I truly think even the most naive gamer knew that Mists was merely a marketing gimmick based off of the movie series,i don't think anyone too kit too serious.
IMO that was a really bad marketing move by Blizzard,i have no idea what the guy in charge or people in charge were thinking,perhaps influenced by their kids or significant other at the dinner table?
I pop into Wow from time to time,by no means an avid Wow player so i don't even remember the xpac titles,geeesh i don't even remember them in my fave games lol.Anyhoot the xpac right before Mists was imo the best AFTER it was fixed up,it was released as a pile of glitched buggy mess.Blizzard was really lazy on quality control,especially considering they have a test server,makes them look as bad as SOE,well nobody could be that bad.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Originally posted by Instigator-Jones MoP was the end for me. I considered the panda content to be a bad move from the traditional dark fantasy vibe, but the addition of pet battles and the dumbing down of class mechanics made my goto MMO just a sad failure. If you remember having to feed your pet as a hunter or taming beasts for their traits, or mixing your own poisons as a rogue, then you'll have known the BEST times in WoW.
because having to click my mouse to mix poison is fun?
You missed the point muffin.. there used to be depth and complexity that made the game interesting and engaging. Instead of expanding on those existing systems Blizzard dumbed them down or removed them. WOW has become a warcraft skinned Farmville.. soon you will be able to play it in a browser.
I enjoyed this xpac for about 6 months then I got bored and quit. All I did was PVP in MOP. I didn't even run 1 dungeon. Just didn't feel like doing the gear grind for PVE also. I am looking forward to the next xpac though. I'll get it once it comes out and play for 6 months or so I'm sure.
Heroic raids were too easy, PvP is an unbalanced CC and burst mess, challenge mode dungeons were the only good thing to come out of this xpac and anyone else who says otherwise is delusional.
You hit the nail on the head for me. I leveled to max level questing and doing dungeons and overall was enjoying myself. After hitting 90 and realizing my future was little more than doing literally 3 hours of daily quests a day it was all downhill from there. I think I lasted another week after that before I quit. My choices were to either grind 3 hours of daily quests a day or get the feeling that I wasn't doing what I needed to do to progress my character and I wasn't going to accept either of those outcomes. Even after quitting I kept an eye on the game just to find out that they nerfed PvP gear to the point where it was better to just wear PvE gear in PvP, which is a slap in the face to WoW's PvP community.
I resubbed a while back due to lack of other good MMO's out there right now and I'll admit that Timeless Isle is pretty fun, but it's just too little, too late. I'll probably end up running around for another week or so then cancelling until WoD when they wipe the slate clean and everyone's on equal footing again.
About pandaren : If you don't like it, you don't like it but don't say that you know better than blizzard what their fantasy world should have or not have. It is "their" fantasy world, "their" dream, not "your", what right do you have to tell them what they should or should not add in their fantasy world? who the hell are you to tell them that something in "their" fantasy world is a joke? i don't like twilight series but i don't go about writing "i don't like twilight at all" whenever the chance occurs, that is immature and so is writing : I hate pandas. Not real ones, mind you, just the “we want your ten year old” kind born on the back of flying turtles. now let me write the following :
"Quality of article writers in mmorpg.com is just going downhill everyday. looks like even a brat who can write a few words now gets paid to write crap here."
what do you think of it? that one above in red is the demonstration of immaturity of someone who can't accept that mmorpg.com has their own procedure and preferences when they choose article writers and mmorpg.com has the right to do what they think is best for their website and most definitely mmorpg.com won't listen to someone disgruntled who thinks that s/he knows everything. Same is with Blizzard and Warcraft.
Get it? Simple example and simple logic.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
In short, sub numbers demonstrate that Blizzard stll does much more good moves then bad ones. Despite my prefference maybe goes to froozen lands of Wotlk, I loved all expansions, including Cata and MOP. Such reconstructuring of some world have never ever happened in any game. And probably never will. Also incredible under sea areas, another unique feature of Wow. Incredible work, flying all over known areas of past, ... Pandas are very fun to play and lore was present loooong before Kung Fu panda came out.
