::looks at last dozen posts::
Oh. Right. Well, that hasn't changed.
But I can only shake my head at the people who --less than a day after the Wrath Classic pre-patch dropped-- already had a Death Knight up to L70. Yes, I ran into them while I was running a few Alterac Valley battlegrounds over lunch on Wednesday.
And if they thought that they'd wipe the battlefield clean with Neve, they were in for a rude awakening. As one of my fellow defenders in Stonehearth Bunker put it, "This ain't 2008, asshole."
The fact that DKs were already at L70 still kind of irked me, even though we won that BG. I mean, I know there's that Joyous Journeys buff out there, and it's only L55 to L70, but come on. Just why on earth would you spend the entire time from 6 PM EST until Noon the next day leveling a DK, when you've got close to a month before Northrend opens? Your gear will get replaced pretty damn quickly in Wrath Classic anyway, and there's a bit of a delay until the first raids open as well.
What's the point?
I guess I'm getting old, because I play MMOs for the journey rather than the destination. And that seems to be very much the exception these days. The destination will still be there, whether I get there tomorrow, the next day, or even the next month. I can't control how other people play the game, but if by their behavior my enjoyment of Wrath Classic is cut short*, I will not be a happy camper.
In this case, I'm actually hoping that the increased difficulty of Discount Naxx puts a bit of a damper on the overdeveloped sense of enthusiasm on some of these "high energy" players.
*By pushing the Classic team to burn through Wrath Classic in about 14-15 months instead of the 25 months originally. Original Wrath dropped in 11/2008, and Cataclysm dropped in 12/2010.
As an outsider, I find these numbers nothing short of bizarre. I wasn't playing WoW when these expansions were originally being released. I was playing EverQuest. In the time it took WoW to move from Burning Crusade (Jan 2007) to Cataclysm (Dec 2010), EQ went through five expansions, having switched from a bi-annual to annual cadence. In the time it took WoW to get from launch to its first expansion, just over two years, EQ released four. In EverQuest, where the whole classic/retro/progression server idea started, the cadence for releasing expansions has always been compressed from whatever the original incidence was, tending to settle somewhere around three months per expansion.
ReplyDeleteEven at the time the original WoW expansions were coming out I found it incredible there were gaps of up to two years between them, something I still find ludicrous in other games like GW2. It has always seemed to me that the natural, necessary increment for a live service game that has expansions as its primary content delivery system, both commercially and from a playability point of view, has to be annual. A year is a long time to wait for anything.
I very much doubt that, given the choice, WoW players would have chosen to wait so long between expansions the first time around. I can't imagine there's a huge demand for things to go more slowly than they are now although there's always a subset of players who want to go at walking pace and another that wants to sprint. Other developers have handled the disparity by offering retro servers with different cadences. With Blizzard's resources you'd think they could do the same but they seem set on a one size fits all policy.
How does EQ handle their new content drops as opposed to their major expac releases? I'm not being facetious here, I honestly don't know.
DeleteWhen a WoW expac drops, it not only involves a pre-patch but the main initial drop of content, then (typically) 3 additional patches of content over 2 years. It's not a "here's your content, have fun for 2 years" cadence. With main raid lockouts being a weekly event, there's only so many gear drops that would happen over the course of a content release before the next one --and the next raid-- releases, making what was the current tier obsolete. If it weren't for the fact that the WoW raiding community is constantly chasing after the current tier of raiding, it wouldn't be such a big deal. That being said, I can say as part of the Classic progression community (for a little while) it is hard to recruit if you are behind on progression. People want to be on the current content, and if you aren't, that's a problem if you're constantly plugging holes in your raid team.
I can't typically speak for Shadowlands in general, since I never played it, but I do know that one big complaint about Shadowlands was the extreme amount of time between content patches. And even then, there were only two instead of three content patches because the expac was so poorly received.
