I got an email from blizzard the other day giving me 7 days of free game time. I thought what the hell, I haven't logged in to my lvl 60 rouge in 8 or so years, let's see what's up.
wtf did they do to this game? I don't know what's going on anymore.
I think the last time I played was before they released the burning crusade.
You should know TW is too cool for vidya gamez. What do you think this is, a game forum?
To be fair though, yes WoW is pretty shit now. I have fond memories of TBC/WoTLK but any time I've tried one of those free 7 day things since then has sucked.
I got an email from blizzard the other day giving me 7 days of free game time. I thought what the hell, I haven't logged in to my lvl 60 rouge in 8 or so years, let's see what's up.
wtf did they do to this game? I don't know what's going on anymore.
I think the last time I played was before they released the burning crusade.
I wouldn't even try now, it's not even the same game it was back in Classic/Vanilla. you want the short of it they yanked a shit-ton of spells and abilities off everything, simplified (dumbed down) all of it and made it casual. Nearly everyone has a simple 3 - 4 button rotation and a couple of ability interactions, and everything else is gone. Good chance you won't like it but with luck you won't bother to figure it out and play other games.
I think they killed it with Cataclysm. Pandaren just really put in the final nail
Wrath and Ice crown was probably the best although I still really liked the original zones. It was a fun game and was absolutely addictive. I was a bit peeved when they ruined the original areas with Cata
I got an email from blizzard the other day giving me 7 days of free game time. I thought what the hell, I haven't logged in to my lvl 60 rouge in 8 or so years, let's see what's up.
wtf did they do to this game? I don't know what's going on anymore.
I think the last time I played was before they released the burning crusade.
I've been actively playing since launch, so I'll do my best run down:
Vanilla was the wild west of WoW, if you've played it you know how crazy some of the shit that went down during vanilla, so much shit was allowed to happen that no longer happens to do, case in point:
The game's gone through 5 different expansions to date. After the original release of the game we've had Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and currently Warlords of Draenor.
In the Burning Crusade much of the feel and grindiness of the original game was left largely in tact. Players drudged through the game at a slow place, and the world was large enough to openly explore and engage content, gold as a currency shifted up slightly, as quests and the general price of "junk" goods increased as did the number of overall quests in the new content to be completed.
The Vanilla game finished off with Naxxramas as the last raid tier to be launched with the final content patch of that set. However, due to the fact that the dungeon was hard, damned hard, less than 0.1% of the total playerbase at the time even set foot in Naxx (Smaller still were the number of players who downed 1 boss). Even at level 70 Naxx was no joke and still required a good number of proficient players to actually clear.
Burning Crusade raised the level cap to 70, and a host of class changes were made to different player classes, Paladins were introduced into the elite few who could actually tank, and were no longer the bitches casting various buffs on the raid and being relegated to healer at best. Rogues also got a major overhaul, abilities like Cloak of Shadows were introduced.
BC rolled out a series of content patches that saw a rather quick release of raid tiers, which was interesting because some of the releases were actually made while content hadn't even been cleared. That is to say that even the best guilds struggled to clear out one raid tier and suddenly a new raid was introduced that was even harder than the one they were still working on.
This was also the first expansion to introduce flying mounts as a method of travel. I'm not sure that the player base really thought it necessary, but Blizzard decided this was a good a time as any to introduce it - it created a new continent (All of the BC zones are technically in the Twisting Nether, even the Blood Elf capital is technically located there, even though geographically it should have been a part of Azeroth. But because of this they decided to add it in, it was slow.
The transition from Vanilla to BC was a smooth one, and it was clear that the developers learned a lot from their mistakes in Vanilla, and were actively working to make the game better as a whole. The game never really rose to that level. Content was hard, but fun. BC really could have ended with Illidan and the Black Temple, but Blizzard would release one final content patch that added yet another raid to the game.
It's also worth pointing out that this was the first time we saw the birth of gold farming in WoW, yeah it'd been there before, but suddenly we had bots all over the place, some crack programmer figured out a way to make players fall to death in specific locations to spell out gold selling websites, and eventually just make the characters float up in the air to spell it out in the air, crazy times.
Next up, Wrath of the Lich King...
