They need to fix the early levels especially for new players. I like thr idea of giving u a long quest chain that recaps all expansions to new players and levels them to the new content in one go. Maybe it can't be repeated past the first so people will go into the world after completing the recap campaign. 20 years of wow and even more of just "warcraft" there needs to be something that explains the story
They stopped listening to their players and started believing they knew better that you didn't know what you actually wanted. Whether it was the game, interviews, or community conduct, Blizzard started operating as if they were above criticism.
They were always like that. Dude the absolute shitshow that was the first class rebalancing patches on classic was so legendary it has never been matched. Maybe by realID drama but maybe not even that
Feeling like it's too late and you're too far behind is definitely a major factor in deciding whether to start playing WoW again. It's a terrible feeling. I miss playing, started in beta and just had life get the better of me for a long time.
I'm a relatively new WoW player. A friend I made in another MMO convinced me to try it a few months ago, and I've really been enjoying it off and on. It's easy to tell when I'm on a 'newer' map, or an 'old' one. Kul Tiras is def my fav maps/story so far. That said, teaming is really not fun, unless I'm with a friend. I've done some pug dungeons/etc, and people are super critical of builds, even in low level content. Even if you play role efficiently, it doesn't protect you from getting kicked because people still want specific builds/gear/stats. The level of elitism in it is unlike any game I've ever played, and will keep me from investing in any team based end game stuff.
Yeah man thats sucks, I remember it was the same when I started. Now days when I level new chars I try to kick those toxic people and try to teach new players if they are interested, because I know the pain. I find this part of the game more rewarding then endgame :P
It just takes a lot of time to find the right people to play with, and i know that time investment is unappealing to most people so i understand they most likely won't. Its just unfortunate because the game is moving in a pretty good direction.
Back in retail wotlk, I had this group, I was the healer. We had a druid with cloth heirlooms, a death knight tank in unholy spec, a hunter wearing grey items, literal trash with no stats. I hated them so much. It was heroic gundrak. We cleared the dungeon and moved on.
couldn't agree more with this guy on westfall. The whole zone is perfect to me, and the fact they have this goonies based dungeon at the end of it is the cherry on top
Warcraft movie should of been the Defias brotherhoodand and the betrayal by Stormwind, leading to civil rebels you could get behind with an eventual hero to villain arc and eventual execution. Like what a movie that would be.
Honestly I think the reason blizz hasn't had the balls to start actually 'fresh' with some form of wow 2.0, instead of the endless expansion train, is that they corporate doesn't believe that if we release something new that it would stand up against its competitors. It would potentially loose all these OG players that do keep grinding for those new mounts, gear and achievements with years of playtime poured into the game. Instead of taking a leap of faith they instead would just go for the cheap and easy to develop zone or two and call it a day.
world of starcraft man. but yeah, it eats too much ressources to get a bugfree mmo running. these things are pain in the ass to program and bugfix. never change a running system
i think the old quests were better at getting people out spending time together. when they sent you out to get 60 razormane tusks you were out there long enough and it was just annoying enough to warrant finding someone else to do it with. or you were likely to run into someone else there. when i think of cata quests i think of stuff like click the hose to put out the fire. it's too quick and has no room for other people.
old quest are only good for fresh servers when everyone is leveling, past vanilla old world is pointless filled with shit quests to do alone cuz barely anyone levels
I think some of the newer quests are better designed, but I VASTLY prefer the quest system under classic than doing the old world after the cata revamp. Blizzard's modern quest system makes every quest feel disposable and forgettable because you're just doing so many of them, and they take a fraction of the time. So I can do 30 quests in the cata revamp in the time that it took to do 10 quests in the old system. That's not a good thing. When you're in and out of the quests so quickly, you don't remember any of them. When you're in and out of the area that you did the quest in so quickly, you don't remember that area, or get a feel of it. With the old quests, I felt like I was really adventuring in a space and getting to explore. Yeah, I know, we all want to get to 60 and run UBRS or whatever, but the 1-60 leveling shouldn't be something to just skip past to the get to the "good stuff," it used to be good stuff, it used to be a really big part of the game and feel like an enjoyable achievement. With the newer questing system, I'm just doing some quick chores. If feels more like busy work than the actual joy of questing and exploration should be. I'd rather do 1/4 of the number of quests and have them take 4x the time (with 4x the exp) rather than the alternative. It just feels more meaningful for the same amount of work. Now one thing I DON'T miss, I don't miss "go kill 20 things in this cave" and then the followup "go back to that cave and kill this one dude in the back." That was always pointless. Fortunately that's a bad feature from the old questing system that is gone.
Questing IMO is better solo, and I think the group quests are kinda trash, and usually don't have good enough rewards to warrant wasting the time to get a group to do them, because most quests are purely just for leveling. Endgame was all about social activities, and that was getting into a guild that matched your goals in the game, and chilling with the homies. This was fun levelling if you had IRL friends to do it with, but what happened most of the time, is IRL people would roll 30 characters and 30 servers and get to level 30, and were way too ADHD to ever get to the point where raids were an option. I was one of the least enthusaistic wow players among my friends, and I was the ONLY one who did endgame content. I find that ironic, because I just stuck to one main character, and only played alts when my body was being camped, or I got angry about some nonsense. Eventually my success got a few of my IRL friends to transfer servers back to the one I was on, but even then they never once went on a raid, so the experience of leveling with someone else long term I think is pretty rare, and quests really shouldn't be modeled for that because there is better avenues to encourage social interaction. I think they should have done more than just raids, and I can see how dungeon finder was a net negative for the game, though I think the idea of dungeon finder is good, and it could be tweaked to be amazing, but blizzard doesn't seem interested in developing ideas until they are good if they aren't good from the getgo, and I think that is why Blizzard has had such a downfall. I respect people who aren't afraid of breaking things so long as they understand that just because you broke something doesn't mean it can't be fixed. There is no excuse for how bad paladins were in retail, why they made dungeon finder give loot for doing a tiny fraction of many dungeons (just kill the objective boss), and why Blizzard does nothing to fix the PvP population skew in wrath classic. They monetized the most basic things they could have done to fix these issues. Personally I think so much of the game would be improved if they just put a few carrot on a stick incentives to address these, such as permanent buffs that scale based on population skew, and layers that prevent being put on a server where you are outnumbered 25:1, requiring dungeons to be cleared to give loot, having dungeon finder be more of like a classified ad for dungeons rather than RNG groups, ect. I actually think their attempt to give bonus loot to people playing under represented class was a solid win, but it was burried under other problems. I also think players should get dishonorable kills for killing players that give no honor, or are engaged in combat for PvP. I have no issues with unconsentual PvP, but is it really "honorable" to kill a player that is fighting mobs already, or is so below your level that you will easily one shot them irrespective of gear?
WOD was such a content drought and the fact that EVERYBODY was closed in their garrisons making gold and not doing raids was what killed the whole thing. I loved the garrisons made a shitton of gold in it, I also know that it was one of the reasons why WOD failed... And they made Mythic dungeons way too late into the exp for them to save it.
my thought is that the Illidan expansion and Arthas expansion were just so good. And for war3 players, their journey is just completed after wrath. I liked the revamp but not the way they revamp it. I think it is better to make the revamped map simply a higher-level map so new players and the old players who have no interest in leveling another alt can feel the changes.
its funny how this sentiment popped up recently about warcraft 3 player quitting after wrath. and now every idiot on the planet has to say it at least once beause they recently saw it on reddit or some shit. it may be true, but stop parroting ffs.
TBC was trash. Alt unfriendly, boring dungeons and raids, extremly slow paced, classes were boring (some were just 1 button classes) and so on. Wotlk went the right way, cata was meh and mop was the #1 expansion so far with so many great changes and additions.
17:00 - WoW needs a main questline add-on that takes you through most of the main zones and the expansions to meet the major characters, kill some of the major baddies, do some of the most lore-relevant dungeons, and then complete an epic weapon-crafting build from level 1-50. Instead of grinding dungeons or doing 3 zones of quests to get there. Just give us a stream-lined questing experience, with all the "go over there and kill 6 bugs and then go over there and pick up 15 rusted spears that we'll never use" bullshit. Keep the old quests in there as optional content, shitty pre-requisite snoozer quests and all. But let new players experience a full tour of the WoW experience. As a new player with Shadowlands, most of the world was completely irrelevant to me when I got to the Shadowlands. I couldn't even finish rescuing Jaina from Tol Dagor. I just leveled up to the Shadowlands and there she was in the Maw, calling me the Mall Walker. Ysera? Don't know who you are. Giant cow man sitting around the whole time? No idea. Pepperoni Nipple Man? Well, I guess to be fair, no one knew who he was and no one cared. Sylvanas? Oh, I remember her, she seemed cool. Oh, people hate her now? Why? What the hell is Teldrassil? I did like 2-3 old school WoW zones, then went to Kul Tiras, hit 50 and went to The Maw and hated everything, running around permanently losing Stygia, and then unsubbed. It was a shitty experience, across the board. TLDR: Create a streamlined main questline experience that skips tons of busy work, introduces players to all the major characters, let the player do some of the most lore-relevant dungeons, kill some of the major baddies/dragons, and then complete/craft a new epic weapon available at level 49. ~20 hours of content. Complete the weapon, get called to BFA or Shadowlands. Go.
I started WoW when it came out back in the vanilla era, i enjoyed Burning crusade that introduced flying mounts, new classes, a deeper dive into the Lore and a whole host of other improvements some successful while others falling flat, hell Karazhan is still probably one of the best raids in the game. I absolutely loved Wrath which led to my addiction to the game when it came out, Arthas was such a compelling villain and the areas and Hub city were great LFG and LFR were controversial and dailies started to become repetitive but I still enjoyed it. When Cataclysm was announced i was excited and had high hopes, Deathwing was awesome and the updated zones were needed because by that time WoW was showing its age, when it came out and I played it I was beyond disappointed with it, people were hitting the max level cap in less than a day, the new archeology profession was awful and the zones and quests just took me out of the RPG experience, I went from storming the castle of The Lich King to Riding a seahorse underwater... I tried to continue but just started not enjoying the game and quit. It was a great 8 years and I always look back with nostalgia and great times but that is the reason for me anyway why I fell off.
This was very similar to my experience (although tbf I was too young to play much during original vanilla, so BC & Wrath was my fave time). Karazhan & ZA were so much fun. Cata was depressing & bizarrely different. Idk why but the archeology profession was so awkward & ... not fun. Plus the talent trees were kinda ruined IMO. I'm sure it's tricky to make an expansion that feels fresh & has new content that isn't disruptive to the game's core playstyles & tone. We've seen WoW struggle with that. Cata was weirdly dark & depressing & then Panda was a bit too cutesy (although to be fair, the contrast felt exaggerated bc it came after Cata). All the pop culture refs in quests seemed to increase, which I detested. Yes there'd always been some Easter eggs but it's 1 thing when limited to quirky characters or futuristic gnomes vs feeling like a different game that lacks immersion bc it's written by too large of a team. Relying on modern references is lazy writing used when a team doesn't feel equipped to achieve in-universe humor & storytelling
I started WoW about 6 months b4 the launch of tBC. I was so engrossed in the lore of the game, I didn't hit 70 until 3 weeks b4 Wrath launched. I joined a casual guild about the same time and stayed until ToC patch when I left and joined a guild that was top 5 on my server. I loved my time in that new guild. We worked so hard to get through ICC, and even Ruby Sanctum just b4 Cata, with LK on farm, helping alts, friends, even pugs (we never charged for entry) to get their achievements and gear. Truly a glorious time in my gaming history. Cata broke that. It broke guilds. New ones formed but weren't the same experience. They tried because they all loved the experience of Wrath. By MoP, everything changed again. I even swapped server and faction to find a better experience. Guilds just kept falling, breaking, collapsing, and when WoD brought nothing new to the table, a lot of ppl just washed their hands of it. I actually stayed as a casual in a mediocre guild until the end of BfA just because I enjoyed the game so much, but after 13-14 years, I couldn't justify plugging bk in for Shadowlands. I love the nostalgia of it all but Wrath was the pinnacle for me. It hasn't been the same since the community I fought with, and for, for so long broke apart. If you were on an EU server in Wrath and ever did 5-man PVP against a team called BOOMCHICKENLOLOLOL, I'm sorry, that was rude of us to make 5 nelf moonkins and go stealth kitty into Starfall for cheap laughs (it was funny, though).
Thanks for writing this. I have to agree with all your points. The community IS WoW and people are just inherently different today compared to 14 years ago.
Before finishing the video, for me having started college about the MOP release i kept myself subscribed but played very little. I imagine a lot of folks were just getting older and having less time. I imagine combining that with the world "revamp" that tons of folks did NOT like along with the classes really starting to get weird people just started getting burned out (no pun intended)
Agree, a lot of their player base were moving into their twenties, getting out of college, and starting lives. On the reverse I think classic is doing so well because these same players have moved into their thirties and have settled enough to have the time to come back and play.
I remember around cata my buddy and I were about 20, we had played together since beta. We both got jobs at the same place, He pulled up one day is a gunmetal grey brand new Mustang GT. Said his parents made him a deal if he quit playing wow theyd buy it. neither of us touched wow again. Big sad. to your point, yes I believe a lot of us grew up sadly.
