Cataclysm

[Sjofn]

And again, 15 dungeons means jack shit when everyone you play with (PUGs were irritating to get together back then, although I did mine AND Ingmar's fairshare on my bear druid) only wants to do three or four of them because they give the best rep return for effort spent, or their last upgrade is in Botanica, or whatever.

I did a fuckton of Botanica, Shadow Lab, Steam Vaults and Shattered Halls. The end.

[Fordel]

No it wasn't an Upgrade, it was "you need this last piece to complete un-hitable or your paladin tank will fuck the entire raid!" 


Lets go run Botanica again!

[Minvaren]

WotLK had way more to do for me. Like not even close. And even so, WotLK's quality of shit to do was, in my opinion, higher. Long-ass dungeons do not equal better dungeons. Miles of trash between bosses do not equal better dungeons. The fact I could earn rep for a chosen faction in any fucking dungeon I wanted instead of one or two that I'd already done to death but Oh God I'm still only fucking REVERED made a huge difference, too.

Gotta say, this is why I even got into tanking PuGs in WotLK.

Besides that, I'm a Story Whore(tm).  I ran CoS over and over in LK, just for The Story(tm).  Should probably resub for a month to see the LK fight.  Ah well.   

[Kageru]

I still don't get the psychology. Launch with raids balanced for the "average" raider, heroic modes for the achiever and insane challenges for the super hard-core. Everyone gets to see the content, there's a progression within the content and you don't have to invest massive resources in balancing the ball-breaking stuff because it is understood that is the point of it. Having content that acts as a brick wall to a large section of your player-base, with the understanding that you'll eventually the nerf the content when it is old and no one cares anymore is just dumb. Nerfing content should be seen as a failure to design a graduated challenge.

Still, now that my guild has exploded I'm safely immunized from any future temptation.

[sinij]

I still don't get the psychology.

My guess is they thought that average person will strive for unobtainable and keep subscribed for longer time (and come back next expansion) if they make it firmly out of reach and cockblock the hell out of it. This would have worked just fine in the early days of mmorpgs. What they failed to take into account is aging demographic that now has less time, is more assertive and has better goal setting checks and balances that comes with maturity. What started as 12-25 back in 99 is now 24 - 37 and not attracting significant number of younger generation.

TL;DR Average mmorpg gamer is now older, has more money and less time and expects "luxury" experience. Instead they are still trying to sell you more of beat-up old Civic that you drove in college.

[apocrypha]

My guess is they thought that average person will strive for unobtainable and keep subscribed for longer time (and come back next expansion) if they make it firmly out of reach and cockblock the hell out of it. This would have worked just fine in the early days of mmorpgs. What they failed to take into account is aging demographic that now has less time, is more assertive and has better goal setting checks and balances that comes with maturity. What started as 12-25 back in 99 is now 24 - 37 and not attracting significant number of younger generation.

TL;DR Average mmorpg gamer is now older, has more money and less time and expects "luxury" experience. Instead they are still trying to sell you more of beat-up old Civic that you drove in college.

Bollocks, that's not what they thought at all. All that happened was they made the MMO Dev Mistake #1 and thought that their forums represented their playerbase.

At the end of wrath the forumtards were screaming about faceroll non-stop and Blizzard listened to that noise, and lo! Cata was born.

[Ashamanchill]

Yup. Not only did they listen to the wrong people, but I think that what the forums were saying played into the dev's fears/aspirations:

"Do we want to develop an easy game, where obviously no one could be having fun, or do we want to develop a meaningful game?"

[Merusk]

fake edit: Also I have never understood people who do extra zones after hitting cap. I know people do it but. Nngh. Unless there's some sort of really awesome quest arc to see that no one can shut up about, I don't bother. I can't be alone in this.

It's a shitload of extra cash.  Way, way more than dailies because each quest turn-in gives the same cash as a single daily and you get the rewards to sell-off.  Additionally when you're quest grinding you get more world drops for DE and crafting mats than daily areas which are always picked clean because so many people are focused there.

Doing Hyjal on the DK I picked up 4-500g without even trying one evening.

