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Cataclysm is superior to vanilla WoW! Stop living in the past.
Amarandes
Member Posts: 104
1. 40 man raids was the biggest mistake Blizzard made with vanilla WoW. Maybe its just because I had a very bad experience with this but this right here was the absolute worst feature of vanilla WoW and let me tell you why.
One of the painful aspects of raiding with 40 people is not the challenge of the instance itself, but the challenge of managing them. Its already hard enough for my guild leader to manage 25 people, imagine what it was like to manage other people. I know because I was an officer of a guild back in vanilla WoW. Raiding back then felt more like a second job then a game. I already have enough stress during the day and I don’t want to have to deal with it again when playing WoW. I want to jump into a raid right away, not having to manage 40 other people.
Additionally, the nightmare doesn’t just stop outside the instance but continues into the raid itself. We had about 5+ people that were always afk or underperforming during the actual boss fights and felt like we were carrying them through the entire raid. We had no choice but to let them stay because we don’t have any other people to replace them.With 40 people around, I only got to interact, socialize and got to know only 10 of them. With a smaller raid, I saw more interactions between guild members. At times, my current guild felt like a family to me, something that I never got out of my vanilla guild. And when the boss drops only a 3-4 items, ugh the loot drama that goes with distributing them to only a small fraction of the raid, I’m not gonna talk about it cause you get my point.
In effect, you are spending more time looking for people and managing them than you actually do playing the game. Needless to say, the stress caused by 40 man raids finally caused my vanilla guild to implode by the time TBC came out. My vanilla guild made it to but never killed Ragnaros in the Molten Core.
Raid sizes do not determine how epic a boss encounter is. A boss can have 40 people attacking him, but if he just stands there and only attacks the tank endlessly, the encounter isn’t epic at all. Look at all of Wow’s dungeons from TBC onwards. Instead of the generic Tank and spank fight that we saw so often in vanilla WoW, bosses now have more interactive and interesting mechanics even with less people in a group. Such mechanics include managing debuffs, controlling another mob, interacting with the environment around the boss, etc.
If I was to go back and redesign vanilla WoW, I would have put the raid cap at 10 and 25 man from the very beginning.
2. End game was for hardcores only. If there was one thing that WoW did right from TBC onwards its that it proved that raids were not just for hardcores. No as a matter of fact, it proved that all MMORPGs don’t have to be hardcore for players to enjoy it. I remembered lasting only a month in EQ1 back in 1999. The severe death penalty was what drove me away from EQ1. Good riddance cause I really hate losing everything item I worked so hard to get.
The raids of vanilla Wow started out pretty hardcore and so did TBC as well. Then Blizzard started to remove the barrier of entry and the hardcore vs casual debate intensified. First came the removal of attunements to many raids in TBC, the splitting of the raids into 10 and 25 man, extension of raid lockouts, and the introduction of “easy” (normal) and hard (heroic) mode. No longer do we have to play WoW 5-7 nights a week in order to raid. Do you guys even know why Naxxramas was brought back in the first place? Not because Blizzard is lazy but because less than 1% of the WoW population got to see the original Naxxramas. It is for this reason that it was brought back in WoTLK with the exact same boss mechanics. To this day, I still stand by Blizzard’s philosophy that everyone should have an equal chance to raid and see the endgame. We pay the same amount of money as the hardcores did so we deserve just as much right as they do to kill a major lore character like Arthas. Think its too easy? Then go do heroic mode instead cause I will gladly stick to the normal modes.
Needless to say, I would not be playing WoW today if these barriers were not removed.
3. Classes are more poorly designed then they are today. Remember the lolret? The talent trees and the itemization in vanilla WoW were so poorly designed that each of the classes had only one spec that was viable. Only warriors could tank. Balance druids cannot dps. Feral druids cannot dps or tank. Paladins cannot tank or dps. Shadow priests cannot dps. Shamans cannot dps. Do I need to go on? In addition, the items of vanilla raids were tailored to only one spec for each class. You are literally laugh at if you specced into any of the non-viable specs. Having only one spec that was viable forced people into roles that they do not like. One person may not like to heal as a paladin but if he/she wanted to see the vanilla raids, that’s all they can do. Today all of the 27 original specs are raid viable.