The problem I foresee with WoW Classic is that for so many people the "Classic Era"* ended with Wrath of the Lich King, and if Blizz tries to create "Cataclysm Classic" a huge portion of the Classic player base will simply stop playing, including myself. And yes, original Wrath did go on for an excessively long time between the final major patch, 3.3, and the release of the Cataclysm pre-patch, but the raid tier for 3.3 (which was Icecrown Citadel) was notoriously hard and the cause of a lot of guilds/raid teams blowing up, and eventually the raid needed Blizz to intervene and release raid-wide buffs to allow most raid teams to clear it. Even then, quite a few guilds didn't successfully finish ICC; I remember Rhii of I Sheep Things' despair at the realization that her guild wasn't going to clear ICC before Cataclysm released**. Blizz threw a 3.3.5 patch in there just to keep people busy with a mini-raid, called Ruby Sanctum.
*Not to be confused with the so-called Classic Era servers, which are permanently on Vanilla WoW.
**I only truly understand this now, having seen my old Monday raid implode just a week after entering into Sunwell Plateau, the final content patch for TBC Classic. They struggled to get there for so long, the attrition and server defections eventually caught up to them. The bad taste in everybody's mouth and the associated burnout were so pervasive that the entire Monday raid lead team is no longer raid leading in Wrath Classic.
For some the journey is not a reward, but a trial to be endured. If being at max level and engaging in BiS rituals is where their fun is, that's cool. For them. For me, I'd rather enjoy the journey and then -- if I want -- enjoy a relaxed jog around the end game world. If they want to get snotty about it I'll just gig them with a "I did all that stuff back in Real Wrath(tm) ;)" and put them on my ignore list if I need to. I'm not going to let anyone else determine how my fun is going to happen in Wrath Classic. The only person I may end up disappointing is myself. ^_^
ReplyDeleteFor me, my goal is to do a level a day on my DK, If I feel like it. I mainly want to be level 70 by the time the pre-patch invasion starts so that I can collect a tabard and the four pieces of the plate Undead slayer set. (I missed out on the cloth and plate versions in the original event.) This gives me a minor short-term project to have a bit of fun with.
There are two of us out here!!
DeleteMost people I've spoken to aren't interested in the invasion event so much as accumulating as much gold and materials as humanly possible to power level their chosen professions quickly to max once Wrath drops. (Oh, and everyone --or it seems-- is rushing to do Engineering.) But ignoring the hyper progression crowd is part of the reason why I quit the guild. I don't feel like dealing with that crap, or watching the cliques sit in their silos, or watch the other guild run roughshod over our guild's community.
The transition from Classic to TBC Classic, toon power wise, was more or less a lateral move. Blizz moved a few things around, tweaked others, and that was that. The transition from TBC Classic to Wrath, however... The power creep has finally arrived big time. I've got a post on that I'm gonna write, but let's just say that I was part of a group that was able to 3-person Normal Blood Furnace --at level-- without a healer. And that's just one example.
It's noticeable, but not item level, it's ability changes. My pally tank holds threat like no other. If you are pulling off me, it's your own fault. (Telling DKs to stop taunting chargers by "pulling" it back to the group has been annoying as hell. Guess I shouldn't care, but it just makes things longer.) Things die and if people die, you can often either survive or keep going longer than you'd think. I almost finished Black Morass at 67 with 4 (70 dps left because I wouldn't set loot to FFA...) and the only thing we had issues with was the last boss. Boss stunned me about 3 seconds in and the healer didn't quite expect the dps to get hit so hard. A 5 level difference and we did pretty well. Had we been expecting it, I think we would have downed it.
DeleteAlso, the Engineering thing is that they are leaving Engineering in Arenas till the second season. Gonna be ugly.
DeleteAlso the Mechano-hog. Holy crap will people not stop talking about that in Trade Chat. (Totally different from when I tease my questing buddy about her 'copter and how she needs a hog to complement it.) I keep wanting to pipe up to tell people to stop with the Harley-Davidson love and buy an Indian motorcycle instead.
DeleteYeah, it was interesting to see Blizzard is going to try to walk back some of the power creep caused by ToC (and to give Ulduar some more breathing room). If I level any professions it will be after I'm done with my goals.
DeleteI can see why people are focused on Engineering and the cool toys. I was too, back in BC and Wrath. Now, though, min-maxing is for someone else. I will happily leave it to them as I've already lived that world.