Players decreased? Yes. I see this as something completely NORMAL. As in life nothing goes at all times only up. Besides never been so many good and (mostly) bad games out there as nowadays. I love Wow, Swtor, ... as I might love pizza ... but I can not eat only pizza for 20 years every day 5 times per day ... and still enjoy it as first day. Impossible. We all need some change. To return later with fresh wish to enjoy again pizza.
As already said, Wow and Swtor are only games in the world I can immagine to play them even after 10 or 20 years. But will for sure try also other "food" in this travelling. :-)
Butchering and dumbing down in MoP far attracted me away from WoW more then anything. The expansion doesn't sound like its attempting to remedy any of that and seems like they don't get it at all. "People like Vanilla Warcraft? Better give them tribute to old warcraft!" I just feel like they don't get it at all. Pandas didn't bother me at all, they were in Warcraft 3, and it wasn't a bother there. The part people seem to focus much (Pandas) seems so trivial to slaughtering the skill tree and further stupifying every class and making it more and more about gear as player skill diminished greatly in its 'need'.
Mists of Pandora failed for me completely in its choice of mechanics and the whole 'everyone should experience everything and be handed everything' mentality. The desire to appeal for casuals is HURTING YOU blizzard, not just from hardcore players but from CASUALS THEMSELVES. Even the most simple minded person will get bored doing repetative things and 'having it all' given to them.
The setting and pandas didn't bother me at all. The only real element outside their horrible design choices with character skills/abilities/rotations/progression was I feel the general lack of an 'appealing' villain, something to tease you and make you really want to 'work to beat him' in the end. TBC you wanted to reach illidan and fight him. Wotlk, to take on Arthas was such a lofty goal you couldn't wait to reach. Cataclysm, as much slack as it has it still felt a sense of excitement seeing such an intimidating enemy to verse (Even if the fight was lack luster in the end). MoP just failed horribly with such a 'phoned in' feeling and just not epic 'big boss'.
TLDR: MoP theme itself and world wasn't bad, perhaps a bit to much asian theme to be ALL there was but still enjoyable. It was the terrible design choices dumbing down the games like the talent tree and over simplifying everything that made MoP a very poor expansion and bad direction for an old MMo.
TBC felt like it took steps forward with a few stumbles back... from there it felt as if there were far more steps back then forward and truthfully, MoP I feel its 'good' elements are just practically invisible compared to many of the other elements that set the game far back.
I liked MoP as a whole. I have to agree with the article though. It had it's failings. Really only two things I didn't like about MoP, dailies and LFR. I didn't enough dailies that my characters all still have like 10,000+ lesser charms lol. LFR wasn't really the problem, it was the players and mechanics in them. Sometimes you would be teamed up with people that didn't speak the same language, and some people would have to end up translating (good thing I know Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French lol). In LFR though, you could tell people exactly what to do, and they still wouldn't do it. As someone that prides himself on knowing every fight and mechanic, it irked me to no end, especially when you explain a fight 5 times and still people don't listen.
MoP did do a lot of new and fun things. The Legendary questline was an enjoyable storyline that kept me wanting to do more, and the loot you received was well worth the effort. I agree that Jade Forest was the best zone in the entire expansion. It seemed like Blizzard spent 50% of their time making that zone, then about 10% making the other zones, and 40% making dungeons and raids. Another thing I really liked was the graphics in MoP. On higher settings it was a beautiful (or terrifying) place. I can remember the first time going to the Isle of Thunder with my guildmates and thinking to myself, this has to be the best ambiance in the entire game. The storyline as a whole was great in MoP, never has Blizzard made me want to kill someone so badly, or fight so hard.
I believe several classes did get "dumbed down" over the years, but there are still a few that are exciting. I personally like my Feral Druid and Protection Warrior. I find myself using more than just the usual 4-5 button rotations that many classes have come to. Feral Druid is especially fun, and I use more than just my main hotbar in every fight.
