World of Warcraft

I'd not recommend the game for anyone, who's not already played in past expansions, though there are different ways to play the game. But if you are not raiding or have some sort of attachment to Warcraft in general, there are better MMORPGs out there. I sub here and there to play with some friends I've made over the years, who don't really play anything else on PC.

I resubbed for a bit not too long ago, but I must say outside of leveling new characters there's, as someone who's not from UK time zone in EU, raiding is nearly impossible with the hours I'll have to stick once University continues in few weeks. PVP is quite atrocious, it's been in a steady decline for while now, while the PVP talent system and making it slightly less gear dependant have been okay changes.

There are just so many classes now and balance is hard for Blizzard to manage. They were never too great with balance to begin with. The faction balance in PVP is quite off as well. On Alliance trying to get a PVP weekly done is next to impossible for me unless I want to frustrate myself. Superior racial traits lured a lot of good PVP players away from Alliance with the new expansion.

The difference is massive. During last Brawl (Arathi Basin Blizzard), on my poorly geared Horde character I was able to grind The Defiler's reputation up from around half way to revered to Exalted, in about 2-3 days of games. Think I counted before I started that it'd take around 25 to 30 -wins- to get it. I ended up losing probably around four games all of them being really close losses and winning the rest.

The game doesn't offer that many improvements over its competition, it has larger population for sure, but Blizzard has taken considerable steps over the past couple expansions to make sure you do not need to have any form of social skills to be able to achieve things in the game. You push a button and go, back when I started if you couldn't play nice and genuinely befriend folk, you wouldn't go too far unless you were an exceptionally good player.

If you don't have time to join a raiding guild that does things together, you will struggle to get much done at level cap. PuGs will ask far better gear for content that won't often even reward the kind of gear, so you'll hit the ceiling really quickly. As bit more experienced player, on every character I've got to max level the ceiling has been hit after about a single reset at a level cap. Then you need to find a guild, unsub or level a new character.

Fortunately the story this time around isn't half bad, so I am just leveling characters to see their class order hall campaign. But all in all, if it wasn't for the long time friends and acquaintances I still have in the game, I'd not go anywhere near it anymore.

Does the game still require an artifact grind? I mainly did BG and WPVP with my warlock on Tichondrius. I had 4 alts. Thinkin about returning since I'm currently bored.

It's pretty good, save for a few glaring flaws. Namely the RNG when it comes to legendary gear. Getting legendaries works differently than how it did in the past. You get them from just doign regular content now instead of long questlines. Dungeons, Battlegrounds, raids, and world quests are the most common ways to acquire them. Each spec has some legendaries that are specific to that spec, while others are usable by the class in general, regardless of spec. Some legendaries are also universal and can be used by all classes, or semi-universal and useable by all classes that use certain armor types. Basically, the problem stems from the potential long droughts that players can experience without getting any legendaries (the first 2 for any chosen spec can be acquired relatively quickly, but beyond that it can take weeks at the very least unless you are supremely lucky), and the simple fact that some legendaries are better than others for some classes/specs. They've mitigated this somewhat by increasing the so-called bad luck protection for legendaries, plus the introduction of crafted legendaries for Blacksmiths, Leatherworkers, and Tailors (but honestly the crafted legendaries are really just for alts, compared to the class-specific legendary drops they tend to be rather poor in terms of effects/procs, though the stats are largely similar).

The only announcement that truly mattered.

I think I wil make it to around Loch Modan or Westfall again, then I will pull one or two too many kobolds or Defias bandits, realize I have a long corpse run ahead of me and log off, never to return.

It hasn't changed all that much, if the server will be anything like  some of the private servers. Most people will quit in first week or two. Those who persist will be demanding quality of life changes that are present in the latest installment or moan for nerfs on forums. With Blizzard going.... "Well you asked for this, we ain't changing sh*t"


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It's been explored already, it will not be anything like it was as you will not need to figure out anything on your own. Everything is available online this time around. No mystery left. I will most likely try it, but it was the social side mostly that kept me playing and it's hard to find in today's internet world. Back when I started using the internet for gaming, the assholes and trolls were few and far between. Now they are seemingly the majority.

I've played around on a few private servers for classic and I do actually prefer it to the modern game, despite the many flaws that vanilla did have. I'm looking forward to an official legit server.

Though I have to wonder if they're going to keep it as it was in what I assume will be patch 1.12(the last patch in classic) bugs and all or will they attempt to fix a few things up.

I think this would be the best would be to do a sort of progression starting with classic and going up to the end of WotLK, otherwise you're going to stagnant things once people have cleared naxx 40 and there's no new content coming ever.

The post on MMO Champion(which is where I read all the Blizzcon news from) just noted that Blizzard's answer to most things was "We don't know yet, we're talking about it" when it came to how they were going to handle it.

Although I do remember a while ago when they were still being adamant about not doing classic servers they mentioned that they no longer have the code. If true, that would make it quite the feat to do a patch by patch release, even if they only hit major content patches.

Implying that things aren't challenging now? What even defines "challenge"? Mechanical complexity? Or spending 8 hours a day farming mats to make potions for 40 people? The argument that newer versions of the game are somehow not as difficult as older versions are objectively horse shit, like that isn't even just an ill-informed opinion at that point, and I implore anyone who actually holds this view to clear Mythic Tomb.

