Cataclysm is nearing its fourth month, and I find myself in a different place gameplay-wise than when I started out. World of Warcraft Cataclysm brought a brand new leveling experience and much harder end-game content. That’s about as well as I can sum it up.
My opinions on the expansion are mixed, but overall I am enjoying it. That said, I have some rapidly rising concerns as to what extent players will continue to enjoy the expansion.
Raid Difficulty
It is well known that raid content is much more difficult, and you almost have to be in a guild raid, or at least running with 9 other greatly-skilled players to defeat content. Not only that, but the amount of time spent raiding seems to have increased due to the newly minted difficulty of boss encounters.
At first, I thought this was a great thing. Wash out the rookies and noobs, and let beating content actually mean something. Don’t let all those purples float around for lesser skilled players to steal…ahem grab. I have had two very different raid experiences with two different guilds, both of which were fun.
However, the time I spent raiding, which was a ton, added with the complexities of every single boss fight, left me drained and exhausted. Those of you who successfully raid end-game content know that fighting the actual boss is only 50% of the process. There is the large amount of time spent researching strategies online and watching videos, as well as preparing and gathering potions, flasks, enchants, and gems to keep your gear optimized for better chances of success. Add to that the time spent making gold for funding all these adventures, and you have yourself quite a time-consuming hobby!
After three months of this ‘rinse and repeat’ process, I have found myself exploring other avenues of the game, that allow me to choose how I want to play, with little research needed. I can also come and go as I please. Leveling and PvP have taken over my gamestyle at the moment.
Raiding has just become overwhelming. It is beyond comparison to the days of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. These fights are rough, tough, and can beat the crap out of you. I’m not sure if I continue to plug away and beat myself to death with this raiding mind-set, that I will be able to continue enjoying this game overall.
I am curious if any of you feel the same. Or perhaps you disagree? What keeps the fires burning in terms of tackling end-game content?
Solution You Ask? Well…
It may not be a popular idea, but I’ll tell you anyways. Blizzard has almost perfected the normal vs heroic raid content. Not to mention the same loot drops from 10 and 25 man runs. I like the format, but I’d change it up just a smidge.
Remember how popular Molten Core was? Not just the 40-man raids, but the fights were more of a gear check than a skill check. A vast majority of WoW players seem to be focused on that ‘gear check’ mindset.
I’d say embrace that, and create one raid that contains 7 to 10 bosses, all of which have the difficulty of VoA and BH boss content. Leave the other raids as they are, but give us an option to gear up and run a raid that doesn’t require banging your head against a wall.
Not only should this be puggable, but it gives a decent stepping stone between 5-mans and Cataclysm raiding. I guess what I’d like to see is something that stands more in the middle of the ground. Throw in a pure tank n’ spank fight to create a gear check. Throw in a fun event like the chess game in Karazhan.
Something like that would definitely renew my passion for raiding. I don’t know though, easy content still doesn’t seem to be everyone’s favorite idea. What do you guys think?
Nice article Khor but even my english sux i`ll try to write few words about raiding as well.
I had break in WoW in time in which we were trying to get down Magmaw with my previous guild. After i`ve back i have started to raid in new guild, we are now 11/12 (only Nefarian left, we are not doing heroics until he will be down. We spent already about 6-8 hours on Nef and we still got some little problems and as you know even one small mistake by someone will wipe the raid.
And i`m enjoying that! Same as i was enjoying a month of wipes on LK (this was really hard fight, simmilar to bosses from Cata;p).
About gearing up: you have BH and randoms HC. Just from rep rewards, Auction House and BS you can be minimum half-epic geared! Killing Magmaw, ODS and Halfus should be enough to get almost all the epic-slots.
4.1 is coming, youll get Zulgurub and Zulaman to get some 353 ilvl items. Will be easier to get VP and much more easier to gear up. And if 33 guilds on my server done 10 or more bosses (and my server isnt even good) you have enough options to get guild for you skill.
