World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade Review 329
It would be hard to argue that World of Warcraft hasn't been a huge success. Not only has it been a financial success in the MMO market, but it has introduced many new people to Massive gaming that might not have otherwise given it a shot. With their first expansion, The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has made huge advances in many areas of the game. Long-standing complaints have been addressed, and the structure of the popular title has been reinforced. The casual players have gotten a large injection of content that is both accessible and enjoyable to someone who doesn't have huge amounts of time to play. At the same time, hardcore players who thirst for new challenges on a daily basis have quite a bit of work ahead of them. This is not to say that The Burning Crusade (BC) doesn't have its pitfalls, but overall I get the feeling that this is closer to what Blizzard's World of Warcraft dream was meant to be. Read on for my opinions of this new round of addiction.
- Title: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
- Developer/Publisher: Blizzard / Vivendi
- System: PC / Mac
- Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Game
- Score: 4/5 - This game is a wonderful addition to the original World of Warcraft universe and helps to alleviate many of the "problems" that players have been complaining about for a long time. If you are burnt out on the original game, now is a good time to give it another look.
The first major improvement in the game comes with the extension of the level grind. There is a vast difference in the enjoyment of leveling a character from levels 1-60 and from 60-70. While the amount of experience is relatively comparable, the mechanisms in place make it a completely different animal. With the original game, leveling was thought of as one of the main aspects of the game and designed to take a long time to do with very little continuity or help to speed you along. Instances were designed to be for gear rewards and something you did rarely in between your bouts of leveling. With The Burning Crusade, the quests were designed to make you feel like you were accomplishing smaller tasks within a grand scheme, and they actually helped to develop the plot and a feeling that you were a part of the game rather than just trying to "beat" the game to get a level.
Throughout the questing and overall leveling process, instances in the Burning Crusade were also designed to be a much more integral part of the game for both leveling and gear. The group experience bonus allows a player to still make good progress towards the next level while playing through group content with friends and finding new challenges and boss fights along the way. The quests for every zone eventually start to poke and prod you towards the next level appropriate instance to help players make this decision and help round out the leveling experience. To make the process of instancing even better, Blizzard has grouped the instances in each zone together as "wings" of increasing difficulty within a larger structure that has an overall theme. This allows players to tackle the content in smaller chunks without having to commit large blocks of time just to do an instance. At the end of each group of instances the content culminates in a larger group encounter for raids to tackle once their players have completed a key quest for that particular instance.
While instances may have gotten a large push in the right direction, there are still a couple of major problems that continue to crop up, preventing players from really enjoying the content that is right in front of them. The largest of these problems are instance-breaking bugs. There have been quite a few of them since launch, and while bugs are to be expected, these are taking a long time to fix. Meanwhile the customer service reps in game are doing very little to help the players deal with the bugs beyond telling them it is a known problem and sorry about your luck. Now, I realize that some people are going to try and exploit GM assistance, but there comes a time when you just need to give your customer the benefit of the doubt and help them through any problems that crop up. The other major problem attached to instances comes before you even make it to the instance. If you aren't part of a large guild with resources always at hand, it means you are going to have to try your luck with a pickup group. While the "Looking for Group" interface was a neat addition, I think Blizzard either did too much or too little depending on what they were going for. With a simple global chat channel it was very easy for players just to type what they were looking to do and for others to answer, a quick and easy solution. In fact, most servers have seen a grass roots channel emerge to move back to this functionality. With the introduction of a user interface and automation to the process, they removed the "easy" solution but didn't go far enough with the complex solution. Ultimately, the "best" answer to this problem would be to bring back the chat channel but make the user interface "grab" names and classes from that chat channel into a larger pool of people to draw from, allowing users to use both methods of communication depending on their preference.