4. More grinding than today. If you think that grinding is bad today, you have no idea what it was like in vanilla WoW. Anyone remember the old honor system? Remember how long it took to reach rank 14 Grand Marshall? You literally had to give up your real life and play WoW pvp 24/7 to reach that rank. I’m not kidding.
Additionally, some raids back then have a very specific gear requirement. Nefarian, for example, required everyone to have an Onyxia Scale Cloak or they will die to his Shadowflame. This in turn required guilds to kill Onyxia multiple times. And when new players joined their guild, they would have to kill Onyxia again and again just to get them that one single cloak. Many hours wasted instead of spending our time in new raids. I don’t know about you but I saw this as another unnecessary barrier of entry into raiding.
And don’t even get me started with the potion grinding. All throughout vanilla WoW, it was a time when there were no limitations on the number of elixirs we can use in raids. The number of elixirs and flasks that my guild would require us to bring to raids were ridiculous. I was an alchemist back then and the hundreds of hours spent outside of raiding was spent farming elixirs and flasks instead of doing something else. The potion grinding nearly drove my mind mad and I’m sure a lot of other people out there feel the same way. With the limitations to how much potion we can use per raid, this pretty much made elixirs and flasks completely optional and eliminated the potion grinding.
5. Unoriginal and poor leveling quests design. Most of the quests in the old world were boring collect X quests, kill Y monsters quests, escort NPCs quests, talk to NPCs quests, etc. There were some quests that sent you across entire zones or even across the entire game world just to see another NPC. And sometimes, this NPC would send you back to the same NPC that sent you there in the first place, except now you have a ridiculously long and boring run back to the other side of the zone. I know some sandbox players like these quests but honestly, how many times can you stand running back and forth multiple times in a zone using the exact same path? It is for this reason, that I only had one main throughout most of my time in WoW.
Now honestly, how can anyone not like a quest like those? They are far better than those generic and dated mechanics back in vanilla WoW because they actually use an entirely different mechanic. Zones in cataclysm have an overall storyline, more cutscenes, famous NPCs interaction, more different quests mechanics, and best of all, you no longer have to run ridiculously long distances to get to a questing area. It is for this reason that I am leveling alts from both the Alliance and Horde just so I can experience the new level 1-60 zones. The only thing that WoW is missing is the lack of player decision. SWTOR is the only MMO that can beat WoW in this area.
6. Miscellaneous other PITA issues including paladin blessings that were only 5 minutes long, unlinked flight path, unlinked auction houses.
No TLDR, read the whole thing and don’t be lazy.
Comments
I had a lot more friends back in Vanilla. Most of them have left due to the Need Loot Now crowd. Superior? Not really. Superiority complex? Definitely.
1. 40 man raids meant that anyone could go. You didn't have to pass a gearscore or achievement check just to get in. It was more social than anything. Players did not have to all play thier best or jump through hoops to see the content without being constantly ridiculed. Getting players together and managing them was the game. It's a multiplayer game. The more the merrier.
2. It was simply a matter of loot. The only reason they changed it was the ocean of tears from casual players (of which I am one). If casual players didn't feel the need to be on par with everyone else and just enjoy the game for what it is, there would have never been a problem. Pure jealousy and greed.
3. Some perfectly viable, fun to play class specs have been destroyed by the homogynization of classes through the years. You list some good examples of how they fixed some classes, but what abou the hybrid specs that are no longer possible, such as Disc/Shadow? There is no longer any experimentation. The class structure does not allow players to fail. You play the class trees the way Blizzard tells you to or else.
4. Volatile Earth, Fire, Water, and Life. 5 new reputations to grind to exalted with in order to progress at all. Heroic dungeons: Now that we've got enough stats from running this dungeon 100 times, we get to run it 100 more times so we can have enough stats to raid? The treadmill is WAY WAY worse now, in my opinion.
5. You got me there, the quests are much better FOR SOLO PLAYERS.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
This is a bold statement.
I agree with the OP. If you were to now go back to vanilla you would understand that it really isn't any better.