And if you don`t wanna work on tactics and raid – you can always do achievements or many other things
And wait for next Tier of gear and raid BD and BoT then 
I would say the situation with Cata raids is, “be careful what you wish for”. For a long time in LK I listened to players in general chat talk about raids being too easy, especially after being well geared. They complained and wished raids were harder.
Well, guess what: along comes Cataclysm and it appears that at least as far as raids are concerned, Blizzard listened. In fact, it seems that Blizzard swung too far the other way, whether out of spite (unlikely) or more probably, said, “you want tougher raids? Here, try these.”
Like I said, be careful what you wish for.
I certainly enjoy this ‘higher’ level of raiding and that things are not so much a gear check but a skills test, you have to know the fights and your class inside and out. Once people become more aware of the game mechanics and are geared then those who do find raiding to be much harder than WotLK should find an easier time of things. What happened with 5man HCs will happen to raids.
In the beginning people were QQing about their dificulty, ideal groups were required with multiple CCs, no AoE, Healers going OOM after every pull, Tank issues, DPS issues, the list was endless. However, look at things now. People hardly CC anymore, AoE is rife, healers have hardly any mana problems and a lot of these things are no longer an issue because people are better equipped and have a greater knowledge of the content.
The problem for me lies in the fact that it appears the majority of people do not put the time in to read up on or watch videos. Their class knowledge and theorycrafting are lacking lacking which can lead to problems in many areas. Not to mention the simplest things like movement, staying out of bad stuff is still a problem for some, how is that even possible at this stage in the WoW life cycle.
I find myself becoming more and more frustrated with the overall player base rather than the game itself. Feckless, is how I would describe them.
I had a feeling it would result in this, I have stopped playing to catch up on lost university classes (smart move right) but the truth is people don’t always know what they want. Vanilla was great, but this was also their first delve into the genre and they didn’t have legions of players shouting at them at first anyways. i guess what I’m saying is, it is what it is, every expansion can’t and won’t be the same as the last, otherwise what’s the point right? It’s just not the casual Friday night pug raid game it was (god i miss that).
I agree, raiding is way too much work. It’s not a game anymore at that point, it’s like having a second job.
I have a feeling (or a hope, maybe) that Blizzard will see the error of their ways with Cataclysm.
Am I having fun? Of course I am, I am playing warcraft, so that is a redundant question. The problem is, as you stated Khor, raiding is not about magically appearing in front of bosses and downing them; there is so much more that goes in to raiding and it is leaving people exhausted and chasing other avenues less intensive than raiding.
For those of you who say “Learn 2 play” or “Stay on the porch” are lacking as much in intelligence as you are ingenuity.
Wrath catered to the casual player-base and Warcraft thrived; the numbers never lie. Cataclysm has seen a slow depreciation in population from the start four months ago. Why do you think they pushed back Firelands? You honestly think it was for any other reason than Blizzard is concerned with overall progression? Why would they release another set of difficult raids when the current ones are giving the majority of the players a tough time? To smooth out edges? Right…
With even more nerfs coming to heroics and raids, seems to me Blizzard is realizing 75% of the player-base don’t want to spend their valuable time peeling their genitals off of the nearest wall only to go in to work tired, or deal with a pissed off spouse, or disappointed children.
Heed my warning: Blizzard is still king of the mountain and they are not stupid. With the literally dozens of other games considered at least a viable option for your well spent efforts, Blizzard will make the necessary changes to get their numbers back up (and keep them up). I am personally waiting for BioWare’s Old Republic; we’ll see how hard raids are when that game launches.
Unlike most games MMO’s don’t offer a range in difficulty setting to cater to the players different skill levels, so in my mind there is a simple solution the “its too hard vs its too easy” debate…. Make the normal raids so that they are similar in difficulty to the normal raids in WotLK and open up HM as they are now from the very start for those who want a tough and more challanging time of things.
