Difficulty of the game (or the lack of it)

#1 - March 28, 2013, 4:06 p.m.

Hey guys ;)

I am simply curious to see what other people feel about this and maybe get some insight from Blizzard.

The raiding from vanilla WoW up to and including WotLK has been an amazing experience for me. So has the PvP, it has always given me the adrenaline rush I needed to stay interested in the game. Even the leveling was amazing. The quests were great in that on more than one occasion I'd find myself having to find more people in the area to be able to down a certain mob for my quest (STV being a great example of this) and dungeons .. man, I had to find groups for dungeons on my own realm! Loved it, loved having to find the things to unlock them, loved having to summon people to get started, loved looking for people to run with as they usually ended up as becoming my friends.

The issues:

Difficulty while leveling
WoW has now been dumbed down so much to the point that my Dutch 7 yo. nephew can level up to 80 (mage) without knowing any English, thus not having a clue of what spells do and so on. He doesn't read quests because whatever he needs to click on is sparkly, and what he needs to kill is marked red. Arrows lead him in all the directions he needs to go so basically, he doesn't need to do anything other than spam frostbolt and the occasional frostnova or whatever.

Now when I do questing myself instead of letting my nephew do it while I go play guitar or whatever it just hurts my heart to see the old STV "bosses" for example either be completely gone or they're now normal mobs that I kill with 3 spells.. There's no challenge at all in leveling now.

Dungeons
Getting into dungeons, and dungeons themselves have turned into the most impersonal experiences I've ever had. Raid/dungeon finder gets me groups while I can AFK and I don't even need to pay attention to the group or talk or whatever because I can solo every dungeon I enter. When I play my tank monk now for example I just tell the healer to go dps spec because I have enough selfhealing to stay alive and mobs don't live longer than 5 seconds. It's boring, tedious and completely ruins my experience in WoW. The other people might as well be NPCs for me because it doesn't change a damn thing about what happens around me.

Specs
I miss having to choose my talents carefully, re-speccing, being different from the rest. I remember having a frostweaving DK and a half enh/ele mixed shaman, was amazing. Right now in arenas when you see what spec somebody is you know exactly what's coming. There's no guessing, observing or adapting anymore (to a certain degree).

Dungeons and questing having been made redundant now just leaves PvP. World PvP is non-existent and battlegrounds are filled with bots, nothing for me to find there either. So what do I do in WoW now to get my adrenaline shot? Raid finder is faceroll. Arenas are filled with FotM classes/specs and if you're not one of those you can throw away your dreams of high rating (not that it matters anymore anyways because elite gear gives nothing extra except for a different color). Raiding itself.. I can't even be bothered anymore. New raids are cleared within the first 10 hours they're out, no challenge there.

The last challenge WoW has given me since Ulduar came out was the green fire warlock solo quest. Kanrethad is the most challenging and fun boss I've ever fought and downed (72 attempts, F yeah!) altough, with all the crying on the warlock forums on how difficult the boss is it will likely get nerfed within the next few weeks anyways.

So yeah, am I the only person who thinks WoW too dumbed down and is no longer challenging? Let me know.

Draztal

Community

#3 - March 28, 2013, 4:47 p.m.

Difficulty while leveling
WoW has now been dumbed down so much to the point that my Dutch 7 yo. nephew can level up to 80 (mage) without knowing any English, thus not having a clue of what spells do and so on. He doesn't read quests because whatever he needs to click on is sparkly, and what he needs to kill is marked red. Arrows lead him in all the directions he needs to go so basically, he doesn't need to do anything other than spam frostbolt and the occasional frostnova or whatever.

Now when I do questing myself instead of letting my nephew do it while I go play guitar or whatever it just hurts my heart to see the old STV "bosses" for example either be completely gone or they're now normal mobs that I kill with 3 spells.. There's no challenge at all in leveling now.

We didn't read quests back then (well, some of us did, and still do) and could do them just fine. You could also level up spamming frostbolt or frost nova, you just had to be careful with how many mobs you were pulling at the same time. And we had sites like Thottbot to go check where quest objectives where (and map addons to get the coordinates). Now those things are built in the game, but it wasn't nothing that didn't exist before.

The STV "bosses" and many other elite quests were changed some time ago. Among other reasons, because it was getting increasingly harder to find players to do that content as we were moving into newer expansions. So, during The Burning Crusade's launch, it was very easy to find players to group up for the elite quests at Hellfire Peninsula, yet at the end of that very same expansion, it was rather difficult to find alts that would help you go through. As you move forward from that content, new players coming up to the game just can't do them because they can't group with people. What's the point of a difficult monster if noone can kill him because you can't find a group at the appropriate level?

Dungeons
Getting into dungeons, and dungeons themselves have turned into the most impersonal experiences I've ever had. Raid/dungeon finder gets me groups while I can AFK and I don't even need to pay attention to the group or talk or whatever because I can solo every dungeon I enter. When I play my tank monk now for example I just tell the healer to go dps spec because I have enough selfhealing to stay alive and mobs don't live longer than 5 seconds. It's boring, tedious and completely ruins my experience in WoW. The other people might as well be NPCs for me because it doesn't change a damn thing about what happens around me.

If you are having an easy time on 5-man heroics, you're more than welcome to try Challenge Modes. Though, if your party overgears the content it's to be expected that it won't be too difficult (but again, this is nothing new, it was being done in previous expansions as better gear was being released).

Specs
I miss having to choose my talents carefully, re-speccing, being different from the rest. I remember having a frostweaving DK and a half enh/ele mixed shaman, was amazing. Right now in arenas when you see what spec somebody is you know exactly what's coming. There's no guessing, observing or adapting anymore (to a certain degree).

How did you choose your talents carefully? I mean, it's an honest question. Because most of the community would go and use the same cookie cutter specs (and using anything else would be a DPS loss on PVE or a survivability loss in PVP).

New raids are cleared within the first 10 hours they're out, no challenge there.

Which one?
Throne of Thunder's Heroic race is still on (and it wasn't released 10 hours ago :-P).

And also, unless you have cleared it, the challenge is there, waiting for you. If you refuse to do it that's entirely a different topic.

So yeah, am I the only person who thinks WoW too dumbed down and is no longer challenging? Let me know.

You aren't, but I would recommend you reading this answer I made about this topic as well as that thread. Might be useful.