Not sure why, but Blizzard made their old dungeons (AQ, ZG, MC, Onyxia, etc...) obsolete with their Burning Crusade exspansion. Unless you are a new player, or running your 'alt's through an old dungeon, it's become so difficult to get a group going. TBS is great, but it would have been nice to see some new dungeons for levels 10-50. I've playing stopped my 'alt's because I can't stand to look at running another Uldaman. Any thoughts on this?

I believe they are trying to cut down on the dungeons that require the most time.  The ones you mention all require very large quantities of time.  They seem to want to make the small group dungeons rewarding for people.

Generally old dungeons become obsolute after expansions anyway.  It's happened in all other MMOs I've played that use a leveling system.

I have no clue why (on the thought of dungeons), but it is obvious for the raids. No more 40-man...now only 25-man. As you can tell/see with the NERF here, because of the crowd in WoW, a 40-man raid was too complicated and uncontrollable for the boss battles. Fighting the bosses in raid requires total obediance in upkeeping strategies and stuff. ONE person can kill the whole party just by making an EARLY mistake.

And they didn't use to have such complex boss battles in WoW, it use to just be kill the boss. Now it's kill the boss and his minions.

Because they realized the mistake they made in terms of gear when it came to the PvP aspect of the game. PvP for WoW was tacked on at the end of the development cycle. Someone wearing T2 or T3 gear versus someone who didn't have access to any of the high end stuff had a huge advantage.

With The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has been able to refocus on the gear and make changes that won't leave the non-raiders out in the cold when they want to PvP against someone in the T4-6 gear. With the way they changed stats, reworked how a lot of them functioned, it opened it up so they could make better PvP balanced gear and shrink the advantage Raiders had in PvP over non-Raiders.

The other aspect behind it is that's just how raid-centric games go. Everquest was horrible about this. All the old zones where made quickly obsolete when successive expansions were released.

because they can !!!  that is the way blizzard works. They hold total control over their projects with an iron fist and if you dont like it you can go play something else !!!! yah you heard me

lol, that's not so logical but it's funny. You can say that about all the MMO creators since they do control the countless hours of our lives with their games (they also control our MONEY 0.o').

But I agree with Adythiel on the gear also. When Burning Crusade came out, I was really mad that they NERF'd so many gear (gear that use to pwn so much in PvP). Now a lot of the best gear can be earned through HONOR points from the Battlegrounds.

No one likes zerging.

Well actually blizzard is one of the few that doesnt let outside influences sway them one way or the other as far as the dev provess goes because they are an independant and pretty wealthy company. Wheeras many dev teams are pretty much under the thumb of the big publishers like SoE or Microsoft, EA

Originally posted by Airspell

Well actually blizzard is one of the few that doesnt let outside influences sway them one way or the other as far as the dev provess goes because they are an independant and pretty wealthy company. Wheeras many dev teams are pretty much under the thumb of the big publishers like SoE or Microsoft, EA

Blizzard isn't an independent. They belong to the Vivendi Universal Games. They have to answer to Vivendi, but the Blizzard name is well known enough that VU allows them to keep the game tagged by being made by Blizzard. Imagine if WoW was brought out by Vivendi Games rather than Blizzard. Lots of people would have been confused and quite possibly wouldn't have purchased the game. Blizzard's name does in fact do a lot of the selling for them.

they did it for money.  more dungeons means more time to play which also means more monthly fee charges.

Think about the fact that it took 2 years for the first expansion to come.  Any game who obsoletes their own content is stupid.   They spent the first 2 years making content whose only purpose was to be flushed down the toilet the day TBC came out.  Imagine how much faster they could have brought the expansion out if they had not waste all those resources on dungeons nobody will ever go to again.  There is no rational explanation for it, and WoW is not the only game guilty of this.  Better luck in another year or 2 when they give you some more faction grinds....err.....content, probably no new classes, and turn even more of their wold into a ghost town.

Because 75% of their player base hated the raid model of those dungeons.  Blizzard decided to change to a 25 man paradigm instead.

They were left with two options:

1) start over and just have people do the new stuff

2) build on top of the old stuff and somehow force people to run the old stuff that they hated and refused to run for almost 2 years and actually stopped their progression or started alts to avoid doing.

Also they changed itemization for level 61-70 so the level 60 raid stuff didn't fit well.

Finally these dungeons were "end game", once the level cap was raised they are no longer end game.  Why sit around farming clock block dungeons for months and months when you can just quest to 70?.  Blizz would have had to redo them all to remake them into "end game" again.  Either that or completely screw non-raid itemization.  Trying to fit them into the 61-70 leveling scheme is stupid because people hated the content to begin with.