[Merusk]

And again, 15 dungeons means jack shit when everyone you play with (PUGs were irritating to get together back then, although I did mine AND Ingmar's fairshare on my bear druid) only wants to do three or four of them because they give the best rep return for effort spent, or their last upgrade is in Botanica, or whatever.

I did a fuckton of Botanica, Shadow Lab, Steam Vaults and Shattered Halls. The end.

Not only did they mean jack-shit for the pain in the ass of getting a group together, they may as well not have existed at all for some classes.  I was lucky to do any of them on my Hunter, who was my main at the time, because "hunters can't CC and we want a  mage/ rogue. "     Even in guild it was hard to get groups and you were dragged along rather than taken happily because they'd rather have had another mage or rogue in my spot.   It's why I started to take the paladin I'd had sitting around since launch more seriously.

[Sheepherder]

They need to stop deprecating old content every time they launch a new raid.

You're wrong. They need to make content accessible on the front end and then dump it when then next iteration comes out.

You'll never get people to love doing something that's not new in a game where they are paying for the priviledge, and you'll never get people excited about dragging people through old content just to get them geared for the stuff they really want to be doing.

Yes, Diablo II nightmare/hell was terribly unpopular.

People will grind the shit out of the place if you give them the least excuse.

[Paelos]

Diablo 2 was a single player game, with a multiplayer component, and you didn't pay for it on a monthly basis.

Why not compare a car to a plane next time? I mean they both have engines.

[Pantastic]

Yes, Diablo II nightmare/hell was terribly unpopular.

I suspect that it was terribly unpopular, I know a lot of people who played normal mode but didn't see the point in playing it again in nightmare, and other people who played nightmare but had zero interest in grinding the kind of gear setup you needed for hell mode. Has Blizzard ever released numbers of how many people actually completed the harder modes versus how many bought the game? Sure, nightmare and hell (and hardcore mode) got a lot of forum talk, but that's like a few hundred or maybe few thousand people - most players don't hit forums at all.

[Sjofn]

And again, 15 dungeons means jack shit when everyone you play with (PUGs were irritating to get together back then, although I did mine AND Ingmar's fairshare on my bear druid) only wants to do three or four of them because they give the best rep return for effort spent, or their last upgrade is in Botanica, or whatever.

I did a fuckton of Botanica, Shadow Lab, Steam Vaults and Shattered Halls. The end.

Not only did they mean jack-shit for the pain in the ass of getting a group together, they may as well not have existed at all for some classes.  I was lucky to do any of them on my Hunter, who was my main at the time, because "hunters can't CC and we want a mage/ rogue. "     Even in guild it was hard to get groups and you were dragged along rather than taken happily because they'd rather have had another mage or rogue in my spot.   It's why I started to take the paladin I'd had sitting around since launch more seriously.

No offense, but your guildies were idiots. My hunter CC'd like crazy in TBC. You just needed the rest of the group to not be fucking tards and break your trap early (having a tank that grasped how to pull to your trap was a bonus). I was survival, though, we were most bestest at it. 

[Merusk]

I'll agree they were particularly since even if my CC sucked my DPS was head and shoulders above the rest of the guild. (Marks FTW)  Even without the CC i was a far superior choice to some of the rogues/ mages they took in my spot.

However, it wasn't just my guild but the entire server that was the issue.  If you only played guild groups at the time, you never got the experience of "LF2m for Botanica.  NO HUNTERS" or sending a tell and having them reply; "No, we don't need a hunter."  I know Xanthippe and I had groused about this in the past.

[Soulflame]

Re:  Diablo II.

Nightmare is fairly fun if you research how to spec your character ahead of time, and it's not terribly gear dependent.  In nightmare, you can max out whatever near 18/24/30 skill you were going to max anyway, and with that, nightmare becomes almost comically easy.  Particularly compared with some of the painful bosses in Normal.  Duriel, Diablo, I'm looking at you.  Hell, the only thing that makes Normal Meph tolerable is you can cheese him over that one foot wide channel he mysteriously can't float across.

I certainly understand why people think the idea of "find a build to play content I paid for" is kind of bullshit though.

Hell, as mentioned, comes down to not only researching a build, but then building the gear required to survive and produce sufficient damage to kill mobs.  It doesn't help that to build that set of gear, you should be able to farm hell.  There's a reason why forb/fire skill sorcs are popular MF chars.

