Accounts shelved. Keep me updated!

[Velassra]

To me this concept that they push "Hardcore only" or "Not everyone will see end-game" is a failure at design level. Stepping aside from what I feel is shoddy work in these last couple expansions look at the concept of the RNG.

Run a dungeon 6 times straight for "Maybe" a drop, making it a grinding painful experience after about the 4th time of going "Cmon drop, cmon..."

How was that more fun then the concept of guaranteed upgrades? Put in your time you might get something, carrot please meet stick.

Or put in time and be allowed to actually progress wanting you to put in more time to progress more... Make the content difficult, make the cost of justice items high, but make these items worth more. Allow more people to see more content, how is this a bad idea? Blizzard seems to think that it's cool to only show content to >1% of the games population.

I don't think it's so much that is that more isn't available yet and this, along w/ artificially high cd's on tradeskills is choking off progression for what they have to know is the majority of their playerbase. Why make it so you can get to max level on release day, then make it almost impossible to progress but at a stupid snail pace?

[Drizhal]

I don't think it's so much that is that more isn't available yet and this, along w/ artificially high cd's on tradeskills is choking off progression for what they have to know is the majority of their playerbase. Why make it so you can get to max level on release day, then make it almost impossible to progress but at a stupid snail pace?

I didn't mean to say that content is unavailable in the sense that it's not there. It's unavailable in the sense that they want you to inject yourself into WoW for every extra waking moment and then only show certain content to certain people. Then on top of that, run all of the regulars become exalted with multiple factions to get gear to do what? Oh ya run the exact same dungeon on heroic, painfully in many cases, for 13 ilvls? ....What? Oh by the way the dungeon will average you 1-2hrs quite easily with trivial trash pulls and gimmicky boss mechanics or even trash mechanics.

Just doesn't make sense in the end.

[Ualaa]

Comparing Everquest, during the years I played (Classic through Planes of Power) to Warcraft.

You have a non-phased dungeon.
As in trash mobs and bosses can be contested.
There might be six "camps" in the dungeon.

You enter the dungeon and call out "Camp Check".
If no one replies, you call out "Claiming Upper Spiders", or whatever.
Then your group has to navigate through trash to get there; trash which belongs to another camp so you don't want to kill it, or they will steal your mobs in return.

You get to your camp, and hope no one is there, as someone might say their group missed your Camp Check, but it is their camp.
Then you clear the immediate area, most camps did not have a safe area to pull to, but rather had to be cleared or you stood in a very small area to not aggro stuff.

You get a puller, to aggro and bring mobs.
Not the tank, because they were to grab threat "aggro" from the puller.
And the puller was to leave, to arrive with another mob as the first was dying or pretty close to that.
DPS killed stuff.
Healer kept people alive.

You needed a debuffer (Enchanter/Shaman) to debuff the mobs and buff the group for a lot of camps.
So, rather than Tank + Heals, before you could roll, there were three ingredients.

The boss would have 1-3 placeholders, who would spawn 95% of the time.
So you could clear the camp for 22 minutes (or whatever), until the boss could spawn but more likely another placeholder mob.
Which could be seven or nineteen spawning opportunities.
The boss would have a common drop, the equivalent of a blue.
But the camp would be desired, because 10-15% of the time, it would have a rare, the equivalent of a purple.
The placeholder would have the equivalent of a green.

The trash mobs would drop stuff that made the camp worth being there, even if you never had a boss.
But the various bosses were the reason to camp whatever.

If something was "camped", you could ask to be put on the list.
When the group left, they would let whoever was top of the list know.
Or if one of the six party members left, and they didn't know a friend to replace one, they'd ask whoever was top of the list.
You could be in a dungeon for five hours on three lists, and not yet get into a group to kill anything.

While warcraft has issues...
It is infinitely better than EQ was.

[Fat Tire]

Comparing Everquest, during the years I played (Classic through Planes of Power) to Warcraft.


While warcraft has issues...
It is infinitely better than EQ was.

So true.

Although, I would give my left nut for wow to have the equivalent of EC commons tunnel. Even though I like wow AH, I loved EC tunnel so much more. This was before there was a bazaar.

"I cant move!, I need a SOW" 30 min walk to the bank......

I had a guy pay me 400 bucks for a CoCW. Here is how it went.

Hey you got a paypal account? Give you 400 for your cloak.

I said....sure thinking it was a joke. Bam 400 sent to me. /shocked

[Drizhal]

Or Subway in AC back before the bazaar was put in...