It's interesting their choice to do WoTLK when they did. Because we'd just spent almost an entire expansion eliminating the Undead already with the Burning Legion. But story wise I guess they wanted us to go seek out The Lich King and end him. It's also worth mentioned that Blizzard was really unhappy how Naxxramas did in Vanilla with player participation, so it was quietly moved from Eastern Plaguelands to Northrend, where it resides to this day, and (oddly enough) only slightly tweaked in difficulty for the new level 70 players as their first raid. However, all the old Naxx equipment, items, and Corrupted Ashbringer would no longer be obtainable in the game, kind of sad, really.
This expansion created a few new concepts that weren't present in previous expansions - new quest dynamics were introduced (riding vehicles or operating turrets, for example) that added a lot of diversity to the usual fetch/kill quests we were so used to doing in the previous expansions.
Something changed, however. The pacing of the game was quickened. Sure it took a while to level, but in comparison to Vanilla or even BC, the leveling process was pretty short lived. The level cap was raised to 80, another 10 levels to earn. The quest structure in Wrath was pretty well made, actually, and some of the quests told a story arc that was a lot of fun at the time and added a lot of depth and lore. It was quick though to cap out on level. And the new PvP zone was fun for a while.
The expansion saw several content patches, including some of the best and some of the worst the game's ever offered. Ulduar is usually hailed as one of the best raids the game had seen, perhaps even since. Ulduar introduced an idea that was quickly scrubbed - in that the bosses had a "hard mode", this usually required the raid to do something different during the fight.
This might include killing heart of XT-002, which would instantly make it enrage (players only had a short time to do this), and if they failed the hard mode wouldn't kick in and they'd just get their normal rewards upon completion. All the bosses had some hard mode feature that required doing something difficult during the normal fight.
Around patch 3.3 though Blizzard did something that I think forever changed the game in a really negative way - they introduced the LFG tool. See, up until now, if you wanted to run a dungeon, you had to go to town, find 4 other gangstas that wanted to run the same dungeon (more for the raids) and then you all had to haul your asses out to the dungeon entrance and go inside. This tool allowed you to queue up for a dungeon, with a menu, then you just wait until the game found your group, and threw everyone into the dungeon - once complete (or you left) then you'd be plopped back to where you were prior to going inside the instance and you could go about your business.
The unattended side effect of this was that players, while not game-breakingly-so, started to spend less time in the game world and instead plunked their asses in major cities because you didn't really have to go out to find a group. With the exception of Raids at that point in time, which I'm pretty sure still required you to find a group and get them all there, players would group up briefly to do their newly-minted daily quests and then the World of Altcraft started to happen, slow at first though.
We eventually saw several content patches, the introduction of some okay raids, the introduction of one of the best raids the game's ever had, and a new healer legendary weapon that every healer and their uncle wanted. The last raid I remember coming out was either Sartharian or Ruby Sanctum (Pretty sure it was Ruby Sanctum), which basically had like one actual boss and was small, really small. It was kind of a letdown really, so much good content and they just end on a whimper, even the story behind the last dungeon made no sense.
It's also worth noting that this was the first expansion to introduce Bind on Account gear, which was class specific equipment that not only scaled up in stats as you leveled, it also increased how much exp you earned while playing the game.
Next came Cataclysm. Up until now, Blizzard realized that if they really wanted flying anywhere on Azeroth, then they were going to have to reinvent the wheel. So much of the content in Vanilla was missing or faked in some way. There were so many fake buildings, backdrops, and areas that were just completely left devoid that they decided that as part of this new expansion, which brought players back to Azeroth that they were going to have to completely revamp the original content and rebuild it from the ground up. And that's exactly what they did.
All the quests were redone, updated, and streamlined. The stories were brought up to date as well. Additionally, many of the empty zones that were left vacant or incomplete prior to this on Azeroth were updated and new content was hastily shoved in to create a series of (5, I think) zones that players would now play through. The level cap this time though was oddly only increased by 5 levels. Which didn't take too long to do.
What this expansion got right though, was the dungeon difficulty. My god were you punished for screwing up in the dungeons. Shit would one shot the tank, or anyone else that failed to move in time or do what was needed of them at a moment's notice. So much so however, that the player base complained and Blizzard nurfed the shit out of the dungeons, so much so that they were suddenly a complete joke.
Each zone featured a faction that players could grind out in various ways to provide players with some pre-raiding gear and things progress quickly from there. This expansion is a bit of a blur for me, I didn't raid much this time around, most of my raid time was spent casually running them. I was working a lot more, didn't have as much time to sink in the game and frankly I found the raid content to be rather dull this time around.
