What was it about Cataclysm that caused so many people to begin

>>383526370
too many to list

>>383526370
For me it was a combination of friends leaving and classes changes.
I just realized there was only a corpse of the game I liked.

On a more technical note, the last straw was the change to druid shapeshifting.
They basically removed the ability to cancel slowing and rooting effects with shapeshifting.
Even if they buffed ferals damage, that small change was the very reason I picked a druid as my first character.

Looking for Raid destroyed server communities
The beginning of the homogenization of classes
Raids were really boring and/or easy
New elements like Path of the Titan were quickly dropped

That was just a few.

>>383526370
It was **that** patch.

When it first came out there was some butthurt about the revamped zones but a lot of people preferred it to WotLK as the difficulty in endgame was back at TBC levels. Then WotLK babbies complained it was too hard to do stuff so Blizz made it piss-easy. You could literally PuG the final raid of the game and heroics required no sort of CC or tactics besides spamming 1212121212121212.

It was at that point people realised that WoW was never ever going to be anything challenging again and was just going to be "free shit lmao, everyone's a winner!". Now most people in the new expansion have multiple legendaries.

It's shit.

>>383526370

before cataclysm you started as fucking nobody, doing minor shit like helping farmers and hobos in westfall while wearing kinda realistic poorfag low lvl armor and you slowly progressed to naruto tier space magic fights, in cataclysm you fight illuminati twilight conspiracy from the start, there is elemental crap (tornados, lavas etc) in every map and it's really out of place, it wasn't wow anymore but bizzareWoW

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Is WoW a fun game for single player?

>>383526370
Cata was by far the most damaging expansion in WoW due to what it did to the zones.

WoW sold itself on its world, it's what, even today, draws people in, so to fuck with it on a level like that was just idiotic. Even now, if you don't level boost, you've got 60 levels where you've got people acting, in every zone, like Deathwing is some hot shit, and we're all gonna die.

>>383526370
Storywise - we got shit like Deathwing after badass tragedy of Arthas.

Gameplay - too many thing to list, srsly

overall - people liked barrnes and other areas, they litteraly destroyed them

Not to mention shit like LFR or some other changes that made WoW a fucking botnet just like Diablo 3.

I bet you can now play this game without even wirtting a single word on chat.

Fuck you Blizzard.

>>383528994
On a similar note, heirlooms are the absolute fucking worst. I got really nostalgic for WoW a while back but upon creating a character I was immediately greeted by 3 guys all decked out in blue-quality gear and riding mounts at level 1. Fucking shit immersion-braking stuff. The game isn't an adventure any more.

>>383529169
Even without that change you would have people acting like Onyxia was still a threat or that Naxx was still floating over EPL even though canonically it was back in Northrend. The problem with updating the zones isn't that they changed them, it's that they created the idea that the world could change to reflect what has happened over the events of WoW. Unfortunately they haven't done another revamp like that since so it sticks out even more than if they did nothing at all.

>>383526983
>They basically removed the ability to cancel slowing and rooting effects with shapeshifting
as a druid main this was really fucking gay

>>383526370
the dungeons were to hard for scrubs off the start and then deathwing raid was out for way to long

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>>383529424
Before Cata, the narrative was linear. You theoretically could do everything in Vanilla, and then move to BC, and then Wrath. From every point afterward though, it was a clusterfuck. The original story got taken out, 1-58 took place after Wrath, then you go back in time to BC, and then Wrath, and then after that.

They realized it was a mess for new players, since they implemented level boosting. They basically gave up.

Still though, changing the world I think inherently was a problem, since they did things so haphazardly. I mean they literally drew a dick into the map of Badlands.

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>Raids were really boring and/or easy

>>383529305
What the fuck is a "Diablo 3"

>>383529051
wow is alright for single players but absolutly amazing on multiboxing

MOP was actually the moment where things dropped off and it was solely the pandas. Blizz even confirmed this themselves.

>>383529051

singleplayer wow is d3

>>383526370
Dragon Soul was the most lazy, uninspired thing I've ever seen in a video game.

>>383529965
Didn't MoP actually recover some numbers? By the end of Cata, shit was bleeding out fast.

Heroics were too hard

They did nerf them in 4.1

>>383526370
The Hpal change of reactive to pre-emptive healing really killed the game for me. Even though I continued to play, achieving 2200 in rbg's and server 2nd in H-DS, I didn't like the class direction. The years on my Paladin started to feel wasted because of it. Giving every class more spillover spells made each class seem less and less unique. This is when I started multi-classing. Destro locks were pretty fun.

>>383530000
Dragon Soul was fine, it was genuinely fun and challenging to progress through

Blizzard's "no, seriously, this is the LAST time we'll let the last raid of the expansion stretch on for over a year, trust us!" shtick tends to be the problem

>>383529983
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read

>There are people who stay foreverly subbed to an expansion instead of playing for a while then unsubbing

How do you do it?

>>383529745
>>383530079
>the dungeons were to hard
>Heroics were too hard

I hate you fucks, you ruined the game.

>>383526370
>Shift the full focus to endgame, making leveling a trivial borefest with zero challenge or thought required, but that STILL takes a while like before
>The endgame isn't actually that good

What a shame, because talent trees had made a huge step in the right direction with less "Gain X% muscles and magics" and more "When you do this, gain this effect".

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>>383526370
MMOs are awful as actual games. Just due to the tech needed to make them work, they'll always be subpar when it comes to gameplay. In the past they made up for this shortcoming in two areas;

1. Socialising and playing barbie dress up. Even terrible MMOs can't fuck this up, and it's why dry turds like FF14 are popular.

2. Feeling like you're living in another world. This is the one every single modern MMO fucks up, WoW changes included.

Despite being more casual at the time of it's release (I remember playing EVE at the time and EVERYONE was shitting on WoW when it launched as casual garbage) it did a whole bunch of things right. The combat felt weighty, you had to rest after a few fights to eat, class perks like teleportation felt meaningful, lack of teleport-to-dungeon-instances as a primary means of leveling, no cross-realm, gold being a useful resource, talent trees you couldn't easily respec, etc. They're arbitrary but all these thing add up to trick your brain into thinking your in another world with it's own rules.

They're all bad things for gameplay, and it's easy to excuse any one of those things being removed, but the gameplay is always going to be bad anyways. It shouldn't be the focus of an MMO. Building a world should be the focus. Just look at the sub numbers. They might've started falling in Cata but it was WotLK where they plateaued - where they added dungeon queues and cross realm and all the other shit. Cata was just the nail in the coffin for a lot of people.

>>383527976
>LFR
>Cataclysm
Wrath started LFG and yet it's heralded as the greatest expansion.

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>>383530438
>That tiny gasp for a last breath at WoD

>>383530526
Yes, and LFG isn't LFR, what's your point

>>383530680
That you're a retarded faggot with double standards.

>>383530590
Blizzard had a chance with WoD. They genuinely could have given the game a second life.

They didn't though.

>>383526370
literally worse than WoD

>>383529412
The VAST majority of low level players are alts. Very few new players are joining the game and even if they do there's no guarantee they'll stay and level to end game. With that in mind, who is Blizzard going to cater to, the rare new subscriber or the multiple lifers already paying 15$ a month?

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was alright tbqh

>>383530773
They didn't because everyone working on WoD got moved to Overwatch, along with the budget. WoW is made by D-Team now.

>>383530760
>LFR is the same thing as LFG because it's the same concept applied to different things

I guess DKs are the same as Warriors because they can use 1h and 2h weapons, basically the same.

The complete removal of community fostering for the sake of convenience. Blizzard catered the game to the whiniest children on the forums. Their addiction research showed that people like chasing higher numbers. This is why the only thing to do is raise numbers. There are no more tiers of progression to work towards nor friends to make on the way.
Fuck Activision.

>>383530878
You didn't play WoD if you think anything is worse than it.

>>383526370
>delete the original world
>people attached to the game for 5 years don't feel attached anymore
>WHY ARE YOU UNSUBSCRIBING

What about Nostalrius?

>>383526370
Lich king was supposed to be the last boss and the normies quit.

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>tfw waiting for the next big MMO that isn't a korean grindfest or weebshit

Its never happening, is it? I was too young to git gud at WoW and by the time I was smart enough to be successful they added pandas and other gay shit and my server was hemorrhaging players so I quit.

LFG was fine, it was cross-realm that ruined the game in the long run

>>383526370
>removing more content than it added
that's basically it

>>383529169
>>383529424
This in conjunction with the level scaling in Legion and the class trials almost being like a starting zone leads me to believe that in the next expansion you'll be able to level 1-120 entirely in the new area. Even if it's something like invasions now where you get a set of world quests each day and then your choices are go back to the old areas or wait until tomorrow the result would be a much smoother leveling experience than jump around. Plus it would play into their "we want you to log in for 30 minutes a day, but gate everything behind time so you have to stay subscribed for months".