One of the main points of skepticism before the release of The Burning Crusade was the number of reputation "grinds" that would be required in order to experience new content. While much of the new content is hidden behind reputation requirements, the new system allows players to gain reputation at an amazingly fast rate making this requirement almost a non-issue. In addition to new content for these new factions the reputation system also unlocks a vast amount of new pearls for the crafting system. This allows different reputation choices to determine which recipes you are able to craft so that each crafter has the ability to obtain unique recipes instead of being a cookie cutter crafter like it was before the expansion.
Despite the fact that the casual consumer has definitely been given quite a bit of content to work their way through, the hardcore player has certainly not been left in the lurch. Raid content is available in spades. The addition of a 'heroic mode' for dungeons allows players to go back and play through previous instances at a higher difficulty level (and for better rewards). This, again, requires that they have put in the time to attain a high enough reputation level with the controlling faction. With each set of instances, there is also a difficult 25-man raid (now that Blizzard has decided to limit their "large" raids to 25 players instead of 40) encounter designed to provide an additional challenge. Beyond these short raids there is also new 10-man content (Karazhan) that allows players to work through a larger dungeon and attain a new armor "set" in addition to the random drops that still occur. Once players have made their way through this 10-man content they can start working towards some of the even larger 25-man content with huge sprawling dungeons promised, eventually culminating in the battle through Mount Hyjal. However, in order to get to this final realization players must wade through a lot of content. In an effort to help players in this goal one player even put together a flow chart of what it is going to take to realize this goal.
The largest problem with the current raid content is that while it requires large amounts of work to get to and complete (as it should), the rewards for actually completing that raid content have all but eviscerated the desire to do the work. Having moved from a "hardcore" raiding style of play to a much more casual approach I was quite pleased at how much I was able to do on a daily basis with my limited time. However, looking back at my previous play style and the rewards that I would be shooting for I realized that there was very little reason for me to aim for those "end game" rewards anymore. The time spent versus rewards earned seems a little imbalanced. I'm sure that a large part of this decision was to try and cater to the larger "casual" player base and stop the hemorrhage of players they were losing to other games. Just the same, if you are going to create content that caters to your hardcore players you should probably create rewards that justify the work they are about to put into it.
While much of the game play and content has been improved greatly the class balance issue is still one that continues to haunt Blizzard. For example, if you are a Rogue and you really want to experience some of the heroic content and smaller raid encounters, you are in for a difficult time finding a group. The same goes for priests if you are really into the competitive player versus player aspect of the game. I am willing to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on this one since they are probably still evaluating how the new talents and new gear will effect the overall class balance, but changes are definitely needed.
In addition to all of the game play changes, each faction also has a new race, a new homeland, and tons of new starting quests to work through. While information on the new horde race, the Blood-Elf, has been available for quite some time, the new alliance race, the Draenei, has been somewhat of a mystery almost until the release of the beta. Unfortunately, this also shows in the quality of both the quests and the overall feel for each of these races. The homeland and starting quests for the Blood-Elves have a much larger degree of continuity and they lend a feeling of a long time in development while the Draenei feel like a last minute cobble when they couldn't think of anything else. This obviously doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things once you make it to Outland and the new content, but it can have a definite effect on someone just starting the game.
Overall, it seems that Blizzard is definitely listening to their player base, they just need to do a better job of communicating that fact. I realize that it is hard to release information about something if it later gets taken away or changed, but let your GM staff work for you, give the player the benefit of the doubt more often, and admit when something is wrong so that players can avoid the disappointment while it is being fixed.
Despite any pitfalls, The Burning Crusade is an excellent addition to the Warcraft Universe. Blizzard has done an excellent job of catering to many of the different types of players within the game, providing a wide array of enjoyable content. If you are new to the MMO scene or even if you gave up hope before The Burning Crusade hit the streets, now is a great time to get into the game and give it a shot.
A ton of content. (Score:2)
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Finally, I don't know that no new classes is a "glaring flaw". I certainly didn't expect any.
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global "looking for group" channel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:global "looking for group" channel (Score:4, Insightful)
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They should definitely implement your idea, and then make it so that auto-join/auto-invite is not enabled by default.
