Jateki wrote:
I’m on two arena teams and haven’t done much of anything with either other than a few practice runs. It’s more of a problem to PVP than raiding is atm, you need everyone on your team online and with the spare time to PVP vice farming crap to support their raid needs. Another big problem I have is with the queues on Azuremyst, we are very low population server that’s in a low population battlegroup. Doing any type of arena or battleground PVP during off-peak hours, when it’s actually convenient, is pretty much impossible. I’ve been in so many Eye of the Storm battlegrounds that ended because of lack of players it’s ridiculous. That basically leaves the weekend for any type of PVP for me.
But that’s basically my only gripes with WoW atm. I’m having a blast with the heroic and normal instances, quests, trade skills and raiding. I checked out Vanguard in beta and my son has the retail version, but it’s just not for me yet. I was also in LOTR beta and that game needed help on many levels. I think Oblivion could be morphed into a better MMORG than either of those with its storyline. It’s going to take an exceptional game to pull me away from WoW at this point because I’d personally rather play CS or FEAR online over any other MMORG on the market.
Givin found this post, and im going to copy it here but this is dead on the problems with WoW.
Quote:
The mistake of the expansion was this, they were too afraid of PvP'ers being dominated by Kel'thuzad drops. They were too afraid of the .25% of raiding guilds killing Illidan by June.
Their Solution:
Arena PvP: Strongly designed weapons, DPS levels 2 tiers in. Resilience, PvP only stat. These two things were outstanding decisions. A dedicated PvP'er mitigates crit rate from a raider, and can have weapons on par with that same raider which helps.
Downside: They just made most of the best PvE weapons more reliably attainable through PvP because you control your drop. No longer will you farm Onyxia for 10 months before a single Vis'kag drops.
Mudflation: They decided they did not want raiding to yield a more powerful character. The mantra of "two fucking AP" became the rule. One elixir now yields a larger offensive boost than looting 2-4 epic items.
Downside: Raiders no longer become more effective in line with difficulty of Boss tuning. The margin for error on subsequent kills does not increase. Because Horde now has paladins, the overall difficulty of the majority of fights is inflated due to an optimal raids power over one that would pre-BC be doable with a few key requirements, and then whatever you had online to fill the 40. Raiders do not enjoy the fact that on the 5th+ kill of many bosses, the loot they have earned has earned them 15 void crystals, little to no stat increases, and one mistake is still as unforgiving as the 1st kill. We did not shard anything except duplicate drops because it was a downgrade in MC/BWL/Late AQ/Naxx. First kill loot is being sharded in NON-DKP systems.
My guild was the only Horde kill of C'thun/Ouro/Visc (and we farmed them every week.) My guild was 4 bosses deep in Naxx before we ran out of time due to starting our progression cycle in BWL just before AQ40 came out and since we weren't crazy about consumables, we used gear progression as a means to break into the following zones. We potted when we needed to, and used flasks on our tanks. We used limited resist pots on Ragnaros, We used DPS consumables on First Nefarion kills, we used Flasks and DPS pots on Twin Emps first kills. We used cheap nature pots on Ouro and Viscidus, and DPS pots on C'thun first kills. We raided 4 nights a week for 4 hours.
Burning Crusade's problems for my guild are the following:
1) Excessively high DPS benchmarks: one DPS death, sub-optimal spec, or lack of consumables to the extreme = automatic wipes. This creates a necessity to raid stack excessively to make success possible. The guild must balance heavily our marginally weaker players so that no given raid has too many of them. We are not talking Idiots, we are talking Average.
2) The concept of "Gearing up instead of farming consumables" to progress through content does not exist. My 9-5 working class guild cannot put in the hours to provide and farm the required consumables to reasonably progress in SSC and beyond. We can handle one or two fights per zone asking for some amount of consumable use. But not the majority.
3) Raid design involving a role that two or three players of one specific class can only accomplish with luck, or outstanding ability and awareness. This again pushes for exclusion and raid stacking.
My guild now raids, one night a week (25man) and kills two bosses, We clear three Karazhan ID's the third of which involves level 70 alts to fill in class requirements without being forced to recruit a player who has no slot in future 25mans. Our guild bank has too many Void Crystals. We have used a grand total of two Maulgar drops(beyond shoulders) as an actual upgrade.
The keying process for Tempest Keep is severe and unforgiving, our tanks will be forced into shouldering an unfair burden, some of the instances will require final boss sub ins so that the clearing of the instances to those bosses is less painful due to class stacking easing the pain. But we persist and will get there. The BC is a good expansion. Guilds who need content past Kara, raid a moderate amount (3-4 nights) are being squeezed out of WoW. Too many of my members have been given reasons to move onto a different game or go inactive. Unless 2.1 truly solves many of these problems, I foresee even more members choosing to move on instead of endure an activity that is supposed to be fun, but ultimately frustrating at our level of time commitment. We are far from casual, and far from bleeding edge. If loyalty and commitment to the guild were not so strong in the membership core, I could easily see the most hardcore transfer off, and the slightly more casual quit. They would not desire a new home and their tenure in WoW would be over.