>>383531256
check back in the next 2-4 years and see what the thousand RvR/sandbox MMOs are like
lots of western MMOs in development

would've loved an ArcheAge without the Korean shit or divided attention toward PVE raiding

>>383531040
No, DKs are the same as Warriors because they're both boring as shit to play with the same amount of abilities.

>>383530884
They should cater to actually good game mechanics. If you're making leveling an absolute joke you might as well make people start at max level.

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>>383531165
was fuckin trash tbqh

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>>383530910
Nice UI

>>383529412
>friend who never played wow wanted to try it out with me
>he plays prot warrior
>queue up for dungeon
>the healer and his dps fuck boy talking to each other in Spanish or something
>they keep running ahead and pulling mobs to my friend
>he gets confused and tries his best to tank every mob
>dies because no heirlooms
>healer starts screaming he isn't going fast enough and leaves
>new healer and dps join and instantly "LOL" when they see his regular green/blue gear and leave
>had to ask my guild to come help
>some hunter still keeps pulling extra mobs to him.
>a few days later he already uninstalled the game

The community certainly isn't winning new players over.

>>383526370
Am I the only one who enjoyed the map revamp? It made levelling new characters fun again, up to lvl 60 at least. Seeing the story progress, meeting old characters, shit like this. Honestly I'd be happy if they decided to refresh Azeroth again in the new expansion.

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>>383530203
Dragon Soul was fucking awful

>reused two Wrath zones in Dragonblight and Eye of Eternity
>reused assets fucking everywhere
>only 8 bosses for a final raid tier
>Spine is the worst fight Blizzard has ever made
>Madness wasn't much better

Not one fucking original asset was in that piece of shit raid.

>>383531542
i enjoyed seeing the Forsaken expand their empire

>>383530884
Blizzard actually does cater to new subscribers, and returning subscribers, by doing the level boost stuff.

They just can't fucking be assed to fix their old shit.

>>383531537
Dungeons are shit now, even at high level you're expected to just weigh down your 'w' key and run through the instance mashing the same three buttons over and over again until it's over.

No talking, no thinking, no stopping.

>>383531609
and after all these years its fuckin cancer to farm for mounts

>>383531537
That's some of the saddest shit I've ever read. Those people should just go play a MOBA or something if that's how they feel about the game.

>>383531542
It was novel for like, a month, and then you realized all the destroyed shit would stay destroyed.

How fucking long did it take for Stormwind to stop being on fire?

>>383531721
>>383531542
Forsaken quest zones were pure videogamekino. Only good bit of the revamp.

>>383526370
too casual

>>383531165
elysium is where the fun is at now

This song single-handedly made Cata worth it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhRRgcAbdI

My only gripe was that Magni was "killed" in a ritual, but he's back now and is Azeroth's husbando so it's alright.

>>383531920
WoW's soundtrack has never dipped in quality. Those guys still do great stuff.

>>383526370
What WoW needs are NPC wives, I want a Panda wife

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>>383531846
>Stratholme is still on fire

>>383532048
I think Blizzard once explained that away by saying it's magical fire.

>>383527976
Homogenization began in Wrath, as well as LFD which was the precursor to LFR. The seeds were already sown.

>>383526370
>9 months for Firelands
>Heroics and raids get nerfed because waaah too hard

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>>383531878
it was a bit too evil for the sake of being evil though, but what can you expect from Blizzard writers after '07

had some fantastic lore points though

>>383531997
>not ERPing with a pandaren player
Cmon now

>>383532283
Pandaria doesn't exist in my headcanon so I can never communicate with Pandaren on any character.

>>383527976
WoW doesn't have server communities and it never has

Cataclysm was absolutely horrendous but it was a necessary evil. The quality jump from vanilla > wrath content was fucking obscene and felt like basically a different game (which for all intents and purposes it was). They fixed that with cata but then realized they had no end game whatsoever and there was nothing to do, so they made heroics hard again to try and squeeze some longevity out of it and completely missed what made heroics good in TBC so you ended up with this slow, shitty slogfest of already poorly designed dungeons like grim batol and stonecore and tons of people got burnt out fast.
Add to that raiding got decasualized until Dragon Soul, so people who got used to their ez mode ICC suddenly found themselves unable to raid for 2 tiers and there was nothing for casual joe to do so they quit in droves
So now we have a decent early game before it gets shit again for the first 3 expansions and then gets tolerable and the timeline is all sorts of fucked up for a leveling character, but they'll never fix it because of how badly cataclysm failed

>>383532283
I want to live out pure male human on female anthro romance, every Panda out there has disgusting fetishes or a futa cock

>>383531978
Yeah even WoD had great music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK0L1MhMlYY

That cinematic made a friend of mine who loves Orcs come back. I still feel terrible knowing how the expansion turned out.

>>383532226
>>383531721
The Horde side stuff here was nice, but anything Forsaken-related simply wasn't fun as Alliance.

Like, you will never see what happens to Gilneas if only play Alliance. After level 12, a Worgen is more or less a Night Elf.

>>383529051
Single player wow is FFXII

>>383530403

I didn't think they were too hard, I thought they were just what the game needed

>>383531256
albion online will save us

>>383532546
WoD I think actually had the best music WoW's ever seen. There was some amazing stuff in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKP1-Xqwuis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0k_T72hjdw

>>383532548
The Worgen zone was pretty neat by itself, at least--minus the "Worgen is now some druidic meme" retcon.

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Are we posting WoW stuff?

>>383532763
The music is FANTASTIC alone.
But the highly orchestrated samples did not fit with any of the gameplay, and so I'd say the music was pretty bad [in the game].
Whereas with TBC and vanilla all the music is more ambient and fitting with all the noises you come across in a zone.

>>383526370
In no particular order:

- LFR
- Replacing talents trees with what exists now
- Caving into the Wrathbabbies when it came to dungeons
- Severe devaluing of resistances
- Reforging
- The beginning of homogenization
- Removal of 2v2
- Awful PVP design in general
- While a lot of zones were improved (specifically in the way of quests), it fucked up a lot of zones, too

I'm sure there are a couple more, but that's what I have off the top of my head. It did have the best set of leveling zones ever, though. Leveling in Cata was glorious.

>>383531256
>Korean
Chinese MMO grindfests are the next thing

>>383532902
Gilneas I think is genuinely one of the best looking zones in the game. It kind of annoys me that you don't really see assets used from it in any other part of the game.

>>383533009
>talents
thought this was pandashit thing where they homogenitated everything

>>383530064
End of MoP was lower than end of Cata I believe, and Cata had a higher start than MoP

>>383532763
I really liked the track that played in the train dungeon that got real dramatic, I cant find a video of it anywhere for some reason

What was the point of Magister's Palace back in TBC? What did it bring to the table? I never used to run it.

>>383530064

the end end of an expansion is always a low-point. then people come back to try the next one.

except in the case of mop most people didn't because cata sucked and >>>pandas

>>383533149
I recall there being some dank loot for mages but I never bothered to run it because it was one of the "harder heroics" or something and just kept on raiding instead of wasting time.

>>383529051
Download the SPP if you're looking for single player.

>>383531542
>>383531846
Yeah the map revamp was fine till it stayed stagnant. With phasing you would think they would have updated zones as you progressed through the questing.

I don't think its possible to revamp again, people can only really accept the same world so many times. After South Seas, since we are done with the Legion "for now" and we will deal with the Naga and lead up onto the Old Gods again, we have to go on the other side of the world.

>>383533149
stepping stone dungeon and also a fairly difficult heroic, part of the cancer that was progression skipping though.

>>383532732
Just checked out the trailer, seems sort of neat. The sandbox and roleplay elements have to be really good to make up for those graphics and lackluster looking combat.

Big Patches serve as points to stop and consider whether the game is ever going to give you a sense of wonder again.

I only ever bought 5 months of WoW time. The whole time it was obvious that I was only ever working towards some secret 'good time' that was just out of reach.

It's really nothing to do with the fact that druid or paladin works a little differently now vs then. It's that playing druid can never make you go "Awesome" all over again.

>>383529745
>the dungeons were to hard for scrubs off the start

as i remember it they were significantly easier than WotLK heroics were in 3.0

but since people were used to 3.3 heroics were you'd 2-man them while sleepwalking, and expected that level of complete nonchallenge to continue, well, you saw how it went

>>383533009
What we have not is objectively superior to the old talent trees

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>>383526370
MoP was announced during that period.

