People get all glossy eyed about EQ because it was more punishing at lower levels and non-raiders had a group focused game that required them to be mildly competent if they wanted to do pickup raids and dungeon groups. For most of the small group content in wow, there's absolutely nothing that makes you pay any attention outside of challenge modes, and those are basically a "do it once" thing. I'm not saying EQ should be our guiding star of game design, but EQ was alsoa decade and a half agoand it feels like some of this stuff really hasn't evolved very well for all the time it's had between eq and today.
For raids: The only challenging stuff seems to be a fraction of the content that you need to spend week after week gearing up for, and that's kind of a let down. It's partially because I play during off hours, but the endgame scene on my server also seems pretty desolate. People don't give a shit about rewards for heroics in general. I might guildhop soon and try to start looking for heroic groups, but if that doesn't pan out I can't say I'm too heartbroken because the thought of doing the same SoO bosses that I'm already kind of sick of with extra mechanics isn't all that interesting. There's no driving fire under my heels like there was to see the plane of time or endgame velious or whatever. The mystique of "new area, new enemies, new loot" is gone.
It's also kind of disappointing that anything prior to the current raid tier, even things within the same expansion (ToT, ToES) are utterly obsolete and not worth revisiting. It might be a server to server thing, but it feels like people on my server aren't messing with heroics if it's not on farm already because WoD is on the horizon, and that means imminent gear resets. What percentage of the playerbase is doing heroics? Because on my server it really seems like a minority thing.
So for a lot of people that leaves:
LFR: Faceroll while sleeping, why does this shit even exist?
Flex: Standard faceroll
Normal: Faceroll after you've kicked out any bad pugs who are asleep at their keyboards. Seriously, watching players in normal mode constantly stand in the fire reaffirms my belief that most players just fucking suck and that they are in fact the biggest challenge in MMO gaming. I saw some damage role shaman doing ~55k dps and the same four retards standing in garrosh's purple cone every time last normal run I did.
So they nailed the heroic mode -great. But why make the other 3 so easy in comparison, and not have a more steady difficulty across all four modes? The easy-easy-easy-hard curve seems really weird to me.
I'm not saying that it hasn't always been the case that a small % of the playerbase sees the top end content, but it feels like in wow the difference is that most people justdon't give a shitbecause the reward for heroic is seeing the exact same zones and getting the exact same gear with 16 extra ilvls on it. It all feels kind of clinical.
TLDR: I want a more consistent difficulty curve, fun and challenging content for single groups, and the raiding treadmill to not consist of the same content over 4 different difficulties - with only the final tier being anything even remotely interesting. I would absolutely love to have heroic mechanics (like the moving lasers on the siegecrafter belts) in the more forgiving difficulties. I think that would be a decent way to make lower tiers of raids feel more interesting.