I think that World of Warcraft has always been time consuming, but my biggest problem lies on how time consuming end-game content has become with Cataclysm. Maybe it’s just that I am getting older (30 this month EEK!), or maybe it is because job and family are chiseling away at my free time. Either way, it’s hard to dedicate as much time as I used to 6 years or so ago, when I started this game at 24.
Maybe I am wishing for easier content so that we can breeze through bosses and get our loots, but still feel like we accomplished something. I know that still ruffles the feathers of those that hate free loots to lesser skilled players, but my focus isn’t skill. I have that. It’s the time factor that seems to be taking me down at this point
But never fear, I am still playing and very active, just addressing thoughts that jump around in my head!
i think that wow should have three difficulties of raids , Normal ( for ppl who just want to see the end content of the game ) , Heroic ( betwen casual and hardcore , ppl who have skill but doesn’t have that much time ) and finally Legendary ( those fit hardcore gaming guilds who wants a real challenge)
So many of the issues that folks are having with WoW seem to be easily solved. At least from this “lame, casual, no skilled noob” s perspective. PvP balance issues easily solved by having players being able to speec both pve and pvp. With folks able to have 10 different toons there is enough variety available to stop all this class balancing nonsense. Make raiding an option instead of a mandatory, time consuming, repetive drudgery that it has become. Have professions give the same or close to the same (instead of lvl 800 gear professions can make up to lvl 750 gear) gear as instance drops. Casuals are the mainstay of WoW and thats the way it is. Most people just want to log on …Go kill a few things..make some things.. Farm some things.. Do a few quests and be done with it. Having to belong to a tight knit social group just to get the “shinies” is not what most people want out of the game. Blizzard has done a great job of providing us with a fantastic vehicle to help us get away from it all. But its becoming a second job and is getting way too complex for the people that make up the majority of the player base. It doesnt have to be “Farmville” but its not necessary for it to be a chess match with “Big Blue” either.And Khor thanks once again for a great site.
I’m very happy with the difficulty as it is right now, it’s not easy, wotlk was awful boring because of the low difficulty, but I really don’t think the content is hard, hard were the burning crusade raids, those made you want to break your keyboard, and i’m not a hardcore raider either, i’m in a casual raiding small guild (around 15 active players), we play 2 days a week and that’s enough to clear all current regular content.
So i disagree with making the content easier tbh
, i have fun, killing bosses for the first time felt like an accomplishment, its not a face roll, it’s actually challenging without being frustrating. and after learning the fights and playing with the same group of people it gets easy.
I like the idea of having one full raid with simpler mechanics. It would be great for guilds to get their teamwork together and train up while running a full raid. The way it is now, you down a boss or two and start hitting your head against a wall. From the casual raiders perspective, it’s not that fun.
I think Blizz decided that 5-mans would be that training ground. Remember how hard they were at first? They had actual raidboss style mechanics in some cases. I think we were supposed to train up on them, and I think a lot of people did.
Blizz did the right thing making Cata raids genuinely challenging. We will overgear this stuff soon and it will be like running Naxx in ICC gear; you’ll blast though, but you’ll still have to do the safety dance.
Raids being a challenge is the best part of the game. And for those casual players, they will still be able to get the epic loot, they will just be a tier behind. When the next raid tier is released, Valor gear will be purchasable with Justice Points.
Give the dedicated raiders that enjoy the challenge of downing new content the chance, then give the casual players their turn.
Hi Khor,
As a WOW player since the first day of launch, I now proudly say that I have given up the game….LOL…for the time being.
Why?
Raiding has now become a second job and I do have a life….a wonderful won at that too. I no longer can spend 6-9 hours a week raiding, and that is only if my guild has the right amount of people who actually show up. While I appreciate the increases in difficulty, the game really should not require that much extra research to learn the fights as well as finding a core group to run with. Most of the guilds that I have been in the past year are pretty much raiding “dreamers” with only a few that actually want to put in the effort while the rest just PVP or do one boring daily after another.