That's weird, I heard nothing but positivity about the Cata revamp. I've been playing WoW, watching WoW content on CZcams, and reading the WoW subreddit since 2006 and this comment is actually the first time I've ever seen someone say the Cata world revamp was not liked. What I personally remember not being liked was the smaller scope of the high-level content combined with the higher difficulty of heroic dungeons. While most people really enjoyed the 1-60 revamp, a lot of people didn't like the high-level zones (of which there were only five plus the PvP mini-zone). Lots of people disliked the underwater gameplay in Vash'jir and hated the storyline of Uldum, which was mostly just one long Indiana Jones reference. WoW hit its player peak in Wrath when group content was at its most accessible, and when they jacked up the difficulty for Cata, a lot of those players stopped playing.
Also, some major games released in Cata. Minecraft, League of Legends, some others. There are a lot of factors that goes into why WoW started to fall off, but honestly this happens with every game. You dont think LoL has fallen off over the years? Fortnite? Its just what happens as games get older. Even now LoL is losing playerbase and having similar issues to WoW where its just not attracting the younger audience; Valorant is. Expecting WoW to keep its massive popularity just isnt feasible and doesnt happen in any other genre, on top of the game effectively ending for most people after the Wrath storyline.
Asmon nailed it with the Wow2 (same playing field) statement. As someone who rarely plays and have missed expansions. A lot of times i don't play because its kina like "meh whatever I'm so far behind already". I've always felt wow should be doing trilogies with fresh starts every 3 expansions. Where each expansion is more a development on the current world vs a brand new game. It would allow blizzard to really plan out this over-arching storyline and for all i care they could use the same base world and change it up a little for 85% of the zones.
The "meh whatever I'm so far behind already" is so spot on. I occasionally get the urge to play again, but I always remind myself I'm already 2 expansions behind, haven't played since 2019 and just dont have the time to invest to chatch up nor do I really want to spend countless of hours on outdated content, you can skip all the old stuff, but then you have a game where you only play the new stuff and have countless hours of older content untouched.
I mean I didn't play WoW since 12 years or so but I would probably consider giving it a try if it weren't for the fact that I'm that far behind and more importantly the game being overly complicated. And I don't mean difficult, just unneccessarily obfuscated or something.
I tried to come back to WoW about a year ago after having been checked out since Wrath. That there's years of expansions that I missed wasn't the issue. It's that none of it matters anymore. If you start fresh in WoW today, there is no way to play the old content in any way close to how it was at release. That whole "talk to Chromie and pick the expansion you want to level in" thing is a bonkers way to experience the story. I created a new character and got to Shadowlands in a couple of days of playing. And once I'd caught up to where everyone else was, I realized I had zero connection to the game. My character had been overpowered from the moment I reached Goldshire. And then I was zipped through 15 years of content in the blink of an eye. This wasn't me powerleveling. This was the game powerleveling me. And it wasn't fun. By the time I hit the Shadowlands I was just bored. I had no sense of the story because I only did a few quests in a couple of the expansions before Chromie said my time was up. And I had no sense of my character because there was never a challenge presented that wasn't defeated with one or two spells. Blizzard has a lot of faults. The worst mistake they've made was making WoW so boring. They can overhaul their image all they want. Get rid of the bad actors, do all the things they should have done years ago, and it won't matter. For a new player or someone returning from long ago, the game is just boring now.
Sadly WoW’s story has always been a clusterfuck of “Blizzard just making shit up.” Some of the classic storylines just hit a dead end right when they get good. I think Deadmines is probably one of the best exceptions.
This is when they completely remade talents. I know because that's when and why I left. I played a sub-par but fun build that the change in talents removed from the game
@11:16 The cloth with strength item is a leftover from when disc priest were being designed to be melee healers (in beta, before GA). That's also why they had the Inner Fire spell buff that gave them extra armor (that had to be reapplied after 20ish hits by an enemy).
I played a ton in vanilla WoW, I was in a solid raid "guild" and got the best gear. And when TBC hit, my equipment was crap within a couple of levels. I couldnt handle that, so i stopped playing mid through the expansion, never feeling as strong as i did in vanilla. These days i probably would have continued to play. On the other hand, i would not have had the same amount of time to play the game either and therefore not progressed in the same way.
First few quests of TBC gave blue gear that was equal if not better then raid gear. The hamster wheel was official and it woke a LOT of people up to just how broken the hamster wheel was.
Blanchy wasn't evil. There's actual lore about sinrunners in-game. The Court Sinrunner mount specifies that Sinrunners were "once the steeds of dark souls, carried in the wake of _either_ their sins or their masters' sins to Revendreth." Blanchy is a Sinrunner, and her own mount description specifies that she "appeared to be an affectionate and well-behaved horse of excellent disposition" to boot. She was a good horse dealt a fell hand.
There are multiple references in the quest lore to Blanchy being jealous of Bessy; and coveting apples. In BC Tarren Mill look for the following quest text, "Here, Bessy, enjoy this apple while I get you ready. Tarren Mill Horsehand feeds Bessy the bright red apple. Young Blanchy stomps her foot jealously." Next the horsehand sais, "Aww, Blanchy, don't worry, my brother in Westfall will take good care of you. I hear he's got a beautiful farm with lots of space for you to roam. Now, now, Blanchy. Don't be jealous, you'll be going on a big adventure of your own, soon. Whoa, there, Blanchy, you can't be having any apples today. Tomorrow, we'll be taking you down to Southshore, where you'll take a boat way across the seas." Blanchy is in Revendreth to get rid of her burden of Jealousy and perhaps her gluttony for apples.
@@grumpyolegamer Unless it was any number of her owners that did some great ill in life. Like Private Furlbrow beating on Jensen over a petty insult during the bloody Northrend Campaign, or the Furlbrows in general abandoning Westfall, or the no doubt countless adventurers sent to their death at the hands of waiting Defias for a farmer's pocket watch. Want of apples is hardly cause to be left on the precipice of Hell. But knowing how blizzard is these days it wouldn't surprise me if they thought otherwise.
It wasn't the zone changes for me, it was the gameplay in Cata that make me quit back then. The streamlining started at the end of WotLK, but softly, and in Cata it went full on.
The lore, ppl tilted when the badmotherfuckingdragon Lost... MoP could have fixed with more PvP Focus and PvP lore, the fight between the differences are over
WoD imo did, but cata was undoubtedly the start of the decline They wanted to add stuff to the main world, instead they ruined their previous work, shot themselves in the foot, and ruined the potential future for azeroth based expansions to be only new islands coming out of the fog instead of advancements in the mainland or the war efforts
It was the Cataclysm, literally. They have destroyed the world I loved, I felt betrayed, there were nothing to do in this new world. Everyone I knew left, I struggled a bit through the initial raid content and left too.
Yep. I loved the night elven coastline. I levelled so many characters through there, and knew the area like the back of my hand. It was beautiful and peaceful, and had a lot of nostalgia value. Then cataclysm took a massive dump on it.
@@malificajones7674 Preach! So many of the beautiful Elven areas, that were part meditative, just _completely_ destroyed. I quit shortly after. I came back for Legion and BFA which has some _really_ beautiful areas but still miss the original world before it got trashed.
I liked the update of the the old world, but I 100% understand why people feel this way. I think they should have given the option or maybe just revamped a lot of the really awful areas. No one every complained about Dark Shore or West Fall for instance, but they got major revamps. I feel like they could’ve been more strategic about the revamps.
I always think of the expansions as what ones I had the most fun with rather than how everyone else received them. When looking back at all expansions w/ vanilla, here is my order of them with the fun I had playing them: TBC, Vanilla, Legion, Wrath, Cata, BFA, WoD, Panda, Shadowlands
They shouldn't have brought death wing in when they did. It was too much of a change. They should have literally rebuilt the background, new trees etc. as they have with dragon flight. Cata killed the nostalgia that held so many people. If they had added new zones and not killed the old ones, but made them relevant by bringing in 70+ quests in the vanilla zones that would have been huge.
After the massive success of wotlk the devs head got too big and try to get fancy with deathwing shock and awe bs which backfired. They could of added new zones as usual and not nuked the nostalgia out of Azeroth.
I think the decline started in Cata because I feel thats when the dev's really stopped listening to what the community wanted and started listening to the top 5%er's, I ran a guild back in Wrath and I knew there was a problem as soon as the cata prepatch went up, we had healers who'd cleared everything in wrath coming to the officers in tears because they couldn't cope with the healing changes and they were just getting raged at constantly by tanks and dps who'd just spent an entire expansion being taught by blizz that healers were gods who could out heal all raid/splash damage and they didn't need to move out of aoe or anything. Now if you were in a guild you could teach people fairly quickly what's what but if you weren't in a guild you instantly found that all the healers just stopped using lfg so if you were dps, you were looking at 2 hours for a que. This obviously created an even more toxic environment with dps queuing as tanks in order to get fast groups, then getting crushed and again blaming the healer. They patched the dungeons a few weeks after release to make it easier but the damage had already been done, ton's of healers quit, people only wanted to run dungeons with their guildies making the game a nightmare for new comers and casuals without guilds. ---------------- I dunno why MOP got so much hate, i loved it the music was amazing and the zones were just a nice place to be. ----------------------------------------------- Wod was so bad at the start i actually quit after a month until just after the first patch when i heard you could print gold from your garrison. :D ------------------------------------------------ Legion was awesome. ---------------------------------------------- the last 2 were a joke.
This guy got it right on the money. For years prior to cataclysm, the top players had been whining at the Devs to make the game harder. They hated pick up raids, and the easy dungeons, and wanted it to all be challenging content... for them. Now, there's a world of difference between hardcore gamers and casuals. So when Devs tailored all the dungeons to hardcore players, casuals couldn't even finish them. So we went from casual friendly wotlk, to l2p scrub cataclysm. And a huge chunk of the playerbase were basically just driven away from the game.
yo i remember how fucking scarce mana was for healers in the early heroics of cata. and the nerfs didnt came after a few weeks. i mean maybe a few things got tweaked with hotfixes but the overall nerf of the heroics came at the end of april in 2011 while cata released at the beginning of december. so we are talking about 5 months almost. and even that a lot of casuals had a very hard time in instances like stone core.
@@mcdick1621 Yes exactly. I've seen people saying that Cataclysm raiding was easy mode, but that came 6 months later. The Cataclysm dungeons were way overtuned on release, and along with the mana changes, were impossible for casuals. So they quit... and there's a hell of a lot more casuals than there are hardcore raiders. So blizzard panicked when they saw subscription numbers take a nosedive and then made raiding easy for LFR. But it was too late by that point, the damage had already been done.
I think most people dont like Cata quests due to how linear it is. You jump from quest hub to quest hub and it doesnt feel like you are discovering an area anymore.
Yes! This! I can't even describe how much more I prefer Vanilla Leveling over everything that came after it. Even though it is so painfully slow. It just feels soooo boring to me just following a line of breadcrumbs in every zone.
This is an underrated point and something most people don't realize. The modern design of quests takes away from discovery, which is important to have in a fantasy game. Fantasy should offer adventure.
@@Soulerous I'm surprised more people don't bring this up. It's my biggest gripe with leveling and is something Blizz has to be aware of to an extent. They design these more "sandbox" zones but their questing continues to be a more linear experience. Maybe its intentional though.
They used wotlk as a sort of foundation with easier dungeons, easier questing and more meaningless difficulties - Dragonflight is the culmination of such mentality. Quests are mostly linear forced storymode, no exploration - the npcs are usually 10meters from you or actually following you. No risk of dying, no need to drink/eat - Mana is never a problem during levelling. Due to the linearity of the experience and how fast one goes from hub to hub, there is no relaxation time to let the player take in the environment. And things that could happen in the classics, like interactions with players, do not occur at all - Its literally like playing a singleplayer action rpg. As a returning player in dragonflight I also felt very weak compared to the classics (vanilla/tbc and wotlk). So I tried more classes, and they all feel the same. The gameplay is extremely rotationheavy resulting in a sort of affliction warlock style of play. As for community, I've levelled 5 chars now and Ive never seen anyone talk in any zone chats. I've also noticed how imbalanced everything is, some classes hit like noodles whereas others can pull the entire zone. Dont think ever seen the game in such an imbalanced state. And there are secondary concerns such as poor animations, or animations not lining up, unnatural zone-design with cluttered microzones everywhere, abilities feel like they have less ooomph, i guess this is related to how weak classes feel. Well, I dont know how it came to this but I despise what the game has become. The only way this game can survive is if they bring back the vanilla/tbc devs.
For me, having played since BC, MoP and WoD were my favorite expansions, while Legion and BFA are my least favorite (I didn't play Shadowlands, so no comment there). After the initial burst of dailies on release in MoP, it was quite relaxed and easy to just focus on what I wanted to do, which was basically only CMs and raids. I could just spent almost all of my time engaged in those activities, it was great. Likewise in WoD, just with even fewer dailies. There weren't any systems to work through or barriers between me making a new character, gearing it, and raiding on it. Alongside what is IMO, some of the peaks of class/spec design we've had making many specs feel great and fun to play. Post-Legion, it's felt more and more like there are tons of activities I don't enjoy that I need to do to keep raiding. More and more daily or weekly tasks that just aren't fun but reward extremely relevant power or loot. For me, it's not fun to just mindlessly do world quests or island expeditions or *need* to do X number of M+ runs a week, let alone trying to farm specific dungeons for BiS the entire expansion patch after patch. It's tiring when all I want to do is log in and raid the highest difficulty content and Blizzard has made that less and less possible.