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Re:global "looking for group" channel (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Altruism - There have been times in the past where I see a grammatically correct and polite request for a VC group sent out for an hour or more. I like to reward people for these things, and so I'll bring in a high level character and get them through the dungeon or a hard quest. The new LFG tool has absolutely no support for friendly, high level players.
2) Multiple Characters - I tend to have multiple characters on a single server. A habit of mine with the LFG channel was to play one character while monitoring the channel for a dungeon another character needed. The LFG tool has no functionality supporting this.
3) Craziness - Sometimes people want to group for odd things. Whether it's a roleplaying parade, a raid on an enemy city, or a counter-offensive to an enemy attack the LFG channel allowed groups for non-standard events. The LFG tool has no functionality for people joining groups unassociated with predefined directives.
4) Automation - While much of the LFG tool is automatic, using it isn't. Most players by default would join the LFG channel on login. People must personally open the LFG tool and set what they need. The result is a crippling effect on participation.
5) Simple Limits - One of the major problems with the LFG tool is the limited amount of LFGing you can do with it at any one time. Despite the fact that I might be looking for several wings of SM, RFD, some elite Arathi quests and perhaps a general Zone group for the Badlands I must pick and choose between a maximum of three things. SM alone can eat 3 of those without even covering the whole instance. As instances generally fulfil many quests, they take higher priority than individual quests. This makes it extremely difficult to use the LFG tool for anything that isn't a dungeon, as people naturally select what will give them their "money's worth".
6) LFM - The LFM portion of the tool is simply bad. Three was limiting enough, but at most you can LFM for one dungeon, quest, raid, zone at a time. If you're doing quests outside of dungeons, you might suffer from the "ships passing in the night" syndrome as you flutter through the relevant quests looking for people who might be interested.
Those are my criticisms of the tool. It has great potential, but I think Blizzard jumped the gun. It's going to be twice as hard to convince people to adopt it because of the perception that it sucks. Even if it is improved to the ease of use and functional level of the LFG channel, people won't be convinced. It would have been better if they had waited and expanded it before replacing the flawed but undeniably useful LFG channel.
Good fix to the wrong problem (Score:2)
Also the game doesn't allow you to specify any classes. If you have several DPS classes there's no way to specify for it to only add a tank and healer.
Incomprehensible! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm equally baffled by the reviewer saying "players must wade through a lot of content." isn't content rather than grind what everyone wants?
Re:Incomprehensible! (Score:4, Informative)
Instances also have bosses with mad l3wt, which is always fun.
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WOW instance detail (Score:3, Informative)
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Verified... Tried swimming from North of Scarlet Monastery to Ghostlands before I installed BC (and after it had gone live) and all you wind up in is 5 dimensional space (shows you walking through the zone on the map, but you're actually standing on an anonymous mountain coastline). I can only presume this is still the case after having installed it. Gotta w
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An instance in WoW is a self-contained "copy" of a dungeon for your group. You basically get your group mates together, walk through the dungeon's portal entrance, and a "copy" of the dungeon is created for your group to progress through. In the days of EverQuest (before the LDoN expansion), every dungeon was shared across the server, so if one dungeon was full, you basically had to wait until people left or you went to another dungeon. It takes a little bit of the "community" out of the game, but the adde
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It's the eternal paradox of MMO's - the customers want more content in game, but they don't actually want to encounter the content. All they want is the next level easily and painlessly. (Then when they've gotten to the top of the ladder - they whine because there wasn't enough content.)
Or as was recently posted by a player after a round of particularly ludi
Good review, for those thinking of returning (Score:5, Informative)
I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend).