>>383533009
>LFR
not until Dragon Soul and people were already leaving at that point so no
>Replacing talent trees
Nope, MoP did this. Cata had talent trees
>reforging
that was not a problem cmon
>2v2
Still a thing just wasnt ranked

>>383526983
>>383529719
I haven't played WoW in so long I forgot about this nuiance to druids. I could totally see this getting out hand in late-game pvp though. They should've just added extra cast time to shapeshifting when you were stunned or slowed but not remove it entirely

I'd take cata over wod any day. Wod was world of Facebook gamecraft.

>>383533139
I found it, the part I was talking about doesnt happen til 2 minutes in though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BB1lKcnwnE

The new zones.

To be fairly honest, some zones were in desperate need of revamping.
The Barrens has 3 or 4 flight points, not counting the one in Thousand Needles which is basically right next to it anyway. (I remember it being quicker to go there if you were heading to RFK/RFD)

However.
While some of the content was needed, some was not. And even then, there was content which should never had seen the light.
Some areas were "updated" with middle-school tier weaboo edginess, cringe of unseen levels.

Some of my favorite questlines were killed off with that expansion. And then, to pour salt in the wound, they were replaced with fanfic-tier garbage.

Also, all group quests were killed with this expansion.
This immediately meant that leveling through the old zones were not only an abysmal waste of time in terms of how awful the story was, THERE WAS NO FUN OF TEAMING UP EITHER.

DUNGEONS? EVERYONE WAS SILENT! DUNGEON FINDER WAS A MISTAKE!
RAID FINDER WAS A MISTAKE!

The entire game revolved around these fundamental gameplay mechanics.
Cataclysm literally castrated the game.

>>383531256
FFXIV is fun

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>>383531256
You'll be waiting for the next WoW expansion to see if they don't fuck it up.

It certainly wouldn't be hard to fix since 90% of Legion's problems stem from RNG iLvl Warforge Edition, RNG iLvl2.0 Titanforge Edition, RNG socket, RNG Legendary, Class Hall for 3rd relic slot, Relic slots, 20 extra talents tied to weapons they have to balance, time gate AK, time gate class hall garrison quests, and everything involving AP.

Honestly if you removed the entire Artifact weapon system you fix most of the above by default. After that it's just the Korean Grinder tier RNG loot to get fixed.

>>383533149

wasn't there an attunenent for the sunwell in it?

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Sunwell Plateau was so underrated it hurts

>>383533149
wasn't this the one that started the "merely a setback" meme?

Dungeons that were nerfed a fortnight into the expansion

World revamp and flying in azeroth which killed all mystery and exploration, every inaccessible area just got turned into badly textured hills and mountains

Even though I loved the new zones and questing apparently people thought that was shit too

Over a year of dragon soul, with no content afterwards until mists.

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>>383533149
it was a late-expansion heroic added with the last raid of the expansion, it was slightly more difficult and offered better gear than most of the heroics.

>dat expertise trink

>>383526370
The model went from "Work hard and you will earn great rewards" to "Do little work and get the same rewards you would have gotten for the past 6 years"

Leveling was trivialized. Exploration was pretty much destroyed with looking for dungeon. Raid Finder was introduced at the end of the expansion eliminating any reason for normies to try in PvE to see content.

Most people that played WoW weren't great players, so raids could take 6 months to clear. The thing was, there was other things to do. Leveling alts was difficult and rewarding. Epic mounts were difficult to obtain and rewarding. Reputation rewards were difficult to obtain and rewarding. The world seemed so big, I don't know. There just always seemed like there was something to do, especially if you had a group of friends that wanted to explore with you.

With Cataclysm and instant teleporting to dungeons, and quest chains that will get you 1-60 in 24 hours just trivialized everything. Try leveling up a character right now. I made it to 72 before I got bored as shit because everything is so fucking easy leveling up. The only time I died was getting ganked.

>>383534258
Technically it was Tempest Keep that started it and Magister's + Plateau were the continuation.

>>383533149
Hard dungeon that required a nerf so casuals could run it heroic
I remember really good rogue pants on heroic
White strider mount

Its encounters were pretty damn good for a dungeon, and it was probably one of the hardest dungeons for pugs since it required managing pulls very well. So much trash mobs so you could just wipe with one fuck up

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>>383533487

>>383533508
kinda true, sold my account and swore to never play it again because of pandaland

>>383533149
All I can remember about it at this point is that there was a hallway where you could jump up onto the side that let you skip a bunch of pulls.

>>383533741
people talked because they were exited to run a dungeon they have never been in, in a game they have never explored, in a genre that they probably didn't played

don't fool yourself, WoW didn't change because blizzard added LFG, it changed because the people became min-maxing players who have all the information on the internet instead of just enjoying a game

>>383534419
It was literally Magisters Terrace where Kael'Thas says "Tempest Keep was merely a setback"

Then autists on the OT board made memes about it

I was one of them

>>383526370

Wrath was unusually populated so some of it was just going back to normal.

As for Cata itself, it was overly complicated, the story was irrelevant. The moment they expected WoW babbies to set up macros it was over.

>>383527976
Raiders don't matter for population. Wow is a casual game. The people that complain about LFR are the people who are never going to leave WoW anyway. Wrath killed server communities and it was the most popular expansion ever.

>>383534334
it had better gear than literally all of the other heroics
iirc it had better gear than karazhan too

>>383533402
wasn't it THE most difficult heroic?

>>383534824
I was in a shit guild. We didn't even try heoric MgT until 3.0 came out because we knew we probably wouldn't even get past the first boss. It was a tough dungeon. Normal was harder than most heroics.

>>383534824
In BC for sure, not just because it was released with the Sunwell thus it had a gear-expectation when going in, but also because Wrath and then on had piss easy heroics.

>>383534824
I still think the auchindoun heroics were the hardest, even when sunwell was released
black morass was insane too

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>>383533042
There's those 2 villages in Blasted Lands and Val'sharah but that's it.
>tfw Gilneas will never be rebuilt and become a capital city

>>383534067
my guild was barely running SSC before it came out
then the talent revamp allowed us to do Black Temple

>>383534997
Sethekk Halls, Crypt, and Mana Tombs were all pretty easy. Shadow Labs was very difficult.

Besides MgT, Arc was definitely the hardest BC heroic, though. That dungeon was a cluster of fucking madness.

>>383526370
The nothingness after Firelands into Dragon Soul for most people, before that the huge difficulty reduction. It's a shame since early Cata ramped up the difficulty quite dramatically from WotLK.

>>383531375
What an unbelievably shit opinion from someone who never played a DK or warrior

>>383535097
maybe it's because I didnt run them so much, but I do remember sethekk being fairly easy and I remember getting fucked hard by that void lord boss in mana tombs the first time I went there

>>383535097
The only "hard" part of Sethekk Halls was running it with a friend's druid just us two so we could farm the mount for both of us. Rogue and Druid could just stealth ALL the way to the boss room IIRC, clear the trash then do the Druid quest.

It was so fucking weird to tie a mount to that boss.

>>383534469
>level up
>Get playstyle changing option

Or

>Level up
>get +00.5% increase to damage with axes

Which sounds better to you?

Raid Finder

>>383531920
If you liked Dark Ironforge, try this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vlsdk_UwN0

>>383529719
>>383526983
>druid tears
absolutely delectable.
But yeah, Cata fucked the game up otherwise.

>>383535002
Gilneas will prevail

>>383535438
The latter had both. Every 5 or so levels would have a big talent, but otherwise it would have minor increments to dump into.

>>383534940
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with Wrath heroics. They were kind of tough in the beginning, but once you got moderately geared, they became easy as fuck, no CC required.

That's the thing with Wrath onward in general. Apparently Blizzard hated CC because nothing requires CC anymore. That made dungeons fun and interesting, and required thought and class considerations and all of that. You wouldn't go in a dungeon with a bunch of warrior dps's because they didn't have any CC.

Just dumb shit like that. Dumbing down the game in general.

>>383526370
The promise to make difficulty/rewarding progression a thing again, actually fullfilling it, then doing a complete 180 and nerfing dungeons and raids into the ground.

>>383531256
Your only real option is Eve online then. It's at least still be around 10 years from now.

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>get LFD pop and accept
>this comes on the screen
wat do?

>>383536040
Leave and take the deserter debuff.

>>383536040

clear it, it's ea-
[faggotelf has left the party]
[ipwnzu has left the party]
[azzrapelol has left the party]

>>383535720
CC never made dungeons interesting. all it did was cause people to stack CC to ez mode through dungeons.

