Were WotLK heroics really all that easy in early WotLK? I only played once everyone was rolling around in Tier 9 or better, which I think skewed the balance a little.
Yeah, they were. Some of the challenge-type achievements in them could be tricky early on, but the mechanics in WotLK heroics were typically of the “just deals some damage to you if you don’t respond correctly”, so they started out only mildly threatening at their best even before you factor in that you could completely avoid them with a moderate amount of effort. Thanks to my really bad luck with tank drops, I got my red protodrake (from every 5-man achievement) while still wearing 4 pieces of tier 6. It’s a clear contrast to BC and Cata heroics, where even the trash is frequently bestowed with some intensely dangerous abilities that you ignore at your peril at any gear level, even after the wave of nerfs that rolled through.
Meh. 90% of WoW’s difficulty seems like “I didn’t know that would kill me.” bullshit anyway. Do 5-mans really need to be all that difficult? Not like you don’t have other options like the raids or the new challenge-mode dungeons. Not sure why you’d play WoW for the challenge in the first place though. Always seemed like a killin’ time kind of game.
When I was raiding, almost all of my annoyance came from two areas:
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The need to hit the keys in a precise order over, and over, and over again and again and again. That really wasn’t terribly fun.
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Poor feedback, as I didn’t always know what was happening. I don’t have a huge computer screen, and with all the fancy effects going on, I generally can’t make heads no tails of what’s going on anyway. Deadly Boss Mods isn’t a crutch, because often I can’t possibly know the boss is about to use some horrible attack without it. The signal gets lost in the clutter. That said, I was a good raider and learned very fast.
ANd while I can understand the worry that simpler talent trees make things too easy… let’s be honest. The talent trees were a joke anyhow. Everybody sues the same cookie-cutter builds because it works. You never had a real choice beyond a handful of talents, and in some cases not even that. They may as well drop that and simply give you a few options as you go. Nobody really needs to fill out a tree with 50 points, because you can’t create that many interesting talents that need careful consideration.
Yeah, MMOs only hold lasting appeal for me when they’ve got challenging content at every scale, ideally even when solo. I just don’t see the point of playing a game where it barely even matters what you do.
WoW wasn’t always in the “killing time” mindset. The vanilla days had the “daily quests” sending you into areas dense with nasty elites, and early BC and early Cata had some dungeon stuff that could make even a well-oiled 5-man work for it. The Wrath model effectively excludes any engaging content until the “heroic” raid point, and even that was dumbed down except for only one or two fights a tier. Even the PVP was more about cycling through an array of massively overpowered abilities and the class that has more of them to spend in a row is the winner by default.
That killing-time philosophy is what results in the time attack mode in MoP being called “challenge mode”. Facerolling your way over content isn’t suddenly a challenge just because you’re doing it to a stopwatch.
That’s true. The clock is considerably less interesting than a more cerebral challenge. Plus if the only way to experience a challenge is the hassle of assembling a raid, that’d be a serious turn off too.
I see two issues myself:
First, it’s bloody hard to give a quality game to as many platyers as WoW has, and the upper tier eats through content at a disturbing pace.
Second, it’s good to have a variety of content. They do tend to corss it up too much. Preferably, i’d liek to see a set of dungeons oriented towards players with too much time on their hands (with heavy damage you need lots of health from top gear to survive), dungeons with complex boss battles, and dungeons with easier or more straighforward bosses. But I also realize that would be a massive amount of content, and at the end fo the day, even WoW may not be able to please everyone.
I can also look from the other end of the spectrum, and see that virtually nobody played the end-game content until Wrath. People simply couldn’t get going, and the changes to the system do make things a hell of a lot easier and more practical. Blizzard has always catered to the average joe or jane over the elite players. That’s why Blizz sells about a hundred million copies of things.
My impression was this is exactly what they’re trying to do with the challenge mode dungeons. They tone down the difficulty of normal and heroics compared to Cata, and give people who want a challenge something to do.
WoW has become a channel for my gaming OCD – I level solo and am guildless, and am basically only playing for achievements and gold.
If I’m still playing when Pandaria comes out, I will probably roll a panda monk just to see how it is, and to make some coin. I doubt it’ll make me want to raid or PvP again, but that’s fine with me – I hated feeling obligated to play.
So, do you just roll a new toon (ex. horde warrior) with the name you want and then when MoP comes out, make a class change?
Roll the toon with the name you want, and then delete it and quickly create the Panda Monk when MoP comes out.
I ‘reserved’ my gnome monk name.
Monkywrench! 
Nah, logically, if they were ripping off Warhammer, then you’d also expect a science-fiction game of the same genre ripping off Warhammer 40K. If Blizzard ever makes something like that, then you’d have a case.
You almost had me there! I already hit reply and was ready to snark the HELL out of you before I came to my senses. Bravo!
I don’t know, I’m the same people who will think Blizzard is really, truly ripping off Kung-fu Panda are probably mostly the same people who thought Warhammer ripped off Warcraft when Warhammer Online came out.
I can’t wait until my master monk, Pandelerium, is up and running!
Too late…
Kwaichang…gone
Masterpo…gone
Masterkan…gone
Well, it did - the gameplay was a dead ringer for WoW, after all.
Well, the gameplay did. But I’m talking about the people that were like “it has Orcs! Warcraft ripoff!”
I’m pretty sure I have seen evidence for some idea-flow going the other way, from the Blizzard games to Warhammer. It’s not like Blizzard is in a position to complain about that, though, given the vast amount of theft that went their way.