Overall it was a good expansion, but looking through rose-colored goggles (engineering ftw!), The Burning Crusade was still the best, maybe that's why we're returning to Outland in the next expansion. I've been playing for over 9 years now, with only a few months of breaks in between, and Warlords of Draenor has me pumped up for the next chapter in the World of Warcraft.
I just bought MoP from the Blizzard store for $10. I'll probably buy a month of game time for Christmas vacation. Hopefully it's better than Cataclysm. I don't think that's asking too much.
It is. I only played it for about 4 weeks though 2 weeks of leveling, and 2 weeks of dailies Same old same.
Agree with many here, Cata and MoP spoiled WoW. It was a great game before those 2 expansions. Unfortunately due to those expansions I'm not sure if I can be bothered to endure them to get to the new one when it releases.
Adding stupid kung-fu pandas was a mistake. Adding a boring class and then utterly ignoring it was a mistake. PvP has literally been the worst ever. If WoD isn't GREAT, has much higher focus on PvP, never mentions pandas again, then i'd say the game has a chance. Hopefully with GhostCrawler gone we can get some fresh change. Or worse change possibly, guess we'll see.
Originally posted by neosparkk Adding stupid kung-fu pandas was a mistake. Adding a boring class and then utterly ignoring it was a mistake. PvP has literally been the worst ever. If WoD isn't GREAT, has much higher focus on PvP, never mentions pandas again, then i'd say the game has a chance. Hopefully with GhostCrawler gone we can get some fresh change. Or worse change possibly, guess we'll see.
This post is laughable at best. No need to elaborate with someone so far out of reality.
" If WoW isn't Great, has much higher focus on PvP, never mentions pandas gain, the I'd say the game has a chance."
WTF are you smoking. WoW still has more subscribers then any MMO period, but in your mind it has a chance. LOL
The increase of CC for ALL classes. I understand they wanted to provide each class with a decent CC kit, but they went overboard.
The ridiculous burst. Maybe into toned down now, I don't know, but it was possible for warriors and hunters to take somebody from 100 to 0 in the span of a few seconds, even against full resilience targets.
And yes, the dailies also sucked balls. I'm a PvPer. Dailies actually increase the chance of world pvp which I enjoy. But screw those dailies. I'd rather run dungeons any day.
Oh please, this whole Pandaren hating thing needs to die. The game was never mature. It has talking cows, talking space cows and races with comically long ears as playable races, and all sorts of childish races and NPCs. Yet people ranted and raved over Pandaren, who were highly requested and is now a hugely popular race.
I just don't get it, all of WoWs quests and achievements and raids reference childish pop culture. The game doesn't take itself seriously at all, and yet there are people getting angry about the inclusion of another talking animal race (not even the first, or even the 10th animal race to grace the game) simply because it is similar to an animated film. I think that is the epitome of childishness. Its like they all suddenly hit puberty and realised that they were playing a game that was targeting people of all ages, and now are trying to act tough and so mature by acting like a spoilt brat.
Personally I think the Pandaren fit the world well, and made a nice addition with the inclusion of an Asian themed continent. People consider Everquest 2 to be a mature MMO, and yet that game had a talking panda race (the Hua Mein) long before World of Warcraft.
The increase of CC for ALL classes. I understand they wanted to provide each class with a decent CC kit, but they went overboard.
The ridiculous burst. Maybe into toned down now, I don't know, but it was possible for warriors and hunters to take somebody from 100 to 0 in the span of a few seconds, even against full resilience targets.
And yes, the dailies also sucked balls. I'm a PvPer. Dailies actually increase the chance of world pvp which I enjoy. But screw those dailies. I'd rather run dungeons any day.
From a PvP perspective I 100% agree. CC has gotten out of hand, and diminishing returns seems to have been toned down. I can seriously get chain feared for nearly a whole minute before I become immune. If you alternate between CC you can keep someone locked down indefinitely. They need to make the CC removal trinket give 20-30 seconds immunity afterwards I think.