WOW has become boring and very repetitive. Every time I log on, I am actually trying to find a reason on “why.” Yes, I could spend more time endlessly working on Archaeology and wait 40 minutes in a random queue that then takes another hour or longer to complete.
I gave it up for the time being. I am now enjoying real life more, watching stuff on TV, reading, spending time with the family, and even playing other video games.
WOW is and always be a great game. But it does need changes to make it more solo player friendly and less on the constant grind of raiding.
As a casual player whose play times are not regular or consistent enough to be a dependable member of a guild raid group I find that the only way I ever see raid content is via a pug, or on the rare exception where I happen to be on and my guild is one short. Niether scenario happens very often. I personally feel that I think the Normal-Heroic mode approach is a great vehicle that should be used to a greater degree than it has been for raids. I agree with Khor and think Normal modes are too hard at the moment – I believe normal mode’s principle goals should be:
1. Be puggable
2. Allow players to see content and learn fights
3. Allow the majority of players access to loot upgrades
Currently I don’t think normal mode allows for any of the above. I also think that if the above goals are accomplished then it will eventually lead to more groups trying to pug the difficult raids as they’ll at least feel like they know the fights.
In parallel to the above I feel the goals of Heroic mode should be
1. Group skill, coordination and focus are a must, and a Heroic Raid should be very difficult to impossible to pug (close to what normal feels like at the moment)
2. Allow players to feel like they accomplished something difficult
3. Be rewarded with the best gear.
I’m not sure I’d support a 3 mode approach as HolyshoteR suggested above, as with another level of difficulty my “epic gear” that I got from every other avenue (crafting, faction, BOE auction house etc) will basically always feel like it should in reality be blue.
Bascially just make Heroics harder and Normals easier thats what I’d like to see. Just my 2 cents.
I’d like to see them make Raids puggable like dungeon instances, with a twist. It can be difficult
to get 10, and almost impossible to get 25 for a raid if you are a casual player. It would be nice
if you could queue in 5-man platoons for either a 10 or 25 Raid. The combination of requiring people to be in a guild (perhaps with some guild reputation to avoid completely random players) and perhaps an iLvl minimum on gear (350?), might allow this to work. Plus of course you can
go cross-realm with it.
It is difficult for us mere players (a somewhat condescending statement) to discern exactly what would make this expansion more viable for the average player as both sides of the “too easy/too hard” dilemma can make valid points and it is only that the “too easy” side has the benefit of numbers.
As I commented on above, Wrath catered to the “casual” player, and thus thrived because “casuals” comprise the majority of the player-base and thus will have the loudest voice. However, we need to note the substantial amount of puggable raids that existed at that time; raids that you could queue for and complete in less than hour, much like Tol Barad now. Blizzard will need to attain an often times volatile balance between these two factions of mindsets; something they have not had a chance to do yet (IMO) with their overall goal of Cataclysm being different than that of Wrath, thus making that comparison a difficult one. Reaching an equilibrium is an art they have proven to be most efficient at and a lot of good ideas have been highlighted in these comments, ones I am sure Blizzard has thought of/could possibly implement.
As with Khor the Creator, I am turning 30 this year and it may very well be impossible for me to devote as much time to this game as I once did, no matter how much (or little) Blizzard “nerfs” their expansion packs in order to cater to people more aligned with my mindset, thus making my mindset unique in that it is a rather selfish one since I want the game I had when I was 24 and that may be impossible due to my mindset having changed or, put rather simply, I aged and absorbed new responsibilities and headaches.
As I also stated above, World of Warcraft is still king and I am sure we will see derivations of this in the very near future. Either way, keep on trucking, RET paladins, when this game finally takes a backseat either physically, or mentally, the paladin class, and thus Retribution, will go down as one of (if not THE) greatest disciplines this game produced.
it too much tactic!!!
1 little mistake and everyone dies. just an inch to the left and the position is wrong. = wipe again.
i dont have time for raids as they happen friday and saturday evening/night. im busy with other things then.
