My thoughts in writing. Those are the exact reasons I quit the game back in May.

That comment does indeed put it well... ;-)

The only problem with that is - do we know when he switched from WoW to Titan? Was he responsible for the failures of Cata's design? Or did he work on Wrath? Did he throw up on Metzen at the Hollywood Bowl? Or maybe he threatened to break an NDA and talk to someone about what Titan actually is so they canned him. Maybe they caught him interviewing with Trion? Or maybe they found Cutaia's home phone number on his speed dial as #1.

Speculation is running rampant. We'll probably never know the full story so assuming he's the guy who created Something-you-didn't-like-in-WoW, of course, makes it the truth.

Lucidique: I unsubbed shortly after that, when my patience for "the second tier of gear access" didn't "fix" heroics for my laid back, "WOTLK 5-mans were perfect for our give-a-damn level, and that's fine with us" guild. I subbed for a month to gather visual gear for my characters when I heard about transmog *in case* MoP (or perhaps even 4.3) went back to an "enjoyment over integrity" model, and it looks like they are, so I'm looking forward to perhaps actually enjoying WoW again.

I think blizzard's main failing was listening to people who complained about how ezmode WOTLK dungeons were. The overwhelming majority of people I played with, who probably never even opened up the blizzard website let alone the forums, generally enjoyed how Wrath dungeons were a relaxing romp through some cool looking places.'

In short, they got it right with Wrath. They would have done well to follow that model, let's hope that's how it goes in MoP.

Yeah, this was my experience as well. Trying to run randoms, especially at the beginning of Cata, was no fun. (Still not as bad as trying to run dungeons in a pug in, say, BC, of course.) A sizable percentage of our guild quit because they weren't having fun, while they'd happily run their dailies all through WotLK.

Were the WotLK dungeons (especially the 200 level, by the time we reached the final patch) /too/ easy? Well, maybe-- but hopefully we can come to a balance between faceroll and UNREMITTING BLOWS TO THE GROIN AREA in MoP.

From WoWinsider twitter, covering the conference call in progress:

"Morhaime: Lessons were learned from Cataclysm content. Level-up content was great but endgame was too hard. That'll be fixed."

"This is where Cat failed exceptionally. It was never fun. Running heroics was like queuing up to get kicked in the nuts. It was more often than not a miserable experience and still is for the most part. And yes, we know all you elite bad asses can run them blindfolded but that was never the point. The point is this - it ain't fun. Being able to do something and wanting to do something are two different things. "

Welcome to the Facebook generation. Entitlement issues everywhere.

Heroics were never, NEVER, hard, and I'm not this fabled "elite bad-ass", either.

People ignored the fact that they needed, NEEDED, better gear, and cheated the gearcheck system with honor gear or borrowed, unequipped items to get into Heroic queues, and blamed the game when they were unable to complete it. Might as well have equipped ICC gear and tried to run through.

Heroics were for people who had ran Normal dungeons several times, gotten all or most of the gear they could get from that, and were therefore familiar with the mechanics and the encounters, and had gear appropriate to the required level. You could also have gotten good gear from high-end quests and crafting, to pad out the missing spots you might not have had good gear.

Normals also helped you to learn what your class was capable of and required to do at the top levels of PvE play. If you did not know how to play your class, you had no place in Heroics, plain and simple; no, Normals were not perfect for teaching you, (teaching players how to play their class is a major point of grief I have with Blizzard), but they were quite useful. Besides that, there are twelve million other people you could have asked for help, as well as a world wide web of helpful pages. Expecting to be able to perform at a high-level with inadequate knowledge of how to play is just silly.

With adequate equipment and ability, and knowledge of the basic encounters, Heroics were not this impossible beast comparable to pre-patch C'thun; yes, if you were doing randoms, you'd likely have to deal with folks who didn't follow this path, and thus likely wiped plenty, at which point I would recommend finding friends or a guild on your server, someone(s) reliable.

Basically, you wouldn't start a game of Mass Effect and, halfway through the game, try to beat the final boss. No, WoW is not quite so linear, but progression is. 3 does not come before 1, F does not come before D.

I will admit, some Heroics had mis-tuned mechanics, and Blizz could have done a better job preparing people so used to Wrath's five-ten minute EZmode dungeons, but the problems were (are) greatly exaggerated. A lot of this could have been fixed by communicating these ideas to the players.

Those who whined about the difficulty of heroic dungeons... really?

Whoever said that nailed it.

Not only were Heroics a horrible exercise in futility, PuGs simply died. There's nothing more discouraging than spending hours grinding gear, and then not having anything to do with it.

I fully agree with Waco. On my druid, my main, I went hrough the old routine of farming normals and crafting stuff, getting rep rewards, before I finally set foot into heroic dungeons with an ilvl of 335ish. And they really weren't that hard. I couldn't faceroll them with my eyes shut like Wrath, I needed to use CC and pull carefully and if we got two groups we were probably dead. I don't see why that's such a bad thing, but I guess the majority of the playerbase disagrees with me.

The problem was people got used to heroics being something you just stepped into when you hit cap, and got a rude awakening that you couldn't do that in Cata. You needed to do the normals first, get some rep gear first, you couldn't pad up with PVP stuff and step in at 330 and coast. You could do them at that ilvl but it would be hard, heroics were meat to be hard. That's why they're heroic, not normal.

But I guess only heroic raids can be hard anymore. They said that in MOP they're getting rid of max level normals and you'll just step right into heroics but I know that's not true. They got rid of heroics. They're all max level normals. They're just called something else to make people feel better.