#20 - July 18, 2012, 9:25 a.m.
1) The entire low level experience - which could have been great with the new quests - is spoiled by insanely powerful heritage gear. It ruins dungeons, which are already too easy by turning them into a pathetic zergfest, and destroys PvP by allowing 30% of the players to 3shot the other 70%.
As people point out regularly, heirloom gear is entirely optional. You have to put time and effort into purchasing it. It’s intended to make things a little quicker for players who have already seen end game on at least one character and would like a quicker levelling experience, allowing them to see end game on another character a little sooner.
Not everyone has heirlooms; many low level dungeon groups have some players without them. If you’d like more of a challenge in instances, try running ones that are aimed at slightly higher levels than your character, or make groups with less than 5 members perhaps. For the ultimate test, why not try soloing them?
Low-level PvP is challenging due to several factors. At the end of the day, heirlooms are equivalent to blue quality items. In many situations, it’s possible to find or craft similar non-heirloom gear, although admittedly it’s harder to do so. But having heirlooms available to you is a plus-side of having an end-game character help your low level one, something that’s always been a benefit.
2) Gear inflation in PvP is still ridiculous. S(n+1)-geared people nomatch S(n)-geared people, turning random BGs into "who-has-the-highest-amount-of-undergeared-gets-camped", and forcing people who haven't played all previous seasons of the expansion to spend months getting raped in BGs / Arenas before they can actually start playing the game.
There have been a number of changes to make it easier for people to jump into PvP quicker and gear up faster, while at the same time not invalidating the efforts of people who have put lots of work into getting the best gear. But ultimately, PvP is what you make it, and good gear is not a replacement for skill. Those who win at PvP were in blues too at some stage, they worked at gearing up just like everyone else. Try teaming up with friends, getting organised and focusing on strategies to make the path easier.
3) World PvP has been low for quite a while, it still existed though when there were Dungeon Stones and people actually had to move to some places to do stuff. Now, it's dead, you consume the content from Orgri/SW with your bottom on your dragon, flying around like an idiot with hundreds of shiny mounts around doing the same thing.
One of our aims in Mists is to get people back out into the world again. We’ve heard from players time and time again that the world outside the city gates feels empty and that’s another reason we’re implementing the cross-realm zones. In Mists, you’ll see more players out and about in the world when you’re travelling from A to B — which you should be doing more often thanks to some of the new features in the expansion.
4) There is no RvR. Tol Barad is just another BG, you get TP'd to it and it has a limited duration. The alliance/horde conflict, which is quite great through low levels zones, means nothing in end-game content. BGs are more like some kind of FPS, you're blue team or red team but you don't give a crap. Anyway, you can just switch factions for a few dollars.
The war between the Alliance and the Horde is also something we’re getting back to in Mists. For instance if the Horde were, say, planning something nasty for Theramore, the Alliance may want to do something about that. If I were you, I’d be sharpening my weapons. Things are about to heat up.
5) The *dungeon finder* farmfest. It boggles my mind how someone who is supposed to get paid may have believed that people would actually enjoy that stuff. Sitting on your mount in Stormwind, the fastest - the only viable - way of gearing up is rushing a hundred times through heroics and raids that are so easy that only 3/5 or 15/25 people could do it without an issue. And you get the best gear available.
I was really shocked when I discovered the LFR tools, only a few days ago. I played as a healer, and not only were the fights insanely boring, with almost nothing to heal, but they were also crazy long. It felt like bringing down some fat passive NPC with 100000000 HP and then looting it.
Actually, LFD and LFR have been very popular tools. When time is short, being able to queue for a quick dungeon while going about other things such as gathering or doing daily quests is very useful. Again, it’s not mandatory and you’re still able to manually form groups with friends, even cross-realm now.
In regards to the difficulty level of encounters, well we’re at the end of an expansion and most people have had ample time to gear up well past the entry level gear requirements for these instances, of course it’s going to seem easier now if you have people in the group with such high-end gear.
6) The stupidity of PvE progression. Instead of simply leaving the great vanilla/TBC system, where you dinged 70, then had to go through normal to get access to heroics, then heroics to get enough gear for raids, then Kara, then T4, then T5, then T6 etc. and where you felt like you had a huge path ahead of you, and the content felt so immensely rich, they decided it would be a smart move to flush all previous content down the drain every new patch.
I skipped Firelands, so I'll never get to see it. I didn't do all BWD/BoT, I'll never get to do it. Oh of course, I can zerg through it with ilvl410-geared guys who will oneshot trashmobs. But there's already LFR for that kind of stuff.
The "we want everyone to see the whole content" is the stupidest thing I've heard from a video game company in a while. Does Bethesda rush-teleport me into every single god damn cavern in Skyrim because if they don't I might not take the time to clean them all ?
I wonder if there is like 1 madman who has a prominent position in their dev teams and has all these dumb ideas, or if they actually - as a whole - are bad enough at their jobs to think it's going to work.
The old way of progression meant the majority of players never got to see the last boss in an expansion, and we wanted to change that. Not only is it counter-productive for us to put out these exciting, epic encounters that only a fraction of the players will ever see while they’re current, it also leaves many players with a feeling that they missed out on the end-game.
The system we have right now means that those who are at the cutting edge of raiding
will still get to progress through all the raids in the order they become available, they’ll have the best gear before anyone else, and all the other fun things that come with being a hard core player. Anyone, like yourself, who skips content because perhaps they joined the game later or didn’t have the time required for this kind of progression doesn’t have to do all the encounters if they don’t want to — but the option is definitely still there if they want to see the story. It totally depends on how you want to play the game. This way, people aren’t forced to grind through non-current content (and often fail to make it to the end before the next expansion) to be able to see the end of the game.
Also, comparing two completely different types of games is bad, please don’t.
7) Last but not least, the uniformization (does that word even exist in english ? Might be.).
Classes, races, factions, professions...
Everything is being mirrored to everything. You no longer need a priest for that buff, or a hunter for that debuff. 3 classes can do the same stuff. Choices are cosmetic, at the end of the day you won't need to have the balanced groups of specs / classes you needed back in the old days, which is for me the essence of an MMORPG.
“Back in the old days”, if you played a Paladin, you were pretty much forced to heal in raids because other classes did DPS and Tanking better. Obviously lots of players were miffed about that sort of thing. We made changes over time to make other specs for each class more viable for not only raiding, but for other aspects of the game.
Having said that, the developers actively work hard to make sure we
don’t see all classes ending up exactly the same, while trying to ensure different specs and classes are valuable in their own right, each having something to add to a group and making sure one character’s ability is not vastly more useful or overpowered than someone else’s.