The game does slow down after you hit 70, but more options open. Most likely, you'll be grinding to get a fast mount, but you'll almost certainly have 1000g for the slow flying mount. You'll want a guild, but one is not necessary to participate in most of the content. However, guildless, it's unlikely you'll progress into the "advanced" content for quite a while. It's difficult to complete the 10-man Karazhan key in PUGs, and even if you do, there are few 10-man PUGs. That sounds kind of funny, but Karazhan is NOT simply a level 70 UBRS. It's more like a 10-man Naxxramus.
Re:Good review, for those thinking of returning (Score:4, Informative)
Eventually, when finished with Hellfire Peninsula and moving into Zangarmarsh, the gear turnover slows down. Suprisingly, I found this to be quite a relief; I didn't want to have to slow down and reevaluate my gear once an hour!
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As a casual player, I completely agree with this assessment. My girlfriend and I play for about six to ten hours a week and when BC came out we were still in our low 50s. Just last week we made it to 58 and headed
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I think there's
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Translation: Get
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Draenei Cobbled? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I can see how someone might prefer the flavor of the Blood Elf starting area to the Draenei area. To me, that difference in flavor shows how much thought Blizzard put into each area.
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casual (Score:4, Funny)
Re:casual (Score:4, Funny)
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A Hard Core Player is anyone who plays more than you do.
G.
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For outsiders looking in (like yourself) it's convenient to view all Wow players as addicted basement-dwellers. That's blatantly incorrect. The reality is that most players play infrequently, have career and families to worry about, and their Wow schedule is dicta
Additional impressions from a casual player (Score:3, Informative)
Initially when you first start the new content, the items you receive feel unbelievably good. They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. And because of this, the new stuff felt really munchkin initially. Fun, but munchkin. Epic items from pre-BC were replaced with green(normal) items found in BC. The quests are good - a lot of the little annoying bits have been toned down (fewer pointless long runs, flagging quests that really require multiple people as requiring 2 or 3 people as appropriate). There is a lot of nice flavor here.
One thing the reviewer missed is that a lot of BC is really beautiful. Each zone is very distinctive. And there have been several times when I just paused to admire the beauty. With the addition of flying mounts, there are some really gorgeous views that can be found. Several of the instances are visually stunning as well. This is a pretty game.
There are some class balance issues -- but I think at least part of the issues are that the classes changed a bit and people have not adapted their thinking. For example, it used to be hard to try to be a raiding druid in the tank role -- there was effectively one set of gear that all tank-druids went for. BC has added a large variety -- which means the class is a lot more viable in a role than it used to be. Is this unbalancing? No. It is different and changes some of the feel of the game.
Quick Question (Score:2, Funny)
BC = Easy (Score:2, Insightful)
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There are a ton of new graphics.
Different classes having different areas of expertise is not class imbalance.
Just because one class can do something doesn't mean all classes should be able to do it.
"Some classes have scaled so far ahead of others that they don't even need a party to help grind elite quests."
lie.
" lots of repetitive quest grinds and nothing new to the game"
also a lot of quests done differently, and probablt fewer grind qu
BC bugginess, and the myth of class imbalances (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the "class imbalances", I have to disagree with
It's all about context (Score:5, Funny)
First Article - "World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade Review"
Second Article - "Recovering a Wrecked RAID"
Instance wings (Score:2)
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Not surprising; I'll bet there are people in the under 50 instances still, but 50 and up? I doubt anyone will be in those until level 70s start grouping up and grinding them as a lark.
BC is good, to an extent (Score:2, Insightful)
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I started a Blood-Elf for the hell of it and realized after not too long that you can skip any quest that involves killing monsters to collect X number of items. That particular kind of quest has to be the most tedious and absolutely frustrating quest available. I read the interview with the Warhammer Online team and th
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Well at that point it's no different than the "kill X monsters", uh, not that "kill an unknown number of monsters to get X items" is really
Thanks for the warning (Score:4, Interesting)
I need my MMORPG fix but I do NOT need those random loot drop grinds.
WoW players might regonize were I stopped playing WoW. It is in the night elf area, third area, and you got to kill some warlocks with their pets for an item to drop as part of a longer quest.