THis is all the OP perception. SOme will dis agree with you and some wont.
No no, he is right. It is better... if you're 7.
Or if you have a life to live.
I'm sorry, I may not be a big fan of WoW, but your statement can be applied to every single MMO that has raiding content, as it is designed by and for the Superiority Complex Crowd.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
If there were Vanilla WoW servers I personally would play on them as well as Cata ones . Vanilla had the charm of people wanting to quest and do world pvp . Where as now most people do raids or bgs when leveling an alt .
If you want the Vanilla WoW type experiance look no further than RIFT . There no need to pine for it here in Azeroth anymore its available in Telara .
Cataclysm's poor design made me quit WoW for good. Don't get me wrong, it did some good things as well but I absolutely hate the do 5 quests go to the next quest hub setup, the game is played on rails now. I also hate the new talent setups and how they have homogenized the classes so much. The things they can do with the questing scripts are certainly nice now but they have just dumbed the game down too much at this point. Hopefully their next MMO is a good one.
I give up with this forum.
From a business perspective, yeah sure.
What I dislike:
- Gear over skill
- Endgame is work, snooooore.
- Gearscore
- Epic gear doesn't mean epic in WoW
- Battlegrounds
- Dungeonfinder
- Dumbing down of dungeons
- Classes can all do multiple things
- Still no new classes, except for the Death Knight. Lazy?
These are my main problems with the game after Vanilla.
Agreed with the OP; Cataclysm is much, much improved from vanilla WoW. The only thing that's truly suffered is world PvP which frankly I don't give a crap about.
Well that and nerfing things because of lolarenas. That's really getting old, and is my #1 complaint about the game.
Edit: And gearscore. Fuck whomever came up with that asinine, ball-brained, cockamaime, ridiculous bullshit, and fuck Blizzard for embracing it.
This is a pretty nice and concise explanation of some reasons I ended up hating WoW. I like the bullets. Of course, it seems what we dislike is very profitable.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Wow, my dissenting opinion was enough to make you quit the forum?
Look, I don't enjoy WoW's end game, I never have. Raiding is fun when you are first learning content but camping it gets boring way too fast, battlegrounds get old fast especially now that they are just a gear grind and Arena isn't even PvP and again is a gear grind, I'd rather player GW for that style of PvP. The part of the game that was always fun for me was leveling a new character and learning how to PvP with them. The new quest system killed the leveling experience for me, there is no freedom in it. You really do feel like you are being led around on rails now. A lot of the new quests are great but the overall system they put in place is just bad and that is how all of cataclysm itself felt as well.
In original WoW my quest book was always full and I was always thinking of the best pattern to do the quests, I could go and do wide circles of quests and come back and turn in 15 at once at the end of the session etc, there was a lot more freedom and I enjoyed it a lot more.
Unfortunately the latest MMO to be released Rift is exactly the same, I sure hope this isn't the future of quests in MMOs though hopefully the much more open system that GW2 has will take off.
I can guarantee you it's the raid obsessed turd developers that moved over from EverQuest that embraced that abhorrent gearscore crap. Just as I know that they're the ones responsible for turning a casual oriented game into a raid or die piece of shit.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
You can think this way as long as you realize there are people who actually prefer vanilla. Cata may be technically superior and polished, and design of raids and classes is probably miles ahead from vanilla... again technically, but it lacks the feel and soul of the original, that isn't just looking through rose tinted goggles.
I personally didn't even play vanilla and can see what was right about vanilla. It felt like a virtual world, a challenging one, and there were a lot of fun details and unpolished content, that kept things mysterious and interesting. This I know by spending most of time in the vanilla areas after the release of TBC, and by reading the stories of others. I leveled countless characters through old content and there was always something I had left unnoticed before. I did a lot of world PvP in TBC and left arena after few attempts. I enjoyed immensly forming groups for dungeons by asking people directly or looking at the LFG channel. It usually meant room for chatting with the groupees before the group was full, and you could actually wipe several times and people kept trying. Then came the low level dungeon nerfs and such, which did spoil it for me, but oh well. For me personally the dungeon finder was the last straw. I don't understand how one can't see the problematicness of it from a -MMORPG- point of view, from a dungeon hack n slash game point of view I do understand.