BH boss is great. the tacts are easy to keep track of. not too chaotic and i dont get frekin exhausted adter the fight.
i have been with some good pugs, but its like a risk to take. will you do it in a try or three or will it take 5 hours, before ppl just leave?
Just think about karazhan. it was a great raid. the atmosphere and everything was great. and i like 10 mans like that so it doesnt lag too bad.
im tired so i hope i wrote some sence here. but to sum it all up: the fun in raiding for very casual/casual gamers isnt there anymore. it just takes too much time to learn tacts, constantly failing. grinding too get money and rep. getting valor points and other stuff.
ok the endgame (deathwing) raiding is supposed to be a bit harder, but the starting raids… come on!
unless i raid many nights a week, and spend all my spare time on grinding and stuff, i have no life. and now i have good enough gear (holy palla) its almost impossible to find a good eough pug.
nn all:)
Firstly, I have only played WoW since cata came out. My ret pala is my first character and the one I have spent 99% of my time on. I am pretty much without guild.
I’d love to give some comment on the raid difficulty, but actually getting into a raid as a ret is the problem for me. I have iLvL 352 but on my server, it’s pretty damn hard even to get to fight Argaloth every week, and I am spamming the LFG whenever we hold TB and I am on (which has been a lot). When I do get in, I am consistently top 3 dps and often first, so it’s really frustrating that I now have to respec as a Holy to have any chance of progressing from here.
This may be an old problem, but as a new player it seems odd that certain specs are effectively excluded from later content by proxy. Something I need to learn and work around I guess. I’m not sure how much a different guild would help as everyone i’ve spoken too basically says “Melee DPS, not really needed. Ret Pala, definitely not. Do you heal?”
So i’ve now farmed most of the pre-raid BiS holy gear and it’s time to start learning how to heal heroics. That, and start levelling a warlock.
That’s my experience so far.
I think my interest in WoW has been cyclical, a pattern of on again off again. I used to be in a fairly large raiding guild, but dropped it after clearing Nax2 for a much smaller, more close-knit group of RL friends.
When I did this, I acknowledged I would likely never be able to raid again, and I’m still ok with that decision.
I think WoW has it right at the moment. Raiding should be for the hard core. If you don’t have time for it, you don’t deserve to save Azeroth from Dragons or whatever. I know I don’t spend that much time playing, so I don’t mind passing buy someone in the Dwarven District and going “Woah, that’s a sweet axe!”
You’re right on, Khor, raiding is too time consuming… that’s why I gave it up.
Love the website, btw Khor!
Peace.
i think everyone should have a chance to raid, this is still a GAME, even if some people take it too far
Raiding has become a hell of a lot of work. Hell I’m now leveling characters just to support the needs of my raider. And part of the frustration is there seem to be a lot of silly mechanics. Blizz if you wanted us to run around like ninnies, just call a phase ‘Run around like a ninny until you become completely exhausted or please just run into a wall repeatedly’ I wish they’d kept the heroic vs non heroic idea and made them like that. Granted wrath was a sea of purples, but now its like … frustration frustration frustration.
Malloreigh [Antonidas] says: “I’m in a casual raiding small guild (around 15 active players), we play 2 days a week and that’s enough to clear all current regular content.”
Ummm…no. First I looked up your guild’s name on WoW Heroes, then read up on their achievements in-game. Exalted is decidedly NOT casual. They’re in the top ten for their server for Cayaclysm heroic clearing on GuildProgress.com, and are in the top three for regular content.
If you’re going to represent the casual player, you might want to actually represent a casual guild.
Many casual guilds are currently losing players, because they don’t have the time to invest in the current content and its learning curve. Heck, a decent cross-section of casual guilds have been slow in even getting groups ready to do raids at all, mostly because of queue times which were a direct result of Blizz upping the overall difficulty factor across the board, but particularly for healers and tanks.