The "community" sentiment never made sense to me either. If you want to clear any real endgame content, be it rated battlegrounds or heroic+ raids, you still need a guild, for all practical purposes. You CAN hypothetically clear whatever content you're shooting for with a group of randoms with no voice chat, but if you're that lucky then you should stop playing WoW and start playing the fucking lottery. High-end content hasn't been easily puggable since 4.3, and that was 5-6 years ago.

The argument comes from how in Classic most things were more difficult than they are now. Yes mythic raids are arguably every bit as difficult if not more so than AQ40 or Naxx 40 was, but that's the only part of difficulty in Legion that really holds up on par with Classic(at least in terms of PvE, PvP naturally can't lose its challenge because of other players being your opponent).

Leveling has become an absolute joke that honestly doesn't even need to be there because not only does it not serve as an extended tutorial for your class it actively teaches you bad habits.

Dungeons no longer require finesse in pulling and CCing, but rather just running through at breakneck speed and at best making a slight adjustment to account for one of the Mythic+ modifiers.

Classes have been simplified down to a "no bad choices" style of design with their talents and it never even solved the issue of cookie cutter builds since we just had other people math out which talent gives us that 1% more DPS than the other ones and we all pick that. Even rotations which at one point you might have had an argument about them being more difficult than Classic where they were honestly very simplistic but they've been re-simplifying that since Warlords.

Community is also about more than just your immediate guild.

Removing for a second the nostalgia goggles that seem to be permanently affixed to people's heads in regard to Vanilla, AQ40 and Naxx were not what I would call "hard", if we're talking about the complexity of the encounters and mechanics. The "hardest" thing about those were, again, simply getting 40 people who were all geared, available, and attuned. That by itself was the biggest hurdle, then you had to make sure that they all had plenty of potions and that some players were willing to be buffbots, literally just standing there and buffing people (see: 90% of Paladin players in Vanilla). Oh, and if you weren't a Prot Warrior then you outright weren't allowed to tank. And even if you WERE a Prot Warrior, your "tanking" amounted to Sunder Armor ---> Sunder Armor ---> Sunder Armor ---> Repeat. The "difficulty" in Vanilla raids came from Blizzard's nigh-complete inability to balance classes and make even half of the specs in the game playable from 2004-early 2008, not because the fights were engaging and required everyone to meet some standard of performance, and their eagerness to ape EverQuest in making almost every raid require 40 people, when that was a big complaint about EverQuest before WoW's existence.

They made dungeons hard again in Cataclysm, after everyone complained that they were too easy in Wrath. The response? "[Dungeon Name] is too hard! Nerf now!" Then 4.1 came around and introduced the troll dungeons, which were difficult similarly to the Cata launch heroics. The response? "ZG/ZA are too hard! Nerf now!" Hell, when Mythic dungeons were introduced in Warlords, people were saying the same fucking thing again, particularly when it came to Auchindoun and Grimrail. Hell, do a +15 nowadays without massively overgearing it and see how smoothly it goes. Because it won't go smoothly at all. Or just look at 7.2, when Return to Karazhan was split and had keys applied to it and when Cathedral of Eternal Night was new. What was the response? "Kara/CoEN is too hard! Nerf now!" If Blizzard releases a hard dungeon, people shit themselves and want it to be nerfed. Then when they release an easy dungeon to placate those people, that same audience turns around and shits themselves again because it's too easy, yearning for "the good old days" of when everything was ball-breakingly difficult. Then Blizzard releases more hard dungeons and everyone shits themselves into a coma and wants yet more nerfs. Basically, this argument is not a good one and the history behind calls for difficulty in this game are fraught with hypocrisy and the Mandela effect on crack, steroids, and heroin all at once.

Classes are either "no bad choices" or they are "cookie cutter builds". You can't have it both ways, those are conflicting ideas. To actually address this point... No, there are most certainly bad choices. I main a DK so I'll use them as an example. At the start of Legion, Unholy was ass-tier garbage. Blood was too. Frost was just sort of alright. Come 7.1, and Frost becomes one of the best melee specs in the game while Unholy becomes out-and-out the worst melee spec, while Blood is buffed and becomes a mid-tier tank. 7.2, and Unholy becomes god-tier, Blood comes just short of God-tier, and 7.2.5 utterly skullfucks Frost and makes it not only the worst melee spec, but possibly the single worst DPS spec, period. Even ignoring for a moment that classes and specs can become good or bad pretty much at Blizzard's beck and call, "no bad choices" doesn't apply to talents either. Again, going to DKs, if you're Unholy and you take the talent that gives you a Risen Archer, then you'll be laughed out of mythics since both of the talents on that tier vastly outperform it pretty much in every conceivable situation. If you're a PvP Unholy player and you don't take the Sludge Belcher talent, you'll get laughed off of your Arena team since the Abomination's utility is simply too valuable to ignore. Risen Archer has never been good at all during Legion's life cycle, and Sludge Belcher has never been bad. There are certainly "bad choices" when it comes to talents and classes, thinking otherwise is simply untrue. That or you're a FOTM-monkey who only ever plays the best specs at any given time.