>group of 5 mobs
>CC 4 of them
>kill 1 at a time
>rinse and repeat for 2 hours

wow so hard and engaging

>>383531842
>implying that isn't exactly what they're doing.

>>383536040
I haven't played in years and seeing this still triggers me.

>>383531256
There will never be a phenomenon game like WoW again. The closest thing was Pokemon GO and it illustrates the difference in zeitgeists.

>>383536207
certainly felt more fun than just AOE'n shit

>>383536040
/afk

>>383531537
Heirlooms are why I quit.
I fucking loved leveling through dungeons and heirlooms shat all over that, nothing more than speedruns where any class can do whatever the fuck they want. Fucking ridiculous.

>>383536307
This is sad because it's pretty accurate. Normies really ruin everything.

>>383532374
t. i never played vanilla

>>383535438
look at this fag that doesn't understand gaming history. In tabletop games, which are what all these mmos got inspiration from, you'd get some bullshit for a couple levels and then something amazing every third or fourth level. It's the best system because of the way our monkey brains handle reward schemes. The only thing that would be more satisfying would be if the big rewards were doled out literally at random, but that leads to shit balance in a game.

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Like most, I left after the first four months with the express intention of coming back during pic related. Vashj'ir was bar none the best zone Blizz has ever put out for WoW and the storyline left me wanting more. I'm beyond angry that they never resolved Neptulon's folly.

Also classes became too easy. WotLK made it fairly difficult to play up to 75% of class potential. Cata made it easy to surpass 90% class potential regularly.

>>383526370
Halfus Wyrm Breaker 10 man heroic. I don't give a fuck if you cleared him in normal or in 25 man. Shit was straight broken in 10 man heroic. And that was the first encounter for many. I still have Atramedes related flash backs.

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Honestly, I don't know why. I skipped WoD and only played it to catch up in Legion, but I played at least to max level in every other expansion.

Honestly, all the content after Wrath just felt a little, I don't know, soulless? Like it was just there to continue the cycle. Cata especially, a lot of the revamps turned me off because it left the world in a perpetual state of Cataclysm and I knew Blizz would probably never bother to update it again with post-Cata zones.

I think MoP was actually the closest they came to making a leveling experience that didn't feel obligatory, and even it dragged at times. Legion is close to a return to form but it still feels kind of artificial.

>>383536207
>all it did was cause people to pay even the slightest amount of attention to what was happening around them

thanks for ruining everything for us you casual piece of shit.

>>383536492
Look at this faggot, doesn't understand games have changed and grinding out 10000 hours to find materials to make the Sword of +2 to Damage, and it has an 80% crafting failure is fucking horrible.

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oh hey don't mind me, i'm just gonna be here for a whole fucking zone

>>383526370

My friends and I had just been playing WoW for a while and after having a lot of fun with Cata, we decided to just quit around the same time. We figured we'd return later (and we did, for Legion). Wasn't the same since it was just three of us, but it was still fun.

>>383529051

I mean, I guess? But I came back briefly for WoD and had fun with the nostalgia. The big problem, personally, was the lack of friends to play it with. That really hurt. At the same time, I'm now in my 30s and don't have the time to devote to WoW like I used to, so shit can only be so much fun.

It's still on the casual-side as far as MMOs go, and there's nothing wrong with that, but even with that in mind I just can't dump hours upon hours into it like I did when I was in my very early 20s.

tl;dr: If you have time and an attachment to Warcraft in general, then sure. Otherwise I probably wouldn't

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>>383536564
>I think MoP was actually the closest they came to making a leveling experience that didn't feel obligatory
Addendum: closest they came to making a leveling experience AFTER WOTLK that diesn't feel obligatory.

I guess vanilla, BC and WotLK felt like I had a mission and I was exploring. Cata felt like whatever the fuck, honestly my least favorite, WoD felt very hand-holdy and Legion is a bit better but I felt like I was being led around by the nose.

>>383536726
That zone was actually pretty fun. The rolling deathball is one of the more memorable quests of the xpac.

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>>383526370
Even though WoW was always a product, it became too commercialized during and after WotLK and even though a lot won't admit it, the game lost everything that was special and *mysterious* about it and slowly turned into a facebook game. Is the game "losing its soul" an argument?

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the only interesting zone to come into WoW after the BC era

>>383536648
>doesn't understand games have changed
oh I understand all too well you literal fucking infant. I understand a cabal of dudebros normalfaggots and women infiltrated my hobby and ruined it like they ruin every hobby, interest, profession or activity they have ever touched in the history of this godforsaken species. I am merely lamenting this sad state of affairs while you feast on the carcass of the leviathan my kind created from dust.

>>383536896

god damn that girl is putting a lot of effort into sucking in her (flat) tummy

>>383536946
mah nigga

the hard dungeons in the beginning and by the end of the expac you really just stayed in the main city spamming lfg.
its sad because they have that one zone (uldum?) with the Egyptian theme that i love but had no reason to go to.

>>383536896
For me it is. It's exactly what killed wow.

>>383536445
The thing is normies back then made it into a phenomenon. I remember people who weren't gamers waiting in lines outside before net cafes opened just to get their spot and play. Honestly if I had to rationalize it I'd say it's a combination of Warcraft 3 being a smash hit, LotR being a worldwide phenomenon and the exciting prospect of a virtual world with some pedigree and marketability. Normies were better back then.

>>383526370
>absolute garbage turd pieces of shit like FF get shilled here daily
>yet wow gets shit on constantly despite still being better even after all this time

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>>383536564
The end of Wrath is also when they started pulling people to work on Titan.

>>383536946

the first third was some of the best stuff they've done, the second third was ok, could have done with less of that big thing you went inside, and the last part was not well paced at all

>>383536946
>avoid Vashj'ir for ages because swimming is shit
>finally visit for achievements
>it's fucking 10/10

>>383537110
They weren't pulled away, they were just done. Don't quote on this but one of the raid designers said they looked on Ulduar as their swan song.

>>383529719

as melee class main (except druid) get fucking owned, spamming shapeshift to remove hamstring/crippling poison etc was absolute fucking cancer

>>383537267
muh seahorsey

>>383537291

certainly matches the timeline, after ulduar there's a very clear quality drop

>>383537110
For those who don't know

Titan's assets became Overwatch. If you like Overwatch, then you're okay with WoW going downhill for a (long) while.

>>383537410
>If you like Overwatch, then you're okay with WoW going downhill for a (long) while.
This doesn't make any sense.

>>383537410
>Titan's assets became Overwatch

like 95% of titan went straight in the bin

>>383529412
yeah, I feel you. Played WC on the Elysium server and it was some of the most fun I had in this game for over ten years. People actually playing, and getting punished for fucking up

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>>383530079

>dude lets make a mode called HEROIC which is the HARD MODE for dungeons
>people are complaining that the HARD MODE dungeons are too HARD sir!
>uhhhhhhh.............. lets make the HARD MODE dungeon EASY!

>blizzard

>>383527976
>LFR destroyed server communities

LFD destroyed those already, bud. If anything, LFR showed how fucking awful most players are. I never knew that the first boss of Deathwing's raid had an enrage until I saw it in LFR.

>>383529051
Legion is probably the best single player expansion so far. Lots of soloable content in addition to leveling quests (storylines, world quests, rare monsters etc.)

>>383530590

it was hilarious really, the blizzard marketing team really deserve a raise for the masterful ruse they pulled on the morons that resubbed for WoD

>'its gonna be just like tbc!!!!! you know, that really good expansion!!!!!'
>'trust us, buy WoD!!!!'

>>383537578

>friends and I are casual but like a challenge
>we wanted the heroics in Cata to be actually difficult
>they were, but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination
>we're having fun
>this was back when my friends and I were active on the official forums
>tons of tears about how the dungeons are too hard
>they get nerfed

Yeah now I remember why we were slowly turning toward quitting back then (and eventually did). That shit was stupid.

>>383536207
First off, that wasn't every pull. Yeah, you could cheese some difficult pulls, but a lot of enemies were immune to CC or had stealth detection, or something similar to limit CC. Not only that, pulls in general were simply more difficult so if you were good enough/geared enough, you could ignore CC, but that took a lot of skill and experience.

Second off, dungeons nowadays are just grind fests. It's go in, mindlessly slaughter a bunch of enemies, get your meme points for your meme armor. They require no strategy, no communication, no nothing. Just a bunch of bodies to waltz in and faceroll everything until it dies. It's not fun, it's just something to do to get your meme points.