Thankfully, there hasn’t been many elitist attitudes presenting themselves on here; Porsgrunn was right in the fact that everyone should have a chance to raid. When the bar’s set too low, the elite tend to complain about how easy it is to get top tier gear and so on…yet the subscription numbers rise. And now that WoW isn’t a new game anymore, just catering to the elite isn’t going to cut it. I hope Blizzard takes note of the fact that Everquest never saw it coming when the mass exodus finally happened.
I know it wasn’t popular with a lot of people, but I think the regular, obvious nerfing done using the Strength of Wryn/Hellscream’s Warsong buff in ICC was an effective way to deal with raid difficulty.
It let’s the hardcore people down the bosses with no buff at the start. But if your raid team is really struggling with, say, Atremedes, you’d know that in a week or two you’ll get another 5% damage and healing. So it keeps raid teams from getting too discouraged.
Maybe to keep the hardcore QQers happy you have the achievements indicate what the buff was at when the player got the achievement. That way people could still have bragging rights, but everyone would get to see the content eventually.
I cant comment much on the current Cata release as Ive stopped playing since WOTLK.. granted ive played nonstop since burning crusade with my pally leveled 1-70 as a tank was ranked as a top 10 tank then for my server. then from 71-80 ret and fell in love all over again with pallys. now seeing how things have gotten and all the feed back ive read im glad i decided to chill out on this expansion. Ive had hard core wow player friends leave for the reasons listed above and not to mention the mindset that Ret paladins should be healers instead of tank and ret.. were back to those days?? damn what happend wow? tsk tsk..
im still playing with the idea of coming back… but being that im a raider more than anything else ..i just dont know..
I found heroics and raids to be pretty difficult and time consuming. I ended up turning my complete attention to PvP. I’ve been working in BG’s and did some arena and am having a blast. Once I get into full purple set then i might go searching for a pvp guild. I don’t even bother with raids and heroics anymore.
I take your points and like the idea, however the example of Molten Core is dead wrong from my perspective. I didn’t raid that place for months because I loved it, I raided there for so long as we had no other choice. ZG was released well after MC and that added an extra instance where we could fight at the beginning of gear levels. MC was brutal, tough, and unforgiving. That is the reason that the divide was so wide between the raiders and casuals in the original game.
There was no alternate path, so you raided MC until you had the gear needed, or quit.
“Galahadnt says: If you’re going to represent the casual player, you might want to actually represent a casual guild.”
The fact that we kill bosses efficiently does not mean we are hardcore, we don’t dedicate much time to raiding, as i said we raid 2 nights a week, we only have one 10 man group. If 2 nights are enough to clear all content, of course i’m not going to agree to making them easier.
In the end I am entitled to my opinion just as you are to yours.
Hate raiding,
Only do heroics to get valor,
Archaeology has tested my last nerve,
And I would probably just bail on this game if I didn’t feel guilty about it in some ways since I got promoted to an officer
I joined very late in Wrath to play with my friends, I picked up the mechanics as fast as I could and I tried to not be a burden. I learned to play 3.3.3 Ret, then 4.0.1, then stayed up to date with all the myriad of changes since. The guild I joined with my friends had been plugging away to down the Lich King, but had issues with Sindragosa and had near misses and wipes with 1% health or something obscene like that. They just stopped because it wasn’t fun and they were a close-knit social guild with friends and family. Cata came out and we blasted through leveling and tried our hand at heroics and stumbled through those and they sucked. Then when we attempted Magmaw we basically died inside and that was the beginning of the end for my guild (and many others.) Wipe after wipe after wipe, it wasn’t fun, it sucked ass, and frankly was a slap in the face. Since then most of the officers either left the guild, quit playing, or just started leveling another toon, messing around, or taking a break and ignoring cata content.
