Next World of Warcraft Expansion: Warlords of Draenor 156
JestersGrind writes with news that Blizzard has announced the next expansion to World of Warcraft, titled Warlords of Draenor. This expansion raises the level cap to 100 and introduces a new world/continent full of zones: Draenor. They're also introducing 'Garrisons,' player-built bases on Draenor that individual users will be able to customize and upgrade. Your garrison will have followers which you can send on missions, and you'll be able to invite other players over to visit and trade. The expansion will also revamp a number of aging character models. Blizzard is also making it so new and returning players can immediately boost one character to the current level cap (90), so they can immediately jump into the new content.
Re:I guess I'll see (Score:5, Interesting)
GW2 [guildwars2.com] doesn't really do the whole "grind" thing - at least not with anything you actually have to do to advance.
Hell, just hop in WvW and murder people. You can level up that way.
Re:I guess I'll see (Score:3, Interesting)
5 man content (Score:2, Interesting)
Obligatory WoW history: Started a few months into vanilla, ended that version as a Naxx 40 raider 9/15. Progression cleared everything in BC save the Sunwell and burned out of hardcore raiding. Took some time off during Wrath but came back for the end and did a fair amount of casual raiding as well as "fleet" building. (I had one of every class and had them all to the level cap.) Played Cata on and off but at most just leveled the fleet to cap. And then Mists hit and of all the versions of WoW it has been the one I have played the least. I leveled only 3 of my toons to the cap, no raiding other than LFR, and then left the game.
And a number of things really turned me off to WoW with the direction they took with Mists:
1. Lack of 5 man content. This is huge. When leveling up I really do like questing but without some 5 man content every now and then to break things up it can get a bit tedious. And the lack of 5 man content in Mists while leveling was unlike any previous version of WoW. Without a decent amount of 5 man content, while leveling, I will never go back to WoW.
2. Daily grinds. I am not at all interested in doing daily quests really at all. Sometimes I might feel up to them but the idea of doing daily quests is not fun to me at all. And then locking things behind those quests was just the last nail in the coffin.
3. Oversimplification. I get that the old talent trees were often just cut and pasted from EJ. But it is a lie to say that they did not make the game simpler by turning them into what they are now. The fact that you can no longer get them wrong shows that lie. And that goes for a lot of other things that they have done in the game as well such as spell downranking, stat simplification, and such. After playing Skyrim a lot lately I look back on my early play and think man I was doing that wrong but now I learned. I don't necessarily want Eve's learning curve [staticflickr.com] but what they have now is not a curve at all.
Re:5 man content (Score:2, Interesting)
1. 5-man content is the bane of all MMOs. It is the singular type of content that forces people to do things in a way that they don't want to do, which is any or all of the following: (a) group with strangers, (b) rely on less competent players for individual progress, (c) waste time waiting for a viable group to form. 5-man content is the reason why many players disregard MMOs completely as a viable genre, whether they realize that as the cause or not.
3. There should never be a way to build your character "wrong". If that's possible, then what it means is that your talent trees are full of cruft, or simply unbalanced in a way that there is only a handful of viable builds when the choices are supposed to be limited only by the available selections. Oversimplification would happen if they simply removed all the minor choices and left you with (for example) three buttons, one for each viable build. That's effectively how it used to work, you had to press 31 buttons in order to generate the 1 build in that tree that everyone else was using. That's just bad design that can only be loved by min-maxers. Same goes for spell downranking, which was one step short of being an exploit. There should be no reason to use an inferior version of a spell. Doing so just means that you screwed up the design somewhere, and again only a min-maxer would look at this and think that using lower-version spells to spam throwaway conditions on opponents was a wonderful way to optimize a build.
Re:5 man content (Score:2, Interesting)
You're not up to date on this at all then.
Blizzard acknowledged that their idea of grinding dailies in MoP was a mistake. They removed it. Way too late... but they did remove it.
I agree with you that the lack of 5 man content is a bit disappointing.
As for a one time copy-pasting of talent trees from the EJ website into the game being a meaningful measure of skill is absurd. There are less skills, sure, but you can actually CHOOSE which skill you want since they are all similarly powerful in each tier. Which you choose is a preference which you are not penalized for - and for heroics, it's often a good idea to swap them for various bosses as the optimal skills for each encounter vary.
As for this simpler nonsense - it really has to stop. The game used to be fairly easy. The trick was to find 40 players who did not stand in fire, understood their rotation, and occasionally did something like dispell or stack. That easy mode has long been gone. Current tier bosses are basically undefeatable if everyone in the raid doesn't know in advance know all the mechanics - the transitions, the various debuffs, the kill priority orders, and everything else involved in every phase of the fight. The days of patchwerk are long gone and a single mistake from any player in the raid will often wipe the raid.
The mechanics are so unforgiving that LFR is harder than normal these days because people like you know nothing of the fights and are forced to be carried by the people who do.
The heroic modes are so bloody hard that there are only 64 of some 25,000 guilds (i.e. about 1,100 people of the 7+ million subscribers or 0.015%) beating current content. Even the world first type guilds with all their gear and amazing players can and do wipe on current heroic content (e.g. Dark Animus). As you are someone who has not raided in the last 2 xpacs (for LFR is NOT raiding), I would be obliged if you quit spreading this unfounded BS about things being simpler.
Third-party vanilla WoW servers (pre-TBC) are best (Score:0, Interesting)
I played back in 2005 and it was heaven. I played against in 2011 and it was hell. Everything was given away. Experience doubled for level 15, all flight paths given, random blues ust for playing in a battleground and worst of all, I found as a priest I simply never ran out of mana. I just sat there, spamming healing spells.
IT WAS SO BORING.
Blizzard have totally and utterly lost the plot. They are systematically eliminating everything which made WoW fun - as we can see here;
"Blizzard is also making it so new and returning players can immediately boost one character to the current level cap (90), so they can immediately jump into the new content."
If you give everything away for free, it has no value.
I play on Rebirth now, it's a vanilla WoW server, privately funded, publically available, runs on the last version of WoW prior to TBC (e.g. when level cap was still 60 and the game made sense).