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[Column] World of Warcraft: Thoughts on Patch 5.4
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Now that it's been a week since the release of the 5.4 patch for World of Warcraft, it's time to share some of our thoughts and impressions before asking you to head to the comments to leave your own ideas. Check out this weeks' WoW Factor!
In past articles I have discussed the Timeless Isle and its many features. While exploring this new zone on the test realm, I rarely spent much time playing with others. Often times on the test realm players dip their toes in a new content for only a few moments to get a taste of what’s to come. Because of this it was difficult to find groups of players to adventure with for more than five minutes. Now that I have spent some time in this zone on the live realms and thus with many more players, I have a newfound excitement for this zone.
Read more of Reza Lackey's The WoW Factor: Thoughts on Patch 5.4
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The Timeless Isle
Comments
(disclaimer: although not a core part of their audience, I decided to sample this patch)
It's funny the sort of blind spots that WoW sometimes has. One can see that they are genuinely trying a lot of things with the open world. They have these incredibly well-engineered mechanics and well-designed zones and treadmills ... then suddenly there's a WTF?! moment were you encounter something that that feels like a rookie design mistake that completely undoes a whole swath of goodwill.
Given the sheer number of different playstyles and subcultures they have to keep track of, I guess I shouldn't throw too many spitballs from the bleachers - the problems I encountered where definitely of the "fool me twice, shame on me" variety.
I disagree for the most part on your article.
First of all the part about "preventing the Alliance from stealing a kill." was silly. You do realize tags on ALL "rarespawn" mobs are global to both factions? Only the Celestial Court world bosses are faction tagged. You don't even need to be in a group to get the tag for those either.
Second the island was a huge failure in my opinion. You play a horde character(I have alliance and horde 90s) which have a huge a rather large numerical advantage over alliance on most servers. Grinding on Timeless isle is a breeze on my horde character(Occasional gank from guys trying to get blood coins), but on my alliance character...good luck. The ratio of horde to alliance is easily as bad as 10 to 1 on my servers, which makes it nearly impossible to go 5 minutes without being swarmed and dying. There were a lot of options they could have done with this island to make it better, e.g. making it have a ratio cap/player cap like Tol'Barad. But of course over populated horde would whine about queue times again.
But I do agree that the raid is cool, and that flex was a good idea. I'm not sure if I would say this is the best raiding has been. IMHO BC was by far the best raiding and PvP experience I've had.
Loving 5.4 so far, been with the game since day one.
No regrets.
Just started up the 7 day trial. Timeless isle is really really really small. Got like 10 epics in a couple hours picked up a bunch of chests. Exploration it is not, you are done exploring fairly quickly after landing on the island. After that you basically run in circles looking for rares. Rewarding but not very exciting. Also they made far too many mobs elite. I don't mean that they are hard, I mean the majority of the elite mobs don't feel like elites at all and it makes it hard to tell apart the few elite mobs that are actually tough.
Just needed a couple iLevels to get enough queue for SoO LFR. Got that and queued. Queue was like an hour, and holy crap it was a total cluster fk. Basically it was wipe after wipe after wipe until you got a high enough buff to clear it. But then again I got higher iLevel gear from the island in the short time I was running around. Now that there is flex, less people need to do LFR, which is a double edged sword, and the bad side is the effect it has on the queues. Probably better earlier in the week, but my first impression is baaaaad.
Still gonna see how it goes for the remaining 6 days, but I'm fairly confident I won't be coming back anytime soon.
The ad looks sexy. In reality is it really small. Don't know if I found all the chests but I found a bunch of them without trying too hard. The caves aren't super deep. I suppose the ocean is big but the interesting parts aren't really. I have only spent a couple hours there but at this point it seems like running in circles killing rares is the best use of time.
The only thing i dislike about it is that normal mobs aren't tap-to-faction/server. On my high pop server it's extremely hard to find any monster that isn't dead or being killed unless it's 3am.
It's probably will be better in a month or two when less people go there, but for now it's a big problem.
Agree fully with you. :-) Love it but still love to try anything new. And so far only permanent love comparable to wow have found in SWTOR, which I prefer for lore, but wow is undisputed king of quality. Everyone can find something for him, always something to do even past max level. They did some mistakes imo, but much more good decisions.
Im glad i stopped playing wow years ago ...
Played the panda content while it was free and didnt enjoy it much .. was pretty much the same ole stuff that made me stop playing in the first place ...
I doubt even if WOW went F2P that i would even bother to play .. enjoying GW2, RIFT and AION that are all F2P and i can jump from one to the other when i get tired of playing and want to do something else for a while ... WOW is just old and expansions for me havnt made it fresh.
Pretty much sums up my feelings as well. I never liked the grinding and once you hit cap dailies were just like pouring salt on a wound.
I did just that. :-) Never liked raiding because too time consuming (I play a lot, but at my time schedule). What attracted me back to endgame in MOP have been scenarios, where every dps can enter usually in secs, they are fun and pretty short. Wish however they would add more of them at faster peace. Same goes for 5man, nightmare from Cata changes when I left for long have not repeated with MOP. Ok, if you have dps that can do close to 200dps or tank that can tank whole scenario at once a lot of fun is taken away ... but otherwise they are just right difficulty with "normal" players.
High on my wish list regarding end game for scenarios and 5man is Blizz should put also UPPER ilvl limit not only on low side. This would keep overpowered tanks suited to tank raids away or at least should somehow downpower to strong alts automatically. Then real joy would return to scenarios and 5man.
Unfortunately, more and more players have all that timeless island 535's and even lfr raid gear let alone heroic/normal raid gear which would blow heroic scenarios away...
Not to mention I am so seriously sick and tired of them now, we haven't had any new heroic scenarios in ages, and they are all old and dated... what we need now are new challenging heroic scenarios with 540 ilvl gear... but, because of flexibles we won't get that until they release another expansion? I see now the problem is they'd have to devalue the flexible raids, in order to give a reason to run heroic scenarios anymore.
All of my 516 heroic sceanrio gear was made worthless with timeless isle's release, although I still have refused to go there and I've done lfr for a few 536's... *sigh* I just hate that all of my heroic scenarios are worthless now, as I really did seriously enjoy doing heroic scenarios with my lfrs...
However, now its reversed. My lfr gear was worthless at 502, because heroic sceanrios were 516, and now my heroic scenario 516's are worthless because of lfr 528 (536 upgraded). Timeless isle 535's would make them even more outdated if I ever bothered to go there, but as said I heard its 10 horde for every 1 alliance, and I see no fun in being massively outnumbered.
Now, when I first heard of the patch I was seriously hoping they'd add new heroic scenarios, it looks like they just went and made the entire scenario feature worthless, as all of the gear is outdated and trivialized.
Why bother going for 516's once a day? When you can grind all the 535's you want extremely unbelievably quickly on timeless isle in a single day? One guy had a full set of 535 armor in like one or two days flat out before the nerf to the drop rates...