The burst isn't so bad with the arena gear on. Burst builds don't work that great in arenas at the moment, and generally die before you do as long as you keep some pressure on them.
I agree with the article about the Jade Forest being the star of the expansion. Moving to the farming valley afterwards was very jarring. They should have had that as the final zone after you had finished the story regarding the Shado-Pan and the Klaxxi.
Oh please, this whole Pandaren hating thing needs to die. The game was never mature. It has talking cows, talking space cows and races with comically long ears as playable races, and all sorts of childish races and NPCs. Yet people ranted and raved over Pandaren, who were highly requested and is now a hugely popular race.
Even blizz admitted that "add in pandaren class was more controversial then they were expecting".
Worgen model is also childish, try to remember old worgen model it was much more dark an evil compared to this one smiling cat-dog creature we have right now.
LFR if I do it I feel stupid, if not I feel stupid...
Only good thing from MoP is FLEX. So yeah whole expansion sucked space cow t**s...
BC ~ Illidan {Demon} : Cool races, not amazing, but cool. Flight.
Wrath of The Lich King ~ Arthas {Lich} : Hero Class, new mechanics.
Cataclysm ~ Dragon : More shiny mechanics. Vash'Jir (?) was pretty fun.
Mists of Pandaria ~ N/A : Pandas.
---- Certainly I was not the only one questioning sanity here.
N/A? The bad guys in Pandaria were the Sha, Y'Shaarj (old god, Garrosh steals his heart which was manifesting the Sha) and Garrosh Hellscream, the warchief of the Horde, who was a much better villain than Illidan because people actually cared about stopping him.
New features? Flex raids, skirmishes, pet battles and collection, farming plots.
Pandaria was a better expansion than Cata, and nearly on par with Wrath, but people just want to act cool and hate on Pandas, which is silly when you look at the other completely ridiculous things in World of Warcraft that have been there from the start.
I mean the game started out with a fat pig princess wearing a mini skirt and a bra in Maraudon. But those Pandas just took it too far! Now this game has no credibility!
Dallies have become just about everyone's bane. They are simply a lazy and thoughtless approach to design. Which would pretty much describe much that his Divine Devness Ghostcrawler came up with over the last while. Perhaps now that he has left Blizzard, they can get back to a game thats not just paint by numbers.
I have four 90's at this point (warrior, rogue, DK, hunter) and timeless isle allowed me to gear them up for the next expansion. But I'm on vacation now. I have very little interest in raids (people howling at you because you don't know a fight, the first time through tends to be annoying... ^^). So timeless isle was a good opportunity for semi decent gear for once.
Lets hope that WoD can salvage at least some of what made WoW such a good game, during some of its rise to fame.
It is sad that WoW has gone down the decline it has, but it was inevitable. People bask in their own glory and then start to believe they know better, this was the hubris of the Blizzard developers and it was a beast with an immense ego.
I started as a vanilla WoW closed beta tester and the emphasis was on having fun, this was a transition from EQ when Sony stopped listening to their players and the WoW developers were focused on taking what was good about about MMOs and stripping out what was bad about MMOs and the focus was on having fun, having meaningful character development.
It was great working with Blizzard as a beta tester through vanilla and the first two expansions but Cataclysm was a disaster and no matter how much you explained in detail the problems with it they just refused to listen. I gave up after finishing the first tier of raid content once they had announced Mists and the drooling idiot character development system I explained that I expect more depth from an MMO than I do from a console game and Blizzard was turning WoW into a console level game.
WoW lost it's wonder, in order to appeal to more people they dumbed the game too far, made too many compromises to get in the console players, the FPS (PvPers) and the massive audience Blizzard had over the years. It was too much, it was not realistic to create such a diverse product which met the demands of so many demographics. One after the other Blizzard compromised their own commandments when it came to having fun. What was fun? To a console player or FPSer the definition is very different to a traditional MMO player.
WoW was once like a hobby game store, it was a boutique that knew it's market well, evolved and catered for it well. It turned into ToysRus, it's scope was wide and had to cater to many different type of people. It is basically gone from hand crafted specialist good to cheap imported plastic mass produced products from China. It has engulfed their mindset, their focus was to make money, not to make a great game that if was successful would make a lot of money, as is the normal reward for success.