I guess that's a design philosophy change. WoW players now just want to get things done NOW NOW NOW, they don't care about fun, they just want everything right away, where as back in the day, people were okay with waiting and navigating through content, developing strategies to skip certain enemies, or certain packs. Roles felt like real roles instead of just placeholders.

It was fun, now it isn't.

>>383537708

The fuck do you think a marketing team's job is.

Of course they're going to make that shit sound like gold. Like what the fuck did you want them to do.

'The game's aight, buy it maybe.' - Blizzard

>>383537630
Cross-server battlegrounds were the beginning of the end community-wise. No more rivalries and epic alteracs

>>383537805
blizzard was too pussy to server merge

>>383536492
Oh I see, you're mad because its different not because its actually bad.

Honour Gear through BG's and Arena's killed world PVP, like almost overnight.

I remember and even i was kind of surprised how quickly the gear-grind affected world pvp.

Cross-Realm dungeons killed server community completely, you used to know alot of the people and guilds on your server simply through experience.

These two things were the death-knell of WoW, because it really wasn't an MMO anymore.

Its been limping and bleeding along ever since.

>>383536979
Not really, she's just fucking fit as fuck. Look at them quads. Bitch's are bigger than yours, I'm sure.

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Just came back to Legion a couple of days ago since Blizzard threw 7 days my way for free. Not sure yet if I'll play past that but I used the time to level a Demon Hunter which I passed on initially. At first I thought it was "okay" but once you get all the talents and traits both specs are a ton of fun. Havoc proccing meta all the time for insane leech and damage and vengeance surviving anything and dealing high multitarget damage with spirit bomb spam.

>>383536040

on gamer district you could just log out and get votekicked and then log back in and you wouldnt have the deserter debuff, based as fuck

>>383537785
>'The game's aight, buy it maybe.' - Blizzard

'Doom is shit, stay the fuck away.' -Bethesda

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>>383534067
It's not that it's underrated, it's that very few actually got to experience how difficult and unique it was (before 3.0 patch). Kind of the same shit with 40 man naxx and then making it 10/25 man at the beginning of wrath was a blessing for the commercialized audience and a slap in the face to everyone with memories of the original

Turning Naxx into a faceroll heroic tier raid was just ughhhhhhhh

>>383537785

i meant that they really outdid themselves with the marketting for WoD you shitlord

>>383526370
Deathwing was the worst villain the series has ever had. He could have been cool as fuck given his backstory, but they wrote him into a generic cartoon villain.

>>383537981
Yeah you're right. Underappreciated is the better term.

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>>383537578
To be fair, heroics were portrayed as the next natural progression for what you can do once you reach level cap. Most of the playerbase is/was shit and didn't expect to raid (till LFR) but if the heroics are too hard for them then the game is basically over at cap.

Keep in mind this was before pet battles, farm/garrison/hall and transmog were added so there really wasn't anything else to do for these shitters. Yeah they should have got gud but there was no possible way for Blizz to say that without creating an even bigger shitstorm.

>>383538074
>but they wrote him into a generic cartoon villain.

metzen

>>383537921
I'm currently leveling a pally. The zones are really cool, and the raids look awesome.

I'm just hoping I can find a non-autistic guild to play with and enjoy and maybe clear heroic raid content.

In WoD I was in the autistic /wowg/ mystic raiding guild and I fucking hated it, even though the players in it were fairly competent.

>>383538036

As opposed to not doing a good job marketing WoD? It's Blizzard. It's Activision. They're going to go full retard with marketing with one of their biggest fucking franchises.

Are you dense you colossal butthead

>Frost mage once again can be specced to be king of snares/kiting
Feelsgoodman

I haven't played in a while. I remember back in like WotLK when they made every non-trash mob immune to snares and stuns which was awful. It feels nice that you can actually count on your CC when soloing rares and shit now.

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>>383536040
>that 5% chance when everyone stays and you wind up clearing it

unironically 1 of the most satisfying things in wotlk

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>>383538127
>play BC at launch
>do heroics and kara
>not particularly hard for the most part
>tsunamis of tears about how heroics are too hard, morose is too hard, romulo is instantly killing our tanks, etc etc
>blizzard announces nerfs to content because people refuse to git gud
>warn people that this is a slippery slope and everything will eventually be nerfed into the ground for the sake of making bad players feel good about themselves
>get told that i'm completely wrong and it's a logical fallacy

it still hurts to this day.

>>383538127

>heroics were portrayed as the next natural progression for what you can do once you reach level cap

but every expansion has had dungeons that are tied to the level cap, ie level 70 normal dungeons level 80 normal dungeons etc, you did those to git gut and get gear till you are able to queue for heroics

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>>383536979
>girl

>>383536040
>unplugs router

>>383537885
>tarren mill and Astranaar raids

Honestly this was the best period of WoW, you had to put up with shitty server queue's and thats about it.

>>383538376

>tbc launch
>magtheridon is a decent challenge
>HES TOO HARD!!!!
>magtheridon gets nerfed into the fucking ground

by the end of tbc and wrath there was only a handful of bosses that were actually 'challenging' rather than just failing because the people you are playing with are shit, the rest just got nerfed because muh casual raiders

>>383538348

scrubs didn't know what they were missing

>>383536040
More like

>daily heroic is Oculus
>Logout for the day

Lfd is meme casual shit.

>>383538595

i had TONNES of fights in the claimable nagrand village, sure it wasnt nearly on the same tier as tarren mill fights but world pvp was most deffinately not 'killed' by tbc

Honest to good, if the lead dev didn't play on a tablet and the classes weren't pruned into a homogeneous mess and there was no RNG warforging, I'd still be playing Legion.

It terms of the zone design, world quests, music, etc etc, it is top notch. Unfortunately, I can't enjoy any of my classes so into the dumpster the game went. Been around since beta of Vanilla on and off. This time, it's off for good, I think.

>>383538832
>Honest to good, if the lead dev didn't play on a tablet

still can't believe this

also can't not believe it

>>383538403
Actually Cata only launched with seven dungeons, none of which were 85 minimum outside heroic and four of which were level 81 or lower.

>>383538832

Legion actually is fucking good; only quit because I couldn't settle on a class and my friends played at weird hours.

>>383531609
I remember feeling completely insulted when blizz emailed me offering a free week to try it out. It's such shit, completely undefendable

>>383531609

I wanted to throw up in Blizzard's Cata post-mortem on the forums where they defended Spine of Deathwing.

>>383531609
Fuck you, Spine was original as fuck. It only got bad because of how fucking long we got stuck with only that raid to do.

Little did we know what SoO had in store for us.

>>383538832
I like my frost mage, has a ton of active skills by modern WoW standards.

On the other hand I can't fucking believe Warlock now. It used to be the class I needed the most action bars for and now affli has like... 5 buttons in active use or something.

>>383536564
At first I didn't know why either. I mean I didn't give a fuck about deathwing, but leveling to 85 wasn't that bad, and I really liked how they made heroics difficult again, but on reflection I figured the damage was done. Leveling in general had become a chore because all the focus was on high end content. I never reached 70 in TBC, but leveling actually felt like the main content of the game because the exploration was fun and there was lots of other people to do it with. At first the revamp seemed like a really good idea, particularly since it made all the low level gear not look like horrible shit, but I just think the damage was done and the same was true of heroics.

LFD had left most DPS complacent and they just refused to learn bosses, follow the tank and CC. Plus my raiding guild was all over the place because instead of raiding every Friday we were leveling and some dragged behind because they could only play on Fridays.

In the end Blizzard just stopped understanding the playerbase, what they were doing and what would have been fun to do next, and that's why it just ended up feeling like an expansion for the sake of an expansion as opposed to an attempt to make the game funner.

>>383531609
Spine was interesting. I'll give you Madness because it sucked dick basically doing the same shit 4 times every single time and like 6-7 if you wiped.

>>383538884

grim batol, HoO & tolvir were basically max level dungeons

>>383530526
>Wrath started LFG and yet it's heralded as the greatest expansion.
Only idiots think that. LFG was the beginning of the downfall and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fucking loser.

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HERE'S THE QUESTION:

will you come back if Blizz somehow manages to not make the classes 4 button wonders, or are you done for good?

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>>383538127
>Most of the playerbase is/was shit and didn't expect to raid (till LFR) but if the heroics are too hard for them then the game is basically over at cap.

why not put some effort into actually trying to learn some basic mechanics of the game? I remember times in vanilla / TBC when something was proving to be too difficult, you'd look to better players / guilds for some advice, which is 1 of those things people mean when they say "community"

>>383536465
or, tbc, or Wrath before Icecrown patch.

