You guys have hit on one of the biggest problems with the expansion. Namely, that Cataclysm has a critical need for specific types of CC in certain instance mechanics if your group wants to be able to make it past a certain point. If you don't have aforementioned CC/interrupts, it is either so tedious as to be painful or you need to drastically outgear the content, or get really, really lucky. All melee DPS groups are a prime example.

WotLK taught us to bring the player not the class. Cataclysm forces you to bring the holy trinity + CC again.

 

-----signature-----

I'm going to say this, and I hope people understand I don't think it's actually happened...


If you were a clueless middle manager at Blizzard responsible for increasing / retaining customers and someone from accounting handed you a chart with attrition numbers since a year or two from launch....


...you might reach the conclusion that Vanilla offered what the customer wanted.


And offered the idea to "turn back the clock" in a design meeting, complete with Kaplan's approach of "herding" the customers into the correct gameplay even if you have to shame them.


Please understand, I don't have a problem with the new heroics and use of CC. We have multiple CC classes in our guild from Vanilla, and we've been anticipating that Blizz would create a situation where we would need a specific type of CC based on instance. Just because TBC emphasized the need even more. We roll as a guild group. We're not the ones being negatively affected by the "new/old" changes, except that we will have to ALSO choose which of our characters get "advancement".


I still have memories of sitting in Ironforge or Stormwind, or Orig listening to players desperately trying to get or even form a group to go do content.


The dungeon finder was supposed to address this.

 

-----signature-----

btw, I think it's fantastic that Blizzard put in guild achievements. I think it's wonderful that the emphasis is on things that can benefit a guild by insisting that a certain number of people from the guild be present for encounters/raids/instances.


However, I have to wonder at their design / management group that may or may not have the discipline to sit down and look at the various customer factions and cross-check to understand the trade-offs and impacts that will occur when they decide to implement a new idea.


Who knows, maybe they do. And this all gets back to an attitude of, our customers will stick with us and we will take care of that (subset) in the next patch/expansion as they claim they do.


Or maybe, it's just that they don't have a marketing department that has a forecast by customer segment, and the authority to zero the financial forecast (e.g. monthly subscription fees) for groups ill-served by the game's proposed direction. This makes design decisions meaningful to the numbers guys on top (e.g. look idiots, if we do this, we are going to lose money HERE, here and HERE.)


But, like the man said, all you have to do is wait. We will tone them down. You'll hang around won't you?

 

-----signature-----

Wrong. Cataclysm tells you to bring the player more than ever, and by that I mean the good player. Scrubs are of course not favored when the content becomes a bit (really just a little bit) harder.

 

-----signature-----

infantile egomaniac is you

 

-----signature-----

LOL, your are so completely wrong it is not funny. There are some classes with no effective CC, guess we can leave them at the door eh?


Blizzard faced a problem, they like PvP, PvP in WOW sucked because it was a burst fest so you were usually quite dead very fast. People bitched and moaned. Because they have Monty Hall'd the loot so badly they only had one route, crank the hit points to stupid levels. This gave them a new problem, even some of the weaker players are better than the content. Hence the first big change is, nerf healers to 25% efficiency. Second is, lots and I mean LOTS of damage that players cannot prevent. Interrupt a caster mob and it starts right back where it left off (Trash appears to follow no rules). Throw in lots of mobs who do 360 damage you cannot interrupt or mitigate, oh and bosses with effect hit boxes so big you practically need to be outside the instance to make sure it don't hit you.

They screwed over PvE completely all in an effort to keep PvP from being its burst gank fest. they then cover this all up with the idea "healers were bored and they all wanted a challenge". Sorry, doesn't wash. Hell Shaman losing their poison/disease totems was a direct result of PvP issues. The whole damn expansion is trying to correct PvP so their next Arenafest doesn't end up being who can mash buttons first.

 

-----signature-----

One thing people seem to forget: Players whined & complained about how easy the game was, how they hardly used any of their class abilities & facerolled content, and how they wanted more challenging 5 man content.

Blizzard listened.


<insert current QQ>

To all of you that are pissed that Bizzard is not listening to you. There is 1 very simple thing you can do. STOP PAYING! When you stop paying and enrollment goes down they will start listening. . . or they won't. If WoW was not the best game in the market and even 20% of the audience went somewhere else another company would rise to meet the call. I don't mean to sound like a rager but seriously if you are that pissed off stand up and DO something, and the best thing you can DO is not to pay to play. When the money starts dropping they will start listening or they will fail.

Personally I think the dungeons are a bit too hard, not oddly so but maybe some tweaks here and there. I am more angry about lower level encounters, like Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines. I have been in there with good to bad groups and they all fail over and over. So let's face it they screwed up.

As a healer I am not using more skills than I did when facerolling shield,Chakra,heal

Oh and lightwell I will drop during boss fights renew here and there pretty much buisness as usual

Pretty much this. If more people leave because the heroics are too hard, than people who left during WotLK because they were bored to death, they'll probably go back to the faceroll heroics.

 

-----signature-----