Not sure for anyone else's reason for quitting at that time. but I personally was one who quit right after wotlk ended. for me it was simple. I played the game since it came out and personally didn't enjoy the gear grind. I liked leveling and playing but the length of raids the amount of time raids/pvp and reputation grind took. by the time you finally get one gear set it's like the next patch is coming out and it's time to do it all again. At least for me since I had a full time job and a gf I could only grind 3-4 hrs like 4 days a week. Got bored of gear grind. Sad thing is it ruined mmos for me cus its all the same shit. just a diff pile.
sad cuzz thats when it became casual, as you left, last dragon's raid was eazy peazy after the update they made easy mode the standard, gulds were no longer required, flexible-auto-raid building... i saw my pal with an admitedly bad guild beat the top raid of cata.. he was appaled it was possible with casualsx
For me it was the expansion model plus subscription model. It was just too expensive IMO for what you got, esp. with the sheer time commitment to play.
Just seeing the graph in the thumbnail without having watched it yet, it is because the Dungeon Browser became a really huge thing, they completely annihilated class identity, suddenly Paladins have speedups, Mages can heal themselves, Rogues can heal themselves, everyone just can do everything, removing the real day-to-day value of Gold, things like buying Skills, getting the Gold for the first mount, flying etc. Another one of the biggest factors, the actual "world" outside of Dungeons was no longer a Danger, Mobs were not really a danger, even rare mobs for which you might have needed a party and made some friends to kill them were solo-able by pretty much everyone, there was no real need for social interaction anymore except for the raids. They took what made Wow feel like a world out of Wow and it became just "of Warcraft"
Blackrock Depths, when you let the NPCs out of the jail cells they were 'reminiscent' of characters from the TV show Oz which was current at the time. Pop culture references have always been there.
We really need an expansion/patch that has us just fixing up the world... The Loch Modan Dam being rebuilt, Silvermoon rebuilt, Gilneas retaken, Gadgetzan expanded like the heros version, etc.
*Blizzard:* _But that would take work!_ *Players:* _You under estimate how powerful nostalgia is plus it would make the world feel more dynamic instead of being a static ghost town._
Kind of a weird observation, but FFXIV started out easy, got hard in Heavensward, and then got progressively easier in many ways starting in Stormblood. That game had continuing growth throughout all of that. WoW's difficulty may have hit a certain threshold similar to what was hit in Heavensward around Cataclysm, and combined with other changes people began to get get excluded from what they used to enjoy.
Cataclysm Heroics pre-nerf were hard, not just because of LFD. Sure, you completed Heroics fine with a guild group, but it still took hours. The time commitment made them hard, as people didn't want to do them.
Barrens being split in half was 2nd to talent tree being removed that made me not like cata but everything else was soo good... The Barrens is just so nostalgic for me as Horde.
I think the main thing that went wrong was the graphics just didn't keep up with newer games and the gameplay/storyline was streamlined. Up until wrath you would play through the classic zones and actually follow a story same through BC. Wrath kinda made only Northrend the viable zone for gold/gear.
I played cata, and i really enjoyed it looking back, warrior was pretty fun to play IMO However I remember my first negative experience came quite quickly in to the raiding scene, when you were immediately behind because you didn't get your 4 set week one through a combination of LFR and Normal RnG /shrug
I remember cata early days. Cata was really hard and fun then they NERFED the crap out of it and introduced heroic raids for the crazys out there to ego after. And if you compared the Loot of these two raid types. Welll its not that impressive and LFR was just the death nail on the head of the last most interesting raid but made a joke by LFR. When you make a game carrot and stick system broken. Its not surprising LFR and Normals became the norm after cata. Sets in original wow were suppose... to have long term value. They for the most part did even in Classic. T1 being the expection as T1 was trash for most classes. By Cata Sets were basically starter gear by the next raid. there was no long term value and there was not big achievement getting the sets . Afterwards why bother raiding normal when you can easily get your gear in LFR.
9:00 --- You only treasure something, if you (can) lose it. I dont think people were particularly fond of Vanilla, but when Blizz updated and practically removed it, people became upset. 42:10 --- No. The difference is, in FF14 the devs made it clear from the get-go that the story itself wasnt finished and that it was just the closure of a chapter (and anyone saying differently, sorry, but then you didnt pay attention to... pretty much everything). After Wrath, the WoW devs let the game sit put for months before announcing a new expansion. Also, the only people who would put down WoW after Wrath... were probably just Warcraft III fans, who also didnt pay attention to anything. Because anyone who did, knew that there were A LOT of unresolved problems and secrets lurking everywhere, Deathwing and the Legion were only two of many potential problems. So people stopping after Wrath (or Endwalker for that matter)... they probably just needed an excuse. Which is pretty dumb, if you ask me: If I dont want to play anymore, I stop. Its that easy.
I'm basically a new player -- 1st started playing Shadowlands 2 years ago. But I was in graduate school at the time and always felt like I was falling behind and I stopped playing it 2-3 months after Shadowlands' launch. My cousins who got me into it kept telling me that I really wasn't as far behind as I thought I was and that the game is designed to help catch up players who are new or who drop off with each new patch/season. I just felt overwhelmed by all the UI, mechanics, add-ons, dungeon mechanics, min-/maxing strategies, complex rotations.... etc. Also, I did not have an MMO mouse, so it essentially gate-kept different classes because "well that class has a lot of buttons/abilities, so if you can't use them all, you'll just be dead weight" However, I did play some classic and I don't like the old graphics and lack of the HUD/UI make-over of the Dragonflight prep-patch. That and my cousins would be playing retail is the biggest reason that I would not want to play classic. I'm glad that you looked at generational circumstances -- such as the age of the original WoW player base and new games taking attention away from it. I've heard WoW old-timers who never recognize these sorts of issues and always just assume that it's the game in a vacuum that determines sub counts... But I would also take that line of argument further and also claim that part of what made WOTLK so successful was how (better) internet was even being proliferated across the country at that time -- how many households got internet for the first time in the early 2000s or switched from dial-up to broadband or to fiber optics which made MMOs more viable? And compounding the issue of the original player base "aging out of" WoW is that if your friend group or guild collapses, then that is further catalyst for people who have the time to put into the game to drop it as well.
so, i miss old quest design really... don't think new is often better, yeah, i mean basic quests ok... but... no open world bosses, no real 3 man or 5 men quests any more... i mean today 3 man quests i can do with a bad equipped twink alone, not thinking about spec spells movement or anything... back than... you needed to search for people, or level up, gear up and try 5 levels later again... this was so cool... and the steed quest... i think the best most memorable questline of all time... having to travel around the entire world mutliple times, without portals or flying, to finally get your steed... best experience ever... or old darkwood questline to summon this big undead destroying the town being an open world quest... so much better than the modern day version, a early game experience you can build on as there is nothing compareable in the modern game.... i was allways an expansion behind, so game was really difficult back than, and i liked it.... noways whan i make a new twink nude and play its even easier than the game back then... i mean, yeah you at least take damage at you did back then, and could sometimes need some food, what you needed after every fight back then... but so fast as you restore health, don't loose any mana by using spells and can't even miss..... i till today hate evere single one of the quality of life changes they did for the hardcore-players.... no more need to train axes when i get a new one but only used swords till then, no chance of missing spells, finding all the hidden traffic possibilities instead of big portal rooms.... the need of trainers to learn spells, allways being out of money to get things i would be able to get... instead of allways getting everything immedeatly, alone Hogger, so good quest back then... half an hour to get alone through the camp and then hoping nothing respawns during the fight... and now? just a runthrough... and even if the person in front of you is to fast for you everything respawns in about 30 secs... really don't like it.... and cata really was a big throwoff for me, loosing all the starting zones... especially because they tried the fading zones in wotlk, which was a big hope for the future game for me, everyone seeing the zone in a different way depending on them being advanced in the story - and then this big backthrow of everything being deleted and then not being changed till today... on of the big dislikes i have for the game for modern standards till now, that the world is so unusable, not being able to move chairs or read books, cut trees or demolish houses... and hot being able to have influence on the zones to better them... no matter how many enemies you defeat, they all insantly respawn befor you even can put in the quest... and even then nothing changes even you get rewarded fo "saving the town" and you come back and nothing changed.... till now i can't get - ok mmo-problems, wanting people play together where almost no one plays, but it takes so much value out of the game.... and till now i feel you can't get the lore any more because of the cata-revamp they made back then... but i feel really sad that they threw away that wotlk idea of zones fading with your progress in the game... that is a thing how modern games should be to me... don't know how it is today, but thats a thing i think gw2 did much better back in the time.... and not needing npc for anything but questgiving at all, towns look so useless, no wonder that they deleted and abandoned every major town other than orgrimmar and stormwind... but that killed the game for me too.... i want there a prospering town for every race at least... remember the glorious days you needed to find the right trader to get stuff you needed to do special things... to get wood to make fire, to get dream dust to reskill, to get arrows to shoot with.... ahhh, good old times.... when the world was a world.... and you needed food and drinks to survive, and you got killed when you walked in the dark woods alone and got surprised by a foe... and i don't know if its just me, but even playing Cata in Chromies time chanannigans, i never get to quest the cata-zones.... shadow high land, the underwater things, the unterstone thing, etc... and the story is so messed up right now, i really would appreciate lore-storylines.... where one could play everything stormwind-related from beginning to now or everything dragon related... or everything demon related... and get new players or old fan an 20 year of story questline of a specific topic of the lore.... so then was this, and those people were hidden dragons, and they split Varion in two, and then Onyxia, and than this, then this fleeing to outlands, what doing there, Malygos going mad, etc, etc.... or history of the gnomes.... getting alive throug curse of flesh, building that city, getting overwhelmed and then abandoned in lore for 16 years.... and yeah, old dungeons... not being able to find the right way before bing in there for 30 times... not finding the bosses.... some dungeons were really like raids back then... precious memories... i mean i don't play classic - because i don't have the stamina to do so and invest so much time in a second wow and onother game, so i don't know how the classic dungeons are... but i would love to have those big dungeons back... especially in my memory Maraudon, Temple of AtalHakkar, Dire Maul... hateloves of my live before they got shattered by the developers... and then new questline did you make those again, and then again, and then again... so fun... just love... and yeah, i stopped playing with Kung-Fu-Panda's ruining the till then well settled world.... coming back for legion a little, happily surprised by BfA-Alliance-Questing zones... and strong underwhelmed by the Shadowlands being so empty... and messing up all those long-loved storylines... so for sure not coming back for at least another 6 months till i can be called back as friend and i see if they can hold at least the level dragonflight is being told to be nowadays...
Talking about the frustrations of having an imbalance in a class that you had spent a lot of time leveling and how it mattered more in PVP... Well, maybe, but this video is about Cataclysm. I clearly remember being kicked from a raid group on Spine of DeathWing just and only because I was playing a Warlock (my main, which I didn't want to change). Locks during Cata were severely gimped and could not generate the DPS necessary. I was straight up told by my guild that I had to play a mage if I wanted to raid.
I remember hating Vashj'ir, not because of the quests, but because it took forever to get anywhere. I tried to level there at launch of Cata. The issue was the slow movement due to being underwater.
Alot of people i know quit like forever in cata, thats all i know. Like most of the OG players i knew from vanilla arent around anymore, most of the people i played with now started in cata or mists, or wrath maybe, or even wod. Alot of the true heads quit then. Alot of those players to never came back. While the players who i met later on would quit and comeback all the time, some of the changes made in cata just were the last straw for some people. Thats why i dont think they should go on with any more classic things after wrath, ur basically just keeping it alive for what ? mists? and then what ur gunna call wod classic? like it has to end at somepoint.
I 110% believe you are right about why there aren’t many new players in Wow. I started playing a year ago and yes there is a learning curve (not crazy or anything) but if you want to fully play with raiding …pvp and or alts u need to essentially learn it before u start bc no one has any patience for someone who is still learning. I would highly recommend having friends that already play and don’t mind helping when u need it. That may be the norm with every game but in a game such as wow classic that isnt holding ur hand in the beginning the first few weeks maybe months require the new player have a lot of patience and a sense of humor for those that don’t 😂
I had that problem during wrath when I started... Finally had money to afford the game, and started playing because all my friends do, and then literally no one wanted to play with me, explain me anything, or otherwise interact with me, causing me to have the most miserable experience playing a game ever....
I went back to the original Everquest back during 2020-21 after a 15 year hiatus and had the opposite experience. I had several helpful people I met and was max level and raid geared in one of the top guilds within 5-6 months. I died a lot at first on raids but rarely died once I sought out and got help with my class (unless we wiped lol).
@@dirtyfrench2926 i think getting into a guild helps tremendously!!!! It is what I did once i was in a guild there were people that were nice offered help and kinda would give me a tip if it were a situation where there was need to know things they would give me the 411. I also think for people who have played the game before that helps too. I had never played wow before this so the new new player base is where they may experience what i was referring to. Joining a guild 110% recommended!!!