For starter expansion material this is stupid, one-shot mechanics are pointless and just do nothing but piss people off. Latency sucks now and they know something is up. That 0.5 second chance to inerrupt is moot if you have a 400ms latency, and frankly one-shotting stuff just changes the difficulty from managing the mechanic to avoiding the mechanic. Not a skill check, just a reflex check which is best left to PvP in my opinion. Whatever any of you say about this I still say this expansion was made for the elite or the hardcore. If you’re dilligent and casual you can survive with considerably more effort than you previously did, but this was made for people who yawned and bitched about Wrath being easy. They wanted what we have and we have to suffer for not meeting their standards.
Cataclysm has pretty much left me lacking in the ability to care anymore, even though I finally have a Magmaw kill from a PuG. I would have much rather been able to kill that with my guild which for the most part is a shadow of what it was. Screw you guild leveling and achievements.
Some fantastic comments on this thread, nice to see some balanced discussion rather than the normal learn your class comments etc etc.
I’ve been playing since just before TBC came out. Have been in a couple of guilds and raided some TBC content, but not the final raids. Come WoTLK I did a faction and server swap to Frostmourne with a rl mate and joined another guild. Did very well there and raided most things. We couldn’t quite drop LK but had a lot of fun trying.
Cata releases and everyone is still fired up and keen from our LK attempts. Now our guild has just about fallen apart. We have gone from a raid leader who ran Ulduar to get the legendary mace to a guy who is now never on.
We are a casual 10 man guild and used to run content with a different team most weeks. We used a core group of probably 6 players and changed the others around. Now we get on on Friday nights and only 2 people are online.
The difficulty has decimated the guild. For the first time since I started I am seriously considering closing my subscription and finding another game.
While I totally agree that WoTLK was too easy in the heroics and that epics were just given away the raids still gave a test to casual guilds. The step up in Cataclysm heroics has been huge and I like it that we have to work to get some good gear, but the step into raids imo has been far too high.
I turned 40 last year and now find that trying to raid has a big impact on my family time and also how tired I am at work the day after we attempt a raid.
I would like to see the normal vs heroic modes that have been suggested above and give casual players who cannot afford the time to raid 3 -4 nights a week. The suggestion of BH having 6 bosses appeals to me, and a loot table that is not just pvp based would be good. At least then a lot more players would have the ability to complete a raid and the hardcore players still have the challenge they want.
I’ll see what 4.1 brings along but may spend my gaming dollars and time on something else.
Its been a fantastic game that I have really enjoyed bu the has suddenly lost its shine.
30 Minute ques for heroics are sad. Heroics in a pug are long and expensive. Casuals players and many former “raiders” don’t have the skill or ambition for end game cata bosses. I find my Guild larger and full of unskilled wannabees. I feel Blizz screwed up by making the gear level for 10/25 man raids equal. My subscription ends in a month. I’m done.
After a year of playing and putting Cata through it’s paces I am reluctantly leaving the game. The reasons are:
1) Raiding is an absloute nightmare unless you are hardcore (multiple marathon night sessions) and are in a hardcore guild. Casual players or serious players not in raiding guilds need not apply.
2) Just when I have gotten fairly decent at pvp and have started enjoying myself Blizzard takes the nerf bat to WoG. This has been beaten to death but suffice it to say they have handled the whole situation quite clumsily. After going through the pvp hell that was the end of WOTLK I have no patience for the coming repeat. Sub is cancelled.
3) I am watching population levels sink. The writing is on the wall.
4) I have noticed Khor’s enthusiasm waning. Best indicator of all.
Great, first they give us the buff from 10 sec, to 30. Then they take it away again. Blizzard hates the paladin, scrap it and give us back our golden age of WotLK!!
Been playing 3 years, fully geared from za & za for raids but cant raid anyway after 7 months into cata! No one to raid with! My guild has 10 raiders that raid every week but they are getting tired and we cant get anymore raiders to make a second team! People dont have this kind of time to spend on raiding and heroics that beast you to death week after week! All the fun is going from the game and if you cant get gear, why play! WOW has created the most abusive game in the world. People call people stupid, dumb, retarted, #$% holes, mother #$%@#@$, just to name a few! Thats abuse folks, done by the ignorant morons that play this game and allowed by WOW!