That same line of thinking also seeped into their D3 design and it also met with disaster. Your emphasis must be to make a great game, even if your only objective is to make money. If making money interferes with the design process then your product is going to be a failure before it has left the design table. Dumbing WoW down was a design change built on greed alone.
"If Pandas weren't enough to turn the returning player off, the literal 1-2-3-4 of combat might have."
So, how many MMOs being non-twitch/action based are not "1-2-3-4" ? And how can you change a 1-2-3-4 system to anything else? That was a bit of an odd statement.
That aside, I quite enjoy the Monk class. Though for zones I am still more of a WotLK person.
WoW isn't what is was before, and it never will be. As are all the other "WoW-like-in-combat-design-MMOs" (not using "clone" on purpose). Having 3 or 4 hotbars with actions you only use once a month or don't understand isn't really friendly to a returnee or a newcomer, so what do people expect will happen over time? Unless it is some sort of elitist thinking of "I know and I don't care if anyone else does or not".
Comments
I truly think even the most naive gamer knew that Mists was merely a marketing gimmick based off of the movie series,i don't think anyone too kit too serious.
IMO that was a really bad marketing move by Blizzard,i have no idea what the guy in charge or people in charge were thinking,perhaps influenced by their kids or significant other at the dinner table?
I pop into Wow from time to time,by no means an avid Wow player so i don't even remember the xpac titles,geeesh i don't even remember them in my fave games lol.Anyhoot the xpac right before Mists was imo the best AFTER it was fixed up,it was released as a pile of glitched buggy mess.Blizzard was really lazy on quality control,especially considering they have a test server,makes them look as bad as SOE,well nobody could be that bad.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
You missed the point muffin.. there used to be depth and complexity that made the game interesting and engaging. Instead of expanding on those existing systems Blizzard dumbed them down or removed them. WOW has become a warcraft skinned Farmville.. soon you will be able to play it in a browser.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
You hit the nail on the head for me. I leveled to max level questing and doing dungeons and overall was enjoying myself. After hitting 90 and realizing my future was little more than doing literally 3 hours of daily quests a day it was all downhill from there. I think I lasted another week after that before I quit. My choices were to either grind 3 hours of daily quests a day or get the feeling that I wasn't doing what I needed to do to progress my character and I wasn't going to accept either of those outcomes. Even after quitting I kept an eye on the game just to find out that they nerfed PvP gear to the point where it was better to just wear PvE gear in PvP, which is a slap in the face to WoW's PvP community.
I resubbed a while back due to lack of other good MMO's out there right now and I'll admit that Timeless Isle is pretty fun, but it's just too little, too late. I'll probably end up running around for another week or so then cancelling until WoD when they wipe the slate clean and everyone's on equal footing again.
About pandaren : If you don't like it, you don't like it but don't say that you know better than blizzard what their fantasy world should have or not have. It is "their" fantasy world, "their" dream, not "your", what right do you have to tell them what they should or should not add in their fantasy world? who the hell are you to tell them that something in "their" fantasy world is a joke? i don't like twilight series but i don't go about writing "i don't like twilight at all" whenever the chance occurs, that is immature and so is writing : I hate pandas. Not real ones, mind you, just the “we want your ten year old” kind born on the back of flying turtles. now let me write the following :
"Quality of article writers in mmorpg.com is just going downhill everyday. looks like even a brat who can write a few words now gets paid to write crap here."
what do you think of it? that one above in red is the demonstration of immaturity of someone who can't accept that mmorpg.com has their own procedure and preferences when they choose article writers and mmorpg.com has the right to do what they think is best for their website and most definitely mmorpg.com won't listen to someone disgruntled who thinks that s/he knows everything. Same is with Blizzard and Warcraft.
