World of Warcraft: Current Year

The issue I have with all these PVP changes, LFR, etc is that the game has just turned into a big swamp of mediocrity. As a casual fuck the only things "out of my reach" now are Ra'den and heroic ToT. I've done 4/9 challenge modes and could finish if I gave a fuck (getting groups is excruciating, but a geared DK tank and mage make it 100x easier), I have Al'ar, I can buy Mimirons head if it ever hits the BMAH, I go back and do Glory raider metas a few patches after it goes live, I can kill all raid bosses in LFR, the PVP changes above mean there won't be any gear differences between players anymore in any instanced PVP, etc. The new legendary shit is just crap, I know exactly which of my characters have thunderfury or glaives but fuck if I remember who has a legendary gem (lol).

I know exactly why Blizzard does all the things it does, and anyone who has raided the latest LFR in the past week knows too. Most players are pants-on-head, cant-move-out-of-fire-to-save-their-lives bad. Oondasta is a great example, Blizzard thought they'd cook up some awesome uninstanced world boss, but they severely underestimated how stupid people are and so almost nobody does it the "right" way by putting together 2-3 badass raids of geared/good players, but instead everyone just throws bodies at the boss until the server chokes and dies or GY zerg it to death. Within just 2 weeks they nerfed the HP 50% and changed respawn to 2 hours from 4 days so, and patch 5.3 nerfs the boss to Sha style (the aoe dmg is capped per player to an easily healable amount). They couldn't even leave it the way it was, because long respawns guaranteed massive zergs, dunno why they didn't leave it hard as fuck though (too much whining?)

I do wish they would try to be like the old Blizzard though and come up with more creative solutions. LFR is lame, its more or less shitty zerg tank n spank fights where only 2-3 people can be forced to know what to do (tanks usually), otherwise no one would kill anything. Imagine instead if they changed LFR so its a big instance with two (fighting) teams of 40, lasts 1 hour, each side kills 1-2 bosses on their way to a big arena or PVP map and then they fight each other and raid bosses come in to also attack, throw in some other random shit that can be fun (think GW2 RvR on a smaller scale, not massive stupid maps) and at the end of an hour one side wins and gets 2 loot bags with a high chance of LFR loot, the losing side only gets 1 loot bag. I'm sure its tweakable to be more fun and you could have a carebear PVE version where the opposing team is AI, but I'd queue up for that shit all the time instead of this current LFR.

Bone farming is another great example of how far Blizzard has fallen. Seriously, you want me to farm in a group (or solo on my DK, haha fuck all you other classes!) for weeks to buy a mount and pet? I'm sure they thought it would be loved by many, but I do a /who z-giants when I'm on (in case a Oond zerg is ongoing) and I see maybe 1-2 people there (usually hunters for their books) on two really high pop servers. Grats, a lot of effort into something almost nobody is doing.

It does seem like they've even dumbed down LFR, I remember in cata wiping in LFR quite a bit, but the last week or so I've done 6 LFR raids and only had 2 wipes, and both of those were the same group wiping on the same boss.

There is still plenty of wiping on the new LFR content unless you have seasoned raiders running the show in it. You also can't have too much complexity because it's typically 25 random people who will pop in and out of the raid. Hard to refine raid mechanics if you have constant churn in your raid population.

Does it also scale you up? If not...I guess there's some progression left. I loved this game during TBC and Wrath. I even enjoyed the fuck out of early Cata heroics. This thing isn't recognizable.

Yeah, just did my last daily ever. Im going to farm the rares for another couple days until my book drops, and if not I'll just buy it. Done until they make this game fun again.

As a ret paladin, pvp is fun every 5 minutes for 40 seconds.

For PVP, I hope the dota bg is like actual dota: You pick a canned hero with limited abilities. In theory they should be able to balance that.

Itzena_sl said:

NB: If you're levelling an alt - give them a faction insignia. It adds the MoP faction bar to the character no matter the level which means you can start working on GL faction via LFG from level 10 upwards, for example.

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I had no idea about this. Silly question, but do they need to actually use it or just have it in the inventory?

you don't have to click mine.

Needless_sl said:

Is that what the new BG is supposed to be? a DOTA esque map?That could be pretty fun actually, and i dont even like moba games lol

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It's called Defense of the Alehouse. They haven't released any info beyond it being a dota-style BG. I'm hoping they actually make it like DOTA vs. AV on a dota-shaped map.

Nope, gold rush isn't it. I'd have to hunt for it, but they have stated they are still working on the dota map, which gives weight to the theory that it may actually be like a dota match.

Brikker_sl said:

Probably one of the more retarded posts I've seen here. Dailies sure; LFR's are not going anywhere. The people who don't want to set a schedule to play a video game (see: majority of players) love the LFR.

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Cool beans. Well I find your post retarded as well, so how's that?

The fact is that nobody is going to be looking back on WoW, thinking of its golden age, and saying to themselves: "That was amazing when they added LFR!"

As far as I'm concerned casuals were already able to do quite a bit with the heroic mode changes that they continued to make from BC. Maybe heroic mode dungeons were hard for you back then but you could do the normal dungeons, buy your faction rewards, etc. until you could move onto heroics. Then after you did heroics you could try your hand at raiding. That worked just fine through Burning Crusade and they actually improved that system of ideas in Wrath of the Lich King with "heroic mode" encounters inside of raids. To me, that was much more fun than simply flicking the easy mode or hardcore switch as they added in Cata.

Are you arguing that people had less fun in Vanilla, BC, and WoLK? Because I would argue against that all day long.

Everyone had plenty of fun back then, casual players, active players, and hardcore players alike. They all had their own things and goals to work toward. I haven't purchases Pandaria but I played Cata a bit so I know how the LFR system work, it was ridiculous being able to flick the ez-mode switch and being able to kill all of the hardest things in the game. I played early on for a short time, then played again sometime after they added the last raid zone. From what I remember it took me a few hours to gear up for the LFR queue, then not long after that I had already finished the entire game. What's fun about that?

LFR is far too casual. It makes things boring. Now everyone gets to participate in the lamest part of hardcore raiding, doing the same garbage over and over again to get geared up... The only difference is that you casuals are now gearing yourselves up without having to help anyone else or participate in a guild environment, which was a key aspect of WoW and any MMO that I've played.

So yeah... I'm glad you are enjoying yourself farming ez-mode garbage to gear your characters up but many players don't enjoy that, myself included. That is and was the most boring part of raiding. How does it feel to have no feeling of progression? To know that everything you are doing and everything that you have is simply being handed to you?

Whatever floats your boat I guess :/

LFR always struck me as something that was more for the benefit of people who used to raid, but didn't have the time anymore vs. the eternal casual market. I find many very casual players don't like raiding, regardless as to its difficulty.

While I do find it to be very nice to actually see the raids as well as get some gear, there certainly isn't anything about it that feels amazing or gives any kind of rush. It really is just about the amount of time you pour into any day... Got a few hours? Great, you can faceroll through all raids in probably one evening. It is kind of silly when you think about it. While I won't argue against LFR entirely, it is frustrating, like others have said, that there's no middle ground. I'm also an adult who wants to play, but doesn't want a full commitment to setting aside evenings days in advance for raiding. It would be great if there were certain ways to gauge players' skills so that better players could be matched up quickly for spontaneous raiding. Or maybe even just add an optional Normal Mode LFR. Because without that, most seasoned players here who can now only do LFR basically log in, fall asleep at the keyboard from boredom, and get their free loots with no sense of accomplishment.