[Ingmar]

I think Nightmare/Hell almost certainly was unpopular - relative to the total amount of people who played D2 overall.

[Sjofn]

I'll agree they were particularly since even if my CC sucked my DPS was head and shoulders above the rest of the guild. (Marks FTW)  Even without the CC i was a far superior choice to some of the rogues/ mages they took in my spot.

However, it wasn't just my guild but the entire server that was the issue.  If you only played guild groups at the time, you never got the experience of "LF2m for Botanica.  NO HUNTERS" or sending a tell and having them reply; "No, we don't need a hunter."  I know Xanthippe and I had groused about this in the past.

Doomhammer didn't give a shit if you were a hunter. They were fine with it. <shrug>

[Merusk]

Alleria was home to the #1 US raid guild in BC, so there were all kinds of stupid things that happened based on their opinions.  (not to mention a hyper-inflated economy)   

Failure (the GL) thought hunters were a waste of space, ergo so did the server.

[Fordel]

Hunter CC was fiddly but it worked and it worked on shit you couldn't sheep or whatever. My Moonkins only CC in TBC was Hibernate 


Then my Paladin got geared and we never CC'd again.

[Rokal]

Not only did they mean jack-shit for the pain in the ass of getting a group together, they may as well not have existed at all for some classes.  I was lucky to do any of them on my Hunter, who was my main at the time, because "hunters can't CC and we want a  mage/ rogue. "

The in-demand CC classes in TBC were mage/warlock. Rogue CC was bad in TBC. With the talent, you still had a 10% chance to not re-enter stealth after using sap, botching the pull for your group. I remember doing Shattered Halls heroic on my rogue and crossing my fingers every time I did a pull. 1 in 10 pulls is a wipe, yaaay....

TBC was still awesome though.  

[Lakov_Sanite]

I notice all the t12 armors seem to be moving away from the laser light show sets from the last 3-4 tiers.

[caladein]

Not only did they mean jack-shit for the pain in the ass of getting a group together, they may as well not have existed at all for some classes.  I was lucky to do any of them on my Hunter, who was my main at the time, because "hunters can't CC and we want a  mage/ rogue. "

The in-demand CC classes in TBC were mage/warlock. Rogue CC was bad in TBC. With the talent, you still had a 10% chance to not re-enter stealth after using sap, botching the pull for your group. I remember doing Shattered Halls heroic on my rogue and crossing my fingers every time I did a pull. 1 in 10 pulls is a wipe, yaaay....

TBC was still awesome though.  

Yeah, TBC heroic dungeons were really good.  The class design of the game around them was complete pants.  (Which is why I liked the first couple of months of Cata heroic dungeons as much as I did.)

[Merusk]

Yeah but that 10% only killed the rogue.  The rogues I knew at the time were always smart enough to sap and stand there in case they had to be rezzed.   If it wiped the group you were doing something wrong or the healer was too quick on the trigger.

[Fordel]

Meh, just vanish, I'm just going to throw my Holy Frisbee and it will fuck up your CC!

[Pantastic]

Yeah but that 10% only killed the rogue.

Yeah, if the rogue was clever enough to vanish or stand in place then it was fine. A lot of players just didn't understand the basics of CC even though it was so important in BC. Good hunters could be amazing, they could trap a mob, kite another one, and have their pet distract a third for a while (cutting down the initial damage spike in SH helped a lot), and misdirect was pretty sick. Mind control from priests was practically broken anywhere it worked, you just MC pull and let the mobs take down one guy for you, then MC another and abuse him for the rest of the fight. With the right opponent mix (like Mechanar) warlocks could CC 3 mobs at a time (Charm a humanoid or enslave a demon, banish a demon, chain fear something fearable).

I never really understood the mage love putting together groups in BC. I get that their CC was easier to use, but people seemed to rave on them even when assembling a group with known good players. I always wanted a good warlock or hunter, mage was just 'oh that's handy'.

[Merusk]

I always attributed mage love to people's general stupidity and four other things.

