World of Warcraft: Current Year

Haus said:

I'm pretty sure I still play WoW out of compulsive habit. Completely underwhelmed by Undermine. Paying for my sub with the fact that I play the AH as the real end game raiding in the game....

Also not really sure what I want in a persistent world game anymore....

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I think I still miss the old wow but every time I dip into classic or into a private server affair, I feel hollow. It feels too temporary for me. Probably zeitgeist but wow felt like a permanent world to me circa Vanilla/TBC/Wrath back in the day. I wonder how much my age and lack of kids played into that. Now it feels like too much opportunity cost for other hobbies and games.

Neranja said:

It's not only zeitgeist, but it's also that the community has deteriorated. My personal recommendations:

a) Poopsock the hell at the start of a season/expansion, to stay ahead of the curve away from the mouthbreathing masses--and hope to god you have a meta spec
b) Find likeminded individuals to play with. But this requires commitment and personal investment in other people

If you're not willing to do b) then you can't complain if everyone else treats you like an easily replaceable bot/NPC to further their own goals. This is the current state of the WoW "community".

There is a hidden third option:
c) become a twitch streamer and get carried in a parasocial relationship with your viewers. Doesn't have to be Asmongold level of fame, but you get the point.

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I did that for Wrath classic and it held up until Ulduar then the guild fell apart due to disinterested leadership and I didn’t want that job again. That time I joined a more reasonable semi-casual to semi-hardcore raid guild. A lot never got to experience the original Wrath. So while some fights got stomped, it maybe took 5-10 attempts on some hard mode or even Yogg. Good people overall.

I primarily quit because it felt like us stomping the content was cheapening the memories I had of Day 1 type raiding with my old guild when shit hadn’t been nerfed, etc. And when certain things like the DK gargoyle shit either wasn’t known or was a bug borne out of imperfect recreation of Wrath.

Plus I got tired of leading their DPS despite playing a middling Frost DK. Which I guess tosses me into almost treating them as disposable. I just wasn’t willing to do all the stupid hoops with two characters, etc that guilds even most casual raid guilds expect.

Finally, my party's enhancement shaman will be able to maintain buff uptime

TJT said:

Hmmmmm, instead of simplifying the game by removing unnecessary complexity, let us integrate third-party addons directly into the game to help manage it.

How can you be this retarded?

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When their entire design paradigm is dictated by elitist jerks- there is basically no chance they will ever have be able to realize that they fundamentally ruined the game- so there is kind of no choice but for them to officially band-aid the game with crutches to staunch the bleeding from their broken designs with the masses.

They're trying to cater to two different audiences

The sweaty tryhards will just do what they are doing with 50 keybinds
The super casual people who don't know wtf they are doing so they give them an "I win" button that does a suboptimal DPS rotation but still probably better than whatever they are doing now

In a tab target MMO, it is pretty hard to walk that tightrope of "not too hard for the casuals, not too simple for the l33t d00dz"

I've always felt if you need more than two hotbars worth of abilities the devs have failed at designing the class. Remember when we used to joke about EQ2 having too many skills/abilities well WoW has become that.

They had no problem stat squishing, level squishing. They need to do ability squishing.

Merging abilities is probably better than outright deleting. Kind of like how long ago warlocks had a lot more debuff curses and Blizzard eventually just rolled a bunch of them under combined curses.