looking at the other fights that were from Tier 7, they did a pretty good job with making Malygos and Sartharion interesting (especially with the hard mode mechanics of Sarth).

So yes, I do still stick by what I've said, B team screwed up, they made the mistakes that they shouldn't have.

[Chesspiece_face]

And simply, how do you account for nearly a million subs going in active in just 6 months of a new expansion when the game was gaining subscribtions up until that expansion came out. Age might have something to do with it, but definitely not everything.

They lost a million subs because they made the dungeon content too hard. Players across the board came into Cataclysm and found that the content that filled up 70+% of their game time had become so hair-pullingly frustrating to do that they stopped bothering and, in turn, found that what they had left no longer validated a monthly subscription.

Add to that the fact that the first Cataclysm tier of raids had horrendously allocated loot tables and players, like myself, who played predominantly for raid content were not feeling adequately rewarded for their game time solely from raids.

Players on the other end of the spectrum who would spend most of their time socializing, achievement hunting, or whatever found that flying around the world doing Archeology ad nauseum wasn't rewarding enough to validate their subscription either.

And then we come back to the fact that the dungeon content, the content for either group that would soften the boredom and pull each group through to the next week, just made everyone want to stab their eyes out.

If you want to keep subs in a game like WoW you need to have a good balance between all of these aspects of the game so that when a player gets burnt out on one they can fill their time with alternate activities. When the players are only left with one of those aspects 90% of them will decide it's not worth their money.