Balance, technical advacement, polish, conveniece - these do not directly make good MMORPG's, they actually are harmful more often than not.
I understand where you're coming from but in my opinion, the grind in vanilla was way worse than it is now. I'll add some more stuff I neglected to mention. Vanilla WoW had way more mat requirements than just the volatile elementals. In TBC, you absolutely have to grind reputations because you can't get into heroics without first getting revered reps with a specific faction. In addition you have to do a SPECIFIC dungeon to raise a SPECIFIC rep with a dungeons.
In Cataclysm you can jump into heroics without having the need to grind a rep to revered save for the ilvl requirement which I and many others had no trouble getting the requirement for. And you don't have to do any specific dungeons to raise a specific rep. You just wear a tabard into any dungeons you want and get rep for that faction.
On the subject of gearscore, I actually saw that addon being used much less now, probably because people realized that gear no longer represents skill levels because the heroics are much harder than in WOTLK.
personally i loved Vanilla WoW and then thought it went downhill when BC came out lol then again i was a pvper and pvp has never been the same since vanilla wow, it's always been broken. PvP became broken when they introduced that god awful stat called resilience, it then became gear over skill whereas in vanilla it was skill > gear, and to this day it's gear > skill...
as for the grind of reps then yea i much preferred the way they did it recently with the whole tabard system, think that's way better then the way it was before in Burning Crusade where you had to run specific instances for rep and even needed soo much to buy the key to unlock the heroic versions.
classes, well they're all meh now in my opinion, they all play the same....
with regards to Amarendes post about not seeing many people using gearscore, he's right they don't, they use blizzards inbuilt one now instead, it displays your avg ilvl, essentially does the same as gearscore does. Before i quit my sub every pug group whether it be for a 5man hc, raid people were spamming you need 348 ilvl for raiding, 340 ish for hc farming, so the issue hasn't gone away, it's just been called something else.
I completely agree with the OP, and disaree somewhat with the second poster, though he brings up valid points. They jsut don't outweigh the OP's points, in my opinion.
Every expansion has been vastly superior to the version of the game before it. At least in my view.
I agree with you. It just seems like the grind is more necessary in Cataclysm. I never grinded in TBC or WotLK much, and it felt fine. In Cata it seems more like you pretty much have to grind something to get anywhere, to me.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
So you are enjoying Cataclysm quite a bit then
That is absolutely ridiculous.
TBC was the most grindy expansion out of them all. I didnt care, it didnt bother me personally, i loved that people had to grind content in order to do more content. Thats how TBC started tho, halfway through and straight to the end it was constantly nerfed. Sunwell was really impressive tho.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
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I also had a lot more friends during vanilla. Vanilla WoW is also the reason why most of them burned out and quit. If Burning Crusade came out 4-6 months earlier most of them would have kept playing.
1. 40 man raiding meant that anyone could go who was in a big enough guild. If you were in a small guild you were out of luck and any larger guild that would let you tag along, prefered that you transfered to their guild to continue. Once a guild got large enough it became a competition for raiding spots and gear became an important consideration. To become eligible for Molten Core raiding you would need to get enough Fire Resistance gear or you would not get a slot. As the guild progressed players who raided less often would fall back in the gear they required and would not be given a slot for a higher tier raid. People got excluded based on gear all the time.
2. The problem with the end game gear was that it locked people out of content. You had to grind a lot of MC even after you beat it to have the gear for BWL and AQ. This meant that more casual players would fall behind and get excluded from raids. The casual players essentially said that they enjoyed the game so far since they were being cut out of the new content, they saw no reason to keep playing. Blizzard did the math and decided to make the game more accessible. The epeeners started whining.
[quote]
Originally posted by Torik
Maybe at first, but near the release of TBC, MC and BWL PuG raids were pretty common. I was in a smaller guild and we teamed up with another smaller guild to do BWL and AQ when they came out. I'm not saying you are wrong, I understand what you are saying, but eventually anyone who logged on frequently was going to see the content. Most people just didn't have the patience. That is the QQ i saw.Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.