I started in BC and found my passion in being a heal priest, absolutely loved it, I was known on the server and was requested often. They kept simplifying the game mechanics to the point it just wasn't fun anymore. They removed special healing gear, homogenized the classes. They introduced cross-server party search, which made every party member instantly replaceable and removed any type of personal connection for me. And Quests? Just go to the marker on the map and do what bullet points say. They literally removed the fun.
I won't argue the simplifying aspect, but they have an option to turn off the quest tracker. I admittedly can't remember when it was added though. Otherwise, I do agree with pretty much everything you said.
You really put into perspective how long I've been playing WoW. I started in Cata when I was a whopping 12 years old lol. I am now 26. Middle school, high school, college, parenthood. WoW will always be my little escape to Azeroth, through the good & the bad
CATA being only 5 levels had more of a negative impact than the world revamp, IMO.. I was there, and that was the biggest WTF for players at the time, the revamp was sold as needed to implement flying in the old world.
I think the main reason why people don't start WoW nowadays is the pricing model. Paying $15 is simply an antiquated way to monetize, especially since server upkeep is much easier now. Nobody will pay that much to try a game they barely know when they could just play whatever f2p game they like, and the WoW free trial is way too limited. For me, the reason I play on private servers is because I can just not play for a month when I'm busy without feeling like i'm wasting money. The game pass idea is so much better than that.
I never played WoW before classic, but my boomer guild cleared SSC/TK pre-nerf and I see/hear people talking about that being the hardest content through wrath. I also hear people saying Ulduar and ICC are going to be at least that hard and other people say SSC/TK was harder. I loved the difficulty of the Vashj/KT dps checks and actually having to sweat a little to complete the content. Do I get to experience that again here over the next year or so? I was feral OT in TBC and just a braindead mage in wrath, if that matters.
Most people say Cata was garbage, but I gotta say, the first phase was actually done really well. The raids were great. They even had to nerf one of them because it was too hard. As soon as raid finder came, the game was dead.
Cataclysm felt like such a massive improvement upon the game, from my point of view. Removing the old maps does suck but everything else felt much better.
Cataclysm changed the raiding model from Wrath. 10 man became equal, in loot, to 25man. This had consequences, most 25man guilds could no longer recruit players as they had no need for us. This shattered raiding guilds, and I left when my social circle fell apart, twice, in one expansion. It was too much. I did not return to WoW until 5.4. Also, the initial launch difficulty of dungeons likely smashed casual players, creating a barrier to entry that they just checked out of.
I have a great idea. Blizzard read this comment. Using Dragonflight, have something occur where someone like Khadgar gets the Dragon Soul, goes back in time, and kills Deathwing. It doesn’t change retail and retail continues like not much happened, HOWEVER instead of Cataclysm being released after Wrath, there’s a new expansion that occurs after that has nothing to do with Cataclysm. That’s how you do it. That’s how you save WoW.
18:24 this is also the reason I don't want to start a new alt, even though I'm burnt out from my main character, I just cannot start a new character because i've had my main for 3-4 years and I done so much with it, that I don't want to do again with the new alt
Easy answer for me was that when cataclysm launched I found blues with better stats than my epics as that level cap increase dictated. Was sort of defeating.
My only critique: Dragonblight was the perfect setting for the Dragonsoul raid because of its history with the dragons and the fact that that's where all the dragons go when they know they are going to die.
What if The War Within ends with a Titan pulling the sword out of Silithus and the water in Thousand Needles starts draining as the cutscene fades to black?
When I first got my own wow account in cataclysm (Cause I was only like 9 at the time) I for some reason decided to lvl in vash'jir, My older brother decided to not tell me about hyjal which I didn't know about as a zone so I ended up quitting at lvl 83 cause that zone was complete dogshit to lvl in for me.
Still don't know why that had to take out the ancient petrified leaf in cata. As a hunter, I wanted the bow so bad, but the leaf never dropped for me before cata came out.
The worst part about Cata is the fact that the world stayed destroyed for so long because Blizzard was too lazy to do anything related to putting in a plot to where the people of Azeroth like the Druids would actually try to recover the world and the destroyed zones, having nobody in the lore care for ages about everything being destroyed, even the main cities having damage to them for so many expansions was actually embarrassing. Anybody that says BFA was better than WoD is on some hardcore copium, it mightve lacked content but the content that existed in WoD was so fucking good, not to mention that the story wasn't even close to as terrible as BFA.
God damn, talking about Spine of Deathwing as the hardest fight because of the damage required to break the plates. Meanwhile, my recollection of that fight was watching 9 or 24 lemmings try (and fail) to balance a seesaw for an hour.
The world changes Cataclysm brought wasn't bad. What was bad was that the Cataclysm happened and every stayed frozen in time just as if the cataclysm happened yesterday, when the expansion came out a decade ago
bro the number pf DPS who broke themselves upon his body feeling the strength of the earth and lack of synapses in their brains was immeasurable, I started liking tanking back then and as a tank you would see people failing, because tanks had the time to observe, and most people failed to stop fasting when he had spell reflect on so the healer could not keep up with the dmg, and the melee would walk in front of the cone and not be ale to go behind the boss to avoid the cone, had some ranged who thought they were doing a 5D chess move by ataking the boss from behind me, thus front of the boss and could not get away from the cone. it was a time of frustration and joy, because I would bet the healer someone would fail all the time we had that dung as a daily
I love to play wow quest. I hope theres an option that you can follow the story without worrying too much from dying. I do like how npcs can be recruited to help on quest which need more than one person. I also understand that built in frustration on games can be irritating on some gamers which can make them quit or can entice more players to play and subscribe. Blizzard must make these two ends meet and not just milking more money from subscribers.
I remember hating the changes to the DPS warrior from WOTLK to CATA. It went very clunky imo and lost the fluidity wrath had. Also single minded fury, I think it was called, was the top build RIP titans grip.
I think new quests were more streamlined, especially for alliance but I liked old quests and zones before revamp. I loved classic undead starting zone and hated the revamp version
I feel like the degradation for the leveling up experience was less about the actual story of the quests. The degradation came from the gear, ability, leveling and wealth progression getting simplified. everything gave too much experience and all questlines gave gear you needed which meant there was no reason to spend time planning and travelling to various zones for various quests to get specific gear peices you'd keep with you until you're max level because instead of all that extra effort and exploring being beneficial like it previously was it was now detrimental. In classic spending that extra time to do a dungeon for a specific gear piece was worth it, finding someone to do an elite quest with was worth it. There was more stuff and options to think about pursuing which would improve your journey in the past. You had to weave your end game gear progression into your leveling up route and that made it more interesting and less monotonous. When leveling now do you need to think about your professions, how you're going to get your gold for your mount, what gear pieces you'll need from which quests and dungeons, at what levels you'll need to go back for your class trainer, what talent build is best for leveling between certain level brackets and whether it's worth the cost of a respec or not. Whether doing that quest for that bag to get those extra slots will save you time later for grinding for your mount. no you don't. Now it's just brainless quest to quest gameplay where you get your abilities as you level, there's no need to think about gold, you don't need to do certain dungeons or quests for specific end game gear pieces while leveling and the gear you build for one spec is mostly the same gear as the other, trying to level up your profession as you level is now a waste of time and leveling up your professions won't help get specific bonuses which will impact your ability to progress faster. Less thinking needed = boring = less people will play.
I'm a new player here, i've been playing for about 1.5-2 months now on wotlk classic, i got into it because my 2 older brothers introduced me to it. i played a bit during classic right before tbc but didnt enjoy it much so i stopped playing, but I've had a lot of fun leveling and playing on mage in wotlk (level 56). I'm on the new server angerforge and its honestly pretty dead but i have a decent guild that does daily raids so i dont really care all too much
Let me be clear: Blizzard had the tech necessary to keep the classic Azeroth in the game following Cataclysm, they just didn't want to keep it because the devs thought the new content was better, and of course they did. They could even readd that content right now, since they've proven they still have all the data by releasing Classic, but again, the retail devs think their shit doesn't stink, but everyone else's does.
Destroying the Legion is honestly still such a mind numbingly serious development. Imagine if in 40k, chaos and all 4 gods were just beaten and chucked under the Golden throne but it’s ok because there’s these other greater beings beyond that makes chaos look like children…. It’s fucking *********
When Cataclysm got rid of the talent trees is when the collapse occurred for me (Patch 4.01?) It was all downhill from there. All that work and specialization that you had created were just thrown out.
It's very simple... The 'Story' was actually important! Players were invested in not only the gameplay, but the story from Warcraft. Once they completed the original Warcraft story arc,, they couldn't recapture the aura. They resorted to 'Splash' and 'Hype' and the beginning of the cash shop. A good story IS integral after all. It might not be important to everyone, but it's important to enough. Honestly, if it wasn't for Lore content creators, the people who really loved the story, consistently put their faith in the speculation and hype it brought. If they kept the balance of great gameplay AND story... they could have possibly saved themselves.
@@Tallborn5 not really. They dragged that back out like " break glass in case of emergency". There were too many 'recontectualized' (retcons)..reconsider... to actually have been the end of the story. Did I like Legion? Sure, mostly. But by that time they had moved on from real story to Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am hype story beats. I'm not saying g it was terrible. It was the best they had done in awhile, but they really dropped the ball in too many ways... and we won't even mention the "Sword"
Some of the biggest trues in this video, since they applied to me, as well. What little I played in Classic was for the pre-Cata zones, as I loved those zones (except Darkshore & Ashenvale). I, also, pumped out The Seeker title during Wrath, though it was mainly due to my love of The Who song by the same name. The challenge of completing that many quests was just a bonus lmao
From what I've heard from a lot of people that played WoW and the RTS games, with the death of the Lich King, Arthas, to them was the end of the Warcraft story and they felt no need to continue on.
I think around cataclysm a lot of original players started getting burned out including myself, right after cataclysm almost my entire guild quit. I was raiding and pvping on one of each class and had full tier and pvp gear on all except my hunter when I quit and offsets for most of them so I was playing a lot and working 40+ hours a week most of the time. I would love to play it again now but so much has changed that I would have no idea what I was doing. I do have a private wotlk server on my pc though so I can mess around sometimes.
You are 1000% correct. I didn't play vanilla WoW when I started playing Classic for the second time because I had no fucking clue wtf was going on. Even as a person who played wow for many years after it came out, I didn't want to put so much effort into relearning a complex game.
Cata lost me because more than ever my time was wasted. Going to and from the Cata zones was a massive time sink and you had to actively pay attention when travelling instead of AFK flying in whichever direction. Having the zones separated sucked and i definitely had these feelings again in SL.
I think we need another Cataclysm but instead the world is fixed instead of broken
They need to fix the early levels especially for new players. I like thr idea of giving u a long quest chain that recaps all expansions to new players and levels them to the new content in one go. Maybe it can't be repeated past the first so people will go into the world after completing the recap campaign. 20 years of wow and even more of just "warcraft" there needs to be something that explains the story
With the dragonflights they could go the path of emerald dream or revision. Something about azeroth untouched. Basically hot reset. Just a theory.
I think we need wow2
Like WoW 2.0
They stopped listening to their players and started believing they knew better that you didn't know what you actually wanted. Whether it was the game, interviews, or community conduct, Blizzard started operating as if they were above criticism.
nah, they had bad devs with no vision and started succumbing to player wants.
They were always like that. Dude the absolute shitshow that was the first class rebalancing patches on classic was so legendary it has never been matched. Maybe by realID drama but maybe not even that
They quit hiring players and started hiring gen-cancel
@@CurieBohr dude they were all busy raping people like get over yourself, nerd
@Sony Alpha Adventure if you don’t know, you’re a blessed human being.
Feeling like it's too late and you're too far behind is definitely a major factor in deciding whether to start playing WoW again. It's a terrible feeling. I miss playing, started in beta and just had life get the better of me for a long time.
I'm a relatively new WoW player. A friend I made in another MMO convinced me to try it a few months ago, and I've really been enjoying it off and on. It's easy to tell when I'm on a 'newer' map, or an 'old' one. Kul Tiras is def my fav maps/story so far. That said, teaming is really not fun, unless I'm with a friend. I've done some pug dungeons/etc, and people are super critical of builds, even in low level content. Even if you play role efficiently, it doesn't protect you from getting kicked because people still want specific builds/gear/stats. The level of elitism in it is unlike any game I've ever played, and will keep me from investing in any team based end game stuff.
Yeah man thats sucks, I remember it was the same when I started. Now days when I level new chars I try to kick those toxic people and try to teach new players if they are interested, because I know the pain. I find this part of the game more rewarding then endgame :P
Kul Tiras is nice, but the Zandalar region for the Horde side is amazing.
It just takes a lot of time to find the right people to play with, and i know that time investment is unappealing to most people so i understand they most likely won't. Its just unfortunate because the game is moving in a pretty good direction.
Back in retail wotlk, I had this group, I was the healer. We had a druid with cloth heirlooms, a death knight tank in unholy spec, a hunter wearing grey items, literal trash with no stats. I hated them so much. It was heroic gundrak. We cleared the dungeon and moved on.
Gotta find a good guild.
