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Cataclysm like Vanilla WoW?
frankah
Member UncommonPosts: 73
Hey guys,
So anyone who played on the Cataclysm beta, i'm looking for some honest answers. Before any of you start going crazy on me, 'why don't you ask on official WoW forums' because my account is frozen, therefore I can not post on them.
I played WoW back at launch for years, and on and off in between, resulting in 5 years of play(I quit during WOTLK after the game became super boring AKA easy).
My question is exactly what the title of this thread is. Is Cataclysm like Vanilla? Oh how I miss the WoW where skill > gear. If you knew your class, you could pump out extra damage, even in crap gear. I miss the difficulty and such.
Anyone who knows about cata, preferably first hand users (Beta testers) can you clarify anythign for me? I'm waiting on RIFT as is, but was thinking about playing cata for a few months?
Thanks!
Comments
While I have no idea how to answer you directly, as your question is a bit vague, I hope you will forgive me for sidetracking by discussing the point you make where Skill used to trump (>) Gear -- as I think I'll be answering your main question to some degree.
"Back in the day" of vanilla WoW, theorycrafting wasn't as widespread as it is today. There were fewer sources of information available to someone who wanted to learn how to play their class properly. This resulted in that the few who did possess this knowledge would sometimes be able to squeeze out more performance than their better-geared peers. *Note; I don't know if the difference was even that significant -- but it stands to reason that Knowledge often = Power.
Today you can hop on websites like 'Elitistjerks' and read tens upon hundreds of pages of theorycrafting for your respective class. Even the official forum often has very straight-to-the-point guides as to how to set up talents and skill rotations.
And even if someone doesn't seem to know the perfect rotation, someone will point them in the right direction -- be it through constructive criticism or through snarky comments. So the end result is that people, on average, will play to the best of their gear's ability, giving the impression that Gear > Skill today.
My point being; Vanilla was hard because the hivemind hadn't mastered the strategy of aquiring the correct set of information.
There is simply no going back to that, I believe.
From what I got to see, Cata is more like a mix between BC and WotLK, it is not a flashback to Vanilla. CC is required for some encounters, not always. Healer mana becomes an issue sometimes, nothing like it was back in Vanilla, and not all the time. Tanks are still quite capable of holding threat on multiple mobs and in some situations, they take way too much damage for this to be viable, but in other situations it works fine.
I do not see them ever returning to the ways of Vanilla. Too many of the current players who just started with LK would /slit and Blizzard is not trying to get rid of the current players, they are trying to find a happy medium for older and newer alike.
Rated BG's, new RvR zones and the wargames guild play will do the tric for me.
All the rest is just a bonus.
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No. Wow will never go back to vanilla. The only way it can move now is forward because screwing over the current players would be a big mistake even if it would make many old players happy.
Blizzard spent a lot of work to maximize their playerbase, going back to vanilla would cost them a lot of money.
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Sorry but thats not justified at all. World of Warcraft had the biggest subsrise back when the game was rewarding and challenging. The lowest rise (look at Wotlk) once the game became so easy, that even 8year old kids could play it. Blizzard did need the china release from Wotlk to increase the subs by 500.000 what does this tell you? Right the subs are proven declining in NA, Europe and new releases in China are only pushing them slower then before.
Sure I can[object Window]t say subs would increase dramatically if they [object Window]d go back to Vanilla but I think it wouldn[object Window]t hurt either. TBH they[object Window]ll never do it the game will become easier and easier (look at the dumbed down talent trees, the linear questing) and stuff like that.
I[object Window]m pretty sure Cataclysm will push subs again but at some point the the WoW will decline in subs could be in 3 months, could be in 1 year but at some point it will happen.
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Best thing Blizzard could do would be offering a Vanilla server but somehow they refuse to do so which is incredible stupid if you ask me.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
Blizzards target demographics is ages 5-12. The game has gotten progressivly worse and easier since launch. From what I have heard from the beta testers it is more of the same. Just drop your quarter into your PC and enjoy an experience with the depth of a pie tin.
There was actually an article on this site a litte while back where the columnist talked about sitting down with his 5 year old figuring he would walk the child through the basics of the game only to be amazed that they were able to play just fine with no help. I hope they add some challenge to that game but as it stands it is the single easiest MMO on the market with the possible exception of My LIttle Pony Online.
Yes, because Mr. T, William Shatner are iconic folk heroes for the 5-12 crowd.
I wrote a long post about this before. But the 'ease' of wotlk dungeons came about because of one mis-step on the part of the devs. At the end of BC, Pally tanks became prefered because of consecration. There were so many add fights, that it was just easier to do dungeons with a Pally tank. It got to the point that people wouldn't even bother trying them with other tanks. Instead of nerfing consecration, they made a mistake. They gave AOE threat abilities to every tank. It workd for their purpose though, because now (and it's a good thing).. good tanks are good tanks because they are good players, not because they have a certain spell. The second part came when fights became more 'aoe-able' because every tank could hold aoe threat.. at that point, some DPS classes had a huge advantage because of spells like Blizzard and Hurricaine. So once the tank could tank the entire pull without CC, in order to prevent DPS balance, AOE spells were added to classes without one ( cat swipe, fan of knives, mind sear etc).
In the end, all they would have had to do was nerf consecration, and then all tanks would have a hard time picking up adds, which means CC would be needed, which means AOE's could not be used so much etc etc.
The other, and lesser problem, was that Naxx was undertuned, which allowed even fairly bad players to rapidly get gear that made heroics dungeons easier than intended. Players should have been struggling through heroics in blue normal dungeon gear, instead, fairly quickly they were doing heroics in Naxx gear
One of the issues is just perception though. Wotlk was not easy. Heroics were easy after the 2nd week, and Nax was easy the first few weeks. Ulduar, TOC and LK were great, challenging dungeons when they were introduced. Heroics and lower tier dungeons, of course, become easy when you outgear them, but thats like complaining about Hellfire Ramparts being too easy for 5 level 80s. The dev team (and I agree with them) purposefully made LK get easier over time because they wanted everyone to fight the iconic fight of the expansion. The difficulty was there in the beginning for the guilds that wanted the difficulty, but they storytelling was there later for those who couldn't kill him without the buff.
Blizzard fixed both errors with this expansion. Tanks (all of them) have had their easy-mode AOE threat abilities nerfed. Tanks will simply not have enough threat for DPS to use AOE abilities often. Also, because mana will be an issue with healers, healers will not be able to heal through a tank getting beat on by every mob in the pull. Finally, the sequence of difficulty in dungeons has been fixed. You will not succeed in heroics unless you have normal dungeon gear. You will not be raiding unless you have heroic dungeon gear.
My son was 5 when he started playing EQ. Does that mean SOE was targeting 5 year olds as their audience?