You know, not being a raider any more, not feeling like I have to stay on the Red Queen's racetrack of 'not letting the team down' has become very liberating. I'm finding I'm actually enjoying the game and wanting to play when before I was just pushing myself through things because it was what I 'had' to do. In a way I'm back to where I was when I started with Vanilla. I'm a solo player again because no one I know is playing the game. (Not a complaint, folks lives have gone different directions.)
@Pallais - not sure if I'm the odd one out here but I go about different games completely differently, so I couldn't even really pinpoint what kind of gamer I am. I guess we could go by time spent, so that is endgame and raiding in WoW, but not for FFXIV, SWTOR, or any others I've been playing.
Delete@Nogamara - I don't think you're an odd one out. I think a lot of it depends on what you are enjoying in each game and how much time you have to be involved in different games. Going where you are having different types of fun makes sense.
DeleteI used to do endgame and raiding in Wow and played other MMOs for different things (usually their story). For me, at least, it depended on what I wanted and what itches I wanted to scratch. That said, it also depended on if I was in a decent guild or not. My strongest ties have been in Wow so there's that natural tendency to play a lot there. Swtor was a strong pull for me during the RotHC days because of being in a good guild there, but health issues and other things pulled me away. By the time I got back the people I had enjoyed playing with were long gone. :sigh:
Now that I'm basically a solo player again, I'm back to being a dilettante among various MMOs and single player games.
Hi Red;
ReplyDeleteJust over 20 hours played to get my DK to 70. The xp boost plus not giving a crap about the quests themselves in terms of rewards allowed me to skip the exceptionally annoying semi-rare drop quests. i.e. Bleeder Venom and Wings in Zangermarsh. Took me about 4 days of my regular playing to get there.
15 levels at the end of an expansion with all the nerfs to quests i.e. 12 instead of 30 for the Nesingwary quests in Nagrand isn't much, so I'm not surprised at all how quickly power levellers were able to knock it out in a day's time.
Nor did it bother me in the slightest. Don't give one rat's ass how quickly people do things, or how slow. That ship sailed years ago when I decided to play the game how I played it, regardless of anyone else's agenda.
Engineering? Surely you're not surprised, shocked nor chagrined that people are following the meta?? C'mon Red, you've posted enough about the sheep that play the game the way Wowhead and Icy Veins prescribes it. I looked at the pre-patch guides for each of my classes, all 10 now, and took note of anything that changed or new stuff that's worth grabbing. Then proceeded to fill in the specs as to the way I play. Don't care what I'm not optimizing, I know my playstyle, and have a good grasp of what's important when I'm out in the field questing.
Fuck you Meta :D
Bill
I'm not surprised about the Meta with Engineering, because I've already encountered at least one person telling me "I'm doing it wrong" by not doing Engineering on my Main. I think the person assumed that Neve was my Main, but the annoyance of someone who shouldn't have bothered piped up anyway drove me nuts.
DeleteHaving an Indian dealership nearby has given me a bit of a bias toward them over Harleys, even though I'd never ride a motorcycle because I'd likely fall off one, because they scratch that "road bike" itch without being quite as expensive as Harley-Davidson.
Just read the Aug 31 post, and your reply talking about how bad questing was. I thought it was going to be that way (Pagle-Alliance) on our huge server, but honestly, there wasn't a single time that I threw out an invite that it was declined (sorry, a couple, who said 'done with quest'). But my thoughts were quite wrong, and the levelling process was smooth throughout. My biggest shock however, was the amount of NON-dk's out still working to 70.
ReplyDeleteBill
That's actually amazing. I was in an AV run where our side (can't remember which faction) had 24 DKs. It was kind of nuts.
DeleteI clearly enjoyed your (unofficial) participation in Blaugust way too much, because you haven't written about your adventures in WoW in ten days and I'm starting to feel withdrawal... 😜
ReplyDeleteThat's kind of funny ("ha ha funny", not "weird and strange funny"), given that I was happy to put together a longer post that wasn't all about WoW.
DeleteWell, that was interesting to me too, but I'm nosy about what you're getting up to in Classic. Especially since I saw hints in your comments on other blogs that stuff's been happening again, such as you getting recruited into a ten-man team in Wrath?
DeleteI'm not posting official stuff on that yet, because there's a meeting on Sunday. It's entirely possible that one of the people I personally don't like may end up on the raid team, and I'm not sure what I'll do at that point.
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