I like how Asmongold feels like he is literally part of the video he is reacting to.
He is
Part of deez
He’s part of the video you are reacting too
sarcasm?
He's not though. He just bitches
Wod looks like the biggest betrayal in gaming history.
couldn't agree more with this guy on westfall. The whole zone is perfect to me, and the fact they have this goonies based dungeon at the end of it is the cherry on top
Westfall server is also Poggers
Warcraft movie should of been the Defias brotherhoodand and the betrayal by Stormwind, leading to civil rebels you could get behind with an eventual hero to villain arc and eventual execution. Like what a movie that would be.
darkshore is better
@@Knsy would have loved that, also would have avoided all the endless “this is just a LOTR ripoff” crap that the movie got
@Lars Steffen So?
Honestly I think the reason blizz hasn't had the balls to start actually 'fresh' with some form of wow 2.0, instead of the endless expansion train, is that they corporate doesn't believe that if we release something new that it would stand up against its competitors. It would potentially loose all these OG players that do keep grinding for those new mounts, gear and achievements with years of playtime poured into the game. Instead of taking a leap of faith they instead would just go for the cheap and easy to develop zone or two and call it a day.
world of starcraft man. but yeah, it eats too much ressources to get a bugfree mmo running. these things are pain in the ass to program and bugfix. never change a running system
i think the old quests were better at getting people out spending time together. when they sent you out to get 60 razormane tusks you were out there long enough and it was just annoying enough to warrant finding someone else to do it with. or you were likely to run into someone else there. when i think of cata quests i think of stuff like click the hose to put out the fire. it's too quick and has no room for other people.
old quest are only good for fresh servers when everyone is leveling, past vanilla old world is pointless filled with shit quests to do alone cuz barely anyone levels
60 was too much honestly, even whrn i finished the quest that goes alongside it i still wasn't close to completing it
I think some of the newer quests are better designed, but I VASTLY prefer the quest system under classic than doing the old world after the cata revamp. Blizzard's modern quest system makes every quest feel disposable and forgettable because you're just doing so many of them, and they take a fraction of the time. So I can do 30 quests in the cata revamp in the time that it took to do 10 quests in the old system. That's not a good thing. When you're in and out of the quests so quickly, you don't remember any of them. When you're in and out of the area that you did the quest in so quickly, you don't remember that area, or get a feel of it. With the old quests, I felt like I was really adventuring in a space and getting to explore. Yeah, I know, we all want to get to 60 and run UBRS or whatever, but the 1-60 leveling shouldn't be something to just skip past to the get to the "good stuff," it used to be good stuff, it used to be a really big part of the game and feel like an enjoyable achievement. With the newer questing system, I'm just doing some quick chores. If feels more like busy work than the actual joy of questing and exploration should be.
I'd rather do 1/4 of the number of quests and have them take 4x the time (with 4x the exp) rather than the alternative. It just feels more meaningful for the same amount of work.
Now one thing I DON'T miss, I don't miss "go kill 20 things in this cave" and then the followup "go back to that cave and kill this one dude in the back." That was always pointless. Fortunately that's a bad feature from the old questing system that is gone.
Questing IMO is better solo, and I think the group quests are kinda trash, and usually don't have good enough rewards to warrant wasting the time to get a group to do them, because most quests are purely just for leveling.
Endgame was all about social activities, and that was getting into a guild that matched your goals in the game, and chilling with the homies. This was fun levelling if you had IRL friends to do it with, but what happened most of the time, is IRL people would roll 30 characters and 30 servers and get to level 30, and were way too ADHD to ever get to the point where raids were an option. I was one of the least enthusaistic wow players among my friends, and I was the ONLY one who did endgame content. I find that ironic, because I just stuck to one main character, and only played alts when my body was being camped, or I got angry about some nonsense.
Eventually my success got a few of my IRL friends to transfer servers back to the one I was on, but even then they never once went on a raid, so the experience of leveling with someone else long term I think is pretty rare, and quests really shouldn't be modeled for that because there is better avenues to encourage social interaction.
I think they should have done more than just raids, and I can see how dungeon finder was a net negative for the game, though I think the idea of dungeon finder is good, and it could be tweaked to be amazing, but blizzard doesn't seem interested in developing ideas until they are good if they aren't good from the getgo, and I think that is why Blizzard has had such a downfall.
I respect people who aren't afraid of breaking things so long as they understand that just because you broke something doesn't mean it can't be fixed. There is no excuse for how bad paladins were in retail, why they made dungeon finder give loot for doing a tiny fraction of many dungeons (just kill the objective boss), and why Blizzard does nothing to fix the PvP population skew in wrath classic.
They monetized the most basic things they could have done to fix these issues. Personally I think so much of the game would be improved if they just put a few carrot on a stick incentives to address these, such as permanent buffs that scale based on population skew, and layers that prevent being put on a server where you are outnumbered 25:1, requiring dungeons to be cleared to give loot, having dungeon finder be more of like a classified ad for dungeons rather than RNG groups, ect.
I actually think their attempt to give bonus loot to people playing under represented class was a solid win, but it was burried under other problems.
I also think players should get dishonorable kills for killing players that give no honor, or are engaged in combat for PvP. I have no issues with unconsentual PvP, but is it really "honorable" to kill a player that is fighting mobs already, or is so below your level that you will easily one shot them irrespective of gear?
WOD was such a content drought and the fact that EVERYBODY was closed in their garrisons making gold and not doing raids was what killed the whole thing.
I loved the garrisons made a shitton of gold in it, I also know that it was one of the reasons why WOD failed... And they made Mythic dungeons way too late into the exp for them to save it.
The Lich Kings (Arthas) story arc was finaly finished. We all have been waiting years to see him again since 2003.
my thought is that the Illidan expansion and Arthas expansion were just so good. And for war3 players, their journey is just completed after wrath.
I liked the revamp but not the way they revamp it. I think it is better to make the revamped map simply a higher-level map so new players and the old players who have no interest in leveling another alt can feel the changes.
its funny how this sentiment popped up recently about warcraft 3 player quitting after wrath. and now every idiot on the planet has to say it at least once beause they recently saw it on reddit or some shit. it may be true, but stop parroting ffs.
@@splitloopgaming3523 ？
@@splitloopgaming3523 what 😂
@@splitloopgaming3523 Lol! "It might be true, but stop saying it"
That's some messed up logic
TBC was trash. Alt unfriendly, boring dungeons and raids, extremly slow paced, classes were boring (some were just 1 button classes) and so on. Wotlk went the right way, cata was meh and mop was the #1 expansion so far with so many great changes and additions.
17:00 - WoW needs a main questline add-on that takes you through most of the main zones and the expansions to meet the major characters, kill some of the major baddies, do some of the most lore-relevant dungeons, and then complete an epic weapon-crafting build from level 1-50. Instead of grinding dungeons or doing 3 zones of quests to get there. Just give us a stream-lined questing experience, with all the "go over there and kill 6 bugs and then go over there and pick up 15 rusted spears that we'll never use" bullshit.
Keep the old quests in there as optional content, shitty pre-requisite snoozer quests and all. But let new players experience a full tour of the WoW experience.
As a new player with Shadowlands, most of the world was completely irrelevant to me when I got to the Shadowlands. I couldn't even finish rescuing Jaina from Tol Dagor. I just leveled up to the Shadowlands and there she was in the Maw, calling me the Mall Walker. Ysera? Don't know who you are. Giant cow man sitting around the whole time? No idea. Pepperoni Nipple Man? Well, I guess to be fair, no one knew who he was and no one cared. Sylvanas? Oh, I remember her, she seemed cool. Oh, people hate her now? Why? What the hell is Teldrassil?
I did like 2-3 old school WoW zones, then went to Kul Tiras, hit 50 and went to The Maw and hated everything, running around permanently losing Stygia, and then unsubbed.
It was a shitty experience, across the board.
TLDR: Create a streamlined main questline experience that skips tons of busy work, introduces players to all the major characters, let the player do some of the most lore-relevant dungeons, kill some of the major baddies/dragons, and then complete/craft a new epic weapon available at level 49. ~20 hours of content. Complete the weapon, get called to BFA or Shadowlands. Go.
I started WoW when it came out back in the vanilla era, i enjoyed Burning crusade that introduced flying mounts, new classes, a deeper dive into the Lore and a whole host of other improvements some successful while others falling flat, hell Karazhan is still probably one of the best raids in the game. I absolutely loved Wrath which led to my addiction to the game when it came out, Arthas was such a compelling villain and the areas and Hub city were great LFG and LFR were controversial and dailies started to become repetitive but I still enjoyed it. When Cataclysm was announced i was excited and had high hopes, Deathwing was awesome and the updated zones were needed because by that time WoW was showing its age, when it came out and I played it I was beyond disappointed with it, people were hitting the max level cap in less than a day, the new archeology profession was awful and the zones and quests just took me out of the RPG experience, I went from storming the castle of The Lich King to Riding a seahorse underwater... I tried to continue but just started not enjoying the game and quit. It was a great 8 years and I always look back with nostalgia and great times but that is the reason for me anyway why I fell off.
This was very similar to my experience (although tbf I was too young to play much during original vanilla, so BC & Wrath was my fave time). Karazhan & ZA were so much fun. Cata was depressing & bizarrely different. Idk why but the archeology profession was so awkward & ... not fun. Plus the talent trees were kinda ruined IMO.
I'm sure it's tricky to make an expansion that feels fresh & has new content that isn't disruptive to the game's core playstyles & tone. We've seen WoW struggle with that. Cata was weirdly dark & depressing & then Panda was a bit too cutesy (although to be fair, the contrast felt exaggerated bc it came after Cata). All the pop culture refs in quests seemed to increase, which I detested. Yes there'd always been some Easter eggs but it's 1 thing when limited to quirky characters or futuristic gnomes vs feeling like a different game that lacks immersion bc it's written by too large of a team. Relying on modern references is lazy writing used when a team doesn't feel equipped to achieve in-universe humor & storytelling
Exactly the same for me
WOW was awesome during WLK! My brother and I would play together! Great times, great memories.....
I started WoW about 6 months b4 the launch of tBC. I was so engrossed in the lore of the game, I didn't hit 70 until 3 weeks b4 Wrath launched.
I joined a casual guild about the same time and stayed until ToC patch when I left and joined a guild that was top 5 on my server.
I loved my time in that new guild. We worked so hard to get through ICC, and even Ruby Sanctum just b4 Cata, with LK on farm, helping alts, friends, even pugs (we never charged for entry) to get their achievements and gear. Truly a glorious time in my gaming history.
Cata broke that. It broke guilds. New ones formed but weren't the same experience. They tried because they all loved the experience of Wrath.
By MoP, everything changed again. I even swapped server and faction to find a better experience.
Guilds just kept falling, breaking, collapsing, and when WoD brought nothing new to the table, a lot of ppl just washed their hands of it.
I actually stayed as a casual in a mediocre guild until the end of BfA just because I enjoyed the game so much, but after 13-14 years, I couldn't justify plugging bk in for Shadowlands.
I love the nostalgia of it all but Wrath was the pinnacle for me. It hasn't been the same since the community I fought with, and for, for so long broke apart.
If you were on an EU server in Wrath and ever did 5-man PVP against a team called BOOMCHICKENLOLOLOL, I'm sorry, that was rude of us to make 5 nelf moonkins and go stealth kitty into Starfall for cheap laughs (it was funny, though).
I'm dying imagining 5 boomkins nuking an entire team with starfall
Thanks for writing this. I have to agree with all your points. The community IS WoW and people are just inherently different today compared to 14 years ago.
@@darkside7109 It was a great laugh until we started getting teams that knew how to counter. Demo locks were our nemesis. 1 fear and we were toast. 🤣
Before finishing the video, for me having started college about the MOP release i kept myself subscribed but played very little. I imagine a lot of folks were just getting older and having less time. I imagine combining that with the world "revamp" that tons of folks did NOT like along with the classes really starting to get weird people just started getting burned out (no pun intended)
Agree, a lot of their player base were moving into their twenties, getting out of college, and starting lives.
On the reverse I think classic is doing so well because these same players have moved into their thirties and have settled enough to have the time to come back and play.
I remember around cata my buddy and I were about 20, we had played together since beta. We both got jobs at the same place, He pulled up one day is a gunmetal grey brand new Mustang GT. Said his parents made him a deal if he quit playing wow theyd buy it. neither of us touched wow again. Big sad. to your point, yes I believe a lot of us grew up sadly.
That's weird, I heard nothing but positivity about the Cata revamp. I've been playing WoW, watching WoW content on CZcams, and reading the WoW subreddit since 2006 and this comment is actually the first time I've ever seen someone say the Cata world revamp was not liked.
What I personally remember not being liked was the smaller scope of the high-level content combined with the higher difficulty of heroic dungeons. While most people really enjoyed the 1-60 revamp, a lot of people didn't like the high-level zones (of which there were only five plus the PvP mini-zone). Lots of people disliked the underwater gameplay in Vash'jir and hated the storyline of Uldum, which was mostly just one long Indiana Jones reference. WoW hit its player peak in Wrath when group content was at its most accessible, and when they jacked up the difficulty for Cata, a lot of those players stopped playing.