From what I can remember, I was disappointed in Blizzard's decision to revamp the old world content, I'm not sure it was really needed to that extent. We were also introduced to flying on Azeroth - again, not sure it was needed. After the initial rush of players blazing through the new content, the world fell oddly silent as players were spending less and less time in the game world itself, and instead focused on flying about and waiting for their LFG/LFR tool to pop up and let them know they can now instantly start running that dungeon/raid they wanted to run.
This was also a very lore centric expansion we'd had. Wrath had some of that as well, but this was the first time that the whole of the expansion was plagued with cinematics and in-game cut scenes. I do remember this expansion ending off though with the Fire Lands raid patch that added Ragnaros as a final boss. Hard mode bosses were removed and instead replaced with what amounts to a menu to enable them. So click a button and you fight a harder version of the boss, then you could shut it back off and go back to easy mode.
The raid was okay, had some stupid fucking bugs that went unpatched for too long, but Ragnaros had legs in the Heroic version. Also we got to pop pimples on Deathwing's back, that was fun, I suppose.
Spoiler
Then came mists... Pandas, monks, Pandas were factionless until they finish their own quest chain, then they could pick either Horde or Alliance to join. Again, I found Mists to be boring as shit. The content was too fast and too short lived, the game was hamfisted with lore, much of it played no greater role in the rest of the story, and some of the story lines were just left wide open because Blizzard couldn't be bothered to wrap up half the story lines. There were almost too many quests in this expansion. The quest chains were required to progress through the content though, which kind of forced players to take a very narrow route while leveling.
Flying wasn't something you could get right away, but it once you had it you'd never ride on the ground again in Pandaria. The expansion really focused on the Warchief though, since Thrall had retired and Garrosh in his place, the Horde had become ultra violent - not all of them, just his elite faction of Horde. All kinds of great lore was going on - if you'd read the fucking books. This was a bad habit that got picked up Blizzard at this time - there's all this backstory presumed to be happening, but if you didn't read the books as they came out in relation to the expansion then you'd probably be more than a little confused as to why Theramore got blown up, for example.
Even the ending to the expansion was cut short because everything they wanted to say and do was already in the books. So we're left with this really ominous justification for why the Bronze Dragonflight is so desperately trying to understand why someone's tampering with time. We ended with this clusterfuck zone called Timeless Isle. It was a shithole that players would spend hours and hours running around mindlessly killing trash to collect coins to buy shit they didn't really need. It served the purpose for gearing up new players that didn't get to raid in the previous expansions' tiers and instead wnated to gear up to run the then-current raid tiers.
This was the first expansion to introduce us to the idea of there being a class-neutral Legendary cloak that was just crazy overpowered. But it took weeks to get, not because it was difficult, but because the game had this artificial stop-gap measure that ONLY allowed you to get so many tokens/points for the objectives per day/week. So once you hit your cap for the day/week then you were forced to wait until the reset and you could progress a bit more. This was a hard turn from the "play 'til you die" style of progression that we'd seen in previous expansions.
I'm not going to get hung up on the raids too much, I wasn't raiding much at this point either. I remember a few of the boss fights, but not because they were fun - but because they were frustrating in different ways. So many of the bosses became needlessly complicated. Some bosses suddenly had 5-7 phases.
Gear was everything, and the rate at which a player became stronger was ridiculous. A new tier in gear meant you would be pulling a huge margin on anyone that was running the lower content for progression. You knew who was geared and who wasn't simply by the damage numbers. Tanks started out-DPSing the DPSers, even to this day. Tank health pools were breaking the 1 million HP mark (If I remember correctly), and damage meters were just over the top in how big the damage was. Blizzard was hitting the technical limitations that the game engine could support, they had to fix this before the next expansion.
Additionally, since the Pandaren player models had such a higher poly count than the rest of the character models in the game, Blizzard also decided that it was time to revamp them as well.
And lastly, we have Warlords of Draenor. WoD was, quite frankly, the worst fucking WoW expansion bar none. Anyone that defends this piece of shit needs to get their head checked as Blizzard failed on every conceivable level. It was a cash grab piece of shit, wasn't finished, delivered on next to nothing that was promised, and served as a reminder that Blizzard's once long-held belief that not launching a game before it was ready is now dead.
I could talk a lot about how shitty this expansion has been, but instead here's a video of someone who, I think, really sums it up in a meaningful way.
tl;dr-
- You probably weren't interested anyways, no reason to start now.
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