Get it? Simple example and simple logic.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
In short, sub numbers demonstrate that Blizzard stll does much more good moves then bad ones. Despite my prefference maybe goes to froozen lands of Wotlk, I loved all expansions, including Cata and MOP. Such reconstructuring of some world have never ever happened in any game. And probably never will. Also incredible under sea areas, another unique feature of Wow. Incredible work, flying all over known areas of past, ... Pandas are very fun to play and lore was present loooong before Kung Fu panda came out.
Players decreased? Yes. I see this as something completely NORMAL. As in life nothing goes at all times only up. Besides never been so many good and (mostly) bad games out there as nowadays. I love Wow, Swtor, ... as I might love pizza ... but I can not eat only pizza for 20 years every day 5 times per day ... and still enjoy it as first day. Impossible. We all need some change. To return later with fresh wish to enjoy again pizza.
As already said, Wow and Swtor are only games in the world I can immagine to play them even after 10 or 20 years. But will for sure try also other "food" in this travelling. :-)
Butchering and dumbing down in MoP far attracted me away from WoW more then anything. The expansion doesn't sound like its attempting to remedy any of that and seems like they don't get it at all. "People like Vanilla Warcraft? Better give them tribute to old warcraft!" I just feel like they don't get it at all. Pandas didn't bother me at all, they were in Warcraft 3, and it wasn't a bother there. The part people seem to focus much (Pandas) seems so trivial to slaughtering the skill tree and further stupifying every class and making it more and more about gear as player skill diminished greatly in its 'need'.
Mists of Pandora failed for me completely in its choice of mechanics and the whole 'everyone should experience everything and be handed everything' mentality. The desire to appeal for casuals is HURTING YOU blizzard, not just from hardcore players but from CASUALS THEMSELVES. Even the most simple minded person will get bored doing repetative things and 'having it all' given to them.
The setting and pandas didn't bother me at all. The only real element outside their horrible design choices with character skills/abilities/rotations/progression was I feel the general lack of an 'appealing' villain, something to tease you and make you really want to 'work to beat him' in the end. TBC you wanted to reach illidan and fight him. Wotlk, to take on Arthas was such a lofty goal you couldn't wait to reach. Cataclysm, as much slack as it has it still felt a sense of excitement seeing such an intimidating enemy to verse (Even if the fight was lack luster in the end). MoP just failed horribly with such a 'phoned in' feeling and just not epic 'big boss'.
TLDR: MoP theme itself and world wasn't bad, perhaps a bit to much asian theme to be ALL there was but still enjoyable. It was the terrible design choices dumbing down the games like the talent tree and over simplifying everything that made MoP a very poor expansion and bad direction for an old MMo.
TBC felt like it took steps forward with a few stumbles back... from there it felt as if there were far more steps back then forward and truthfully, MoP I feel its 'good' elements are just practically invisible compared to many of the other elements that set the game far back.
I liked MoP as a whole. I have to agree with the article though. It had it's failings. Really only two things I didn't like about MoP, dailies and LFR. I didn't enough dailies that my characters all still have like 10,000+ lesser charms lol. LFR wasn't really the problem, it was the players and mechanics in them. Sometimes you would be teamed up with people that didn't speak the same language, and some people would have to end up translating (good thing I know Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French lol). In LFR though, you could tell people exactly what to do, and they still wouldn't do it. As someone that prides himself on knowing every fight and mechanic, it irked me to no end, especially when you explain a fight 5 times and still people don't listen.
MoP did do a lot of new and fun things. The Legendary questline was an enjoyable storyline that kept me wanting to do more, and the loot you received was well worth the effort. I agree that Jade Forest was the best zone in the entire expansion. It seemed like Blizzard spent 50% of their time making that zone, then about 10% making the other zones, and 40% making dungeons and raids. Another thing I really liked was the graphics in MoP. On higher settings it was a beautiful (or terrifying) place. I can remember the first time going to the Isle of Thunder with my guildmates and thinking to myself, this has to be the best ambiance in the entire game. The storyline as a whole was great in MoP, never has Blizzard made me want to kill someone so badly, or fight so hard.