Also, some major games released in Cata. Minecraft, League of Legends, some others. There are a lot of factors that goes into why WoW started to fall off, but honestly this happens with every game. You dont think LoL has fallen off over the years? Fortnite? Its just what happens as games get older.
Even now LoL is losing playerbase and having similar issues to WoW where its just not attracting the younger audience; Valorant is. Expecting WoW to keep its massive popularity just isnt feasible and doesnt happen in any other genre, on top of the game effectively ending for most people after the Wrath storyline.
@@djmeowth the video you are commenting on that Asmon is commenting on talks about it :P.
Asmon nailed it with the Wow2 (same playing field) statement. As someone who rarely plays and have missed expansions. A lot of times i don't play because its kina like "meh whatever I'm so far behind already". I've always felt wow should be doing trilogies with fresh starts every 3 expansions. Where each expansion is more a development on the current world vs a brand new game. It would allow blizzard to really plan out this over-arching storyline and for all i care they could use the same base world and change it up a little for 85% of the zones.
The "meh whatever I'm so far behind already" is so spot on. I occasionally get the urge to play again, but I always remind myself I'm already 2 expansions behind, haven't played since 2019 and just dont have the time to invest to chatch up nor do I really want to spend countless of hours on outdated content, you can skip all the old stuff, but then you have a game where you only play the new stuff and have countless hours of older content untouched.
I mean I didn't play WoW since 12 years or so but I would probably consider giving it a try if it weren't for the fact that I'm that far behind and more importantly the game being overly complicated. And I don't mean difficult, just unneccessarily obfuscated or something.
I tried to come back to WoW about a year ago after having been checked out since Wrath. That there's years of expansions that I missed wasn't the issue. It's that none of it matters anymore. If you start fresh in WoW today, there is no way to play the old content in any way close to how it was at release. That whole "talk to Chromie and pick the expansion you want to level in" thing is a bonkers way to experience the story.
I created a new character and got to Shadowlands in a couple of days of playing. And once I'd caught up to where everyone else was, I realized I had zero connection to the game. My character had been overpowered from the moment I reached Goldshire. And then I was zipped through 15 years of content in the blink of an eye. This wasn't me powerleveling. This was the game powerleveling me. And it wasn't fun. By the time I hit the Shadowlands I was just bored. I had no sense of the story because I only did a few quests in a couple of the expansions before Chromie said my time was up. And I had no sense of my character because there was never a challenge presented that wasn't defeated with one or two spells.
Blizzard has a lot of faults. The worst mistake they've made was making WoW so boring. They can overhaul their image all they want. Get rid of the bad actors, do all the things they should have done years ago, and it won't matter. For a new player or someone returning from long ago, the game is just boring now.
Sadly WoW’s story has always been a clusterfuck of “Blizzard just making shit up.” Some of the classic storylines just hit a dead end right when they get good.
I think Deadmines is probably one of the best exceptions.
This is when they completely remade talents. I know because that's when and why I left. I played a sub-par but fun build that the change in talents removed from the game
Yep! They dumbed down the talent trees and just ruined them.
@11:16 The cloth with strength item is a leftover from when disc priest were being designed to be melee healers (in beta, before GA). That's also why they had the Inner Fire spell buff that gave them extra armor (that had to be reapplied after 20ish hits by an enemy).
I played a ton in vanilla WoW, I was in a solid raid "guild" and got the best gear. And when TBC hit, my equipment was crap within a couple of levels. I couldnt handle that, so i stopped playing mid through the expansion, never feeling as strong as i did in vanilla. These days i probably would have continued to play. On the other hand, i would not have had the same amount of time to play the game either and therefore not progressed in the same way.
First few quests of TBC gave blue gear that was equal if not better then raid gear. The hamster wheel was official and it woke a LOT of people up to just how broken the hamster wheel was.
Same thing happened here with me and TBC.
Always hated that expan for that reason, but then I came back for WotlK and 1 month of Cata.
Blanchy wasn't evil.
There's actual lore about sinrunners in-game. The Court Sinrunner mount specifies that Sinrunners were "once the steeds of dark souls, carried in the wake of _either_ their sins or their masters' sins to Revendreth."
Blanchy is a Sinrunner, and her own mount description specifies that she "appeared to be an affectionate and well-behaved horse of excellent disposition" to boot.
She was a good horse dealt a fell hand.
There are multiple references in the quest lore to Blanchy being jealous of Bessy; and coveting apples.
In BC Tarren Mill look for the following quest text, "Here, Bessy, enjoy this apple while I get you ready. Tarren Mill Horsehand feeds Bessy the bright red apple.
Young Blanchy stomps her foot jealously."
Next the horsehand sais, "Aww, Blanchy, don't worry, my brother in Westfall will take good care of you. I hear he's got a beautiful farm with lots of space for you to roam.
Now, now, Blanchy. Don't be jealous, you'll be going on a big adventure of your own, soon. Whoa, there, Blanchy, you can't be having any apples today. Tomorrow, we'll be taking you down to Southshore, where you'll take a boat way across the seas."
Blanchy is in Revendreth to get rid of her burden of Jealousy and perhaps her gluttony for apples.
@@grumpyolegamer Unless it was any number of her owners that did some great ill in life. Like Private Furlbrow beating on Jensen over a petty insult during the bloody Northrend Campaign, or the Furlbrows in general abandoning Westfall, or the no doubt countless adventurers sent to their death at the hands of waiting Defias for a farmer's pocket watch.
Want of apples is hardly cause to be left on the precipice of Hell. But knowing how blizzard is these days it wouldn't surprise me if they thought otherwise.
It wasn't the zone changes for me, it was the gameplay in Cata that make me quit back then. The streamlining started at the end of WotLK, but softly, and in Cata it went full on.
The answer is Cataclysm. No single expansion did more damage to WoW than Cataclysm.
The lore, ppl tilted when the badmotherfuckingdragon Lost...
MoP could have fixed with more PvP Focus and PvP lore, the fight between the differences are over
I like cata it has best pvp even swifty said back in his cata videos cata pvp and bg's were amazing
As someone whobhasnt even played WoW I know the damage Cata caused.
WoD imo did, but cata was undoubtedly the start of the decline
They wanted to add stuff to the main world, instead they ruined their previous work, shot themselves in the foot, and ruined the potential future for azeroth based expansions to be only new islands coming out of the fog instead of advancements in the mainland or the war efforts
Honestly it doesn’t matter. I’ve played every single mmo out and wow still beats them all. It truest is a timeless masterpiece
Glad you brought up the aging of the player-base. It is absolutely important and Blizz probably didn't really deal with that audience change.
It was the Cataclysm, literally. They have destroyed the world I loved, I felt betrayed, there were nothing to do in this new world. Everyone I knew left, I struggled a bit through the initial raid content and left too.
Yep. I loved the night elven coastline. I levelled so many characters through there, and knew the area like the back of my hand. It was beautiful and peaceful, and had a lot of nostalgia value.
Then cataclysm took a massive dump on it.
@@malificajones7674 Preach! So many of the beautiful Elven areas, that were part meditative, just _completely_ destroyed. I quit shortly after.
I came back for Legion and BFA which has some _really_ beautiful areas but still miss the original world before it got trashed.
I liked the update of the the old world, but I 100% understand why people feel this way. I think they should have given the option or maybe just revamped a lot of the really awful areas. No one every complained about Dark Shore or West Fall for instance, but they got major revamps. I feel like they could’ve been more strategic about the revamps.
I always think of the expansions as what ones I had the most fun with rather than how everyone else received them. When looking back at all expansions w/ vanilla, here is my order of them with the fun I had playing them: TBC, Vanilla, Legion, Wrath, Cata, BFA, WoD, Panda, Shadowlands
They shouldn't have brought death wing in when they did. It was too much of a change. They should have literally rebuilt the background, new trees etc. as they have with dragon flight. Cata killed the nostalgia that held so many people. If they had added new zones and not killed the old ones, but made them relevant by bringing in 70+ quests in the vanilla zones that would have been huge.
After the massive success of wotlk the devs head got too big and try to get fancy with deathwing shock and awe bs which backfired. They could of added new zones as usual and not nuked the nostalgia out of Azeroth.
I think the decline started in Cata because I feel thats when the dev's really stopped listening to what the community wanted and started listening to the top 5%er's,
I ran a guild back in Wrath and I knew there was a problem as soon as the cata prepatch went up, we had healers who'd cleared everything in wrath coming to the officers in tears because they couldn't cope with the healing changes and they were just getting raged at constantly by tanks and dps who'd just spent an entire expansion being taught by blizz that healers were gods who could out heal all raid/splash damage and they didn't need to move out of aoe or anything.
Now if you were in a guild you could teach people fairly quickly what's what but if you weren't in a guild you instantly found that all the healers just stopped using lfg so if you were dps, you were looking at 2 hours for a que. This obviously created an even more toxic environment with dps queuing as tanks in order to get fast groups, then getting crushed and again blaming the healer.
They patched the dungeons a few weeks after release to make it easier but the damage had already been done, ton's of healers quit, people only wanted to run dungeons with their guildies making the game a nightmare for new comers and casuals without guilds.
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I dunno why MOP got so much hate, i loved it the music was amazing and the zones were just a nice place to be.
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Wod was so bad at the start i actually quit after a month until just after the first patch when i heard you could print gold from your garrison. :D
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Legion was awesome.
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the last 2 were a joke.
This guy got it right on the money.
For years prior to cataclysm, the top players had been whining at the Devs to make the game harder. They hated pick up raids, and the easy dungeons, and wanted it to all be challenging content... for them.
Now, there's a world of difference between hardcore gamers and casuals. So when Devs tailored all the dungeons to hardcore players, casuals couldn't even finish them.
So we went from casual friendly wotlk, to l2p scrub cataclysm.
And a huge chunk of the playerbase were basically just driven away from the game.
yo i remember how fucking scarce mana was for healers in the early heroics of cata.
and the nerfs didnt came after a few weeks. i mean maybe a few things got tweaked with hotfixes but the overall nerf of the heroics came at the end of april in 2011 while cata released at the beginning of december. so we are talking about 5 months almost.
and even that a lot of casuals had a very hard time in instances like stone core.
@@mcdick1621 Yes exactly. I've seen people saying that Cataclysm raiding was easy mode, but that came 6 months later.
The Cataclysm dungeons were way overtuned on release, and along with the mana changes, were impossible for casuals. So they quit... and there's a hell of a lot more casuals than there are hardcore raiders.
So blizzard panicked when they saw subscription numbers take a nosedive and then made raiding easy for LFR. But it was too late by that point, the damage had already been done.
I think most people dont like Cata quests due to how linear it is. You jump from quest hub to quest hub and it doesnt feel like you are discovering an area anymore.
Yes! This! I can't even describe how much more I prefer Vanilla Leveling over everything that came after it. Even though it is so painfully slow. It just feels soooo boring to me just following a line of breadcrumbs in every zone.
This is an underrated point and something most people don't realize. The modern design of quests takes away from discovery, which is important to have in a fantasy game. Fantasy should offer adventure.
@@Soulerous I'm surprised more people don't bring this up. It's my biggest gripe with leveling and is something Blizz has to be aware of to an extent. They design these more "sandbox" zones but their questing continues to be a more linear experience. Maybe its intentional though.
holy shit youre right! retail levrling id like playing on a railway
They used wotlk as a sort of foundation with easier dungeons, easier questing and more meaningless difficulties - Dragonflight is the culmination of such mentality.
Quests are mostly linear forced storymode, no exploration - the npcs are usually 10meters from you or actually following you.
No risk of dying, no need to drink/eat - Mana is never a problem during levelling.
Due to the linearity of the experience and how fast one goes from hub to hub, there is no relaxation time to let the player take in the environment.
And things that could happen in the classics, like interactions with players, do not occur at all - Its literally like playing a singleplayer action rpg.
As a returning player in dragonflight I also felt very weak compared to the classics (vanilla/tbc and wotlk).
So I tried more classes, and they all feel the same. The gameplay is extremely rotationheavy resulting in a sort of affliction warlock style of play.
As for community, I've levelled 5 chars now and Ive never seen anyone talk in any zone chats.
I've also noticed how imbalanced everything is, some classes hit like noodles whereas others can pull the entire zone.
Dont think ever seen the game in such an imbalanced state.
And there are secondary concerns such as poor animations, or animations not lining up, unnatural zone-design with cluttered microzones everywhere, abilities feel like they have less ooomph, i guess this is related to how weak classes feel. Well, I dont know how it came to this but I despise what the game has become.
The only way this game can survive is if they bring back the vanilla/tbc devs.
For me, having played since BC, MoP and WoD were my favorite expansions, while Legion and BFA are my least favorite (I didn't play Shadowlands, so no comment there). After the initial burst of dailies on release in MoP, it was quite relaxed and easy to just focus on what I wanted to do, which was basically only CMs and raids. I could just spent almost all of my time engaged in those activities, it was great. Likewise in WoD, just with even fewer dailies. There weren't any systems to work through or barriers between me making a new character, gearing it, and raiding on it. Alongside what is IMO, some of the peaks of class/spec design we've had making many specs feel great and fun to play. Post-Legion, it's felt more and more like there are tons of activities I don't enjoy that I need to do to keep raiding. More and more daily or weekly tasks that just aren't fun but reward extremely relevant power or loot. For me, it's not fun to just mindlessly do world quests or island expeditions or *need* to do X number of M+ runs a week, let alone trying to farm specific dungeons for BiS the entire expansion patch after patch. It's tiring when all I want to do is log in and raid the highest difficulty content and Blizzard has made that less and less possible.