>tfw remembering being a blizzard zealot
>cata and diablo 3 release and massive disillusion happens
What is it about this company that made people so attached to it. I honestly believed they could do no wrong for so long.

>>383539282
Nobody is going to stand around in town spamming /2 no matter how much you want that to be the case.

Just like when Wildstar tried pandering to the 'hardcore WoW raider' that doesn't fucking exist outside of a few guilds remaining in WoW, it's bound for failure to try.

>Legion
>Other faction walks by me

This honestly made me pretty sad.

>>383526370

>ruined old zones and classic questlines with new not-so-great redesigns and pop-culture questlines
>stream-lined and homogenized classes completely, removing all flavor perks and making most of them feel incredibly similar with different colors
>total centric focal shift towards the casual players, players who essentially hated MMOs but wanted to be included in an MMO
>story and narrative began taking a front seat above all else
>beginning of the EVERYONE IS A SUPER POWERFUL HERO shtick that has honestly made the game less interesting and just more stupid
>overall complete garbage writing
>LFR ruined the last scraps of community the game had
>dungeons and raids were very linear, except for Firelands
>Dragon Soul
>total exaggeration of armor designs leading to some seriously shit designs, and started making pauldrons fuck huge and fucking stupid looking
>etc etc fucking etc

The game honestly should have just fucking died during Cata. The game didn't deserve to go on in the sorry state it was misshapen into. Some things have gotten better, but Cata did some serious fucking irreversable damage to the entire game that Blizzard still struggles to undo, and put the community into habits and got them used to things that can't be taken away or people will just quit en-masse because Blizzard has no fucking idea how to just do their own fucking thing and tell people to suck it the fuck up.

>>383539286
They need a fresh start. They can't remove all the bloat now without everyone complaining.

>>383539394

the last good thing blizzard made was WoTLK

it's all been downhill from 2008 for nu-blizzard

>>383536973
>my kind
I'm sorry your kind thought that shit like Ultima Online was fun. I'm sorry you believed that standing in a corner and swinging a sword for 5 hours to get a 0.01% increase in accuracy was fun. I'm sorry you believed that walking outside and being killed by a deer is fun.

The moment there was a better option, people left. Do you really think dudebros and women are what did it?

How many subs are there now? Estimates if there's none official please.

>>383539108
I guess that's fair. The extreme emphasis on end game is definitely palpable post-Wrath. Leveling is just a speed bump on your way to LFR.

>>383539339
I don't think there's really an excuse for WoW but I've honestly felt this way about higher skill floor games, like FPS. I started WoW in sixth grade and had all the time in the world to git gud at video games. Now I'm an adult who has to spend 40 hours a week gitting gud at his job.

I'm fucking exhausted and the last thing I want to do is get shit on in a video game. I don't think it should be made easier or that I deserve the top rewards but in FPS games at least I only want to play with my fellow shitters.

>>383539549
you mixed in valid things with complete retardation like complaining about the armor in WoW, or pop culture references.

Did you even play fucking vanilla or TBC?

>>383539286

if flying pigs show up, i'll start considering a flying pigride

>>383530403
>durrrrrrrrrrrr fire dancing every 0.5 & oom healers @ 80% boss hp r guud me hardcore i playz dark soulzzz

>>383526370
it wasn't warcraft 3 lore and they tried to make it hard, and then they made it way too easy

>>383539286
No. This game has made its mark on history and overstayed its welcome. Legion gave it some dignity as it seems, it's time to use this goodwill, make a graceful exit and be remembered as one the landmark games of the era for all its good and bad.

>>383532732
no it will not, it's absolutely shit-tier. I've been playing since the first beta and they keep changing things to worse

>>383529051
it's chill if you don't care about racing to the finish

>>383533105
Cata cut half the talents out. Pandaria was the coup de grace.

>>383539286
i don't care for raiding so i'd never come back

>>383532732
i'm so sorry for you anon...

>>383533430
ya. relying on "roleplaying" elements will only ensure the game wont close up shop in the first year thanks to dedicated players that have dumped tons of money into.

in the end, it'll be any imbalances that will sign the games death. I can tell already from the already 18 some odd "Tiers" of equipment for both PvP and PvE that p2w won't be too far behind if not already.

I like Pandas

>>383539726

Did you even fucking play Cata?

>people waited YEARS to find out what they'd do with Uldum
>it was a fucking playground for one massive India Jones pop-culture jerkoff questline
>The complete fucking entirety of it minus the small Faction there that sent you into the dungeons
>Hillsbrad turned into a giant fucking parody of WoW players
>Entirety of Badlands is just some goofball fucking story of people punching Deathwing
>Red Ridge turned into fucking Fight Club

Pop culture references in Vanilla and TBC were tame and often subtle enough to where you might not notice it at first, but then you do, and you kind of smile because it was somewhat clever. In Cataclysm, it was entirely in your face, unsubtle, and quite frankly, fucking retarded.

Yes, I fucking played Vanilla and TBC.

And in response to your comment on armor, armor DID indeed go into a sharp decline in quality and effort in decent designs in Cata. There's maybe a few sets of the entire expansion that look decent. Introduction of xmogg made it worse.

>>383539878
>Legion gave it some dignity
somehow told a more retarded story than WoD, introduced gonzo amounts of RNG, boring raids, pruned the classes to mobile phone level, and gave us the worst PVP balancing yet? Are you fucking high?

>>383539593
It's true. Yet I and the overwhelming majority of the community at the time thought it was some grand plan, with Lich King looming in the future and Starcraft II being split up. Speaks of their past legacy, really.

>>383530362
to be fair, retail isn't too far from that description

were warlocks desired in TBC?
kind of want to roll one because of the armor because i don't remember what mage armor looked like

How long do you think they will continue to support wow and make expansions for it? Will blizzard ever try making a new mmo?

>>383540296

yes. one-button wonders.

>>383539718
>Now I'm an adult who has to spend 40 hours a week gitting gud at his job.
>I'm fucking exhausted and the last thing I want to do is get shit on in a video game. I don't think it should be made easier or that I deserve the top rewards but in FPS games at least I only want to play with my fellow shitters.

sucks balls but that's how it is. Casuals always existed in WoW but somehow the original world in vanilla was enough to keep casuals interested and even 5 man / 10 man dungeons gave off a better adventure experience than lootpinatas in later installments

>>383540125
I don't know, I didn't play for years at this point. Old friends who are still playing are telling me it's good so I'm taking their word for it, and I added an "as it seems" anyway.

>>383540078
this is probably where you forget shit like Paris Hilton being in Shat, or that the Arrakoa and a lot of their quests are straight up from The Dark Crystal, or any number of other things.

Complaining about pop culture in WoW is fucking stupid, and so is crying about the armor in Cata when TBC was Shoulders: The Expansion.

>>383537751

this is what you do for high mythic+ keys. you can't mindless run through a 20+ key, you need to know what packs you can and can't pull and you need to coordinate stuns, CC, and tank/healer cooldowns. No one gives a shit about heroic dungeons anymore, it's entry level content meant to get people into the actual hard shit.

>>383526370
Cataclysm wasn't actually as shit as everyone says it is but it was definitely a lot of hot garbage when compared to wotlk.

People complain about wotlk for "casualizing" everything but that wasn't really what the game did directly it was just that at that point the community had pretty much completely theorycrafted the game out for everyone. LFD ulitimately ended up being abused by blizzard but in those early days it was still nice, PVP was great in wrath, raiding was fun and enjoyable, there was tons of content. It wasn't so much that it was casualized but more that it was extremely accessible while still clearly being world of warcraft. It was Vanilla WoW's original formula but completely refined.

Cata was when they just started cutting out the "excess" of what WoW was and streamlined the game wayyyy too hard, there was no reason to leave the capital city. But the community still tried to be a community. It was only towards the end of Cata that the game truly caved in on itself.

>>383540484

>one NPC and a single questline
>even remotely comparable to entire
>fucking
>quest zones
>dedicated to entire fucking questlines filled with unsubtle popculture referendum

Keep defending the worst expansion tho.

>>383540346
>somehow the original world in vanilla was enough to keep casuals interested
Well yeah, the world was huge compared to any expac and travel was a lot slower, plus most of the cool pets were hidden in very obscure places. Even if there weren't a lot of interesting quests, the idea of an explorable 3D online shared world was really novel back then - now it's passe.

>even 5 man / 10 man dungeons gave off a better adventure experience than lootpinatas
Because back then they were a pretty immersive experience for the time that took a lot of focus and coordination. There's nothing engaging about speeding down a linear corridor as your eyes roll back in your head.

>>383540323
A couple more expansions at least. Doubt they'd make another full-blown mmo but I wouldn't be surprised if they did a game focused around small groups.