I believe several classes did get "dumbed down" over the years, but there are still a few that are exciting. I personally like my Feral Druid and Protection Warrior. I find myself using more than just the usual 4-5 button rotations that many classes have come to. Feral Druid is especially fun, and I use more than just my main hotbar in every fight.
Overall it was a good expansion, but looking through rose-colored goggles (engineering ftw!), The Burning Crusade was still the best, maybe that's why we're returning to Outland in the next expansion. I've been playing for over 9 years now, with only a few months of breaks in between, and Warlords of Draenor has me pumped up for the next chapter in the World of Warcraft.
It is. I only played it for about 4 weeks though
2 weeks of leveling, and 2 weeks of dailies 
Same old same.
Agree with many here, Cata and MoP spoiled WoW. It was a great game before those 2 expansions. Unfortunately due to those expansions I'm not sure if I can be bothered to endure them to get to the new one when it releases.
This post is laughable at best. No need to elaborate with someone so far out of reality.
" If WoW isn't Great, has much higher focus on PvP, never mentions pandas gain, the I'd say the game has a chance."
WTF are you smoking. WoW still has more subscribers then any MMO period, but in your mind it has a chance. LOL
Some things I did not enjoy in this expansion...
The increase of CC for ALL classes. I understand they wanted to provide each class with a decent CC kit, but they went overboard.
The ridiculous burst. Maybe into toned down now, I don't know, but it was possible for warriors and hunters to take somebody from 100 to 0 in the span of a few seconds, even against full resilience targets.
And yes, the dailies also sucked balls. I'm a PvPer. Dailies actually increase the chance of world pvp which I enjoy. But screw those dailies. I'd rather run dungeons any day.
Oh please, this whole Pandaren hating thing needs to die. The game was never mature. It has talking cows, talking space cows and races with comically long ears as playable races, and all sorts of childish races and NPCs. Yet people ranted and raved over Pandaren, who were highly requested and is now a hugely popular race.
I just don't get it, all of WoWs quests and achievements and raids reference childish pop culture. The game doesn't take itself seriously at all, and yet there are people getting angry about the inclusion of another talking animal race (not even the first, or even the 10th animal race to grace the game) simply because it is similar to an animated film. I think that is the epitome of childishness. Its like they all suddenly hit puberty and realised that they were playing a game that was targeting people of all ages, and now are trying to act tough and so mature by acting like a spoilt brat.
Personally I think the Pandaren fit the world well, and made a nice addition with the inclusion of an Asian themed continent. People consider Everquest 2 to be a mature MMO, and yet that game had a talking panda race (the Hua Mein) long before World of Warcraft.
From a PvP perspective I 100% agree. CC has gotten out of hand, and diminishing returns seems to have been toned down. I can seriously get chain feared for nearly a whole minute before I become immune. If you alternate between CC you can keep someone locked down indefinitely. They need to make the CC removal trinket give 20-30 seconds immunity afterwards I think.
The burst isn't so bad with the arena gear on. Burst builds don't work that great in arenas at the moment, and generally die before you do as long as you keep some pressure on them.
I agree with the article about the Jade Forest being the star of the expansion. Moving to the farming valley afterwards was very jarring. They should have had that as the final zone after you had finished the story regarding the Shado-Pan and the Klaxxi.
Vanilla ~ Dragons : Introduction
BC ~ Illidan {Demon} : Cool races, not amazing, but cool. Flight.
Wrath of The Lich King ~ Arthas {Lich} : Hero Class, new mechanics.
Cataclysm ~ Dragon : More shiny mechanics. Vash'Jir (?) was pretty fun.
Mists of Pandaria ~ N/A : Pandas.
---- Certainly I was not the only one questioning sanity here.
Even blizz admitted that "add in pandaren class was more controversial then they were expecting".
Worgen model is also childish, try to remember old worgen model it was much more dark an evil compared to this one smiling cat-dog creature we have right now.
LFR if I do it I feel stupid, if not I feel stupid...
Only good thing from MoP is FLEX. So yeah whole expansion sucked space cow t**s...
