I’m sorry that this got a little ranty, these are most of the things that bother me.
If There was any further proof needed to display the fact that Blizzard B-Team is in charge, go no further than to look at the latest content patch. And the poor, poor newbie players (Yes, even you who have “been playing since beta”). Still newbie. Some would say that this is a harsh thing for me to say. But it’s true. The fact of the matter is, people who have played several games, several mmo’s and played them at any length can see how shitty wow is.
This is simply justified by several things. First of all the crafting system insufficient for it’s needs, At the higher levels, it’s just not as noticeable. Players start off with Gear which no Armor Value, and 90% of what you can pick up is gray quality (Extremely poor, and is generally looked at as “Vendor Fodder”) Many of these items, for some reason have extremely cool art… Which is honestly better than the stuff you will wear. Seriously when my mage had level 12 green quality pants that had patches in the knees as if she had a “great weekend” , and the grays have intricate designs, it’s a little ridiculous. There are grays of nearly every level in the game. However, decent gear on a per level basis is simply not available, this is extremely noticeable through the crafting system. The crafting system if you look at it. Doesn’t give you an option to craft gear for any given level. Which in this bloggers honest opinion, it should. The vast majority of items are white quality (common item — nothing nice about it, also generally considered as vendor fodder.) until you get into level 10-12 now if you look at the beginning 20 patterns for armor you’ll notice two things right away. The materials to make most of them are really unreasonable for that level, and there are no two things for the same level. So you have to be level 4 to wear the bracer’s, and level 6 to get the chest piece and level 7 to get a new pair of gloves (and now your level 4 white quality bracers are crap compared to the level 7 grays that again are considered vendor fodder.) level 8 you can make boots. The saddest thing is, you do not have the ability to collect the materials to make that level 4 item until you are level 7-10. but it’s still an upgrade so you wear it. You can’t get shoulders that aren’t gray until level 20, and finding a helmet BEFORE that is neigh to impossible, I do not think they made one. This is how it is for the entire crafting system, for all classes in all armor unless you can get some poor unfortunate person to run an instance for you several times to get upgraded gear that is meant for your level you’re never going to see any.
Secondarily, Getting the required materials to MAKE items for your character AT your level is also really really difficult. (as I said earlier requirements are stupid insanely high.) I have a level 23 horde mage, of the blood elf variety. I took Tailoring as a profession. The reason is so I can make my own bags, and armor. However, at level 20 I ended up going out and buying more cloth to LEVEL my Tailoring high enough to make 1 piece of gear that is equal to my level. In addition to the gear you get in questing is several levels BELOW the required level to do the quest, and a level 25 Mob, Drops a level 19 or lower item. So in order to actually attempt to make gear to keep yourself in decent gear (pre level 20) is to either farm for the materials which is really time consuming, buy it on the auction house — which is really expensive, and you’ll run yourself out of the money so that you will not be able to train new armor patterns, which again are really too expensive to begin with. Or the last option is, you get a friend or an alt who can mass farm an instance to get it for you.
Training costs:
Training expensive, for everything, wither It be skills, profession or repairs, is really expensive. Everything costs a lot; And If you wear plate or mail armor, the expense is worse. This keeps the low end of the community really poor. Thus making the above situation with the crafting, really difficult, you do have to farm for everything. One way or another you farm for it. You farm for reputation, you farm for money, you farm for armor, you farm for Achievement, you farm for materials. (Blizz should just issue everyone an epic John Deer Tractor Mount.)
Durability is a good conceptual idea. The whole point is that it’s a money sink, it’s a place where if you are questing, raiding, PVP, or just doing the cooking daily eventually you will have to repair. The problem is the extremes, The cost to repair mail vrs cloth in the first 30 levels is negligible. When you hit 30, the difference starts to sky rocket. If you are unfortunate enough to wear plate at 40 the difference sky rockets again, and you make money at the same rate of speed as the clothie. This is simply another money sink, another place to throw your cash. A required place mind you. With this, there are gems to buy, glyphs to buy, materials or components to buy for your spells/skills (required mind you.) so until you hit max level, getting any form of gold, which is hard enough in itself is ridiculous. In addition to this, blizzard has said that certain stats on armor are worthless, and are there as “filler.”
These are all pretty standard for this game, any one player of World of Warcraft who sits back and thinks about it cannot dispute with this. Now here is the part where nearly every WoW player is completely blind.
WoW is putting out crap content. This last patch we got access to a live event that will typically not happen until the following month of May. The game is Gear dependent. You spend your time farming for Armor, wither it’s through mining the materials or killing for the cloth or leather – or you run endless instances you spend your time to get gear. So you can go into a new raid instance, then you farm the raid instance for yet, more gear. The major thing for me up to this point has been story line. Blizzard had a habit of putting a storyline into their instances so they had something for everyone. Each one was unique, there was a smaller 10 man version, and a harder 25 man version. The 25 man version gave better gear, but the main point of the instances has been to get gear. With BC they gave us Tokens that you can turn in for gear, it’s not as nice, but it’s an upgrade for most people.
With this patch, that has changed. The latest set of instances they are doing take a lot less people.
There is a 5 man, 10 man, 25 man instance. Each one has a normal, and heroic version. The heroic version drops tokens, that you collect then use them as currency to buy better gear. (again Gear based.)
However the caveat to all of these is that the loot that drops in 5 man normal, and 5 man heroic, is identical. The difference is the tokens that drop. Where it takes upwards of 35-100 tokens for a semi decent piece of armor. (Look more farming!) Which is crap in comparison. But unless you spend the time to get the tokens to get the gear you can’t do the harder ones. Which again, the difference between 25 man normal, and 25 man heroic, is only the tokens. The gear that drops in loot (which at this point is far more valuable than the tokens. ) is generally overpowered. Now because it’s the SAME instance, with the same mobs, and the same tactics, and the same loot, and the 25 man normal is SIGNIFCANTLY easier. Then there is no point to do the harder raids. It’s the same small room , with the same scripts and npcs the only difference is the difficult of the mobs and the gear the same. The rest is worthless. The Rest of it are daily kill quests. Which wouldn’t take that long to do. The only thing that taxed Blizzard for this content patch is the art assests. Most of that is armor, the rest is moot. This was a filler content patch, nothing else. They temporarily enabled a world event, gave us an arena, which is nothing spectacular, and some daily quests. Players who have not played any other MMO’s cannot see that this is the true beginning of where Blizzard is throwing in the towel on WoW. It’s their self sustaining cash cow. People get addicted to farming. Because they had to have something, the interesting is, once they released their first expansion, people stopped doing the classic WoW content. So they put in an achievement system, which is for bragging rights to give people a reason to go back and do it. This again is to absorb player time, so they can prolong the decline of their player base.
I’m not saying that WoW will fail. In fact it will thrive for quite some time, most of this is because people who started MMO’s with WoW, will go play other games, and cite that they are “lame” and “rip-offs” and “copies” of WoW. When Blizzard has not done ANYTHING unique. Everything they have done, someone else did first. They are not the best, they only had an already, extremely popular IP going for them. WoW is NOT a good game. It is designed for people who do not have any responsibilities, or a family. Or people who do not care about them, everything is a time consuming task. Instances take 1-4 hours to complete.
The game won’t fail and fall on its face. But Blizzard already did, people are not able to see it for what it is.
And to think, I’ve not even start on the fact that they’ve overpowered the gear so much, that instead of nerfing gear stats, they are nerfing classes. Making leveling far to difficult, therefore Further propagating the whole crafting/loot/leveling issue.
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