Also Rob Pardo always envisioned raids as the "hardcore" content for max levelers who need to be kept busy for long periods of time.  The leveling portion of WoW is directed at a very specific audience.  There is a reason WoW has only max level raids while EQ2 has raid mobs right from the beginning.  Raiding serves a very specific purpose and that purpose is not really scalable, it is essentially a band-aid/tacked on solution that in general does not fit the rest of the game well.  So when they change the parameters of the game they have to rearrange the shanty town they call "end game".

Originally posted by gestalt11

Because 75% of their player base hated the raid model of those dungeons.  Blizzard decided to change to a 25 man paradigm instead.

The idiocy is that they knew this as they were making the expansion, and at the same time continued to waste time on content following the original model.   I feel bad for the developer who wasted countless hours making the content that everyone knew would never be played again.

I don't really care on the matter, yes I loved the 40-man raids and yes I did have access to all of them (MC-Naxx) and had alot of fun. If they kept the percentage system the T2 / T3 would still be effective vs some gear that may have a few more point's of spell damage and/or stm and int. But the Point system (16 point's to hit) becomes less and less as time goes on. At lv60 the point's would equal 1%, at level 70 they equal only .3% (a random percentage, but it is much much lower then before). I still wear all my T2 and other gear I have from raids, I only replaced my ToEP so far (I'm lv66 currently).

Leveling for me is the biggest joke ever, I can kill a 2+ or even a 3+ with ease (I'm a Fire mage). I'm kind of feel sorry for the people that had to level in DS2's or even greens. I'm looking forward to raiding again (if I get back into my old guild I will be able to do The Eye, SSC, and soon BT (they need to kill the last boss of TE and they can move to BT)). I'm going to have to work my way up from getting better gear via Kara, Tailoring, and Heroics but I completely under stand and fine with that.

I will miss the 40 man raids, but maybe the 25 man raids will be just as much fun.

As I see BC is more of a way to get more money and help out more casual players, but to do the 25 man raids you need to push out just as much time and effort as before (makes sence... yet it doesn't). Also to help fix PvP reward vs PvE reward (I could have swore I read some where that Blizzard said PvE gear will alway's be a notch ahead of PvP gear, don't know if that's true... don't care).

Off to level some more.... so easy... and boring lol.

Let me tell you, PVP gear in TBC matches upto anything in raid instances.  merciless and even normal gladiator armour and weapons match anything upto and including TK.  Before TBC no PVP gear matched anything in instances

With merciless and normal galdiator armour and weapons I can out dps any rogue in a raid as a fury warrior with those items.  Along with abacus trinket and heroic badge trinkets.  Ofcourse there are a few items from ssc and TK and BT that will be better than the PVP items, but hey u cant please everyone, and when season 3 starts even better PVP rewards.

Atm, my guild has cleared Kara, grull, mag, and SSC, abd killed void in TK.  I have full gladiator set and 4 parts for merciless gladiator set.  i also have 1x gadiator offhand and 1x merciless gladiatoer MH, along with merciless gladiator 2H, i got over 37% crit in zerker stance, and over 1900 AP unbuffed. And trust me when i say there is no rogue, mage, warlock hunter etc that can out DPS me in their PVE gear compared to my PVP gear in any instance, whether it be 10 man or 25 man.

Arena gear is in no way comparable to PvE gear.   You lack +dmg and crit vastly more.  We have a warlock in guild with full Season 2 gear and myself up through TK/SSC.  We've both questioned the gear difference and do the exact same specs for some raid nights and I out damage him by at least 10% on damage meters.  His resilience and +sta sure is nice, but it's no place for PvE effecincy. 

L2play

Originally posted by kerusso

Arena gear is in no way comparable to PvE gear.   You lack +dmg and crit vastly more.  We have a warlock in guild with full Season 2 gear and myself up through TK/SSC.  We've both questioned the gear difference and do the exact same specs for some raid nights and I out damage him by at least 10% on damage meters.  His resilience and +sta sure is nice, but it's no place for PvE effecincy. 

L2play

  Well maybe for a warlock, warrior PVP is just fine for raids.  Out dps anyone with PVE gear

<- #1 or #2 on Dmg Meters.  Warriors come in 5-10th.  Recklessness ftl.

Originally posted by kerusso

<- #1 or #2 on Dmg Meters.  Warriors come in 5-10th.  Recklessness ftl.

Coz ur warriors have suck as PVE gear, or they just plain suck.

Originally posted by Demz2

 

Originally posted by kerusso

<- #1 or #2 on Dmg Meters.  Warriors come in 5-10th.  Recklessness ftl.

 

Coz ur warriors have suck as PVE gear, or they just plain suck.

tier5 > arena season 2 all the way for pve warriors right? arena has less str, less crit and no useful pve set bonuses... so how is that pvp warrior set better?  

**edit** havent played WoW for a couple of weeks now... but I doubt warriors are #1 raiddmg haha