New Weekly WoW Rant
by Mike D'Anna 
Apr 24th 2006 at 3:00PM
VideoGameGeneration.com has launched anew feature
called Weekly World of Warcraft, which takes a
slightly diff'rent perspective from most of your other WoW sites; WWW is devoted exclusively to rants & raves about
the player's frustrations with WoW & the things that need review; or at the very least, some acknowledgment.This weeks edition, the 3rd so far, mainly deals with the implementations of the new dungeons in 1.11. The author has some opinions I don't necessarily agree with, but he makes some very interesting points & it's a good, informative read. Check it out over at their homepage.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Odds and ends, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nick Apr 24th 2006 3:18PM
They do make some good points, i suggest reading the crafting article, they make for some interesting ideas. (IE making engineering useful to other besides the crafter)
PickyPants Apr 24th 2006 4:31PM
I agree wholeheartedly with this critique. As a gamer with not only a regular day job, but other games and game systems that I enjoy, scheduling my time around a guild's events are just not happening.
Do we really need more 40-man raids? The two main bosses from AQ still have not been downed. It seems exsessive to me.
My 2cp.
spicytuna Apr 24th 2006 6:16PM
1) Dire Maul was introduced, 3 new 5 man instance right there.
2) 20 man ZG and 20 man AQ also introduced
3) tier 1.5 sets introduced
4) BG grind also introduced
5) introducing lower level 'sets' is a bad idea. By the time you collect everything you'll have outgrown the set by then.
Zamael Apr 24th 2006 9:46PM
The level cap will be raised to 70 with the introduction of the Burning Crusade expansion pack.
I am quite keen to tackle what is currently considered "endgame" (Ahn'Qiraj etc) with 5-man and 10-man parties of level 70 charachters. I just hope that Blizzard reduces the number of party members required to enter these instances.
Bottom line is, I am comforable with Blizzard developing what is currently considered "endgame" content, because I am confident that as a "casual" I would be able to eventually get a taste of it - albeit 12months or so after the rest of the community has had a chance at it.
As a "casual" ... it is the voyage that counts, not the destination.
Mike Apr 24th 2006 11:01PM
Wait a second...
"VideoGameGeneration.com has launched anew feature called Weekly World of Warcraft, which takes a slightly diff'rent perspective from most of your other WoW sites; WWW is devoted exclusively to rants & raves about the player's frustrations with WoW & the things that need review; or at the very least, some acknowledgment."
Did I read that right? WWW is devoted to "rants and raves" by frustrated players? So how is that "diff'rent" from other WoW sites? From all I've seen, 90% of WoW sites are devoted to whining about nerfing this or nerfing that or server outages or BG queues... I say enough ranting...
crsh Apr 25th 2006 9:32AM
I'm a member of a raiding guild, but I believe I understand some of casual players' concerns with regard to loot and what can one get by still having fun and not spend 40 hours/week raiding like a second full-time job.
There are great 20-man dungeons in the game, namely ZG and AQ20, a small/non-professional-raiding can assemble 20 people, at worse a guild can do a joint raid with another one. ZG and AQ20 are by no mean easy (hell, Jin'do alone is tougher than Ragnaros in my opinion). Plus, given the current timers, you don't need to clear the whole place in one night, nor (in the case of ZG) need to stick to a certain order: you can go around and kill whatever boss in whatever order you want.
What I do hear, and don't quite get, is the small portion of whiners who want easy epics; it just takes some work, some strategy, and some skills. We're all playing this game, where's the fun if you can get epics by just showing up at the door? Oh, and epics from ZG and AQ20 are not "lesser" epics, there's some seriously good loot in there, ones that have nothing to do with the shitty epic pieces one can get with upgrading your class set to tier 0.5 (which aren't epic quality at all, Blizz just slapped a purple label on a few mediocre blue items).
So, is the 40-man Naxxaramas dungeon too much too soon? Not really, a lot of raiding guilds aren't done with BWL and haven't tackled AQ40 yet, but it is something to look forward to - plus, it will probably be bugged like AQ40 was, so Blizz releasing it early is mostly just PR, they'll need some time to fix it.
TheFlyingOrc Apr 25th 2006 10:40AM
The problem is not wanting "easy epics". The problem is I want to be able to play when I want, when I have time, and feel like I'm working toward something. As of right now, as a level 60, I cannot make forward progress in the game without raiding. You can't work your way up to an epic - if I put in 400 hours of time outside of raid dungeons, I wouldn't be as well geared as someone who raided for 100 hours of time. That frustrates me.
crsh Apr 26th 2006 8:10AM
Wrong. There are quest chains to get reputation rewards that leads to epic rewards; yes, those quests require endless grinding to gain reputation, but you do these on your own time (logistic/combat quests in Silithus, for example) and at your own pace. You won't be as well geared as someone who spends hundreds of hours raiding simply because it would be unfair to those that do go out of their way to raid weeks on end in MC and BWL, learning strategies, farming fire/nature-resist gear to perform better, etc. I admit it's not a great alternative, having those logistic quests in Silithus it's pretty repetitive and boring, but consider what raiding guilds have to get into to actually progress and get those "phat epix", it's not like they drop in our lap the minute we step in MC/BWL/AQ; it's tons of gold wasted on repairs when we wipe trying to learn something new, it's tons of gold spent on resources like protection/health/mana/whatever potions, and the list goes on.
The only thing I can suggest is finding/starting a guild that raids casually, there are many on my server and I assume it's the same on every server; many guilds that do ZG or AQ20 on weekends, or just once a week when they can assemble a full 20-man raid (or do joint raids with other guilds, etc). It is possible to go in there and have some fun, while having a shot at greater loot and quite a few epics as well.
spicytuna Apr 26th 2006 9:51AM
TheFlyingOrc is correct. Which is why many many people have alts. Post-60, unless you PvP, you HAVE to raid. You have to dedicate 4 hour blocks to the game to do anything useful.
Rep grinding is horrible, I for one do not want to spend hours and hours killing timbermaws or bugs.
Pre-60 WoW is a casual MMORPG, post-60 it's almost as hardcore as you can get imo.