It didn't drop. My rogue gained two levels in that area while I learned how exactly to get them in the shortest possible time. Simple, conceal, sap caster, kill pet, kill caster. Rince and repeat.
That killed the game for me, right there and then I knew that this was exactly how the game would be for the next 40 levels and then some.
Since I had already paid over the next few weeks I got my char to around 30 (were getting new skills ends and you just get slightly more powerful skills to deal with more powerful critters) and then just stopped.
I couldn't stand the random drop nature of things. EQ2 at least most times TOLD you how much you had to kill. Granted most its quests were Kill 8 X, Kill another 8 X, and again. Once more. Okay, now kill 10 of them. Okay! Now kill 8 x (adjective) X. Congrats, you done part 1, now kill more X.
But at least you could count them.
Get the goddamn fucking randomizer OUT of my MMORPG's. If I kill every single last one of those casters the damn item should just fucking drop.
It was the same with crafting. The chances of actually getting some of the rarer stuff were so random that you just couldn't make plans. By the time some items actually dropped I had gotten so many levels I was way beyond the item I had wanted to grind.
WoW takes to long. Your warning tells me BC does not improve this. I HATE RANDOM DROPS.
If Blizzard had made Star Wars poor Luke would have had to make a dozen trips to the Jawas before R2-D2 dropped.
Then again, if Sony had made Star Wars, you would have had to form a que to rescue Leia, if she was spawning that day.
Mmm, if only Lucas made a MMORPG. Surely that would be tops! Oh wait.
time vs skill (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should it? This is why I hate (and do not play) this game. A good game should advance with the player's skill and a little bit of time. World of Warcraft advances the story only with time, time, and more time. You'll pour your life into the game, but you can still suck large amounts of ass at it. The reason that there are countless level 60/70 clueless morons is because the game requires no skill to speak of, only endless amounts of time.
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Grinding = $$$ for Vivendi
The game is no longer about serving the player's interests and thus acquiring new players and making $$$, it's about wresting as much $$$ you can from the existing player base as they can. That's why everything is grind, grind, grind. It's why the new pvp system runs on "seasons" so you have to play for 3 months at level 70 everytime you want to try to for the special pvp rewards. Tha
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Meanwhile Engineering gets a single faction recipe (Score:2, Funny)
What do they do you ask? Nothing. FUCK YOU BLIZZARD!
My (short) experience with WoW (Score:5, Funny)
lawl dude ur ghay
wtf i need
i clicked greed it must be a bug
ya right btch
ok we're almost to the boss
i gotta go
What? why?
mom wants cpu
Huh? Your Mom? Its 4a.m. How old are you anyway?
i nd gold plz
Huh?
ind gold to repr my armer
will u giv me sm gd?
No.
y not? wtf
I'm almost broke, I can't be giving any gold.
FU thn nub u sck
not a gamer so please forgive me (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone else find it ironic (Score:2)
Aren't they all?
2 points of contention (Score:3, Informative)
A few notes... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, I put the game down as I'd seen everything I wanted to see, and accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish except for the last new pieces of epic purple lewt(TM) in my set.
Fast forward a year or so, and I bought the expansion, and I found that my needs (being halfway between "raider" and "casual") had been met absolutely perfectly.
The game is gorgeous, the new questlines and level progression from 60-70 doesn't feel anything like a grind, and the improvements to the game made over the last year as a whole, are astonishing.
Yeah, you can look at that flowchart about what it takes to get into the final, epic battle at Mt. Hyjal and it looks terrifying. But, with the exception of taking out Lady Vashj and Kael'thelas, you'll be doing all of that anyway while you're progressing through the content.
That's what people don't realize... you only have to visit each of those instances once (well, twice if you run Heroic versions for the Naaru trials), and you'll be hitting that content anyway as you continue down questlines in your 60s and past 70. The reputations with each faction aren't grinds anymore. You'll get the required rep just following quests and running instances a couple times (as opposed to running, say, ZG 300 times to get exalted so you can actually use the chestpiece you won).