>>383526370
dont know pham
the day the expansion went live i was till that point daily logged in for the past couple of years, with the same guild doing hc shit main tank
played the first week, got the levels, guild was like lets start doing hcs to start gearing up
i was like nah cya..and played the next expansions a couple of months each during the summer and mostly did solo raids for neet mounts and legendaries
i havent touched legion and never will

for your question though
changes in map were a big deal and i also felt that my wow experience died when i killed lk

;_;

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>>383539394

blizzard have fallen from grace harder than bioware and that is REALLY saying something

i would describe blizzards older games as 'magica'; starcraft and warcraft (3 specifically) are/were genre defining games and two of my favourite rts games, starcraft is the national sport of an entire country for fuck sake and tournaments with decent prize pools are STILL being ran to this day almost TWO DECADES LATER

playing diablo 1 for the first time was one of the best moments of my childhood and diablo 2 is a pretty solid contender for one of my favourite games of all time, i put thousands of hours into that game

and obviously WoW was truly incredible, all the way up to defeating the lich king

and now we have nu-blizzard, cataclysm onward was a fucking joke, starcraft 2 is fucking awful and is already dead, heroes of the storm is the most pathetic attempt at cloning dota and is also dead, overwatch is imo the most overrated game of ALL TIME and has some of the worst balancing of any mp game ive ever played in my life, i feel embaressed that diablo 3 has the world 'diablo' in its title for how much of a piece of fucking shit it is & hearthstone is the most unbalanced card game out there (quite an achievement considering what other card games there are) and is on the same level of jewish as most mobile games are

i really dont know what happened, if i had to guess, some truly key people left blizzard around 2009~ because everything past that year take a massive nosedive and dont hold a candle to classic blizzard titles

its a huge shame really

>>383540676

magical*

>>383540484
>Paris Hilton being in Shat

Oh no, not a vendor!

>>383539368
even wrath during icc had so much community it was insane.

My shitty backwater server that was low pop had so many cliques and they all interacted.

The alliance pvp assholes
The chinese horde raiders
The one good guild
The asshole huge guild that was full of shitters but could zerg swarm anything and would always do for the horde raids
The guild that did amazing pugs but were notorious for ninja looting
The rogues for some reason all knew each other

Pug raiding in ICC era wotlk was one of the best server wide community things i have seen since vanilla. People actually came together.

>>383539448
Yes, nobody is going to do that now that papa blizzard does all the social aspects of the game for you.

The point is that before LFD people actually formed groups on their own. LFD destroyed any and all cohesion the game had.

It took the blizzard team years to see the damage flying mounts did to immersion and try to own up to it. I have to wonder if they'll ever realize that LFD did the same to community cohesion. Maybe they did, and thats why Mythics are now a thing, nearly a decade later and too late to save anything.

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>>383540676
>overwatch is imo the most overrated game of ALL TIME
but muh progressive characters!

>>383540484

Nigga are you serious right now?

A couple NPCs that sit around and a minor questline here or there are not comparable to entire zones having their entire set of quests rewritten to be unfunny popculture ripoffs or parodies of unfunny memery regarding the people who play the very game itself.

>>383540532
I think LFD would have been way less hated with a few changes:

>preferred matching you with players on your server
>did not instantly teleport you into the dungeon
>did not offer bonus XP (but did incentivize tanks and healers in need)

The state of finding a group at the time was so bad that there was really no need to add all these insane incentives to use LFD. Just some way to automatically create a group would have been enough.

>There's people who defends the atrocity of lfg

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>>383533149
You got a Chocobo from 5-man Kael.

>>383539448
wildstar didn't fail because it was "too hardcore"

it failed because the devs were inept and still to this day havent fixed the performance problems

>>383540886

LFG is actually great for people stuck on shitty low pop servers or people who play during late hours.

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>>383526370
Legion tho
>Hey guys I bet you really want a new cool home city like shat, stormwind/org/ dalaran so we'll give you dalaran again.

Seriously, reusing dalaran and making it slightly different is exactly something a private server would do.

so so gross.

>>383540807

i will give one pro for overwatch - the porn is god tier

>>383540924
it also failed because everything about it was inherently gay

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>>383539286
Blizzard currently refuses to apologize for what they did to all three specs of Hunter, so I doubt they'll ever come around.

>>383533149

had some extremely good trinkets and other items that were basically tier 5 quality

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>>383526370
Once you lower the skill floor, players will rebel at any attempt to raise it back up. It's sad and fascinating how players will argue FOR their own skill decay and being able to take the easy road to all rewards. Wrath babbies couldn't handle the 4.0 changes to healer mana, difficult heroics, and having to discover instance entrances before mindlessly queuing. l'horreur.

Once you allow players to no longer care about mechanics, individual responsibility, threat, survival, etc, it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

Server communities were already weakened/dying off because of world transfers and LFD. Cata's guild system effectively made guilds more insular and less social with their home realm. LFR was terribly implemented and hurt the life of the game further.

10/25 raid balance was a fucking joke, much like 4.0 frost mage pvp balance. If you cleared 10man BRD, BoT, ToTFW, FL, and/or DS you really hadn't achieved the same thing as those who did it on 25. Individual dps requirements were generally higher on 25, in some cases like Ultraxion 25, significantly so.

Huge mistakes in planning for Cata patch cycles led to canceling content, changing plans, droughts, and reflected in poorly thrown together fights later on. I still can't believe how bad DS was and how they thought making the final two boss fights against the main antagonist of the entire expansion ones where you never actually see or fight him in his entirety and you do not even beat him, npcs do.

Players were dropping within the first 6 months, but for me the release of the Firelands daily zone was when the player activity drop off really showed. Raiders were done with it quickly, and following those first couple weeks the content was gradually abandoned more and more.

>>383540841
i could be wrong but i swear when LFD first released it was battle group only, and a lot of battle groups like BG9 all had pretty big cross realm communities.

The amount of incentives to use it were so crazy that I remember that even on my server you could have people in /2 putting together groups to chain queue heroics through LFD.

I think the inverse should have been done, LFD should have been left as is but there should have been an incentive to not use it. Like you're given a daily tracker that if you complete a dungeon a day without LFD you're given a bag of gems or gold or extra badges

>>383529773
the dick has a fun questline though

Early Cata was great, and then they nerfed the heroic dungeons because casuals complained

>>383540484
Yeah and vanilla had an entire fucking zone dedicated to Land of the lost. You know the difference? EVERYBODY knows Indiana Jones. Only a few people will get the Dark Crystal, or Land of the Lost references without reading about it somewhere.

>>383541132
>Like you're given a daily tracker that if you complete a dungeon a day without LFD you're given a bag of gems or gold or extra badges
I don't know man. Using the pre-existing LFG tools was miserable. So many flakes, shitters, assholes or server celebs.

I used to play on a server with a notorious holy pally who was often the only healer available when I was able to play and he was fucking awful.

He ended up scanning his new credit card and posting link in Trade to prove he legally changed his name to that of his character.

WotLK was the first step towards catering to casual players, which is the same as catering to a solo player experience, yet the game is an MMO. This is clearly retarded.

So we see expanded use of the dungeon finder into a raid finder and more welfare gear.

So rather than an MMO where you would seek out groups, travel together to an instance, and then form friendships/join guilds to consistently play with other people who you've met and established some sort of rapport, we instead get a game where you queue for a dungeon, get matched with 4 fucks you don't give a shit about, then you queue for a raid and get matched with 9-24 fucks that you don't give a shit about.

At the end of the day, you've spoken to nobody, formed no new friendships, and likely didn't enjoy the clusterfuck that is PuGing in MMOs.

But hey, at least you got all of your dailies and weekly grinds completed; see you again tomorrow and next tuesday to do it all over again.

>create an expansive, open world, multiplayer focused game
>remove the parts where players travel the world with other players

Say it with me: fucking casuals.

>>383536040
To this day I will never not be mad at all the faggots who abandoned or said "kick me pls" when this shit came up.

It was a shorter dungeon than utgarde pinnacle, utgarde keep, the nexus, culling of stratholme and halls of lightning.

Yet people would freak out when the oculus popped up.

There are like 5 trash packs in the whole dungeon, 2 joke bosses, 1 sort of real boss and 1 gimmick fight. It takes 15min tops.

It's funny how many people were unanimous in their hate of the old world at the time. Everyone was on about " streamlined cinematic questlines and modernization". 2010 was a terrible time for gaming.