1) Their CC is instantly recastable in or out of combat, unlike sap or (then) traps.
2) It has no cooldown, unlike fear and traps.
3) It has a clear visual component for those too dumb to realize things like the hunched-over guy with the birds is "sapped" and hearts are chamed. Don't hit those, fuckers.
4) It has no chance of aggroing other mobs, unlike fears or (then) pets that wander into aggro range when offtanking. (Sheep wanders that would take them near other mobs were ultra-rare occurrences.)

[Pantastic]

4) It has no chance of aggroing other mobs, unlike fears or (then) pets that wander into aggro range when offtanking. (Sheep wanders that would take them near other mobs were ultra-rare occurrences.)

That's why you needed a good warlock - you could fear, then put on curse of recklessness to make the mob unfear for a bit, then toss weakness or tongues on it to make it run again before it got to you. An affliction lock could keep this going pretty easily without losing much damage, since DOTs would keep ticking on the kill target.

But yeah, the reasons turn into mostly 'mage CC was the easiest to not screw up' and I think people extended that even to hand-picked groups where people wouldn't be screwing up.

[Simond]

Yeah, TBC heroic dungeons were really good.

No, this is pretty much the opposite of true. There were, what, fifteen at launch? How many did people actually want to run? Two? Three?

[Paelos]

Let's see, the TBC dungeons... Oh hell, I'll rank them!

The ones people ran: Mechanar, Magister's Terrace, Underbog, Ramparts, and Black Morass.
The ones people tolerated: Sethekk Halls, Steamvault, Slave Pens, Blood Furnace, and Botanica
The ones people would have to be drug to: Hillsbrad, Shattered Halls, Arcatraz, Shadow Lab.
The ones people would tell you go fuck yourself: Auchenai Crypts, Mana-Tombs

[Setanta]

Ran all of the across 5 alts regularly. As tank, heals and DPS. Usually in a group of guildies and friends. We had fun.
I don't agree with your ranking at all. Hell, 2 of my alts hit exalted with Keepers of Time :D

Hunter - not an issue to CC. Distracting shot was there for a reason.

[SurfD]

Let's see, the TBC dungeons... Oh hell, I'll rank them!

The ones people ran: Mechanar, Magister's Terrace, Underbog, Ramparts, and Black Morass.
The ones people tolerated: Sethekk Halls, Steamvault, Slave Pens, Blood Furnace, and Botanica
The ones people would have to be drug to: Hillsbrad, Shattered Halls, Arcatraz, Shadow Lab.
The ones people would tell you go fuck yourself: Auchenai Crypts, Mana-Tombs

Some of those would depend highly on if it was before or after they nerfed a lot of them from "crush your nuts with a sledgehamer unless your group comp is PERFECT".

For example, before the nerf, getting ANYONE to do Arcatraz, Shattered Halls, Hillsbrad, Blood Furnace or ShadowLab unless they absolutely had to (ie, they required it for the Attunement Quests) was nearly impossible.  Especially Bloodfurnace and Hillsbrad, since they had some of the trash pulls from hell in them (like the Hillsbrad sentries who patrolled around and summoned assist-teams of group wiping when attacked).

I think the main reason EVERYONE hated Crypts was because it was only 2 bosses, with some of the most irritating trash in the game at the time.

[Paelos]

I stand behind my rankings from my personal tanking experiences. YMMV of course.

[Rokal]

My version of the TBC dungeon list:

The ones I ran because they were awesome: Magister's Terrace, Ramparts, Blood Furance, Botanica, Shadow Lab, Slave Pens, Mechanar
The ones I ran because they were pretty fun: Sethekk, Arcatraz, Steamvault, Underbog
The ones I only ran to help guildies or for daily quests: Hillsbrad, Mana-tombs, Shattered Halls, Black Morass
No thx: Auchenai Crypts

[Paelos]

I ran underbog a ton because it had a fun atmosphere and lots 'o badges

[Pantastic]

(like the Hillsbrad sentries who patrolled around and summoned assist-teams of group wiping when attacked).

Don't forget that those sentries (and the ones in SH) had a disorient attack on the tank (which makes mobs temporarily deaggro), and most heroic mobs would kill a non-tank in 2-3 hits. They made some REALLY stupid trash back in those days.