The point is, there's a TON of stuff to do at level 70 now that doesn't require a raid, and raids are far less painful a proposition than they were in the Molten Core days.
Contrast that to pre-burning crusade. If you didn't run raids, you were either stuck in UBRS to rinse & repeat for loot, or stuck in 18 hour Alterac Valley BGs for loot.
Now, I can log in, run any one of 18 new high level, incredibly well-designed instances (requiring boss strategy normally reserved for old 40-man runs) in an hour, run TWO games of Alterac Valley in an hour, and actually make progress in both quests and reputations for the foreseeable future in a couple hours a week.
That flowchart shows you what it takes to "win"... ie get attuned to everything and raid the 'leet raid. For all but a few of the hardcore, getting there is the fun part. You're not supposed to "win"... because you run out of stuff to do!
There's a lot to do now post-70 that's a hell of a lot of fun if you don't raid, and there's a TON to do if you raid.
The best part is: the gear gap is really narrow now. Those who pvp or run dungeons occasionally for their gear won't be horribly outclassed in PvP anymore by people with full Tier 4/5 raided gear. It's a really, really small upgrade, but the raiders are more interested that the name's in purple and they look cool, so everyone wins.
For those who never got to high levels, the new Dranei and Blood Elf areas are great little alt sandboxes as well. The leveling seems a little faster than it used to be as well.
Take all that and add in some of the best art direction, game design and polish that you're likely to see in any game, and I think it's a fabulous expansion.
Overwhelming (Score:3, Interesting)
After getting into BC a bit, overwhelming applied to how much new quest, gear and instance content there is.
I'd say I'm a casual gamer even though I play WoW ~25 hours a week. I've played since beta, played every class to some extent, achieved a few level 60's, run all the non-raid instances and half of the raiding ones. I still felt like I had quite a bit more to do and see in the old content. Then BC came out and I feel like I'm starting over again.
I've started new characters to experience the new starting zones, and I have a few of my characters in Outland. My guild is quite divided about the content: hardcore group has muscled ahead and reached 70 planning to lead the guild through raiding, casual group is still reaching 60 and wants to raid the old content.
I haven't purchased any other game since November 2004. I played Ultima Online for 7.5 years. WoW is considerably better than that, so I expect to be playing for a very long time. The review is fairly accurate though I disagree with the author's negative opinions about the old content.
Karazhan Key (Score:3, Funny)
I'd say more, but I have to level my alts.
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Re:Why review this? (Score:5, Funny)
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One of us, one of us.
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Re:Why review this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people want more of exactly the same, but combined with Vivendi's foolish idea that removing dps class roles from the game would somehow improve the game by disenfranchising rogues and mages, the game ended up being more of the same but distinctly worse. Since the release of the expansion there has been a steady trickle of people in my former guild quitting the game. It seems only the really new players actually like the expansion, mostly because they hadn't invested time into doing level 60 activities and thus didn't end up wondering why everything that had accomplished in the game to date had to be rendered utterly useless by the expansion.
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I have a very different experience from yours with BC. I belong to a guild which itself is part of a guild group, geared toward what people call the "hardcore" instances. Only 1 on 200 people in my guild left since BC, and all the others are enjoying it so much that it's now hard to gather 40 people for a good auld "hardcore" instance.
There is no "reset the cap to 70 and everything before 61 is gone.". Most items in BC aren't worth replacing the set items found in 60 instances, and such sets help you fly th
Re:Why review this? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Most players know that set items pre-BC weren't very good in the first place, they are easily replaced by non-set items gained through questing. True, the epic items will mostly be replaced by blue quest items, but they will be replaced. Many of the bonuses on your level 60 gear actually scale downwards as you level. Your "crit rating" becomes less effective as you level up, going from level 60 to level 70 you will loose about 50% of the crit bonus that you had at level 60, for example.