N/A? The bad guys in Pandaria were the Sha, Y'Shaarj (old god, Garrosh steals his heart which was manifesting the Sha) and Garrosh Hellscream, the warchief of the Horde, who was a much better villain than Illidan because people actually cared about stopping him.
New features? Flex raids, skirmishes, pet battles and collection, farming plots.
Pandaria was a better expansion than Cata, and nearly on par with Wrath, but people just want to act cool and hate on Pandas, which is silly when you look at the other completely ridiculous things in World of Warcraft that have been there from the start.
I mean the game started out with a fat pig princess wearing a mini skirt and a bra in Maraudon. But those Pandas just took it too far! Now this game has no credibility!
Dallies have become just about everyone's bane. They are simply a lazy and thoughtless approach to design. Which would pretty much describe much that his Divine Devness Ghostcrawler came up with over the last while. Perhaps now that he has left Blizzard, they can get back to a game thats not just paint by numbers.
I have four 90's at this point (warrior, rogue, DK, hunter) and timeless isle allowed me to gear them up for the next expansion. But I'm on vacation now. I have very little interest in raids (people howling at you because you don't know a fight, the first time through tends to be annoying... ^^). So timeless isle was a good opportunity for semi decent gear for once.
Lets hope that WoD can salvage at least some of what made WoW such a good game, during some of its rise to fame.
It is sad that WoW has gone down the decline it has, but it was inevitable. People bask in their own glory and then start to believe they know better, this was the hubris of the Blizzard developers and it was a beast with an immense ego.
I started as a vanilla WoW closed beta tester and the emphasis was on having fun, this was a transition from EQ when Sony stopped listening to their players and the WoW developers were focused on taking what was good about about MMOs and stripping out what was bad about MMOs and the focus was on having fun, having meaningful character development.
It was great working with Blizzard as a beta tester through vanilla and the first two expansions but Cataclysm was a disaster and no matter how much you explained in detail the problems with it they just refused to listen. I gave up after finishing the first tier of raid content once they had announced Mists and the drooling idiot character development system I explained that I expect more depth from an MMO than I do from a console game and Blizzard was turning WoW into a console level game.
WoW lost it's wonder, in order to appeal to more people they dumbed the game too far, made too many compromises to get in the console players, the FPS (PvPers) and the massive audience Blizzard had over the years. It was too much, it was not realistic to create such a diverse product which met the demands of so many demographics. One after the other Blizzard compromised their own commandments when it came to having fun. What was fun? To a console player or FPSer the definition is very different to a traditional MMO player.
WoW was once like a hobby game store, it was a boutique that knew it's market well, evolved and catered for it well. It turned into ToysRus, it's scope was wide and had to cater to many different type of people. It is basically gone from hand crafted specialist good to cheap imported plastic mass produced products from China. It has engulfed their mindset, their focus was to make money, not to make a great game that if was successful would make a lot of money, as is the normal reward for success.
That same line of thinking also seeped into their D3 design and it also met with disaster. Your emphasis must be to make a great game, even if your only objective is to make money. If making money interferes with the design process then your product is going to be a failure before it has left the design table. Dumbing WoW down was a design change built on greed alone.
"If Pandas weren't enough to turn the returning player off, the literal 1-2-3-4 of combat might have."
So, how many MMOs being non-twitch/action based are not "1-2-3-4" ? And how can you change a 1-2-3-4 system to anything else? That was a bit of an odd statement.
That aside, I quite enjoy the Monk class. Though for zones I am still more of a WotLK person.
WoW isn't what is was before, and it never will be. As are all the other "WoW-like-in-combat-design-MMOs" (not using "clone" on purpose). Having 3 or 4 hotbars with actions you only use once a month or don't understand isn't really friendly to a returnee or a newcomer, so what do people expect will happen over time? Unless it is some sort of elitist thinking of "I know and I don't care if anyone else does or not".
--------------------------------------------
Youtube newb:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC96N3cxBuqKTPV2BQNlzGUw