MOP and WOD are my fav aswell
Not sure for anyone else's reason for quitting at that time. but I personally was one who quit right after wotlk ended. for me it was simple. I played the game since it came out and personally didn't enjoy the gear grind. I liked leveling and playing but the length of raids the amount of time raids/pvp and reputation grind took. by the time you finally get one gear set it's like the next patch is coming out and it's time to do it all again. At least for me since I had a full time job and a gf I could only grind 3-4 hrs like 4 days a week. Got bored of gear grind. Sad thing is it ruined mmos for me cus its all the same shit. just a diff pile.
You just can't expect to have end-game gear content for free without putting in some hours/grind, that's the way most MMOs are designed
sad cuzz thats when it became casual, as you left, last dragon's raid was eazy peazy after the update
they made easy mode the standard, gulds were no longer required,
flexible-auto-raid building... i saw my pal with an admitedly bad guild beat the top raid of cata.. he was appaled it was possible with casualsx
For me it was the expansion model plus subscription model. It was just too expensive IMO for what you got, esp. with the sheer time commitment to play.
Just seeing the graph in the thumbnail without having watched it yet, it is because the Dungeon Browser became a really huge thing, they completely annihilated class identity, suddenly Paladins have speedups, Mages can heal themselves, Rogues can heal themselves, everyone just can do everything, removing the real day-to-day value of Gold, things like buying Skills, getting the Gold for the first mount, flying etc. Another one of the biggest factors, the actual "world" outside of Dungeons was no longer a Danger, Mobs were not really a danger, even rare mobs for which you might have needed a party and made some friends to kill them were solo-able by pretty much everyone, there was no real need for social interaction anymore except for the raids. They took what made Wow feel like a world out of Wow and it became just "of Warcraft"
Blackrock Depths, when you let the NPCs out of the jail cells they were 'reminiscent' of characters from the TV show Oz which was current at the time. Pop culture references have always been there.
We really need an expansion/patch that has us just fixing up the world... The Loch Modan Dam being rebuilt, Silvermoon rebuilt, Gilneas retaken, Gadgetzan expanded like the heros version, etc.
*Blizzard:* _But that would take work!_
*Players:* _You under estimate how powerful nostalgia is plus it would make the world feel more dynamic instead of being a static ghost town._
@@shortyorc121 those excuses don't work anymore. Small ass dev teams with half the budget does more.
Kind of a weird observation, but FFXIV started out easy, got hard in Heavensward, and then got progressively easier in many ways starting in Stormblood. That game had continuing growth throughout all of that. WoW's difficulty may have hit a certain threshold similar to what was hit in Heavensward around Cataclysm, and combined with other changes people began to get get excluded from what they used to enjoy.
Cataclysm Heroics pre-nerf were hard, not just because of LFD. Sure, you completed Heroics fine with a guild group, but it still took hours. The time commitment made them hard, as people didn't want to do them.
Cata's 2 major sins:dragon soul and coming after wrath
Yep, cause DS added the abomination that is raid finder
Barrens being split in half was 2nd to talent tree being removed that made me not like cata but everything else was soo good... The Barrens is just so nostalgic for me as Horde.
Vashjir was really cool fwiw. Going into those krakens or w/e it was for the quests was awesome.
I think the main thing that went wrong was the graphics just didn't keep up with newer games and the gameplay/storyline was streamlined. Up until wrath you would play through the classic zones and actually follow a story same through BC. Wrath kinda made only Northrend the viable zone for gold/gear.
I played cata, and i really enjoyed it looking back, warrior was pretty fun to play IMO However I remember my first negative experience came quite quickly in to the raiding scene, when you were immediately behind because you didn't get your 4 set week one through a combination of LFR and Normal RnG /shrug
I remember cata early days. Cata was really hard and fun then they NERFED the crap out of it and introduced heroic raids for the crazys out there to ego after. And if you compared the Loot of these two raid types. Welll its not that impressive and LFR was just the death nail on the head of the last most interesting raid but made a joke by LFR. When you make a game carrot and stick system broken. Its not surprising LFR and Normals became the norm after cata. Sets in original wow were suppose... to have long term value. They for the most part did even in Classic. T1 being the expection as T1 was trash for most classes. By Cata Sets were basically starter gear by the next raid. there was no long term value and there was not big achievement getting the sets . Afterwards why bother raiding normal when you can easily get your gear in LFR.
The saddest change was when they removed the damn Ashbringer interaction in Scarlet Monastery.
9:00 --- You only treasure something, if you (can) lose it. I dont think people were particularly fond of Vanilla, but when Blizz updated and practically removed it, people became upset.
42:10 --- No. The difference is, in FF14 the devs made it clear from the get-go that the story itself wasnt finished and that it was just the closure of a chapter (and anyone saying differently, sorry, but then you didnt pay attention to... pretty much everything). After Wrath, the WoW devs let the game sit put for months before announcing a new expansion. Also, the only people who would put down WoW after Wrath... were probably just Warcraft III fans, who also didnt pay attention to anything. Because anyone who did, knew that there were A LOT of unresolved problems and secrets lurking everywhere, Deathwing and the Legion were only two of many potential problems. So people stopping after Wrath (or Endwalker for that matter)... they probably just needed an excuse. Which is pretty dumb, if you ask me: If I dont want to play anymore, I stop. Its that easy.
I'm basically a new player -- 1st started playing Shadowlands 2 years ago. But I was in graduate school at the time and always felt like I was falling behind and I stopped playing it 2-3 months after Shadowlands' launch. My cousins who got me into it kept telling me that I really wasn't as far behind as I thought I was and that the game is designed to help catch up players who are new or who drop off with each new patch/season. I just felt overwhelmed by all the UI, mechanics, add-ons, dungeon mechanics, min-/maxing strategies, complex rotations.... etc. Also, I did not have an MMO mouse, so it essentially gate-kept different classes because "well that class has a lot of buttons/abilities, so if you can't use them all, you'll just be dead weight"
However, I did play some classic and I don't like the old graphics and lack of the HUD/UI make-over of the Dragonflight prep-patch. That and my cousins would be playing retail is the biggest reason that I would not want to play classic.
I'm glad that you looked at generational circumstances -- such as the age of the original WoW player base and new games taking attention away from it. I've heard WoW old-timers who never recognize these sorts of issues and always just assume that it's the game in a vacuum that determines sub counts...
But I would also take that line of argument further and also claim that part of what made WOTLK so successful was how (better) internet was even being proliferated across the country at that time -- how many households got internet for the first time in the early 2000s or switched from dial-up to broadband or to fiber optics which made MMOs more viable? And compounding the issue of the original player base "aging out of" WoW is that if your friend group or guild collapses, then that is further catalyst for people who have the time to put into the game to drop it as well.
so, i miss old quest design really... don't think new is often better, yeah, i mean basic quests ok... but...
no open world bosses, no real 3 man or 5 men quests any more... i mean today 3 man quests i can do with a bad equipped twink alone, not thinking about spec spells movement or anything...
back than... you needed to search for people, or level up, gear up and try 5 levels later again... this was so cool...
and the steed quest... i think the best most memorable questline of all time... having to travel around the entire world mutliple times, without portals or flying, to finally get your steed...
best experience ever...
or old darkwood questline to summon this big undead destroying the town being an open world quest... so much better than the modern day version, a early game experience you can build on as there is nothing compareable in the modern game....
i was allways an expansion behind, so game was really difficult back than, and i liked it.... noways whan i make a new twink nude and play its even easier than the game back then...
i mean, yeah you at least take damage at you did back then, and could sometimes need some food, what you needed after every fight back then... but so fast as you restore health, don't loose any mana by using spells and can't even miss.....
i till today hate evere single one of the quality of life changes they did for the hardcore-players....
no more need to train axes when i get a new one but only used swords till then, no chance of missing spells, finding all the hidden traffic possibilities instead of big portal rooms.... the need of trainers to learn spells, allways being out of money to get things i would be able to get... instead of allways getting everything immedeatly,
alone Hogger, so good quest back then... half an hour to get alone through the camp and then hoping nothing respawns during the fight... and now? just a runthrough... and even if the person in front of you is to fast for you everything respawns in about 30 secs... really don't like it....
and cata really was a big throwoff for me, loosing all the starting zones... especially because they tried the fading zones in wotlk, which was a big hope for the future game for me, everyone seeing the zone in a different way depending on them being advanced in the story - and then this big backthrow of everything being deleted and then not being changed till today...
on of the big dislikes i have for the game for modern standards till now, that the world is so unusable, not being able to move chairs or read books, cut trees or demolish houses...
and hot being able to have influence on the zones to better them... no matter how many enemies you defeat, they all insantly respawn befor you even can put in the quest... and even then nothing changes even you get rewarded fo "saving the town" and you come back and nothing changed.... till now i can't get - ok mmo-problems, wanting people play together where almost no one plays, but it takes so much value out of the game....
and till now i feel you can't get the lore any more because of the cata-revamp they made back then...
but i feel really sad that they threw away that wotlk idea of zones fading with your progress in the game... that is a thing how modern games should be to me...
don't know how it is today, but thats a thing i think gw2 did much better back in the time....
and not needing npc for anything but questgiving at all, towns look so useless, no wonder that they deleted and abandoned every major town other than orgrimmar and stormwind... but that killed the game for me too.... i want there a prospering town for every race at least... remember the glorious days you needed to find the right trader to get stuff you needed to do special things... to get wood to make fire, to get dream dust to reskill, to get arrows to shoot with.... ahhh, good old times.... when the world was a world.... and you needed food and drinks to survive, and you got killed when you walked in the dark woods alone and got surprised by a foe...
and i don't know if its just me, but even playing Cata in Chromies time chanannigans, i never get to quest the cata-zones.... shadow high land, the underwater things, the unterstone thing, etc...
and the story is so messed up right now, i really would appreciate lore-storylines.... where one could play everything stormwind-related from beginning to now or everything dragon related...
or everything demon related... and get new players or old fan an 20 year of story questline of a specific topic of the lore.... so then was this, and those people were hidden dragons, and they split Varion in two, and then Onyxia, and than this, then this fleeing to outlands, what doing there, Malygos going mad, etc, etc....
or history of the gnomes.... getting alive throug curse of flesh, building that city, getting overwhelmed and then abandoned in lore for 16 years....
and yeah, old dungeons... not being able to find the right way before bing in there for 30 times... not finding the bosses.... some dungeons were really like raids back then... precious memories...
i mean i don't play classic - because i don't have the stamina to do so and invest so much time in a second wow and onother game, so i don't know how the classic dungeons are...
but i would love to have those big dungeons back... especially in my memory Maraudon, Temple of AtalHakkar, Dire Maul... hateloves of my live before they got shattered by the developers...
and then new questline did you make those again, and then again, and then again... so fun... just love...
and yeah, i stopped playing with Kung-Fu-Panda's ruining the till then well settled world.... coming back for legion a little, happily surprised by BfA-Alliance-Questing zones... and strong underwhelmed by the Shadowlands being so empty... and messing up all those long-loved storylines... so for sure not coming back for at least another 6 months till i can be called back as friend and i see if they can hold at least the level dragonflight is being told to be nowadays...
Talking about the frustrations of having an imbalance in a class that you had spent a lot of time leveling and how it mattered more in PVP... Well, maybe, but this video is about Cataclysm. I clearly remember being kicked from a raid group on Spine of DeathWing just and only because I was playing a Warlock (my main, which I didn't want to change). Locks during Cata were severely gimped and could not generate the DPS necessary. I was straight up told by my guild that I had to play a mage if I wanted to raid.
Willie missed the opportunity to put on top of where Asmon has his cam
I remember hating Vashj'ir, not because of the quests, but because it took forever to get anywhere. I tried to level there at launch of Cata. The issue was the slow movement due to being underwater.
450% swimming speed mount given for free 20 min afther coming to vashir...
@@KW-tx6er this is why tutorials are so annoyingly in your face these days
Alot of people i know quit like forever in cata, thats all i know. Like most of the OG players i knew from vanilla arent around anymore, most of the people i played with now started in cata or mists, or wrath maybe, or even wod. Alot of the true heads quit then. Alot of those players to never came back. While the players who i met later on would quit and comeback all the time, some of the changes made in cata just were the last straw for some people. Thats why i dont think they should go on with any more classic things after wrath, ur basically just keeping it alive for what ? mists? and then what ur gunna call wod classic? like it has to end at somepoint.
I 110% believe you are right about why there aren’t many new players in Wow. I started playing a year ago and yes there is a learning curve (not crazy or anything) but if you want to fully play with raiding …pvp and or alts u need to essentially learn it before u start bc no one has any patience for someone who is still learning. I would highly recommend having friends that already play and don’t mind helping when u need it. That may be the norm with every game but in a game such as wow classic that isnt holding ur hand in the beginning the first few weeks maybe months require the new player have a lot of patience and a sense of humor for those that don’t 😂
I had that problem during wrath when I started... Finally had money to afford the game, and started playing because all my friends do, and then literally no one wanted to play with me, explain me anything, or otherwise interact with me, causing me to have the most miserable experience playing a game ever....