2) You will never again see a 40 man raid, the new raid content is 25 man raid content and the old stuff offers nothing to justify the time expenditure. The only reason to do the 40 man raid content is curiousity or nostalgia, because even the legendary staff from Naxx pales in comparison to epic level 70 one-handed weapons. There are simply no rewards worth delving into the 40 man content for. Even then, the level 60 content should be so trivialized by level 70 players that you probably won't need more than 10-20 players to complete MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone starts soloing the level 60 raid bosses for fame and kicks.
3) There are no rewards worth earning from any factiont that you can rep grind outside the Outlands. Almost everything of value is concentrated in the outlands. This means the time invested in grinding those level 60 reputations is now worthless, just as the time invested in earning equipment from Naxx is now pointless, you gear will be superceded by new gear on the way to 70. To some people that will seem justifiable, but the case was that did not happen on your way to level 60 from level 50. If you had the good fortune to have a level 50 epic weapon, you most likely kept it until you replaced with a high-end level 60 blue item, rather than a quest reward from some random level up quest. The only exceptions are the new instances Caverns of Times and Medivh's Tower that are in the "old world".
That's why everything pre-61 has been rendered pointless. In some ways that's a good thing, someone who just made level 60 before the expansion came out will essentially be on an even footing with someone who started at release and spent almost 2 years at level 60, but in my opinion and that of many others, that's going too far. This is a MMORPG, part of the point is to build up your character, to reduce someone who put 2 years of effort into their character to the same level as someone who put 2 weeks into it, just doesn't sit right.
Actually, since I played a mage, it was much worse than that for me. Mages received a ton of nerfs for the expansion to force one of the original 2 pure dps classes into the position of doing only average damage. At that point, why play a mage, and since it was obvious that Vivendi doesn't understand how to run or balance their game, why bother playing? Mages in particular are now inferior in every way to warlock character. Less dps, more downtime, less hit points, less pvp viabilitiy, worse AoE. If I was running a hard core raiding guild, I wouldn't take more than 1 mage into a 25 man instance, and the mage would be there solely to buff warlock dps with scorch (and hand out food and water and AB). I played the class, and that would be my recommendation.
Heck you hardly need any diversity in the game for an ideal raid. You want Druids to tank, and Druids to heal, warlocks to dps, and shadow priests for support dps (2 SP and 3 Warlocks for every dps group), and a few paladins for healing and buffing. The other classes are all hinderances. They lessen the effectiveness of your raid. If you're horde you might want a shaman or a warrior to deal with a fear spamming boss.
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BC is 90% content for hard core players.
Re:Why review this? (Score:4, Informative)
My only character in the game was a level 60. I haven't done any of the new races (I heard they're well designed and beautiful). From level 60-70, I've probably gone on 20 small-man dungeon runs (5 players) and done about 400-500 quests. I've levelled up my leatherworking and saved money for my epic flying mount (Druids get the regular one for free). Even when I play totally solo, the new content has kept me enthralled.
Will you enjoy the game more if you level to 60 and find a few friends to play with. Yes. Is that hard? No. If you're still struggling to get to 60 (again, not hard) you're going to see generic content -- nothing from 20-60 has changed. For every other casual player who's at 60, the expansion has been a blessing with loads of new content and lots of upgrades.
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Re:Why review this? (Score:5, Informative)
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1 hour a week (what you're describing) seems really REALLY casual. Like "10 minutes of Tetris" casual. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but yeah, it's going to take you a while to get anywhere in this style of game at that rate.
That said, Blizzard has been really good about letting both styles
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You're joking, right? The BC expansion seems tailor-made for casuals to enjoy. The level progression is set at a good pace for casual gaming, and there are many instances that can be played with casual, 5-man groups. Reputation gain is also a lot faster, so people who don't play 8 hours a day don't feel as though all the good rep rewards are out of their reach.