>>383541420

honestly i didnt give the slightest shit about the change, in fact i loved it because it meant that i could just get my daily/weekly heroic shit out of the way

the only people i cared to socialize with were my friends in the guild, fuck the random shitters i would spend 30 minutes forming a group with then end up disbanding after being in the dungeon for 5 minutes because the tank/healer has literally no fucking idea how to play

>>383540990
Yeah because finding 4 people on the fucking server os insane cmon anon don't lie to yourself

>>383541017
Better than segregated ghetto camps on an island in the middle of nowhere.

Legion is far, far from perfect. But, it is the first time I feel like the game design team has really tried since Wrath. The three expansions in between had vistas and music that were continually better than the one before and it was squandered on the most phoned in trash in terms of game design.

Look up the Warlords soundtrack, all of the best tracks don't even show up anywhere.

Legion is the beginning of generation three of the Game design team. Not perfect, a few kinks but at least they're pumping out content and trying new things.

>>383537713
the cata release heroic dungeons were straight up undoable with an LFD group. Especially deadmines. Especially with people queing at the bare minimum gear.

That boss with the steam shades in deadmines was harder than anything in ICC10. Not to mention vanessa and fuckin chef murk.

I loved cata heroic dungeons early on though, that shit was a real thrilll. It's probably why i think MoP's challenge mode dungeons were the best content they've ever put out. In WoD and Legion CMs are a joke.

>>383541756

t. plays during peak, on a high-pop server, on the more populated faction

>>383540516
>We have normal dungeons (Baby mode)
>Then we have heroic dungeons (Easy)
>Then we have Mythic Dungeons (Normal)
>Then we have Mythic+ Dungeons (Hard)

Heroicly Mythic Adventure Legendary Dungeons when?

>>383541814
Shittrath and Dalaran were terrible hubs. Vanilla was great because of the big cities of each race, and gnomes didn't get shit because they're little faggots.

This "both factions hub" shit is awful.

>>383541959
why do they do this? same shit with diablo 3 "difficulty" setting

>>383541814
Legion is the first expansion that blizzard has gotten more right than wrong since WotLK. It's got a lot of problems that stem from their current design philosophy but at least lack of content isn't one.

Fucking WoD was LITERALLY ONE CONTENT PATCH

FUCKING ONE PATCH FOR THE FINAL RAID AND ONE PATCH FOR TWITTER INTEGRATION

FOR A FIFTY DOLLAR EXPANSION

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>>383526370
>mfw I resubbed for Cata at the tail end of Wrath w/ my friends and we have been subbed ever since

I played from launch through vanilla Naxx on my first go-around

>>383526370
Cat

>>383540990
Before LFG none of the servers were dead and ones that were struggling were helped by Blizzard via free transfers and other methods.

>>383542079

because the vast majority of the playerbase is shit at the game. if they were stuck at normals they would be mad, so they gave them 2 extra difficulties so they have some sense of progression.

>>383542112
WoD at least gave us a resurgence of Draenei porn

I want to impregnate Yrel

>>383542334
>I want to impregnate Yrel
the worst character to ever be written into warcraft isn't even good fap bait though

>>383542052
Better than not having a fucking city for an entire expansion.

I'll tell you why Shattrath and Dalaran worked. Its because through TBC and Wrath the racial cities were still populated. Shattrath and later Dalaran were neutral ground for the high level players that fought their way through hostile territory to get there. They were like Booty Bay or Light's Hope on a larger scale.

I agree Legion having Dalaran again and having yous start from there is a little lame, but it beats the island camps from Warlords.

>>383534634
You're wrong. Lowbie dungeons are easier than easy. Theyre fucking braindead. Theres almost no chance of wiping. Theres no strategy or tactics, the tank just plows through everything and spam aoe button and everything dies in seconds. Everyones an invincible juggernaught in heirloom gear.

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>>383526370
The launch of cataclysm was fine, and the heroic dungeons were engaging and difficult.

The ending boss rush of heroic deadmines near launch was the funnest five man content I remember doing

The expansion went downhill as soon as the first heroic nerf patch hit, and kept on going downhill until it bottomed out at pandaland

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>>383539286
I prefer having less buttons to press to be honest. Dedicating half my keyboard to keys and moving with the mouse was a bad time

>>383542421
better to pretend she isn't a major character and imagine her as a random draenei

>>383542648
i remember leveling a ret paladin with full heirlooms in cata i think and I was able to tank, heal and dps the whole dungeon down by myself basically.

I remember getting kicked a few times because the tanks would get mad that I wasn't letting them pull and the healers getting mad that I still wouldn't die after they had loudly said "IF YOU DONT LET THE TANK PULL THEN YOU DON'T GET HEALED" I'm not even good at the game or anything I just used my skills and had heirlooms, that's how easy lowbie dungeons are.

The people that still play WoW are fucking awful human beings, i've met people on private servers who are more stable and rational people.

>>383542659
>ywn have as much fun as you did in 4.0 H Deadmines and H SFK again

>>383543149
>Those hour long Wailing Caverns runs

Has anyone recently leveled a new character just by questing? No looms, no dungeons, just questing?

>>383543635
I started doing it and got up to 30.

It was fun with friends, but it's not quite the same.

Content is very easy throughout. Playing a meme survival hunter was kinda fun.

Did some Cataclysm quest lines I never did before at least.

>>383543635
I have. Wanted a break from the whole endgame rush so I decided to take it slow. Made a tauren paladin and read all the quest text I came across.

>>383533159

It's really a shame that most people fell for the Kung-fu Panda meme. The expansion had a great soundtrack, a pretty interesting overarching story before they decided to make Garrosh into a Saturday morning cartoon villain instead of a Warchief, and some interesting worldbuilding.

>>383543860
>People
>Not Blizz

Pandafags will use the excuse that western audiences just dont want Oriental Fantasy. But Stormblood is absurdly popular right now. It was literally just the Pandas. All Blizz had to do was not fuck it up by using big dopey Pandas as their main race and the expansion would have been heralded as the absoltue best the game had ever seen.

>>383543860

it's really a shame that samwise if a furfag, you mean

Ulduar was the peak. The drop in quality after that patch is astounding.

>>383529745
Someone who was actually there and saw first hand people quitting, this is the reason. Blizzard tried to bring back difficulty and the healer changes drove people off. They tried to go back on it during the Dragon Soul patch, with LFR and all that, but the damage had been done.

>>383526370
For me it was when they announced the first major content patch was just the troll dungeons again.

>>383526370
It's been a while, so some of this stuff might have been introduced in WotLK, but in either event it contributed to the exodus as shit built up. Some of it affected everyone, some of it only affected particular faggots
>Removal of many "fun" features of classes, and pressing into cookie-cutter Tank, DPS, and Healer roles
>Imbalancing of classes by patch, some classes are absolutely worthless, while others are absolutely broken. and this can change overnight
>Dungeonfinder destroyed server communities and made the game feel more grind simulator-ey
>Heirlooms make low-level play retarded
>Dungeonfinder and Heirlooms together destroyed all non-endgame content, turning it into grinding until you reach the "good" content
>PvP suffers from many of the same balance issues, and frankly is only worthwhile for people ONLY doing PvP. Dabbling in it is impractical.
>Dungeonfinder makes dungeons the norm, rather than an event. It is now possible for a character to go from level 15 to the cap and never complete a single quest not shat out by the new mob of homeless people who live in the beginning of dungeons
>Instead of telling a coherent story, which is now impossible because the various expansions did not "scale" with the plot advancement set forth by Cataclysm, a single player experience now consists almost entirely of mindless collection of animal parts, epic dudebro quests, and retarded movie reenactments which, while amusing, further the sideshowing of anything not grind-related
>A smattering of the above means most low level characters are actually alts
>New user numbers dwindled, meaning they didn't have to care that their level 1-59 game feels like a retarded grindfest
>Lore rape
>Lorefags satisfied with WotLK as a reasonable end to the story
>People hear the next expansion is Kung Fu Panda: The Video Game: Featuring Pokemon Training

A lot of it leans in the direction of the game becoming a mill, rather than something fun to do over the weekend.

When was it they started the whole "Bring the player, not the class!"-thing? Does anyone remember?
Because in retrospect that felt like a terrible idea

>>383541053
You clearly didn't get into the raids or even very far into them. Really good and hard raid bosses. The performance was shit I agree.

>>383544374

t. gay

>>383544327
They recently commented on a Q&A they want to renig. I like the new guy, he actually points out where he fucks up and apologizes for it

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>>383541058
How do you feel about sidewinders my dude

>>383539048
>whole fight relies on 20s burst dps
>have classes with either no burst or overpowered burst
also fuck that healing debuff bullshit and fuck pet twisting felguard moonwell chalice bullshit