I went back to the original Everquest back during 2020-21 after a 15 year hiatus and had the opposite experience. I had several helpful people I met and was max level and raid geared in one of the top guilds within 5-6 months. I died a lot at first on raids but rarely died once I sought out and got help with my class (unless we wiped lol).
@@dirtyfrench2926 i think getting into a guild helps tremendously!!!! It is what I did once i was in a guild there were people that were nice offered help and kinda would give me a tip if it were a situation where there was need to know things they would give me the 411. I also think for people who have played the game before that helps too. I had never played wow before this so the new new player base is where they may experience what i was referring to. Joining a guild 110% recommended!!!
I started in BC and found my passion in being a heal priest, absolutely loved it, I was known on the server and was requested often. They kept simplifying the game mechanics to the point it just wasn't fun anymore. They removed special healing gear, homogenized the classes. They introduced cross-server party search, which made every party member instantly replaceable and removed any type of personal connection for me. And Quests? Just go to the marker on the map and do what bullet points say.
They literally removed the fun.
I won't argue the simplifying aspect, but they have an option to turn off the quest tracker. I admittedly can't remember when it was added though. Otherwise, I do agree with pretty much everything you said.
vash was so awesome. great z axis movement for the time.
Because it was a slippery slope leading to a pool of liquid warm diarrhea after wrath
You really put into perspective how long I've been playing WoW. I started in Cata when I was a whopping 12 years old lol. I am now 26. Middle school, high school, college, parenthood. WoW will always be my little escape to Azeroth, through the good & the bad
CATA being only 5 levels had more of a negative impact than the world revamp, IMO.. I was there, and that was the biggest WTF for players at the time, the revamp was sold as needed to implement flying in the old world.
I think the main reason why people don't start WoW nowadays is the pricing model. Paying $15 is simply an antiquated way to monetize, especially since server upkeep is much easier now. Nobody will pay that much to try a game they barely know when they could just play whatever f2p game they like, and the WoW free trial is way too limited.
For me, the reason I play on private servers is because I can just not play for a month when I'm busy without feeling like i'm wasting money. The game pass idea is so much better than that.
I never played WoW before classic, but my boomer guild cleared SSC/TK pre-nerf and I see/hear people talking about that being the hardest content through wrath. I also hear people saying Ulduar and ICC are going to be at least that hard and other people say SSC/TK was harder. I loved the difficulty of the Vashj/KT dps checks and actually having to sweat a little to complete the content. Do I get to experience that again here over the next year or so? I was feral OT in TBC and just a braindead mage in wrath, if that matters.
I get with the Cata hate (I quit the game due to burn out in Dragonsoul). It would be a shame to miss Firelands though. That phase/raid was amazing.
Most people say Cata was garbage, but I gotta say, the first phase was actually done really well. The raids were great. They even had to nerf one of them because it was too hard. As soon as raid finder came, the game was dead.
Cataclysm felt like such a massive improvement upon the game, from my point of view. Removing the old maps does suck but everything else felt much better.
Any cata improvments your thinking of goes against the opinion of 98% sorry but they got bought out by china
I remember playing WOD and really loving Ashran. Now that I think back. Um.....what else happened again?
Cataclysm changed the raiding model from Wrath.
10 man became equal, in loot, to 25man. This had consequences, most 25man guilds could no longer recruit players as they had no need for us. This shattered raiding guilds, and I left when my social circle fell apart, twice, in one expansion. It was too much. I did not return to WoW until 5.4.
Also, the initial launch difficulty of dungeons likely smashed casual players, creating a barrier to entry that they just checked out of.
Asmon: “WOD was the worst expansion.”
Also Asmon: (In the Was WOD really that bad video) “I love WOD.”
I have a great idea. Blizzard read this comment. Using Dragonflight, have something occur where someone like Khadgar gets the Dragon Soul, goes back in time, and kills Deathwing. It doesn’t change retail and retail continues like not much happened, HOWEVER instead of Cataclysm being released after Wrath, there’s a new expansion that occurs after that has nothing to do with Cataclysm. That’s how you do it. That’s how you save WoW.
18:24 this is also the reason I don't want to start a new alt, even though I'm burnt out from my main character, I just cannot start a new character because i've had my main for 3-4 years and I done so much with it, that I don't want to do again with the new alt
Easy answer for me was that when cataclysm launched I found blues with better stats than my epics as that level cap increase dictated. Was sort of defeating.
My only critique: Dragonblight was the perfect setting for the Dragonsoul raid because of its history with the dragons and the fact that that's where all the dragons go when they know they are going to die.
What if The War Within ends with a Titan pulling the sword out of Silithus and the water in Thousand Needles starts draining as the cutscene fades to black?
The expansion was a cataclysm for World of Warcarft’s subscriber count.
When I first got my own wow account in cataclysm (Cause I was only like 9 at the time) I for some reason decided to lvl in vash'jir, My older brother decided to not tell me about hyjal which I didn't know about as a zone so I ended up quitting at lvl 83 cause that zone was complete dogshit to lvl in for me.
The arms race of addon developers is INSANE. You practically need a speedometer addon for dragon riding because they tuned kalimdor cup so high.
I loved cata...the raids, classes, dungeons...
Still don't know why that had to take out the ancient petrified leaf in cata. As a hunter, I wanted the bow so bad, but the leaf never dropped for me before cata came out.
The worst part about Cata is the fact that the world stayed destroyed for so long because Blizzard was too lazy to do anything related to putting in a plot to where the people of Azeroth like the Druids would actually try to recover the world and the destroyed zones, having nobody in the lore care for ages about everything being destroyed, even the main cities having damage to them for so many expansions was actually embarrassing.
Anybody that says BFA was better than WoD is on some hardcore copium, it mightve lacked content but the content that existed in WoD was so fucking good, not to mention that the story wasn't even close to as terrible as BFA.
God damn, talking about Spine of Deathwing as the hardest fight because of the damage required to break the plates.
Meanwhile, my recollection of that fight was watching 9 or 24 lemmings try (and fail) to balance a seesaw for an hour.
The world changes Cataclysm brought wasn't bad.
What was bad was that the Cataclysm happened and every stayed frozen in time just as if the cataclysm happened yesterday, when the expansion came out a decade ago
It really started in TBC DST - was likely the best trinket all the way to mirror of truth or greatness
Downhill since 2011 which was the launch of transmog. The social fabric was undone by removing the ability to exclusively 'peacock' your playtime.
bro the number pf DPS who broke themselves upon his body feeling the strength of the earth and lack of synapses in their brains was immeasurable, I started liking tanking back then and as a tank you would see people failing, because tanks had the time to observe, and most people failed to stop fasting when he had spell reflect on so the healer could not keep up with the dmg, and the melee would walk in front of the cone and not be ale to go behind the boss to avoid the cone, had some ranged who thought they were doing a 5D chess move by ataking the boss from behind me, thus front of the boss and could not get away from the cone. it was a time of frustration and joy, because I would bet the healer someone would fail all the time we had that dung as a daily
I loved doing heroic achievements in early Cata...stopped shortly after and never went back.
I love to play wow quest. I hope theres an option that you can follow the story without worrying too much from dying. I do like how npcs can be recruited to help on quest which need more than one person. I also understand that built in frustration on games can be irritating on some gamers which can make them quit or can entice more players to play and subscribe. Blizzard must make these two ends meet and not just milking more money from subscribers.
I remember hating the changes to the DPS warrior from WOTLK to CATA. It went very clunky imo and lost the fluidity wrath had. Also single minded fury, I think it was called, was the top build RIP titans grip.
I think new quests were more streamlined, especially for alliance but I liked old quests and zones before revamp. I loved classic undead starting zone and hated the revamp version
I feel like the degradation for the leveling up experience was less about the actual story of the quests.
The degradation came from the gear, ability, leveling and wealth progression getting simplified.
everything gave too much experience and all questlines gave gear you needed which meant there was no reason to spend time planning and travelling to various zones for various quests to get specific gear peices you'd keep with you until you're max level because instead of all that extra effort and exploring being beneficial like it previously was it was now detrimental.
In classic spending that extra time to do a dungeon for a specific gear piece was worth it, finding someone to do an elite quest with was worth it. There was more stuff and options to think about pursuing which would improve your journey in the past.
You had to weave your end game gear progression into your leveling up route and that made it more interesting and less monotonous.
When leveling now do you need to think about your professions, how you're going to get your gold for your mount, what gear pieces you'll need from which quests and dungeons, at what levels you'll need to go back for your class trainer, what talent build is best for leveling between certain level brackets and whether it's worth the cost of a respec or not. Whether doing that quest for that bag to get those extra slots will save you time later for grinding for your mount.
no you don't. Now it's just brainless quest to quest gameplay where you get your abilities as you level, there's no need to think about gold, you don't need to do certain dungeons or quests for specific end game gear pieces while leveling and the gear you build for one spec is mostly the same gear as the other, trying to level up your profession as you level is now a waste of time and leveling up your professions won't help get specific bonuses which will impact your ability to progress faster.
Less thinking needed = boring = less people will play.
As someone who joined during BFA I gotta say Legion is my favorite. I lvled all my alts there
I'm a new player here, i've been playing for about 1.5-2 months now on wotlk classic, i got into it because my 2 older brothers introduced me to it. i played a bit during classic right before tbc but didnt enjoy it much so i stopped playing, but I've had a lot of fun leveling and playing on mage in wotlk (level 56). I'm on the new server angerforge and its honestly pretty dead but i have a decent guild that does daily raids so i dont really care all too much
Let me be clear: Blizzard had the tech necessary to keep the classic Azeroth in the game following Cataclysm, they just didn't want to keep it because the devs thought the new content was better, and of course they did. They could even readd that content right now, since they've proven they still have all the data by releasing Classic, but again, the retail devs think their shit doesn't stink, but everyone else's does.
Destroying the Legion is honestly still such a mind numbingly serious development. Imagine if in 40k, chaos and all 4 gods were just beaten and chucked under the Golden throne but it’s ok because there’s these other greater beings beyond that makes chaos look like children…. It’s fucking *********
WoD was so bad that even the people hanging on from Cata couldn’t take it any longer. MoP was magical in my opinion, though. Loved it.
i started playing late in Cata and i would say from Cata to Shadowlands, where i quit playing, MoP was the best portion of WoW to me.
When Cataclysm got rid of the talent trees is when the collapse occurred for me (Patch 4.01?) It was all downhill from there. All that work and specialization that you had created were just thrown out.
It's very simple... The 'Story' was actually important! Players were invested in not only the gameplay, but the story from Warcraft.
Once they completed the original Warcraft story arc,, they couldn't recapture the aura. They resorted to 'Splash' and 'Hype' and the beginning of the cash shop.
A good story IS integral after all. It might not be important to everyone, but it's important to enough. Honestly, if it wasn't for Lore content creators, the people who really loved the story, consistently put their faith in the speculation and hype it brought.
If they kept the balance of great gameplay AND story... they could have possibly saved themselves.
@@Tallborn5 not really. They dragged that back out like " break glass in case of emergency". There were too many 'recontectualized' (retcons)..reconsider... to actually have been the end of the story.
Did I like Legion? Sure, mostly. But by that time they had moved on from real story to Wham Bam
Thank You Ma'am hype story beats.
I'm not saying g it was terrible. It was the best they had done in awhile, but they really dropped the ball in too many ways... and we won't even mention the "Sword"
Some of the biggest trues in this video, since they applied to me, as well. What little I played in Classic was for the pre-Cata zones, as I loved those zones (except Darkshore & Ashenvale). I, also, pumped out The Seeker title during Wrath, though it was mainly due to my love of The Who song by the same name. The challenge of completing that many quests was just a bonus lmao
great song
From what I've heard from a lot of people that played WoW and the RTS games, with the death of the Lich King, Arthas, to them was the end of the Warcraft story and they felt no need to continue on.
I think around cataclysm a lot of original players started getting burned out including myself, right after cataclysm almost my entire guild quit. I was raiding and pvping on one of each class and had full tier and pvp gear on all except my hunter when I quit and offsets for most of them so I was playing a lot and working 40+ hours a week most of the time. I would love to play it again now but so much has changed that I would have no idea what I was doing. I do have a private wotlk server on my pc though so I can mess around sometimes.
i stoped play wow in 2011 when cataclysm came out because i didnt like the change on tree spec for my healer druid.
You are 1000% correct. I didn't play vanilla WoW when I started playing Classic for the second time because I had no fucking clue wtf was going on. Even as a person who played wow for many years after it came out, I didn't want to put so much effort into relearning a complex game.
Cata lost me because more than ever my time was wasted. Going to and from the Cata zones was a massive time sink and you had to actively pay attention when travelling instead of AFK flying in whichever direction. Having the zones separated sucked and i definitely had these feelings again in SL.
ye taking a portal to and from the zone is such a time sink. cata had the fastest access to the zones, and still has them now
there was literally portals in the main cities? Did you play cata? How is this any different from waiting for a boat to go to northrend?
You had portals in main city to every cata zone tho.