I'm not a hardcore raider, but I wouldn't quite call myself a casual player since I average about 4 hours of gaming a night. I can clearly see h
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Just because you are too low level to actually see the content doesn't mean it is hardcore.
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That is unless...
I'm a fairly hardcore WoW player, although other interests and a 40hr/week job reduces how much freetime I have to dedicate to the game. However, despite having the game for over a year I have not one 60 yet.
This is, as you stated, because I keep rolling alts. I have approxmiately 30 characters most of whom are low level alts, although about
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My account was cancelled for a full year, but I picked it back up in January, got the expansion, and have enjoyed it so far. I reached 70 on my main a few nights ago, and spent last night just flying around on my (flying, obviously) mount.
Actually there's another group.. (Score:2)
$15 a month may not mean a lot to a company that pulls in billions a year, but it means a lot to me, and it's my $15. They have to earn it by doing more than making me cough
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You don't know much about sustainable business models and running a company, do you?
How is Blizzard going to maintain a bewolf of clustered blade pancakes or servers without a steady revenue stream?
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I paid $40 for 7 years of Starcraft
1. The scope of WoW is at least an order of magnitude larger than SC.
2. The bandwith requirements to host all the shards of WoW dwarfs the bandwith requirements of Bnet.
3. Blizzard hasn't updated Starcraft for years (minor patches don't count).
Blizzard has really gone down hill..
Yeah, just look at how many subscribers they have.
If you still enjoy Starcraft (after 7 years) more the WoW, by all means, keep playing Starcraft. Just because a company is charging a monthly fee doesn't mean they are going down hill. If even dabbled in game d
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Farther along you said you had been playing Starcraft for 7 years for $40. That's great, but it's apples and oranges. You've been playing the same thing over and over for seven years. I've been playing WoW for 2+ years, and aside from repeats of things that i chose to do to help friends or to get a special piece of gear, i have been doing new stuff the whole time.
Even if i only spent 2 hours a week playing WoW and i paid 1 month at a time (no bulk dis
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Seriously, 15$ is not that much. It's much less than %1 of my monthly income. If you enjoy the game, what's the big deal?
Oh, and Blizzard/Vivendi are greedy leechers because they charge a price that's adjusted to the demand? Shame on them for charging prices that their customers are willing to pay for!
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Not that editors shouldn't be able to submit stories -- far from it. Instead, why not have them submit their stories just like a regular user? There could be an anonymizer so that one editor's couldn't have bias for fellow editors.
If the Slashdot submission process works, and the story is homepage worth, then we'll still see it; Ju
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Speak for yourself. I just started WOW. (Score:2, Interesting)
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One new thing is that the last boss tends to be near an exit. It's a small touch but it's noticably nice to burn through a dungeon, then just jump down to exit instead of having to spend, literally, 3 minutes running out.
The dungeons are very, very well designed. Most of the scripting bugs have been hotfixed, too.
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Exiting directly after beating a dungeon boss seems logical to me, but I grew up with Zelda. Doesn't it just seem lazy when game devs make you walk out of a dungeon, fighting mobs, for added (artificial) challenge?
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Honor System?
Battlegrounds?
Dire Maul?
Zul'gurub?
Ahn'Qiraj?
Naxxramas?
Darkmo
Talent Reviews?
Were those not enough free expansions for you?
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And going to a bar plunges you into a sea of masks and unrealities. Dont lie to yourself, clubbing with other meat puppets is easily more fake.
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Several people have gotten it to work in Linux with the help of third party apps/emulators.
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I tried rolling both a Draenei and a Belf during the launch week for Burning Crusade. While the Blood Elfs are prettier, it still seemed like folks were rolling more Draenei. The Draenei area was packed like the checkout area of a Wal-Mart. There were so many players in that small zone that it was unplayable - you had to camp on a postage stamp to kill the same re
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Also, some heroic runs are required to qualify for the new "end game" content past Karazhan.