[Lokked]

I miss parts of EQ:
Velks in General. Every spider camp was soloable by Bard. Good times for OP bard.
Trial of Fire. Soloable by Bard. Could redo every 5 mins. Named dropped a wiz Rod that sold for ~40k plat. I made around $3,000 US farming this and selling the plat.
Kedge Keep. Soloing Phinegal Autropos for class Epic drops in exchange for mass Plat.
Western Wastes. Bard could solo Harla Dar - gauranteed spawn that dropped 4 lvl 60 drop-only spells.
AEing ~100 mobs at a time in Halls of Honor. I was maxed on AA, and was paid to group with others to max their AA. You could PL someone from 53 - 65 in about 4-6 hours, or max AA in about 12 hours.

Basically, I miss EQ only for its obsurd class imbalance and that I happened to have rolled the most OP class and had my secret farming places.

I do miss that EQ made you work for your gear, and didn't hand you anything on a platter (unless you were a bard). You felt a sense of pride for each piece of gear you had, as you had to suffer to attain it :P

Edit** I was scanning and just realized this isn't supposed to be an EQ thread. Sorry for being a derailer**

[Tonuss]

Cata heroics are a lot closer to BC heroics.
At least from forum comments.
Haven't done the PvE end of Cata at all, aside from leveling.

I loved the challenge of the BC heroics.
And hated that Wrath heroics were essentially the same as Wrath normals, in that TONS of people got the achievement for both at the same time; there was no chance in hell of someone in BC running a heroic with leveling up gear and getting the achievement for heroic and regular Shattered Halls in the same run.

I think that one thing to remember is that the LFD tool was put in at some point during WotLK, and by that time people had already done some gearing up via normal/heroic dungeons and also several raid tiers. People ran LK heroics in ilvl 213-245 gear so that they could get emblems to buy ilvl 251-264 gear. Heroics that were tuned for ~187 gear.

Aside from that, tank threat generation had gotten too good, many DPS classes had pretty good AOE and mana regen (especially for healers) was simply broken. I can remember doing heroic runs with my hunter. I would misdirect to the tank and then spam volley until everything was dead. Over and over and over... and... over... Even bad players could not slow down a group. tBC's heroics were pretty over-tuned at the start, and people were rushing in to try them and getting flattened, so Blizz nerfed them a bunch of times. The difficulty of heroics was a constant issue in the forums. I can only imagine what it would have been like if they'd introduced LFD just before tBC.

It's just a particular set of circumstances, is all. Cata heroics are nowhere near as bad as tBC heroics were, but back then you had to form your own group and were limited to your own server. If you were bad, people would avoid you. Many players who like the convenience of queuing for dungeons with LFD today would never have set foot in a heroic back then.

[Tonuss]

Comparing Everquest, during the years I played (Classic through Planes of Power) to Warcraft.

I played from Luclin to the expansion after PoP. I always said that EQ punished players. I don't think they did it to be mean, but they wanted you to bleed for every bit of progress you made. And bleed profusely. Aside from the leveling grind (which you described pretty perfectly) there was the raid grind, where you'd spend hours organizing, dying, recovering from wipes, and occasionally killing something and hoping for a chance at rolling on one of the eight-to-ten drops that you'd get over the course of the evening. And 8-to-10 drops for 40-70 people for several hours of work made the leveling grind seem kind of quaint. Especially when some of those drops required other raid drops before you could get the actual gear item.

I never complain about WOW's leveling grind, because I have been permanently scarred by EQ's leveling grind.

I think WOW is mostly suffering from having squeezed what they could out of this type of game. EQ was the hard core difficulty. Vanilla WOW ramped it down a fair amount, and tBC ramped it down a bit more, and WotLK ramped it down too much, and now they're trying to find some middle ground that keeps people playing without turning the game into a complete joke. I don't know if they can find it, to be honest. Just gimme my Diablo 3 already and we can call it even.

[Svpernova09]

Hmm, I wasn't aware that the only content in Wrath was the starter raid they put in.

lol exactly.

I LOVED Ulduar, and ICC.

What a bunch of debbie downers.

There are a quite a few in this thread, I think they're pretty easy to point out and overlook. My comments are purely "IMHO" and I didn't mean to express anything other than my heartfelt apathy for this expansion.

[Kromtor]

So true.

Although, I would give my left nut for wow to have the equivalent of EC commons tunnel. Even though I like wow AH, I loved EC tunnel so much more. This was before there was a bazaar.

"I cant move!, I need a SOW" 30 min walk to the bank......

I had a guy pay me 400 bucks for a CoCW. Here is how it went.

Hey you got a paypal account? Give you 400 for your cloak.

I said....sure thinking it was a joke. Bam 400 sent to me. /shocked

EC tunnel was awesome. You get some awesome bargain and you have to run to the freeport bank and drag ass back encumbered with gold hoping to get there before the guy sold it to someone else. I can't figure out if the bare bones and imbalanced nature of early EQ was superior to the polished easymode of modern MMO's or if it just felt superior because it was new.