The days when Blizzards "nerfing" consisted of making the game harder, not easier?

A few examples:

-Limiting Blackrock Spire to 15 people, as guilds were doing this in large raids to make it simple. Later lowered to 10. Then they just turned it into a 5man because they had made the place so easy.

-Removing Fel Iron from around the Dark Portal not long after BC came out. People were farming it by just flying around the land the Dark Portal is on, so they made no nodes around there.

-Boss fights were often made harder, not easier. Usually by fixing some exploit people were using to avoid a key mechanic.

I'm noticing a lot of things also going unfixed lately. Minor bugs/issues. All the while making major changes that just cause more and more problems themselves.

The game keeps getting easier and easier, has been ever since around 3/4 through BC.

Sometimes I wonder if the original developers are looking at what they created and are saddened by what the current team is doing to their once-upon-a-time masterpiece.

 

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One of the hardest things to do as a creator of something you love is to let someone else take control of it.

 

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There is nothing wrong with making the game easier, it means it becomes more accessible. What some people see as making the game easier others write off as 'that is not something I cared about or affects me'. What broke the game has been gear inflation which got way out of hand in BC by allowing everyone and their kid brother to obtain arena gear that was greatly unbalancing with little effort. I had some pieces on a few characters simply because it was simple to get and in many cases near bis. The stuff lasted almost to 80 for some slots.

Come Wrath and they simply went ballistic with the loot. Numbers became so great as to become silly. Spell power on items nearly doubled from the beginning of Wrath till its end, crit values for many geared people were in excess of 50% if not a lot higher when in a raid setting. It was as if the GM came along with a D&D loot manual and said "take what you want" and lets go. Monty Hall all the way.

 

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There have been a number of these recently. You probably didn't notice because they were fixed before anyone but the top guilds in the world were attempting the fights. e.g. there was a positioning exploit on Atramedes, there was Guardian Spirit abuse on fights with damage-splitting mechanics like Maloriak, there was a change to heroic Nef to break the druid-stacking approach that got the world first kill, there was an Atonement nerf to stop it trivializing fights with damage buffs like heroic Halfus..

 

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C'mon, dont bring facts into this! The current Devs couldnt find their asses with both hands.

If you think making BRS a 5-man instead of 15-man made the place easier, you must have never pugged it while it was a 15-man. I cannot count the times people would initiate pulls that were bad and caused pain (blacksmith, whelps shelf) and/or wipes. Back then, even with 15 people you'd still end up with one, maybe two healers, a tank or two and 12+ DPS. Not to mention hunter pets lagging off the spans and aggroing the stuff below you causing people to get stuck in-combat.

Or are you saying raids are easier than 5-mans?

 

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They removed the ability to raid it and nerfed it into the ground difficulty wise when they did so.

A lot of the fun I get out of Gaming is the challenge. Not all, obviously, but a healty portion. Blizzard has turned most of the PvE game into a faceroll. I was happy to see the heroics much more difficult in Cataclysm than they had been previously. But they've already started nerfing them. And they aren't even that hard, as long as you know what to do and can dedicate 10% of your attention to the task.

Loot/Stats are definately another issue. Ever since they implemented Arena/PvP/Resilience gear, items started getting out of control.

I just find they have oversimplified the game to a point where almost all the "challenge" is removed.





Yes, I'm sure they still do fixes for boss fights, to have them work as intended. But if you read a lot of the old patch notes, changes were made almost specifically to make the encounters more difficult. Obviously they still fixed things wrong with the fights if they weren't working propery too, though.





I pugged this place countless times. It was always fairly difficult as a 15 man, then as a 10 when they lowered it, again. Now it's laughable easy for 5 people, even without BC geared people. I was one of the few people to have the key early on, opened the door a lot for groups I didn't even go with as well. Ever had to kite or have a Hunter kite the General to the Beasts room? Good times. That place required CC and a lot of attention. It was one of my favorite instances.

That's another thing. What ever happened to "keying". It was a great idea that they decided to drop, to cater to the lazy/bad people. Required some effort on your part to be able to participate in raids. The Onyxia keying quest was pretty cool.

Raids easier than 5 mans? Currently, no. But old school 5 mans weren't a walk in the park. So getting geared for raids required people to know what they were doing, generally.

I find almost all PvE in WoW now to be a joke. Mind you, I rarely raid anymore. All it requires is a little more attention than a 5man.

 

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Keying was a tedious affair to repeat on multiple characters. The Onyxia attunement quest was fine once. It was hell after. Just like the resistance gear check fights like Huhu in AQ. Huhu wasn't hard. It was just tedious and not fun. You seriously can't say that raiding is a joke in this game unless you've done the heroic level stuff, because comparatively from Vanilla to Now, heroic level raiding is a huge step above. They have more toys to play with and so do players. To think otherwise is just ignorant at best.